No to anti-Semitism, no to Israel

I love the Symonds St cemetery. I love that it’s right in the middle of the city where anyone can enter, not locked up behind a fence. I love that a Jewish cemetery in a mostly non-Jewish country can be in the middle of the city where anyone can enter.

I love sitting in the cemetery and reading the inscriptions on the headstones. It’s comforting reading Hebrew in New Zealand. It makes me feel less alien here. I don’t know anything about the lives of the people buried in that cemetery, but it’s reassuring to see that Jews have a history in this country—as much as any other Tau Iwi anyway.

I imagine that’s exactly why neo-Nazis targeted the Symonds St cemetery. To them, Jewish people are not part of New Zealand society (along with other non-White, non-hetero people). Attacking a 19th century Jewish cemetery is a way of attacking Jewish existence in New Zealand.

It’s hard to describe how I felt when I read about it. It’s not the first time something like this has happened. In 2004 the Jewish cemeteries in Karori and Makara were vandalised by neo-Nazis. So it’s always at the back of my mind, the possibility of anti-Semitic attacks. But that didn’t stop the shock that hit me this afternoon. It’s the same shock I felt the first time I saw swastika jewelry being sold at a New Zealand shop. It took me a few minutes to notice I was shaking.

The people who attacked the cemetery spray painted swastikas and 88s on Jewish headstones. They also sprayed ‘fuck Israel’ on a grave. Why spray anti-Israel slogans in a cemetery that pre-dates the Israeli state’s existence?

I am not a Zionist and I don’t support Israel. I support freedom and equality for everyone living in historic Palestine and I support the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. I don’t think that ‘fuck Israel’ is an anti-Semitic slogan—except for when it’s spray painted on a dead Jew’s grave.

Whoever vandalised these graves wasn’t acting out of solidarity with Palestinians. White supremacists attack Muslims just as much as they attack Jews. But anti-Semites are perfectly happy to hijack Palestinians’ struggle for liberation from a racist state, when it serves their racist agenda. That’s something the global Palestine solidarity movement has been addressing recently after a Palestine solidarity organisation tweeted an anti-Semitic video. Both Bekah Wolf and Ali Abunimah have written about it. The discussion on anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement lead over 100 Palestinian activists to sign a statement condemning anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Zionism and all other bigotry.

Anti-Semitic attacks on diaspora Jewish communities hurt both Jews and Palestinians. They reinforce the Zionist claim that Jews aren’t safe unless Israel remains a Jewish-supremacist state—and that this justifies the horrific consequences for Palestinians and other non-Jews. Anti-Semitism and Zionism are both racist ideologies and they reinforce each other.

I’m sad that the response to these racist attacks is to increase security, including building a $250,000 security fence around the cemetery. We should be addressing the root of the problem, which is to say, we should be addressing anti-Semitism and racism.

I’m relieved that so far no one’s attempted to exploit the situation to garner support for Israel.

Defending Jewish people’s right to live in peace anywhere in the world is part of the wider struggle against racism and colonialism, in Palestine and elsewhere. Conflating Jews with Israel serves anti-Semites like the people who spray painted swastikas on 130-year-old graves, and it serves Zionists like the IDF soldiers who terrorise West Bank Palestinians. It doesn’t serve anyone’s struggle for liberation.

In any war between the coloniser and the colonised, support the oppressed

San Francisco buses have recently started displaying these ads:

 

 

 

 

 

 

At first I thought this was (brilliant) satire. I mean, American Freedom Defense Initiative sounds like something George Orwell would make up. Alas, it is a real thing.

I can’t help thinking these ads have a lot to teach us about Western White people’s support for Israel. The alternate text for them could have been ‘Indigenous sovereignty anywhere is a threat to colonisers everywhere’.

It seems that the aim of these ads is to get White American people to identify with Jewish-Israelis by equating Palestinians with Indigenous American people. Inadvertently these ads illustrate the connection between Western settler-colonialism (for instance in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine. In all these countries, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty threaten existing power structures. In all these countries there’s an ethnically privileged group who are terrified of having to stop their exploitation of Indigenous resources, and having to give back what was stolen.

One of the most frustrating ideas I’ve encountered while working with Western pro-Palestine activists is that Israel is somehow an exceptional state, that it is different from other colonial states. Once, at a Palestine teach-in, a Pākehā man spent half an hour explaining to me why I shouldn’t compare New Zealand colonialism to Israeli colonialism. (According to him, Māori were lucky that Europeans introduced them to universal human rights values.)

The idea that Israel is somehow special is a Zionist idea. Zionists argue that the Israeli state doesn’t have to meet basic minimum human rights standards, like legal equality for all its citizens, because it is special. That’s not an idea Palestine solidarity activists should be reinforcing.

I realise I’m not making any profound statement by pointing out that Israel is a colonial state. Many people have pointed this out in the past. For many Palestine solidarity activists in Western countries (both Indigenous people and those who are part of colonising groups), this activism is part of a wider struggle against colonialism and imperialism.

But I’ve also encountered people who use an inverted form of the rhetoric employed by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (I still can’t type that with a straight face). Where Zionists initiatives try to get White Western people to identify with Jewish-Israelis, pro-Palestine activists try to get White Western people to dis-identify with Jewish-Israelis by situating Israel as inherently incompatible with the principles for which the West stands—democracy, equality and freedom. I agree that Israel is not compatible with these principles. But I don’t think Western governments are either.

I’ve often heard Americans complain that support for Israel is inconsistent with the ethics on which the USA was founded. The USA was founded on the genocide of its Indigenous people and the slavery of African people. Those aren’t just historical atrocities that are disconnected from today’s American society—the USA continues to be a racist and colonial country. Support for Israel is utterly consistent with that.

Denying the colonial nature of Western states does real harm to Indigenous people who are suffering under colonisation. It also does harm to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. This is something that Mike Krebs articulates really well in this article:

If Israel is held accountable for its crimes against Indigenous people on the world stage, Canada has a greater risk of meeting the same fate. It can’t allow these precedents to be set, and thus it benefits from ensuring that the UN and its various bodies are kept weak and unable to uphold international law.

He’s talking specifically about Canada, the country that colonised his people’s lands, but what he says is equally relevant to other settler-colonial states. I recommend reading the entire article.

The San Francisco bus ads were quickly corrected:

 

 

 

 

This picture sums it up pretty succinctly.

Where do I stand on Palestinian land?

May 15 is Nakba Day, the anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. An ethnic cleansing that was an integral part of establishing a Zionist state on Palestinian land.

It’s easy to live your whole life on colonised land and not think of the history that lead you to be there. Part of the colonial project is creating a culture where members of the colonizing group never have to think of how they are implicated in colonisation.

This is something I wrote about the colonial history of the village I grew up in—a history I never thought about when I lived there. It’s from issue #2 of Not Afraid of Ruins zine, which you can download here.

***

When I visited Al Walaja, the locals took us to see what they reckon is the oldest olive tree in all of Palestine. Olive trees live for centuries—there are olive trees in Palestine that are estimated to be 3000 years old.

I never really thought about the trees around me before—olive, citrus, pine and palm trees. I never thought about how old they were, and who planted them where they are, and who used to stand under them the same way I do.

When I was a kid I lived in Kfar Netter, a small moshav[1] (village) near Natanya, in the Hof HaSharon region of Israel. We had a six dunam[2] property full of citrus and other fruit trees, excellent for climbing. It was an awesome place to be a kid. Right in front of our house was a ginormous olive tree, as big as the one I saw in Walaja. In summer it was the centre of my family’s social life. My parents put a table and chairs under the tree and strung a lamp from the branches, and when they had guests round for dinner we’d eat under that olive tree.

I never thought about how long that tree had been there or who had planted it, and why there was one lone olive tree growing in the middle of a citrus grove. I never thought about what had been on that land before the village. I knew about the Nakba, and that Israel was built on Palestinian land. But somehow I assumed that the places I grew up in were always the way they are, that that land had been empty until the village was settled by Zionists. I thought, like most colonisers, that it was Terra Nullius.

Well here’s a history lesson for you and me:

Kfar Netter was founded on 26 June 1939, by students from the Mikveh Yisrael agricultural school. The moshav was named after the school’s founder, a French Jew named Karl Netter. It was part of the ‘Khoma U’migdal’ (tower and stockade) movement. Khoma U’migdal was a settlement tactic used by Zionists during the ‘Arab Revolt’ of 1936–9, when Palestinians revolted against mass Zionist settlement in Palestine (remember, this is before the state of Israel was founded, when Palestine was under British Mandate). The idea was to build lots of Zionist settlements that would be able to defend themselves in rural areas—hence the tower and the stockade. That way Zionist control of land was maximised.

That’s the history I learned from the village’s official website. Then I did some research on the Palestine Remembered database, which keeps a record of each Palestinian community ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and since. Here’s what I learned:

Back when Kfar Netter was established, the land it’s on was part of the Tulkarem district of Palestine. That land belonged to the village of Ghabat Kafr Sur, 16 kilometres southwest of the district centre. It wasn’t a very big village. In 1931 the combined population of Ghabat Kafr Sur and the neighbouring villages of Bayyarat Hannun and Arab al-Balawina was 559. By 1945 the population of Ghabat Kafr Sur was 740, and that includes the Zionist settlements of Kfar Netter, Beit Yehoshua and Tel Yitz’hak. Even before the state of Israel was established, most of the village’s land was owned by Jews. After the state was established in 1948, the Palestinian inhabitants were completely ethnically cleansed. Today they and their descendents are scattered around the world. All that’s left of the village are three houses.

It’s funny how colonisation becomes so much more personal when you start thinking about the history of the places you spent your life in. Suddenly it’s far less abstract. What if I met someone whose parents or grandparents were ethnically cleansed from Ghabat Kafr Sur? What would I say to them?

---

[1] Well, not exactly a village. A moshav is a particular kind of Zionist agricultural settlement.

[2] 1 dunam = 1,000 square metres, or 0.1 hectares

Just yesterday you were slaves

This Pesach was the first one in my life that I haven’t attended a Seder. I could’ve made plans for the holiday if I’d thought of it in advance, but life has been getting ahead of me lately and it’s hard enough remembering to get out of bed and eat something, let alone make travel plans to see my family.

Instead, I watched the documentary Free Voice of Labour: The Jewish Anarchists.

It’s perfect Pesach viewing. I felt like I was getting a peek at this secret hidden Jewish culture that no one remembers anymore. It was a culture built on the experience of racism and capitalist exploitation, built by migrants who were shocked by the shitty living conditions in their new country. Their response wasn’t to work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they didn’t try to be model minorities. They created a class struggle movement based on Yiddish culture and anarchist ideals.

I find it reassuring to be reminded that Zionism was never the only Jewish response to oppression. One of the things that struck me about the Jewish anarchists interviewed is that none of them mention Zionism, they barely even talk about Israel. It’s as if it didn’t enter their consciousness at all. It’s so different from the compulsory Zionism of mainstream Jewish culture today.

Free Voice of Labour also has an excellent soundtrack. I fully recommend watching the whole film if you get a chance.

After I watched The Free Voice of Labour I made some toast and thought about the custom of putting bread on the Seder plate, as a commentary on the idea that ‘there’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the Seder plate’. I told myself I was eating chametz on Pesach as an act of solidarity with all those marginalised by the Jewish mainstream. But actually it was because I had nothing else in the cupboard and the supermarket was shut for Good Friday.

I think Pesach holds a really mixed significance for me. It’s an important family time, and family times are always stressful and full of conflict. Every year I tell myself that it’s not worth the hassle, and next year I should just stay home. But sitting alone at home on Friday I realised that I actually really miss them.

The holiday itself is also imbued with a mixed significance. We celebrate the struggle of the Israelite slaves against slavery, the escape from Mitzrayim to the promised land of Canaan. There is no mention of the people who were already living in Canaan, who were conquered by the invading Israelites. It echoes the Zionist narrative of Israel’s establishment: The survivors of genocide and anti-Semitism escape to the promised land and establish their own state. No mention of the Palestinian people ethnically cleansed from this land (incidentally, today is the 64th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre).

+972 Magazine published an interesting commentary on Pesach and the construction of a nationalist Jewish identity. I agree with Matar’s analysis of the Latma video (which is both hilarious and disturbing). It’s worth remembering that there is a historical reason for the ‘nationalistic ethos of Jews looking out for one another as a group no matter what’. It comes from a time when Jews were oppressed on the basis of our ethnicity, and our survival depended on solidarity with each other. We had to stick together in the face of anti-Semitic persecution. Somehow that solidarity mutated into the sense that our loyalty is first and foremost to other Jews, even when they’re guilty of horrific crimes against other peoples. The lesson here being that solidarity should not be based on national or ethnic identity, it should be based on supporting oppressed people against oppressors.

This is why I’m reluctant to let the Zionists have Pesach. The story of people’s struggle against racism and slavery is too powerful to let them ruin it for me. Although I would like to expand that story so there’s space for the experiences of non-Jewish people too.

Social justice and the right of return

 

Remember a few months ago when I was being all cynical about the new social justice movement in Israel, the July 14 movement (or #J14 for the twitter savvy)? I really really badly wanted to be proven wrong. I wanted to see an amazing potential for social revolution. So the other week I went along to the Social Economic Academy‘s forum on social justice in Yaffa. The forum was a report back on the findings of the ‘experts’ committees on social justice’. I guess the word ‘experts’ should’ve been enough of a warning that I wasn’t gonna find what I was looking for here.

The committees focused on education, health, employment and welfare and it was interesting to hear what issues they thought were most urgent but overall I came away feeling like we had drastically different views on what social justice means. The main thing that struck me is how much the words ‘patriotic’ and ‘citizen’ were thrown around. Sometimes I feel like politics in Israel is just one big competition to out-Zionist everyone else. The unifying theme of this forum was people wanting to make the state stronger, to give it more power – as if the state is some kind of guardian against neo-liberal capitalism rather than its lackey.

I was disappointed and not surprised that the voice of those people who are most exploited in Israel (Palestinians, migrant workers, refugees from Africa) weren’t represented at all. The one speaker (Daphni Leef) who did mention the demolition of Bedouin villages in the Naqab/Negev made sure to emphasize that these Bedouin are citizens. As though ethnic cleansing is only wrong when its victims are citizens.

It’s that narrowness, focusing only on the struggle of one group of people – a group that’s relatively privileged – that makes me so sceptical about the July 14 social justice movement.

The same week I went to an exhibition opening at Zochrot (remembering). There are countless human rights NGOs in Israel that work against the occupation and most of them accept a two state solution and a return to the 1967 border as an end to the conflict. Zochrot is one of the few NGOs that actively works to raise awareness of the Nakba and educate Israelis about the hidden history of occupation in the 1948 territories.

The exhibition was about facilitating the return of the refugees from 1948 to their homes. Most of it consisted of a series of plans drawn up by architects looking at how to integrate existing Jewish communities with Palestinians returning home to their lands, based on the understanding that it’s not possible to turn back the clock and return to 1948, but instead we need to build something new.

But the exhibit that I found the most interesting was two short documentaries about the right of return. In the first, the filmmakers took to the streets of Yaffa and interviewed Jewish Israeli locals. First, they asked them what they thought of African refugees in Israel. The responses were mixed. Some people thought refugees should be welcomed to Israel, that as a state founded by refugees Israel had a special duty to support refugees. Others argued that refugees from Africa have no place being here, because they’re not Jewish, because they increase crime and prostitution, because of all the reasons people usually give for keeping refugees out of any country.

The second question was: if these refugees want to go home, should they be able to? The answer was unanimously yes. Everyone agreed African refugees have a right to go home.

Then they were asked: what about the Palestinian refugees of 1948, do they have a right to come home? Again the responses were mixed. I was really pleasantly surprised at how many Jewish Israelis said that they welcomed the return of refugees. Then there were the ones who said that people who ‘ran away’ didn’t have any right to come home, as if to escape a warzone is to forfeit your home.

The most interesting response was the guy who said that if Palestinians were allowed to return home to Yaffa then he should also be allowed to return to the house his grandfather had left behind in Budapest. Of course, he’s completely right. Jewish people – myself included – whose ancestors escaped Europe because of anti-Semitic persecution (whether it was during the holocaust or earlier) have every right to come home. But it’s not Palestinians who are denying us that right, and they shouldn’t be paying the price for European anti-Semitism.

The second documentary interviewed Palestinian refugees from Yaffa in the West Bank. The first question was: would you return to Yaffa if you could? Everyone, from teenagers to those old enough to remember 1948, said yes.

The interviewers also asked: How would you get along with your new Jewish neighbours? This is the question I was most intrigued by. The two teenage boys interviewed both said that they didn’t want anything to do with Jews, that both people will just keep to themselves, although they did say that if they ran a restaurant they would allow Jewish customers since ‘a restaurant would flourish with Jewish customers’. On the other hand an elderly woman who was 13 years old when her family was ethnically cleansed from Yaffa said that she didn’t think Jews were a problem, that her family had always lived side by side with Jews.

It made me think about how the longer the occupation (of both the 67 and the 48 territories) continues the more we take it for granted that it will always exist. The older generations, the ones who can still remember a time before all this, are dying. The younger generations have lived with the occupation our whole lives. It’s easy for us to see this conflict as something inevitable, that can never be resolved. The generations that come after us won’t even have parents or grandparents who can remember a Palestine that wasn’t under Zionist occupation. The longer the occupation continues the harder it’s gonna be to end it.