How Zionists Use State-Sponsored Antisemitism

State-sponsored antisemitism has been used as a deliberate strategic ploy by zionist leaders from the inception of political zionism at the end of the 19th century till the present day.

Joseph Massad explains in his excellent latest oped:

‘Palestinians understood well these arguments and always insisted and insist that their struggle is against Jewish colonisation of their lands and not against Jews qua Jews. When Khaled Meshal arrived in Gaza a couple of weeks ago and made a speech to that effect, he insisted: “We do not fight the Jews because they are Jews. We fight the Zionist occupiers and aggressors. And we will fight anyone who tries to occupy our lands or attacks us.”‘

Antisemitism – anti-Jewish bigotry – like other forms of bigotry and racism, serves noone except the ruling elite. Resist!

May Your Presents Not Be Plastic This Year

GingerThis solstice, celebrate trees with their gift of diversity and life, conserve dwindling resources from human predation, and aim at ending all tyrannies, capitalism, racism and bigotry and especially US imperial hegemony, the dominion of apartheid Israel over Indigenous Palestinians and Indonesia over West Papuans.

In the home zone, here’s to de-amalgamation of Noosa from the development-crazed southern Sunshine Coast vultures and protection of our UNESCO-designated biosphere in March – even if the rest of the planet goes down due to pollution and over-consumption, at least we succeeded in living in harmonious sustainability with the environment in Noosa!

Me to parent as one surveys the mountains of child-placating crap: ‘Wow, what a lot of plastic!’

Parent: ‘I never got anything at Christmas as a child so I am making sure my kids get everything!’

Me: ‘So you really spent thousands of dollars on yourself.’

Parent: ‘We can spend hours together building this rare R2D2 lego model!’

Me to child: ‘Did you get any books?’

Child: ‘No, just this instruction manuel for Power Rangers’.

This society is not built for me.

On Israeli Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity

Guest post by David Rylance:

On indigeneity, I wish to make a historical point. And I wish to start by acknowledging that it is absolutely true that there is a difference to the usual “plot” of settler-colonialism in Israel’s case, which usually revolves around a division of natives and foreigners. Certainly there could be no claims for origination from the land in the case of the Anglo-European extermination of American First Nations or Australian Aborigines, for example. However, indigenous “identity” is based on something far more fundamental than an identity claim to a historical relation to territory. It’s based on the concrete experience of dispossession from the place that one lives and the only home one knows. Even counting in the late terrible conditions in and after the Second World War, the experience of Jewish settlers was one of either deliberate planned immigration or, alternatively, of refugee flight. They had every grounds to flee and every right to be accepted wherever they fled to – *especially* Palestine. And Leftists of any principle will today defend the principles of open borders, precisely, in part, because of the quotas and closed borders that everywhere met the Jews in the lead-up to the Second World War. But there is a distinction between open borders and a project of colonization aimed at absorbing a territory under its own exclusive political power. Only the Right insists those two things are confusable, that too “large” an immigration is immediately a colonization – as though the free movement of peoples were a type of violent takeover in itself – and that colonization, meanwhile, as it has happened historically – especially in terms of the European dispersion across the globe – was ultimately little more than a regrettable but “inevitable” form of “modernizing” immigration of peoples.

I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal but it’s said that there was an exchange, reported in the memoir of Maarouf al-Dawalibi, between King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (hardly a progressive) and Charles de Gaulle (also anything but a Leftist) on this issue of indigeneity. I’ll quote from the text available online:

[In 1967], Charles De Gaulle held a dialogue with [Saudi] King Faisal. De Gaulle told King Faisal that the Jews have a right to Palestine because they lived there 4,000 years ago. King Faisal told him that in that case, France belongs to Rome, because 3,000 years ago, the Romans were in France. Does every country that occupies another country [have a right to it]? Palestine is the country of the Palestinians,who have lived there since the day God created it. If every country belonged to the people who entered it, no country in the world would belong to its people.
[De Gaulle] said: But some Jews were born in Palestine, and therefore, it is their country.
[King Faisal] asked: How many embassies are there in France?
[De Gaulle] said: 150 embassies.
[King Faisal] asked: What if every ambassador or embassy worker whose wife gives birth in France were to demand that France belong to him because his children were born in France? France would be lost to you.
Charles De Gaulle was speechless, and he was so convinced by what King Faisal said that he banned the sale of arms to the Jews in those days.

I’d amend this in a crucial manner. Rather than speak of embassy births in comparison to the Jewish population of Palestine – a population that was also, in 1948, comprised of many native Jews, with as fully continuous a territorial existence in Palestine as Palestinian Arabs, who were coerced and forced into shattering all civic social ties they had built with Palestinian neighbours in order to vindicate the declaration of “independence” forced down upon them – I would compare the formation of Israel based on claims to the historical lineage of Jewish births in the region – and thus a Jewish indigeneity, a non-foreign claim – as being equivalent to New Guinea being able to prove that the Aboriginal population of Australia had descended from migrations from its territory tens of thousands of years ago and to then make claims for its right to a *New Guinean* state on Australian territory due to the fact the Indigenous Aboriginals of Australia were, “in fact”, not indigenous *Australians* – native to their country of indigenous attachment – but were, on the contrary, a New Guinean diaspora that must identify with their New Guinea-ness now in order to qualify as indigenous.

That’s the plight of what Zionism inflicted on many Jews in Palestine – not invested in this project of state-formation – in the lead-up to 1948. As Ariella Azoulay, a Jewish Israeli, argues, one of the greatest crimes in this entire business has been the way racialization – deeply connected to capitalist state-formation – has enabled Israelis to insist that whatever the nakba might be, it is only a catatsrophe *from their point of view*, that it has nothing to do with a violence that had to forge an essential and absolute dividing line between Jews and Arabs that sliced across the civil society that actually existed on the ground. She writes of 1948: “Dayr Yasin, Sheikh Mouanis, Kibbutz Saris, Majdal, Sidna Ali, Miske and Rashpon are only a few of the places where Jews and Arabs tried to preserve their lives in common.” The utter devastation of that society – not only by the Zionist movement, I should add, if it was by that movement primarily and fundamentally, but also by the power politics of surrounding regimes which were deeply disinvested from care about the Palestinians’ autonomy and concerned more about the militarized colonial threat they could (quite correctly) see brewing on their doorstep – determines everything about Israel/Palestine today, from the shattered splintering of the Palestinian people into “citizens” of Israel, subjects of the occupation, “foreigners” in Gaza and exiles in the disapora to the perennial siege mentality, eulogization of state and military chauvinism, and deeply narcissistic wound culture of Israel that instrumentalizes trauma (sometimes real, but mostly imagined) both so hysterically and so cynically. To claim, then, that a very real Jewish historical indigenity in Palestine justifies the exclusivist and chauvinist Israeli state is not only wrong, it is an obscene erasure of the entanglements and interrelations in a single civil society that were the actual truth of that indigenous history. And this is exactly why there has always been, from the very moment Zionism came into being as a national-colonial political ideology, anti-Zionist Jews absolutely resolute upon opposing it not just for the sake of Palestinians but *for the sake of its oppressive demands upon Jewish indigeneity and diversity*, not only in Palestine but all over the world.

So I ask all of you who care for indigenous rights not to be confused by what can appear a very seductive argument about “conflicted justice” in this situation which exploits this fine point about indigenous ties. There is, indeed, in this historical relation a difference that sets Israel off from almost all other settler-colonialisms but it is *not* a difference that negates the fact it *is* a settler-colonial state, only that it has imposed that fact not merely upon Palestinians but also upon many Jews who lived in Palestine who it now claims, totalistically, to represent.

Stanley Jordan, Please Respect the Boycott of Israel

Stanley JordanDear Stanley Jordan,

We are aware that you, Kenwood Dennard and Alex Blake, are slated to play at the Eilat Red Sea Jazz Festival in January, 2013, and wish to persuade you to reconsider and cancel. In 2005, Palestinian civil society called for boycott as a principled tactic to achieve justice and the rights denied to them by Israel. SInce then, prominent musicians such as Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Cat Power, Cassandra Wilson and many others have responded in solidarity and with vocal support. The Portico Quartet has already cancelled their performance at Eilat. A letter sent to the director of the band said that “the decision to cancel the arrival of the ensemble Israel stems directly from the Israeli government’s decision to build 3,000 housing units in E1”.

The call to boycott is made to people of conscience across the globe because governments have refused or been unable to act to implement justice guaranteed to Palestinian people under international law. The Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is similar to the effective means employed by anti-apartheid activists to end South African apartheid. Noted anti-apartheidists like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Alan Boesak, Ronnie Kasrils and others have stated that the apartheid practised by Israel is far worse than that which they experienced in South Africa.

As you observe in your NLP studies, while music can be employed as a healing tool, 65 years of music have not healed Israel’s constant oppression of the Palestinians and denial of their basic human rights. Music has not helped to end the criminal occupation of Palestinian lands, to allow equal rights for all in Israel and to recognise the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Israel continues to steal Palestinian land and prevent the Palestinian people from attaining self-determination, while pretending to be for ‘peace’ under the pretext of interminable negotiations, ‘security’ and ‘the right to defend itself’.

In 2005, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry specifically denoted all culture as propaganda, a means to obscure Israel’s oppression, to anaesthetise its first class citizens from the results of their state’s actions, to dehumanise Palestinians and send a false message to the world that all is normal. Musicians who breach the boycott are used to promote these lies and are flaunted on Israel’s propaganda sites to bolster excuses for ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Portico Quartet supports BDS
Portico Quartet announcement of support for BDS – http://www.facebook.com/porticoquartetmusic/posts/10152308885645234

Please do not compromise yourself and your music by being appropriated and used in this way against a moral right. Music can move the spirit of the planet, yet it can also drown out the cries of oppressed people.

As the powerful entity in this grossly unequal situation, Israel intends to dominate the message, and sees all criticism of its crimes as delegitimising. Nevertheless, the truth about its oppression is beginning to ring out clearly. You can assist Palestinian people in gaining their rights by choosing to do no harm to their chosen tactic of resistance – please cancel, and stand in solidarity with the voiceless who rely upon those who can use their voice to support their just cause.

Best regards

Don’t Play Apartheid Israel

We are a group of 950 members, representing many nations around the globe, who believe that it is essential for musicians and other artists to heed the call of the PACBI, and join in the boycott of Israel. This is essential in order to work towards justice for the Palestinian people under occupation, and also in refugee camps and in the diaspora throughout the world.

For the Palestinian People – Against the Normalisation of Apartheid

False Equivalence

Contrast free choice
with less by the years
one is duplicitous
one is crushed
bulldozers grind
village homes to dust
one expands to usurp
indigenousness
one says enough
to a bone harvest
of human surplus
valley to valley
springs sealed dry
one steals water from
daughters of vines
one exposed, burning
one hand to hand
from settlement terraces
one laughs alone
500 checkpoints
between the two
one throws stones
one shoots to kill
one cries protest
one fires murder
tree spirit scream
love disinterred
ripped from the body
one redeems curses
exotic burdens
on children of land
another empirical
divide and rule
one from one
unequivocal theft
torments one mind
one asks the Beast
for armament gifts
one asks just people
for support, to resist.

Sylvia Posadas, December 2012

New Age Apartheid

In light and love
no more enemies
knock at the door
at 2 a.m. to drag away
the children
to the dungeons
where they will be
verballed,
detained till they
implicate out of fear
and next week the
boots will kick at the door
in light and love
at gunpoint take
husband for years
on no charge
no trial,
robbing light and love
no more enemies
they think
when all are driven
from coveted land.

Sylvia Posadas, December 2012

The appropriation of indigenousness has been a long term project on the part of the invading zionists – as Haneen Zoabi said at the Russell Tribunal hearings some months ago, they are trying to redefine themselves as the owners of the land – they are stealing the very concept of homeland from Palestinians. This endeavour is not only unjust for Palestinian Arabs but Palestinian Jews.

Zionists, who were and are predominantly secular, have absorbed pieces of mythology from many sources in order to bolster their expansionist, land thieving settler colonial purposes. The syncretism of religious themes into the political ideology of zionism is highly convenient, but of course is utterly worthless as any real claim. The Christian zionist vote is of much interest to Israel, for the evangelical vote is the single most important factor delivering clout to Israel’s influence in the US. Thus, when Israel courts evangelical Indigenes, there’s a double purpose – to aid in the usurpation of Indigenousness from Palestinians, rebranding Palestinians as invaders of their own lands, and assuring the evangelical vote.

Related Links

Poet Joy Harjo responds to boycott demands over Israeli performance by adding a West Bank visit

Coincidentally and contemporaneously: Navajo President meeting with Israeli Apartheid government: Grassroots Navajos outraged, call Navajo president ‘war machine puppet’

‘Noting that Native American governments have been complicit with, or coopted by Israel, Barker says:

I want Native governments to divest themselves from Israel as well (most immediately the Chickasaw and Navajo governments, who support Israeli products and send delegates to the Israeli government).

Notably, Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly was in Israel for an official visit at the same time as Harjo.’

From Sa’ed Adel Atshan: ‘Many Palestinians and those in solidarity with our struggle had hoped that Joy Harjo would be principled in heeding the calls of another subjugated people. We have been profoundly dismayed by her recent decision to accept funding from Tel Aviv University, an Israeli state institution, and to not only perform there on Monday but also to serve as a Writer-in-Residence. Soon after hearing this disappointing news, Native American peers of Harjo, including Robert Warrior, called on her to boycott the event.’

President Shelly in Israel to Meet with Knesset, Agriculture Ministry, & Memorial Visit to Yad Vashem

Inferring wrongly that Palestinian students support her, Harjo breaches the boycott

Joy Harjo ‘Didn’t Know’

Alice Bach examines the fake biblical syncretism by zionists.

‘The triumphant Assyrians settled some of their subject populations there and in Syria to mingle with the Palestinian people. The Hill Country of Samaria remained a province during the Persian period. Then, Samaria, along with Judea, became the property of the Babylonians, from 539 until 333 BC, and subsequently was ruled by the Hellenistic Greeks, and then the formidable Roman Empire. The land was never owned by the Jewish people, except in minds that were nourished by the Biblical narratives.’

From Ricardo A. Bracho:

“My response to Joy Harjo letter defending her indefensible performance at Tel Aviv University. The “last minute” stuff is re: her seemingly being unaware of the boycott until she was contacted night before and day of her flight out.

Joy, It wasn’t as last minute as you claim. I, among others, noticed your earlier intent when you posted “Should I go to Tel Aviv?” while the occupying Zionist forces rained down bombs on the Gazans in November. Tel Aviv University posted in cancelling the event that you did not go “for security reasons” while your postings indicated that you stayed for a family medical emergency. I thought that was that. I should have intervened then. That was my political error. I then noticed, as others did, your posting indicating you had an early flight out to Tel Aviv the evening prior to your departure. Once I began to recover from his shock, and yes I found it utterly shocking that you would go to Israel and Tel Aviv University, I contacted others closer to the BDS movement and to you. Our emails and phone calls reached you before you left the US. You could have not boarded the plane. You could have, once you arrived, cancelled the gig and put yourself in contact with Israeli and Palestinian activists and gone to the West Bank and Gaza. You could have simply returned. You could have engaged, directly, with the critique coming from Palestinians, the initial letter emailed to you and then posted on here or the many eloquent comments. You did none of this. You now hide behind platitudes and metaphors. At the very least, you are a better writer than this. But even your best verse, will provide no shade for your grossly unethical actions. I am less in shock now. In rage and sadness, Ricardo A. Bracho”

Building Bridges Between Jews and Christians

Joshua Generation for Jesus: ‘The offical business is presenting a Proclamation Declaring the Navajo Nation, as a Sovereign Nation, is standing with Israel.’

‘Whether you are a Jewish person wondering about your connection to people who believe Yeshua is the Messiah, or a Christian who has accepted Him as your Savior you are called. We are called by God to join together.’

Tso is full Navajo, a “pastor” but also has a businesschurch is a registered non profit but has not submitted 990s. This is possible only if revenue is under 25 grand.

Somebody Cares America – The Net that works!

Glenn Beck amplifying Pastor Tso

Messanaic Jewish org: Navajo nation supports Israel

Main Street USA – Gallup, New Mexico – 10 Sep 07 – Part 1 : Dave Marash visits the town where Navajo and Palestinian traditions intertwine.
Main Street USA – Gallup, New Mexico – 10 Sep 07 – Part 2

On her blog, Harjo reflects dissonantly on boycott here, here and here.