Fighting the enemy at times
means fighting your erstwhile comrades-in-arms, writes Eric Walberg
The phenomenal success the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement
has had since it began in 2005 has attracted attention from all corners
of the political spectrum -- for better or for worse. Israel is scared.
Israeli thinktanks have described BDS as a greater threat to Israel
than armed Palestinian resistance. At the same time, at the forefront
of the movement against what is now widely called Israeli apartheid
are Jews -- Israeli and diaspora. This is not surprising, as Jews have
traditionally been active in “political mobilisation and opinion formation”,
according to Benjamin Ginsberg.
So it should not be surprising if the BDS movement itself experiences
turmoil. For several years now, the UK Palestinian Soldarity Committee
(PSC) has conducted a policy of calling leading activists such as Paul
Eisen, Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir -- all Jewish -- anti-Semitic
for daring to point out that those who persecute Arab Muslims and Christians
are not just Zionists but are invariably Jewish. That the Jews who have
opted to take Israeli citizenship are increasingly racist, belligerent
settlers who use their new identity to dispossess, terrorise and murder
Palestinians, with the intent of forcing them to leave even the remaining
12 per cent of the land once called Palestine.
These Jews have given Judaism a bad name, causing some “good Jews” to
critique their own religious heritage and even disown it, such as American
highschooler and winner of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr Writing Award
Jesse Lieberfeld, who came to realise, “I was grouped with the racial
supremacists... I was part of a delusion.” For these Jews, Judaism today
had been perverted by Zionism. Paying tribute to Jesse, ex-Israeli Gilad
Atzmon said, “Journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time
to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism
are there at your side -- for all time.”
Atzmon, born and bred in Israel, with holocaust victims in his family,
is the latest victim of the UK PSC, which earlier ostracised Eisen for
his Der Yassin Remembered group honouring martyred Palestinian Muslims
and Christians of the 1948 Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were
killed and hundreds of thousands made permanent refugees.
After being ostracised, Eisen and Shamir dismissed the “gatekeepers”
in the movement, and carried on with their analysis and organising from
the sidelines, sidelines which are growing just as fast as, if not faster
than the mainstream and are now firmly centred on popularising a one-state
solution to solve the Palestine-Israel problem.
Atzmon continued to lock horns with the UK PSC establishment, hoping
to change it, though it is dominated by the likes of Tony Greenstein
with his J-Big (Jews boycotting Israeli goods). No doubt Atzmon’s Sabra
heritage steeled him for battle with those supporters of the Palestinians
who see the movement as more a way to fight anti-Jewish sentiment (caused
by Zionism) than to actually achieve victory for the Palestinians. He
decided to write an analysis of his Jewish heritage and how it was transformed
over the past century entitled The Wandering Who? (see Al-Ahram Weekly
“Jezebel’s Legacy”). His book became a bestseller and he has been touring
America and Europe regularly, speaking out bravely and making his gilad.co.uk
a must read for all who care about both Palestine and “the plight of
the Jews”.
Jewish intellectuals such as Ilan Pappe are following Atzmon’s footsteps
and leaving Israel, disgusted with the cynicism and duplicity of the
entire Israeli establishment. Atzmon has attracted many admirers --
too many, it seems -- from among the more mainstream critics of Israel.
Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer -- both Jewish -- endorsed Atzmon’s
book, Mearsheimer recommending that the book “should be widely read
by Jews and non-Jews alike”.
On 13 March, near the end of Atzmon’s latest tour of the US speaking
to pro-Palestinian groups, Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah published
a letter at the US Palestinian Community Network (PCN) signed by 23
Palestinian activists, including Columbia University professor Joseph
Massad and Omar Barghouti, a founder of the Ramallah-based Palestinian
Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and author
of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian
Rights (currently doing an MA in philosophy at Tel Aviv University).
The letter called for “the disavowal of the racism and anti-Semitism
of Gilad Atzmon”. Abunimah effectively excommunicated Atzmon from participating
in pro-Palestinian activities of the US PCN, as he was by the UK PSC.
Atzmon wound up his tour the next day with an interview with (Jewish)
history professor Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State University,
at Washington’s Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, where he
rebutted the charges against him.
But just as Muslims are loudly called on to disown Islamic terrorists
such as Al-Qaeda, so must Jews disown their own Judaic terrorists, reasons
Atzmon, who has been leading the way in this politically-incorrect battle.
Now that the dust has settled, and support for Atzmon has poured in,
the letter in retrospect looks like an exercise in hasbara gone wrong.
Conspicuous in their absence among signatories are leading Israel critics
Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, The Progressive’s
Matt Rothschild, Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, OpEd’s Rob Kall, and US Congress
hopeful Norman Solomon.
It is possible to critique Atzmon for downplaying the imperialism behind
Israel’s founding and support, which Abunimah does: “Our struggle is
with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to
movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous
people and build new European societies on their lands.” However, there
is nothing wrong with critiquing the problem from a cultural point of
view, and the guilty culture just happens to be Jewish. Sadly, there
is more than one way to skin the Palestinian cat.
Shamir took the debate a logical step further by posing the question,
“To disavow or debate Abunimah”. He was attacked by Abunimah a decade
ago, when he “hunted me out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying
that without Shamir, they will win sooner.” After a decade of unrelenting
Israeli crimes, Shamir advised Massad, Barghouti and other Arab signatories,
“Our Arab brothers will do well if they will stand out of this debate:
let the Jews fight out the battle for their identity. As it happens,
Gilad is their strongest champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer,
not discourage him.”
Perhaps what prompted the letter was fear that BDS was just not mainstream
enough. This was the implication behind a dismissal of BDS by Finkelstein,
who just a few weeks before the Abunimah screed, called BDS a “cult”
and admonished Palestinians to limit their struggle to the “two-state
solution”. While himself exposing the “cult” of the holocaust, calling
it an “industry” used to promote Israel’s aggressive colonial agenda,
Finkelstein disappointed many admirers by suggesting that BDSers are
conspirators intent on wiping poor Israel off the tattered old colonial
map. “What is the result? There’s no Israel!”
But ironically, Atzmon and Finkelstein are on the same side this time.
They are both pro-Palestinian activists and believers in free speech
and open debate, not afraid to point the finger at machinations of their
co-religionists. Before writing his ill-fated missive, Abunimah, author
of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict,
would have done well to ponder Atzmon’s defence of Finkelstein’s criticism
of BDSers for their cultishness. “Finkelstein’s criticism of the solidarity
movement is largely valid. The recent expulsion of Palestinians and
academics from the UK PSC proves that we aren’t just dealing with a
‘cult’ discourse as Finkelstein suggests, far worse, we are actually
dealing with a rabbinical operation that exercises the most repulsive
Judaic excommunication tactics.”
“Finkelstein is correct when he suggests that the achievements of the
solidarity ‘cult’ operations are pretty limited,” continues Atzmon.
He looks beyond the gatewatched BDSers and the larger-than-life critics
such as Chomsky, Finkelstein and himself -- two-state or one -- and
predicts “that the solidarity movement is already a mass movement ...
that the Palestinians and the Arabs will liberate themselves.”
The Lobby is no doubt patting itself on the back, having through obvious
pressure on prominent activists helped to weaken its foes for the nth
time. This tactic is part of the age-old strategy by those in power
of “divide and conquer”. Just as Britian and then the US and Israel
have worked to divide up the Muslim world to weaken and control it --
even mobilising “Islamic terrorists” (not to mention “Judaic terrorists”)
in their schemes -- so the domestic representatives of imperialism do
the same on the homefront, manipulating soft anti-Zionists.
The tactic was used in the Cold War, using liberals and ex-Communists
to isolate Communists from movements critical of imperialism. Now as
then, it is necessary not to boycott each other, but to work together
without responding to provocation. It is to be expected that the bad
guys are going to infiltrate progressive movements and try to split
them.
When Saudi Prince Faisal grilled Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal about his
alliance with Iran, the Hamas chief explained: “Yes, we have relations
with Iran and will do so with whoever supports us. We are a resistance
movement, open to the Arabs, to the Muslims and to all countries in
the world, and we are not part of any agenda for regional forces.” BDSers
may have their differences, but the goal is the liberation of Palestine.
Let a hundred flowers blossom.
***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/ His Postmodern Imperialism:
Geopolitics and the Great Games is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html
|