Re: <nettime> Statement by Miriam Margolyes on Israels conduct of the war in Gaza

[Joseph Rabie via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dan, thank you for your wise, encompassing analysis of the situation.

I have not read Rashid Khalidi, but Edward Said writes similarly in “The Question of Palestine”. On the Israeli side, you are spot on when you write that “I truly believe that Israel will not change without strong dissenting voices from within”. This is the tragedy of the situation, for since the sequence that ran from the Oslo Accords to the assassination to Rabin, the rise of Netanyahu and the Second Intifada, the left has been pushed to the margins. Before Rabin was murdered, there was euphoria, as people from both sides discovered each other, engaged in dialogue, established friendships, set up businesses together. And certainly now the left is in tatters, and how could it be otherwise, after the mini-genocide conducted by Hamas on the left-wing Kibbutzim on October 7th? Yes, the intention for genocide was unambiguously stated by Hamas’s leadership. Calling it “resistance” does not fly.

Perhaps one can see a glimmer of hope for a settlement in some things. There is, in Israel, an undeniable normalisation occurring between Jewish and Arab citizens. It may be far from perfect, but progress is being made. In healthcare, for example, both Arab Israelis and Palestinians from the occupied territories work together as equals. This is the case, for example, of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Perhaps there are people reading this whom this angers, because it does not correspond with your narrative of total Zionist infamy, but that's your problem.

Another glimmer of hope are the next elections, hopefully soon, but not to be counted on, as Netanyahu and his suprematist partners are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Though there is no possibility of a turn to the left, given the circumstances, the following is feasible: the centre-right (Gantz, Lapid) get a relative majority, but in order to reach the absolute majority needed to form a government, they will have to make a coalition with the Arab Israeli political parties. This is both an anathema for many and no longer a taboo, because a previous right-wing government (Bennet, Lapid), included a conservative Arab party. A coalition of Jews and Arabs in the Knesset would potentially be a game-changer towards negotiations leading to an independent Palestine.

As for many of the others who write here, their prose is a regurgitation of outraged denunciation that is beginning to sound like the proverbial broken record. Keith admonishes me: “Anyone of good conscience is at least morally conflicted about what is happening in Gaza.” Keith, have you actually READ what I have been writing over the past six months, or perhaps you don’t understand it, or don’t want to, or are incapable of, because it deviates from your narrow ideological comfort zone that opposes innocent Palestinian and demoniacal Israel?

Indeed, what is so disconcerting about so much of what is being written here is how it resembles the conspiratorial mindset that has become so widespread, particularly since Covid. This manifests itself in the use of language, the holier-than-thou denunciation, the ideological puritanism, the inability to engage in meaningful dialogue. In Alan caricaturally telling me to “do the research”.

Just try swopping Gaza with Covid or the Twin Towers, and swopping Zionism with Big-Pharma or US Imperialism, and it would all sound not so very different...

Joe.



> Le 12 avr. 2024 à 01:08, Dan S Wang via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> a écrit :
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> Greetings to All,
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> Thank you for the discussion, and Patrice for forwarding the inspiring (and disheartening) elder Miriam Margolyes's statement. Thank you to Joe--I truly believe that Israel will not change without strong dissenting voices from within. It is the principled courage of the anti-occupation Israelis who will turn the tide, and in the process save their own country from its current headlong rush towards complete failure. All of us from outside are the supporting act.
> 
> Just a few tangential points.
> 
> One, having recently read Rashid Khalidi's excellent primer The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, I was struck by A) Khalidi's unflinching criticism of Palestinian political leadership over the decades. But not in the register of typical American and Israeli criticism emphasizing corruption (though there is some of that, too). Khalidi's consistent disappointment is mostly rooted in what he sees as the provincialism of Palestinian leadership, their inability to imagine political cultures outside their own. According to Khalidi--as respected and public a Palestinian partisan as there can be nowadays--none, including today's Fatah and Hamas, have ever understood the war of public opinion, particularly in the all-important US context. And, especially, as compared to the sophistication and consistency of the Israeli outreach, lobbying, and education campaigns, the Palestinian leadership has been nothing but out maneuvered and out played, lots of times without having realized it.
> 
> In Khalidi's estimation, Palestinian leadership is a tale of one self-inflicted failure after another. So: "equally" responsible?? Not so sure about that, but certainly many key moments could have gone less badly for the Palestinians had the leadership understood the stakes better than their limited view allowed. See the book for specifics, I won't recount it all here.
> 
> And B) by about a third of the way through the book, I also noted that for his arguments and sources Khalidi relies on a very good many Israeli authors and scholars, most all of them Jews. Which kinda reinforces my point above--that Israeli society itself is divided, that many intellectuals and researchers working inside Israel are helping the cause of reforming and/or undoing the Zionist tunnel-vision of land grabs and displacement, with both the credibility of full Israeli citizenship, Jewish identification, and, most significantly, the privileged view from inside (which of course is at the same time distorting, but nonetheless essential to a resistance of global distribution).
> 
> Finally, on this matter of "Hitler winning." In my earlier years of studying the conflict, I remember well this question being raised by various post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers: could Hitler "win" without having completed the Nazi Final Solution, and moreover having lost WW II? And what would such a victory look like?
> 
> In the Cunning of History, Richard L. Rubenstein argued that Hitler "merely" normalized yet another variety, specifically a technocratic one, of mass targeted violence, a sordid portfolio that includes earlier episodes of colonial genocides, slavery, etc. With the continuation of mass death of innocents after WW II, and, further, the persistence of nuclear holocaust--and now we can cheerfully add the various collapse scenarios of climate chaos--in a sense, "Hitler won."
> 
> In Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist's Polemic, Hillel Halkin argues that his composite friend, typed as a Jew living as a fully participatory citizen in the mixed culture of the United States, needs to seriously consider his complicity with Hitler's intention to exterminate the Jews. According to Halkin, gassing bodies was one way to do that; voluntary assimilation and distance from an historical homeland is another.
> 
> Obviously there are lots of problems with both of the above arguments, particularly Halkin's. But my point is this: the paranoia about the extirpation of a people lives deep in Jewish thinking after the Holocaust, to point where every crisis and conflict is informed by that question: Now that we survived Hitler (just barely?), how are we to guarantee our continued survival in an unfriendly world? Or even in a friendly one, given that Jews were participating positively in every level of German society at the time of Hitler's rise (which may explain Israel's fundamental distrust of even the United States)?
> 
> But Rubenstein and Halkin wrote their screeds in the 70s and early 80s. Conditions since Oslo, certainly since the 2nd Intifada, and definitely since Oct 7, have allowed into this well-worn trope of "Hitler winning" Margoyles's assertion (and of course she's far from the only one; the irony of role-reversals is obvious to most of us) that the Israelis have turned themselves into the Nazis, that they have CHOSEN to oppress as their forebears were oppressed.
> 
> I'm somewhat lost as to what we who wish for [Palestinian freedom / decoupling of US-Israeli policy / peace in general] can do with this updated take on the old trope. The facts on the ground are inarguable. On that score, thousands of slaughtered children, hundreds and hundreds orphaned, are only the beginning. As a match for any of history's earlier cruelty, it may be only a matter of scale, and even there the comparisons are narrowing with each passing day.
> 
> Motivated by Khalidi's sourcing from Israeli writers, I'm doing some reading about Israeli society. I picked up A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, a memoir of growing up in Jerusalem, beginning with the years just prior to statehood. In it Oz recounts his family's journey from Central Europe to Jerusalem in the early 20s. One of the towns, I forget the name of it, no place I'd ever heard of--it's in the first quarter of the book, too lazy to go look it up--a waystation for his immediate family, but a place of permanent residence for some 30k Jews and a regional center for Jewish life, was targeted in a Czech or Polish or Hungarian pogrom (can't remember, his family passed through a number of countries), and about 25k of the towns inhabitants were murdered in a few days' time. This was BEFORE the rise of the German Nazis--Germany was considered the safe haven. Then Oz casually relates that the surviving 5k Jews, no doubt unbelievably traumatized, were slaughtered in a second assault a year or so later. These are the ghosts we're up against.
> 
> I'm happy for little in this unsettled world, but as we Americans were reminded by daytime darkness on Monday, we're nonetheless stuck together on this warming sphere hurtling through outer space. Happy to be here with all of you.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Dan W.
> 




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