| Best arguments against the violently racist state of Israel. |
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| Written by Administrator |
| Wednesday, 27 July 2011 15:15 |
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From Dave Kersting on Facebook --- The kernel of the anti-racist argument, as it applies to Israel-Palestine, is brutally simple. An expressly "Jewish" state forced into a multi-ethnic region is, itself, violent criminal racism as plain as it canever get. End of argument. The appearance of a complex argument - or any argument at all - is THE Zionist trick, and it must be dismissed, just as any dodges would be dismissed regarding any other case of openly-declared racist violence. The solution is equally simple: everyone who's taxes are financing the Zionist policies which perpetuate the forced creation of the Jewish state - or which perpetuate the ethnic-cleansing - must audibly object to any US financing for any policies of ethnic or religious prejudice, by anyone involved in the conflict - the same as we would do in any OTHER case of openly-declared racist violence. --- The postures of shock or displeasure by those who dislike such plain terms must be treated the same as the emotional defenses offered by those involved in racism throughout history: some brief efforts to explain, and if that's not enough - simple acknowledgement that such people are, themselves, the violent racists of our time and place - unless they change their positions and begin objecting to policies of prejudice. --- Since nothing that happened yesterday can justify ethnic stereotyping or racism today, any efforts to divert attention from the simple rejection of racism must be disregarded. --- A simple refusal to passively finance policies of official prejudice ("racism") by anyone in the Israel-Palestine conflict instantly translates into a total end of Zionist privilege - an end of "Jewish Only" settlements - an end of the violence that prevents the return of ethnically-cleansed Palestinian families - an end of prejudice that prevents war-criminals from facing fair trials. --- It's important to note that the anti-racist principles were common knowledge among a vast number of people who had followed the progress of the Civil Rights Movement, through the 1960s and into the '70s. In those days, the Zionists' lies had to focus on denying that Israel was ever intended to be an expressly Jewish state - since everyone THEN would have seen that any such plan was inherently racist. The basic conflict and ethnic-cleansing were deliberately lost in "the complexities of the Arab-Israeli Conflict" with its "inevitable Arab refugees." Yet, even then, the emphasis on the "Arab" ethnicity of Israel's neighbors - a stark exception to general understandings about NOT identifying one's adversaries by their ethnicity or gender, but by the problematic behaviors or principles. That was the beginning of Zionist success at ERODING the general anti-racist consciousness. --- It was then, in the late 1970s, that I saw how the ZIonists did everything they could to hide the racist nature of their program - and hide the fact that it had been intended in a racist way, as the dispossession of the non-Jewish locals, from the very beginning. Yet it was also clear that Israel-Palestine would not reach the progressive front-burners, until after the South Africa problem had been solved. My activist friends and I knew that, sooner or later, the basic nature of "the Jewish State" would appear, as the conflicts with Israel's immediate neighbors died down and left the initial conflict in full sight. --- That moment took place on September 28, 2000, when the "Oslo Talks" had inevitably collapsed and the Zionists sent Ariel Sharon to the Al Aqsa Mosque to kick off the final grab for Palestine and final destruction of still-resisting regional populations, just outside the perimeter of Israel's immediate and thoroughly defeated neighbors. In the Fall of 2000, my friends and I began to contact the local and national antiwar organizations and "pro-Palestine" organizations, and we quickly discovered that they had been dragged so deep into Zionist perspectives as to experience severe shock when the situation was explained in plain, rather than Zionist, terms. --- For example, ethnic-cleansing and perpetuation of ethnic-cleansing are pure unadulterated racist violence - but the realities in Palestine have been gentrified into a kind of extreme afterthought as: "the Palestinian right of return." This was initially posed as a "Palestinian" variety of the basic "Jewish right of return" to "their" Biblical homeland. Antiwar leaders and even Palestinian leaders, championed by Noam Chomsky (an ostensibly "fearless" critic of Israel), would treat the "Palestinian right of return" as a pipe-dream and deal-breaker, a too-extreme proposal. This served to remove the whole underlying question of racism from the discourse. We who retained our sensitivity to the power of popular antiracism knew that looking directly AT the racism would end the diversionary debate about "Palestinian return" before it began. In the classic example, the leaders of the Social Justice Center of Marin told me and a large group that they could not join us in "supporting the Palestinian right of return" because it threatened the existence of "the Jewish state" - a Zionist-tilted way of saying that full equality would end Jewish privilege, yet hiding that imbalance in a sacred status-quo. My response was nothing more than clarifying the issue from a non-racist perspective: "Palestinian right of return is not an issue that goes to sleep if we don't arouse it. We are all, right now, allowing our taxes to finance the violent denial of Palestinian return - in an active process of daily violence which we cannot morally justify. While any Jewish person is welcomed and paid to go to Israel or Palestine, the people who were ethnically-cleansed are not allowed to return - that is, their absolute human right to go back to their homes is violently denied - their ethnic-cleansing is being perpetuated - simply because they're not the desired ethnicity. Nothing can be more plainly racist and violent than this, and we are already doing it to the Palestinians, with our taxes. We have an obligation to, at least, OBJECT. There's no way that anything calling itself a "Social Justice Center" can refuse to object." --- I was not allowed to express this elementary opposition to violent racism, without frequent interruptions of shouted obscenities and even threats of violence by the three main leaders of the Social Justice Center - though I was speaking in absolutely the correct time and place and procedure. And this is a highly representative sample of what I have found quite commonly when the Zionist rhetorical screen is set aside and ordinary egalitarian language is applied. --- In other words, any policy that imposes PREJUDICE based on religion or ethnicity is defined as "racist," and if that --- Since there’s a nice response to my comments about racism, I think I should add some of the specific – axiomatic – understandings about racism which often seem to be absent from the Israel-Palestine discourse. This absence – this deliberate erasure by “pro-Israel” leftists - is turning the clock back and ruining the understandings that were established (in the USA, at least) by all the great people of the US Civil Rights Movement. This stuff was common knowledge among anyone with any claim to being “hip” in the late 1960s and 1970s, but it’s become remarkably absent, due to the constant excuses, and exceptions, and confounding innuendoes of the Zionists. --- 1.) When we oppose Israeli racism, we’re not “picking on” Israel and “the Jews.” We are addressing a fatal bad-habit at the core of a worsening illness. The first fact about racism is that it’s bad for everyone. The societies which depend on racism always end up being damaged by that mistake almost as badly as their victims. We who have worked to get rid of official racism in the USA have always done so as a way of serving everyone: this has never been an attack on the USA: or on the racists. Ending racism is like helping a friend break a deadly addiction. This was the Whole Point of Martin Luther King: it was NEVER a question of helping Blacks and opposing Whites – not even opposing White RACISTS. It’s the sensible people trying to help the whole community. Correspondingly, the millions of pro-Zionist voters and campaign-donors have been bamboozled and terrified into thinking their very survival depends on racist-supremacist policies. This has always been the trick of racist opportunists: it’s so easy to arouse fears and then pose as the protector. The more a group of people have to fear, the easier it is for the worst of their politicians to take advantage. --- 2.) “A state of one’s own” is NOT a human right. Another way of saying it: “Self-determination for the Jewish people” is a gross reversal of the meaning of “self-determination.” Sure, Ireland may be mostly Irish and Catholic; and China may be mostly Chinese: but that does not mean that people have a human right to live in a place where their ethnicity or religion predominates. Self-determination explicitly refers to the rights of people to live in their own region without the interference of outside interests: this has nothing at all to do with the ethnicities of the populations in question. When self-determination is distorted into a “right” of a tribe or ethnic-group or religious group to have a state of their own, it is distorted into the most virulent doctrine of violent racism. If self-determination were an ethnic or religious right, it would indeed justify violent invasion and ethnic-cleansing of innocent nations, for the sake of creating the ethnic-supremacist state that would be justified by such right. A right to ethnic self-determination would be counter-balanced against the rights of people to live in their own homes and work their own fields, free from ethnic-cleansing – one people’s rights versus another’s, the outcome to be determined by force of arms: exactly as the Zionists express their false “right” to “self-determination” in Palestine. Acknowledging such “right” would merely turn the globe back to the most barbaric standards of pre-history or the Old Testament, when invasion and slaughter could be “justified” by the advantages gained by the conquering tribe or ethnicity. The more educated Zionists have recently stopped talking about “Jewish self-determination,” because the true reasoning about this reveals such talk as the violent racist doctrine it really is. It’s empowering to know that, as the world looks more closely, the Zionists ARE backing off on the horrible nonsense they have depended on for decades. They are finding that the more they say, the more they vaunt the wrong of what they’re doing. Their success in confusing people with such talk is diminishing very rapidly. --- 3.) Any talk which invokes and compares the crimes of the “two sides” in the Israel-Palestine conflict is totally missing the point – and is actually a racist kind of talk. Both sides suffer from a racist SOURCE of the conflict. No one can pretend that one group of people is better or more criminal than another. The fact that Israeli/Zionist atrocities, attacks, killings, and general horrors out-balance the Palestinian or “Arab” wrongs by a thousand-to-one is irrelevant. All the violence, by both sides, in all its “cycles,” is the absolute face of a racist invasion. The point is to end the racism that directly causes all the violence and fatally harms both societies. --- 4.) “Palestinian” is not an ethnicity. It refers to everyone – Muslim, Arab, Christian, Jewish, Druze, atheist, goth, skater, etc. – who lives in Palestine. There is no valid reason to mention anyone’s ethnicity or religion in any court action or political dispute or housing application. The largely “Arab” ethnicity or “Muslim” religion of Israel’s victims and neighbors has NOTHING to do with the conflict. If the “Jewish state” had been forced into a largely Amish or Inuit or Chinese locale, we would all be hearing about all the moral deficiencies of the Amish or Inuit or Chinese. Ethnicity enters the discourse only when the Zionists proclaim the indigenous population too insufficiently “Jewish” for their racist agenda. --- These may be the main points. There are others. This is enough for now. prejudice is enforced with violence, it's "violent racism." |
| Last Updated on Thursday, 28 July 2011 09:10 |