Guest opinion column from the writer Zaid Jilani argues that the pathologies of the extremist left undercut broad support for Palestinian human rights.
Protest in a manner that invites/persuades others to join - that’s the message I heard in this piece. The majority of the actions of protesters I see these days makes me want to run in the opposite direction.
I think this is mostly spot on. However, Palestinian leadership has been offered a two-state solution several times & rejected it each time. They want a one-state solution: Palestine without any jews. The "occupation" that they & their western activist allies decry isn't just the West Bank or Gaza — it's Israel istelf. They consider Israel to be an illegitimate, "settler-colonialist" project that can only be remedied by being ended. As long as this remains the position of these groups, their solution to the problem will turn off every normie in America, & they'll never attract more than their fringe supporters. It'd be nice if they grew up & stopped their tendentious sloganeering, but their maximalist demands will always be what prevents them reaching more people.
There are four basic issues between Palestinians and Israel:
1.) BORDERS (pre-1967 war borders = the whole of the West Bank including east Jerusalem and also Gaza): It was proposed that these borders would form an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Palestinians accepted this decision of the international community, which included all the legal and political bodies in the world, e.g., the International League of Justice, the UN General Assembly, all of which/whom accepted the borders should be the pre-1967 borders. Israel (& the U.S.) rejected this decision wanting a part of the West Bank. In Israel’s last offer it wanted approximately 8% of the West Bank.
2.) LEGAL TITLE OF TERRITORY ACQUIRED IN WAR (A.K.A. JERUSALEM): It is inadmissible under international law to acquire territory by war. Israel acquired east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in the course of the 1967 war; therefore, Israel has no legal title to east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza providing the basis for the above mentioned proposal using pre 1967 borders; however, Israel rejected this observance of law by the international community because it wanted parts of east Jerusalem.
3.) SETTLEMENTS: Israel has long built illegally in the occupied Palestinian territories. There are now approximately 700,000 illegal settlers living in the occupied West Bank. Under international law these settlers/settlements are illegal and had been (is now) enacting a low-level ETHNIC CLEANSING of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. During the peace process Israel wanted to keep under its sovereignty 80% of the illegal settlers on occupied Palestinian land, therefore rejecting the international community’s position that international law be honored and the illegal settlements be dismantled.
4.) RIGHT OF RETURN FOR REFUGEES AND THEIR DESCENDANTS SINCE 1948: International law asserts the RIGHT OF RETURN to refugees’ homes after the cessation of hostilities. Israel defied/defies this and during the peace talks, again, said it would not allow any of those refugees and or their descendants to return, thereby refusing the international community’s proposal.
To summarize. The Palestinians ACCEPTED the terms as developed and ratified by the whole international community of legal and political bodies on the basis of international law. Put another way. On all of the questions #1-4, the Palestinians were willing to make concessions; Israel was unwilling.
Paraphrasing Palestine-Israel scholar Norm Norman Finkelstein:
Every single year the UN General Assembly passes a resolution called PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT OF THE PALESTINE QUESTION, which lays out the terms described above, anchored and embedded in international law. Every single year the vote on this resolution is the whole world, approximately 180 countries, voting FOR it and, usually, the United States, Israel and a handful of south sea islands, i.e., the Marshall Islands, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu voting AGAINST it. Anyone can search this out on the internet.
“Israel’s commitment to enforcing the dispossession and occupation of Palestinians has also led it to undermine any prospect of the two-state solution that it claimed to support. The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) were “founded on a neo-colonialist basis,” in the words of former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. “One of the meanings of Oslo,” Ben Ami explained, “was that the PLO was eventually Israel's collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada,” – a grassroots and largely non-violent uprising against Israeli occupation – thereby “cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.” Oslo’s Israeli architects, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, NEVER “wanted the autonomy to usher in a Palestinian state.” As a neo-colonial endeavor disguised as a “peace process,” the Oslo era saw a doubling of the Israeli settlement population in its first eight years.” (journalist Aaron Mate)
Fast forward.
In December 2000, President Clinton put forth what were called “parameters for resolving the conflict”. ALL of the parameters required concessions by Palestinians. NONE of the parameters set forth by Clinton required concessions from Israel on the basis of international law.
“Settling this so-called “conflict” on the basis of international law is the only way because there is no alternative framework that exists on our planet.” -Norm Finkelstein
In January 2001, both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side accepted WITH RESERVATIONS these “Clinton parameters”.
[However,] Israel’s so-called “generous peace offer” at Camp David in July 2000 – widely cited by Israeli officials and Western pundits as proof of an Israeli willingness to “compromise,” and a Palestinian refusal to “co-exist” – was in fact a perpetuation of Oslo’s neo-colonial ruse. As Ben-Ami, who took part in the summit as a top Israeli negotiator, himself acknowledged years later: “If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.” (Aaron Mate)
Fast forward some more.
“In 2002, the Arab League offered Israel full normalization in return for a withdrawal from all Arab territories (Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian) that it occupied in 1967; the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital; and a “just resolution” to the refugee issue. The initiative was subsequently endorsed by Iran, which signed on to a December 2017 declaration calling for a “two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine.”
The proposal would require Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and abandon the illegal settlement blocs, which carve up Palestinian land and disproportionately consume precious water reserves. Later on, the Arab League signaled that it would accept mutually agreed land swaps, as the Palestinian Authority had already done, that could keep some settlement areas under Israeli control. But even the most far-reaching Israeli offer, presented by lame-duck Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, rejected parity in any territorial exchange. As veteran Israeli negotiator Michael Herzog wrote in 2011: “No Israeli government to date has accepted the Palestinian stipulation that land swaps be fully equal in size and ‘quality.’”
Israel has repeatedly rejected the Arab League’s diplomatic initiative and even refused to accept it as a basis for further negotiations. In shunning the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, Israel has shown a less accommodating position than even what Hamas, at one point, claimed to support.” (Aaron Mate)
•Watch: Full interview of Palestine-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein
The so-called right of return is a imaginary right that exists for only one refugee group in the modern world, the Palestinian Arabs. There is no right of return for Germans who were forced out of Russia after WW2, for Indian Moslems who were displaced by India, for more recently Syrians who fled the civil war in Syria, and certainly not for the 700,000 Jews who were truly ethnically cleansed from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa. Although there are many individual Palestinians who feel otherwise, the Arab and Palestinian leadership has NOT accepted the idea of a Jewish state from decades before the 1948 establishment of the state. "From the River to the Sea" is not a chant for peaceful co-existence, it is a chant for the destruction of the Jews, You are relying on a very narrow group of "scholars" for your information.
1.) “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (that is, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea) means exactly what is says: freedom within those boundaries where, Palestinian rights, including freedom of movement, is now and has been obstructed by illegal occupation by the zionist settler colonial project, which now also includes apartheid. The phrase origin, as expressed by Najla Said, Palestinian artist who happens to be the adult daughter of the late scholar Edward Said, is purposeful co-optation of “the old zionist slogan that said ‘from the Euphrates to the Nile’, which means from Iraq to Egypt”, a stated goal for its colonialism. Najla Said goes on to say “They [settler-colonialists] were the only ones wanted to get rid of anyone.”
Palestinians in the diaspora were restricted from landing even in the airport on the land - of course it means From the river to the sea FREEDOM. The world sees through your zionism as Jewish supremacism, violent racism and dehumanizing attempts in order to steal the rest of the land a.k.a. “hasbara” and and rejects it.
2.) Hasbara does not stand up to the reality before our eyes. I reject your disinformation while noting how sick it is to try generally keeping the genocide going and particularly during the Rafah slaughter of indigenous Palestinian people including children. #SuperBowlMassacre
The world sees and now knows that the zionist’s false belief embedded in hasbara is that Jews lives are of more value than others and; we understand zionists are delusional supremacists in this belief since everyone on this planet is EQUAL. In desperation the genocidal zionists spout the nonsense you just put forward that the real genocide is of Israelis though anyone can check the record well documented in the various human rights organizations reports, e.g., Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; even B’tselem. Zionists don’t represent Jews and illegal occupation and apartheid of the indigenous Palestinians doesn’t provide security for anyone, which has everything to do with the universally human inclination to defend one’s rights to freedoms and nothing to do with religion.
3.) The indisputable facts of the diplomatic record, which anyone can look up for themselves are as I outlined. Every word stands.
A moral standard can be consistent and not everyone equally measures to that standard. If my standard for human worth were entirely based on how small their ears are, then some people are going to be of greater worth according to that single consistent standard. I wager you don’t like that single consistent standard though.
Humans are not viewed as equal by other humans in practice as clearly demonstrated by the way people differentially relate to humans. And that includes how you relate to people differently. It’s simply not possible to value everyone equally. We all are finite beings with limited resources. And we also shouldn’t value everyone equally. A serial killer should not be valued equally with any random child.
The assertion that humans are equal is generally just a vague and meaningless expression of piety.
But, regardless of disagreement about meta-ethics, I think it is usually more important people agree on the concrete stuff, like that the US should not be support an ethno theorcatic state in Palestine or fund Likud.
From what I’ve found the slogan for Likud was specifically “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Pretty much the same meaning but different words.
I really like Zaid, I appreciate him and I agree with him on around 95% of what he writes. But on this issue he and I are miles apart, as are Lee and myself. Doesn't mean I can't learn from reading both and try to gain perspective by doing so. Thanks for bringing him on to write this, Lee.
Decades ago a small newspaper reported that four (4) Mideast reporters for the NYT, including their Mideast Bureau Chief, had children serving in the IDF. After six months of hounding the NYT, they finally admitted it. They tried to argue that having children in the IDF did not influence how the reporters wrote about the conflict with Palestinians !!
If you do some research you'll find that the Biden WH is riddled with rabid Zionists.
And Trump's son-in-law Kuschner, a major Zionist financing expansion in West Bank, has ILLEGAL Israeli settlement playgrounds named after him.
For apartheid Israel Zionists, it's like owning both boxers - no matter who wins, THEY can't lose !
"In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States" – Vladimir Putin in interview with Tucker Carlson -- https://substack.com/home/post/p-141567310
I don't know what's more strange - the fact you so fervently remember the details of an entirely inconsequential event from decades ago or the fact you give a shit in which army the children of reporters is serving.
This story neglects to mention the big money behind Palestinian activism; many of the protesters are paid, and sometimes recruited via Craigslist. Signs are nicely printed in a uniform font, and masks and flags are provided.
It seems likely that protesters are guaranteed legal help, as well - you don’t start shaking the fence at the White House, as Palestinian protesters did last month, without being very sure someone is ready and able to get you out if you are arrested.
Where is the money to finance these protests coming from, and does the source of those funds really care about the Palestinians at all? Or is there some other goal?
Yet another dumb comment from someone who claims to care about the welfare of Palestinians. Online, you are your own worst enemies; I doubt you convert anyone at all.
My comment doesn't address the rightfulness of the Palestinian cause. Instead, addresses the sincerity and legitimacy of protesters in the US who claim to be pro-Palestinian.
My guess is that many of them are the same old anarchists who are paid to turn up at almost any left-wing protest.
Who funds it? Good question. Wealthy divorcees and widows like Mackenzie Scott and Laureen Jobs donate a great deal of money to "social justice" causes, and I doubt they can track where all of it goes. In addition, outsiders like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss donate enormous amounts to left-wing causes in the US. (The New York Times says Wyss "has been a leading source of difficult-to-trace money to groups associated with Democrats.")
Left-wing heirs to big fortunes are another source of funding, such as James "Fergie" Chambers, a scion of the Cox family, who openly funds anarchist causes like Stop Cop City.
Why does it matter if there are genocide protests that receive funding? I’d be more concerned about the people paid to defend it. It’s like being upset that there were mercenaries fighting the Nazis in WW2.
The ads on Craigslist have been widely shared on social media. The going rate appears to be $30 an hour, which is nice money for a student or unemployed person. Not sure if taxes are deducted.
Paying protesters in the US isn't anything new. Back in the day I saw Al Sharpton personally distributing white envelopes after a protest, and I doubt there were birthday-party invitations inside.
It’s widely shared on social media that the earth is flat. Back it up. (And yes, paid canvassers, phone bankers, etc are a side gig on Craigslist. Show me something that says that we are paying for people to go to protests on behalf of Palestine.)
Zaid's got the right idea but he's too generous to the fanatical racist Jew hating rampaging protesters. In my opinion, it appears the protest movement has gone way beyond caring about Palestinians. (Hamas doesn't care about Palestinians so why should they?) And it IS a movement that is cheering on bigger ideologies like Marxism, anti-capitalism/colonialism/imperialism, anti-West and now we learn about funding from Communist Worker's groups outside the US. The "Pro Palestinian Protest Movement" is is woefully under-informed about the intricacies of Israel, it's founding and ethos. It's a pernicious movement and has little to do with Palestinians and caters to wannabe revolutionaries. And as it is with these pro-Marxist movements, it always ends with Jews who are responsible for the world's ills. It's really obvious.
None of this objection to genocide has anything to do with ‘hating Jews’ and quite honestly, that dog doesn’t bark any more. I don’t ‘hate’ Americans, but I loathe the government of the US at this point. I don’t hate Italians, but I detest the fascists that are now holding office. I don’t hate Jewish people (in fact, I have several Jewish people whom I absolutely adore) - but I hate hate hate hate that Israel is now committing a genocide, and I weep that I see people so whipped up in blood-thirst that they are in denial over their nation’s commission of the same war crimes that they, themselves, were victim to.
Now, we could dive into Marxism (as I recall, there were many respected Jewish scholars in the Marxist movement), socialism (I understand that Israel actually has socialist health care - unlike the US), anti-colonialism (a grand idea, in fact.)
Jews aren’t responsible for the world’s ills. An elite group engaged in end-stage, zero-sum capitalism is. Israel, however, is currently responsible for a genocide. This requires no understanding of Israel’s founding or ethos; all decent people should be opposed to the slaughter of innocents.
The hundreds and hundreds of protests throughout the world by "Pro-Palestinian" people have been, to me, a catastrophe for Palestinians.
I have seen countless videos and attended an actual protest to watch. At no time have I seen remonstrations against Hamas. It is Hamas which immiserates and exploits Palestinians, and which refuses to hold elections.
And don't forget that Hamas siphoned off probably hundreds of millions of $ to build circa 350-400 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza, turning it into essentially a military installation. A war crime in and of itself. And now it has become undisputably clear, that the UN via UNRWA, is up beyond its collective eyeballs in bankrolling and covering up for terrorism and Hamas.
No. Your comment is cringeworthy. Why aren’t you embarrassed? You have no idea what or who is “Hamas”. Nobody will be answering to you. To be in this conversation you’d need to know. Now. Let’s have it. Your condemnation of the apartheid regime and its US sponsor for the EIGHT 10/07-type terror attacks it has carried out on the indigenous Palestinians in Gaza between 2004-2022. You know the ones that massacred more people than were murdered (by militant fighters/their activists and Israeli forces) on 10/07 including more Palestinian children than all of them; next for the 5,000 Palestinian hostages the illegal occupier held prior to 10/07 including hundreds of CHILDREN, in fact more children than all of the hostages taken on 10/07, and including 1,200+ who never even were charged some after years despite the already sham military court that convicts the indigenous at a rate of 95+% for absurd and unproven things (as apartheid colonizers do)
Did you see any remonstrations against Likud for consciously cultivating Hamas so that it could use the inevitable atrocities that Hamas would carry out to carry out a genocide against Palestinians?
Netanyahu is on record claiming Hamas is a strategic asset. It is clear why he claimed that—because useful idiots like yourself.
Incorrect. Gaza has continued to be occupied by apartheid Israel this their birth and death records exist with illegal occupier Israel as their water, food, electricity has been rationed at the whim of the Israeli regime which controls every meaningful aspect of the indigenous Palestinians’ lives in what Giora Eiland calls “the highest concentration camp”. Thank you for asking as this is an important point.
Yes, show us in more ways that you know nothing about this subject. Go on, blow some hot air on the next thread; you’re surely making the rounds. Nevertheless, for the scrollers. In 1880 there were people living on the land called Historic Mandate Palestine whose people had been there a thousand+ years, a minority of Jews (20k) and a majority of Arabs (480k) whom coexisted peacefully enough. Balfour Declaration (look it up), WWII and the holocaust of the wholly innocent Jews, and the aggressive zionist movement imposes its plan based on the lie “A land with no people for a people without a land.” Zionists unleash brutalizing violence upon the indigenous taking their own sociopathy and post-holocaust humiliation and rage out on the innocent in the land they forcibly established an apartheid ethno state.
Take author Rich Forer’s observations.
“Whenever someone asks me if I believe Israel has a right to exist, I reply that all human beings should have a right to live wherever they want as long as they do not disrespect the rights of people who might already be living there. Israel exists and its people are not going anwhere so the question is moot. Nations are legal constructs, names on a piece of paper. If you changed the name of Israel it would not change the habitats of the people who live there. Do I think the establishment of Israel was a mistake? Yes, because most European Jews did not want to migrate to Palestine after WWII. They were forced to by the international Zionist organizations in order for the Yishuv in Palestine to have enough of a population to convince UN states to vote for the UN Partition Plan, which they begrudgingly did under pressure. Had Zionist orgs not blocked FDR's proposal, agreed to by western European nations, to resettle 100% of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, there would be no Israel. After WWII ended a survey of Dachau concentration camp survivors revealed that only 15% were open to migrating to Israel and, based on previous migrations, it is likely that 50% would have returned to Europe. Also, pre-Israel Jewish terrorist gangs led by future prime ministers Begin and Shamir, pioneered bombs in the marketplace, drive by shootings, and bus bombs, and were so vicious they probably killed more Jews than any other demographic. Jews who were friends with Arabs, Jews who did buisiness with Arabs were all targets.”
The word "occupation" gets thrown around like the word "genocide". I have heard it said that by "occupation" people mean things like control of air rights, control of what goes in...along with Egypt (which is always forgotten)....and so on.
But I am not sure. Would you trust Hamas having air rights to fly air craft over Tel Aviv????? Ha Ha Ha.
Apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, collective punishment, these are all correct terms. So is Jewish supremacy in the ethno state. What a stupid thing to say that Hamas, which is the running of the concentration camp, such as water, garbage retrieval, schools, etc. (Qassam Brigades is the militant resistance fighters) and whom are people born with the exact same inherent rights as you ought to have your ill-informed opinion dictate whether they get…an airport? Bwahaha! It is the genociding colonial, apartheid Jewish supremacist illegal occupier and the United States’ military outpost that cannot be trusted given their entire history since inception when the zionist terrorist gangs led by Israel’s eventual leaders went around murdering indigenous Jews and Arabs. Read a book about the issue before opining about something you are seriously confused about.
I personally think that if the left of center and right of center could do away with some idealism and hard-lining, much could be done about many issues. No one likes either of these sides very much but there are some issues that could make this a very powerful voting block, maybe extremely powerful. Just a thought.
This is the key to fixing many of the problems we are facing today. We need a group of people in the center who are willing to work together and come up with some serious fixes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what neither Party in the two party system wants.
Great article, lots of respect for Zaid. I do have to wonder tho, if the majority of actual Liberals are invisible bc we’re not being courted by anyone with a PAC / Deep State ghouls / a bunch of social media clout etc. ?
I think the far left crazy people are annoying, and while some have good intentions most of them are idiots repeating gibberish as a show of belonging. They give zero fucks about making anyone’s life better; they have a large hole in themselves they’re trying to fill with misplaced anger and fear. I don’t know if they’re driving people away from issues like justice for Palestine, but they certainly aren’t interested in helping anyone who doesn’t know their secret handshake, or who hasn’t drank enough kool-aid to send away for the secret decoder ring.
On the other side are the suburban neoliberals who loyally consume MSDNC and recite litanies about Trump and Putin and whatever during the Two Minutes Hate. They’d probably drop bombs on civilians themselves if someone let them, as long as Maddow or some other milquetoast fashy-wannabe told them it was ok. Some of them could probably be convinced with reason and information, but first you’d have to deprogram them of the lies about Russian spies supporting a ceasefire like Nancy says…
So where are most of us with functioning brains who want these bullshit wars to stop? Where are the majority of people who want basic justice and human rights for everyone? Why aren’t there enough of us to matter? Why can’t we form a voting block to unfuck our country and government??? Probably we’re being ignored by and silenced by the mainstream bc we’re the only threat to their dominance. And most of us are too poor, sick and sad to do anything about it besides being angry in the comments.
So how do we break on through and make ourselves heard?
“ Where are the majority of people who want basic justice and human rights for everyone?”
The “majority of people” don’t really care about any of that. They mostly want feed their families, become more prosperous or at least maintain their standard of living, be safe from crime, raise their children and be left alone. Those that do care about the other stuff, most of them blindly support their tribe, and while some do post ( predominantly platitudes ) about Ukraine or Israel, there’s nary a peep about Syria ( many, many more dead Muslims than Gaza ) the slavery in Libya, oppression of the Kurds, the oppression of Falun Gong and the Uyghurs, and any number of African genocides and wars. The “majority” isn’t on Twitter or posting on Substack, let alone paying any attention to mainstream news, or even the “current thing”. It’s an illusion. A luxury that young people, the PMC, and the media have time for…
“The “majority of people” don’t really care about any of that. They mostly want feed their families, become more prosperous or at least maintain their standard of living, be safe from crime, raise their children and be left alone.”
Fair enough - but why is that mutually exclusive from supporting human / civil rights??
My question still stands, why are regular mf’ers who want justice being shut out if we’re (hopefully) the majority?
I’m with you, but “regular mf’ers” don’t really care until something affects them personally, and that is the majority🤷♂️ I mean most USians don’t even vote.
Of course most don’t vote. They’d be voting for this criminal or that criminal, this genocide or that war. This Wall Street or that Wall Street, this Big Bank or that Big Bank, this globalized corpratocracy or that one. Lol That’s the fault of the corrupt parties that choose not to offer something to voters.
What a crock. Unless you were looking in the mirror as you opine about filling an empty hole by repeating nonsense not caring about improving life conditions. The colonization of indigenous (whose politics aligned to “leftists”), the meddling in to overthrowing leftist’s governments, mass rapes, torture, murders of leftists on this planet in the last 100 years alone have been sponsored by the United States and apartheid Israel. Theirs is the extremism and it’s collapsing our ecosystems as it persists in disappearing leftists/de colonialists and disposing of us. Why? Because said leftists uphold that equality is for everyone.
Timely and much needed — as we watch a televised US-supported genocide and while the US “elite” and US security state feverishly “fight for democracy”.
1. I don't accept that figure as being even close to realistic. And of course Hamas, which controls Gaza, is going to say Israel is killing mainly women and children - it's in their interest to do so. But in reality, for the length and intensity of this campaign - I think the IDF is doing an excellent job of keeping civilian casualties low.
That sort of reminds me of all the anti-semites who challenge the numbers of the first holocaust. Sorry, Shane - but yours is a bad faith argument. You are either a paid bot here to interrupt the adults, or you are the sort of person who will watch as hundreds of thousands of people die and keep muttering about how Israel needs to ‘defend itself’ and no number of mass graves, dead children, slaughtered families, destroyed buildings is ever going to move you.
Apartheid Israel terrorizes Palestinians for 70+ years.
Gaza civilians were slaughtered on MANY times in the past — this time it is apparently a “Final Solution”. The bipartisan fascist US War party is totally supporting two Nazi-dominated governments (U and I).
No, I'm someone who is trained not to respond to base appeals to emotion, which is what your entire comment was based on. And Lee knows me, I am anything but a "bot." I tend to find that when that accusation is lobbed at someone, it's because the person lobbing it is losing the argument.
I only lib that argument when people are spreading specific false talking points as if on copy/paste. No one disputes those numbers except hasbara. The UN, WHO, and even the US government don’t dispute those numbers. And a potato can look at the moonscape that is Gaza and see that tens of thousands of people who are dead.
You are a liar. If you are doing it fir money it’s disgusting. If you are doing it because you want to believe your own lies, you are mentally ill. Now, as I do with any holocaust denier, we’re done here.
I thought in terms of bodily harm, as opposed to culture, genocides dealt with death only.
And how many of the dead aren't Hamas combatants? Why isn't that distinction clear? Is it just another manner in which Hamas uses civilians as human shields?
I really appreciate your effort here. I have not been persuaded though. I do agree that the Palestinian protestors need a completely new approach to move the needle in their direction.
I think most Americans and probably most westerners are done with large protests marching through our streets disrupting civil society as they scream outrageous demands.
Adding insult is that many of the protesters are recently arrived from other countries or indoctrinated college students who are filled with idealist views without any nuance to a complicated subject.
They often dismiss any criticism of the damage that Hamas has done to not only Israel but even more importantly to the Palestinians. That issue has to be addressed between the two countries or I doubt there will be no good ending.
I abhor mob mentality and that is what I see here just as we saw with the riots after George Floyd.
Zaid, it sounds as if you are saying to those groups "pretend to be closer to mainstream until we win". I'm not sure how I feel about that. And what is winning to you and all these groups? Do you even all agree? Sounds like, perhaps, not.
A lot of this is sensible political advice, and the idea that "the worst thing for Israel’s government would be for Americans to start to see it as more analogous to the region it lives in than a North American democracy" is a really stellar insight. However, I'm very skeptical of the idea that turning rallies into a "sea of Israeli and Palestinian flags" would be feasible or even desirable. Asking Palestinians to fly the flag of the regime that's repressing them is a humiliating prospect. A much more reasonable ask would be for Palestinians to fly the American flag next to their own.
Turning Palestinian rallies into unity rallies also confuses the messaging. The argument that "an endless occupation only endangers Israel in the long term," while it may be true, is also not a silver bullet. Part of the problem in American politics *is* that the Palestinian issue is seen through the lens of what's best for Israel. (After all, as you say, there are "few political campaigns that have ever succeeded by embracing the opposition’s framework.") Americans need to start thinking of the Palestinian nation as an actor that carries moral weight in itself and whose condition affects U.S. interests directly.
This is way beyond figuring out how to moderate a proPalestian movement that appeals to common sense and common decency as AIPAC has had years to manipulate public opinion and there’s no catching up. Until America stops sending money and weapons, the Europeans grow a backbone and MSM shows the country the extent of the carnage I don’t know how this can be stopped. I watched CBS news last night and there was a 45 second report on Gaza sandwiched in among the Super Bowl hype, Taylor Swift and a weather report. And Biden’s dementia.
I needed to take some time to think about this article. And, you know - I think I’ve decided that it’s poppycock. Yes, SJW campus movements ought to be more focused. Yes, adding 5 more colors to the rainbow flag has ridiculously and unnecessarily diluted the pride flag and its message. Totally agree about being focused. BUT - during the vietnam war, nothing would have happened to end it had the protestors focused on persuading the valium moms - and quite honestly the scolding of the protesters was not much different that the scolding Zain is dishing out. Ditto that protests against the dirty wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The gay rights movement started with a riot, and men in dresses taking to the streets (the HRC only came on board once activists had made the space safe for the pink polo shirt set.) In fact, the HRC actively interfered with AIDS activists and delayed treatments for AIDS because they wanted to go along to get along; it was ACT-up that was willing to be obnoxious and cause enough trouble that something needed to be done.
I’ve been a part of enough protest movements at this point to realize that appealing to soccer moms and appeasing mainstream liberals is pointless until critical mass is achieved. If wine-swilling Karen can look at the endless stream of dead babies in Gaza and state that ‘Israel has to defend itself’ Karen can just fuck off.
The settler-colonial Zionists who emigrated to Palestine never had any intention of living peacefully with the indigenous Palestinians. This is clear from history as well as the well documented quotes from their Zionist leaders. After all, the they were “God’s chosen people,” and Israel was their “promised land.” Why would they share this land with people that were not “chosen?” As a result, the history of Israel has been one of discrimination, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide. The establishment of a homeland for Jews may have started with good intentions but that experiment in social engineering (with zero input from the Palestinians) has proved to be a disastrous mistake, leading to unending hatred’s wars, and death. Time to admit the obvious.
The only reason that these Zionist extremists have been able to carry out such inhumane and deadly policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians is due to the full financial, political, military, and diplomatic support of the United States. Without that, Israel would long ago have had to make peace with their neighbors and recognize the human rights of Palestinians. So, instead of fecklessly decrying Israeli Zionists we should be demanding an end to all support for Israel on every level. Not one more dime of foreign aid, not one more protective veto in the UN Security Council, not one more bomb or bullet for these murderous fanatics. Israel has lost the right to exist and our US leaders who support this genocide should be tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Either the Israelis learn to live in peace and harmony with Palestinians or they need to emigrate. Let’s ask that US suburban mom how she likes her tax dollars and politicians supporting the bombing of women and children inside the Israeli-controlled Gaza concentration camp for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes in other parts of Palestine.
Protest in a manner that invites/persuades others to join - that’s the message I heard in this piece. The majority of the actions of protesters I see these days makes me want to run in the opposite direction.
I think this is mostly spot on. However, Palestinian leadership has been offered a two-state solution several times & rejected it each time. They want a one-state solution: Palestine without any jews. The "occupation" that they & their western activist allies decry isn't just the West Bank or Gaza — it's Israel istelf. They consider Israel to be an illegitimate, "settler-colonialist" project that can only be remedied by being ended. As long as this remains the position of these groups, their solution to the problem will turn off every normie in America, & they'll never attract more than their fringe supporters. It'd be nice if they grew up & stopped their tendentious sloganeering, but their maximalist demands will always be what prevents them reaching more people.
False. Review the peace process history.
There are four basic issues between Palestinians and Israel:
1.) BORDERS (pre-1967 war borders = the whole of the West Bank including east Jerusalem and also Gaza): It was proposed that these borders would form an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Palestinians accepted this decision of the international community, which included all the legal and political bodies in the world, e.g., the International League of Justice, the UN General Assembly, all of which/whom accepted the borders should be the pre-1967 borders. Israel (& the U.S.) rejected this decision wanting a part of the West Bank. In Israel’s last offer it wanted approximately 8% of the West Bank.
2.) LEGAL TITLE OF TERRITORY ACQUIRED IN WAR (A.K.A. JERUSALEM): It is inadmissible under international law to acquire territory by war. Israel acquired east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in the course of the 1967 war; therefore, Israel has no legal title to east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza providing the basis for the above mentioned proposal using pre 1967 borders; however, Israel rejected this observance of law by the international community because it wanted parts of east Jerusalem.
3.) SETTLEMENTS: Israel has long built illegally in the occupied Palestinian territories. There are now approximately 700,000 illegal settlers living in the occupied West Bank. Under international law these settlers/settlements are illegal and had been (is now) enacting a low-level ETHNIC CLEANSING of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. During the peace process Israel wanted to keep under its sovereignty 80% of the illegal settlers on occupied Palestinian land, therefore rejecting the international community’s position that international law be honored and the illegal settlements be dismantled.
4.) RIGHT OF RETURN FOR REFUGEES AND THEIR DESCENDANTS SINCE 1948: International law asserts the RIGHT OF RETURN to refugees’ homes after the cessation of hostilities. Israel defied/defies this and during the peace talks, again, said it would not allow any of those refugees and or their descendants to return, thereby refusing the international community’s proposal.
To summarize. The Palestinians ACCEPTED the terms as developed and ratified by the whole international community of legal and political bodies on the basis of international law. Put another way. On all of the questions #1-4, the Palestinians were willing to make concessions; Israel was unwilling.
Paraphrasing Palestine-Israel scholar Norm Norman Finkelstein:
Every single year the UN General Assembly passes a resolution called PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT OF THE PALESTINE QUESTION, which lays out the terms described above, anchored and embedded in international law. Every single year the vote on this resolution is the whole world, approximately 180 countries, voting FOR it and, usually, the United States, Israel and a handful of south sea islands, i.e., the Marshall Islands, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu voting AGAINST it. Anyone can search this out on the internet.
“Israel’s commitment to enforcing the dispossession and occupation of Palestinians has also led it to undermine any prospect of the two-state solution that it claimed to support. The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) were “founded on a neo-colonialist basis,” in the words of former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. “One of the meanings of Oslo,” Ben Ami explained, “was that the PLO was eventually Israel's collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada,” – a grassroots and largely non-violent uprising against Israeli occupation – thereby “cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.” Oslo’s Israeli architects, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, NEVER “wanted the autonomy to usher in a Palestinian state.” As a neo-colonial endeavor disguised as a “peace process,” the Oslo era saw a doubling of the Israeli settlement population in its first eight years.” (journalist Aaron Mate)
Fast forward.
In December 2000, President Clinton put forth what were called “parameters for resolving the conflict”. ALL of the parameters required concessions by Palestinians. NONE of the parameters set forth by Clinton required concessions from Israel on the basis of international law.
“Settling this so-called “conflict” on the basis of international law is the only way because there is no alternative framework that exists on our planet.” -Norm Finkelstein
In January 2001, both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side accepted WITH RESERVATIONS these “Clinton parameters”.
[However,] Israel’s so-called “generous peace offer” at Camp David in July 2000 – widely cited by Israeli officials and Western pundits as proof of an Israeli willingness to “compromise,” and a Palestinian refusal to “co-exist” – was in fact a perpetuation of Oslo’s neo-colonial ruse. As Ben-Ami, who took part in the summit as a top Israeli negotiator, himself acknowledged years later: “If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.” (Aaron Mate)
Fast forward some more.
“In 2002, the Arab League offered Israel full normalization in return for a withdrawal from all Arab territories (Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian) that it occupied in 1967; the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital; and a “just resolution” to the refugee issue. The initiative was subsequently endorsed by Iran, which signed on to a December 2017 declaration calling for a “two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine.”
The proposal would require Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and abandon the illegal settlement blocs, which carve up Palestinian land and disproportionately consume precious water reserves. Later on, the Arab League signaled that it would accept mutually agreed land swaps, as the Palestinian Authority had already done, that could keep some settlement areas under Israeli control. But even the most far-reaching Israeli offer, presented by lame-duck Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, rejected parity in any territorial exchange. As veteran Israeli negotiator Michael Herzog wrote in 2011: “No Israeli government to date has accepted the Palestinian stipulation that land swaps be fully equal in size and ‘quality.’”
Israel has repeatedly rejected the Arab League’s diplomatic initiative and even refused to accept it as a basis for further negotiations. In shunning the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, Israel has shown a less accommodating position than even what Hamas, at one point, claimed to support.” (Aaron Mate)
•Watch: Full interview of Palestine-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein
https://youtu.be/EFbdKdwqlZw?feature=shared
•The roots of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza: Israel has always chosen occupation and supremacy over peace and diplomacy
by Aaron Mate
https://open.substack.com/pub/mate/p/the-roots-of-israels-ethnic-cleansing?r=r7yk&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
•Watch: Bisan Lecture Series interview of Professor Rashid Khalidi: The latest phase of the hundreds years’ war on Palestine
https://youtu.be/lFnonQBNJug?si=lpmwZgMpaEIrPfyX
The so-called right of return is a imaginary right that exists for only one refugee group in the modern world, the Palestinian Arabs. There is no right of return for Germans who were forced out of Russia after WW2, for Indian Moslems who were displaced by India, for more recently Syrians who fled the civil war in Syria, and certainly not for the 700,000 Jews who were truly ethnically cleansed from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa. Although there are many individual Palestinians who feel otherwise, the Arab and Palestinian leadership has NOT accepted the idea of a Jewish state from decades before the 1948 establishment of the state. "From the River to the Sea" is not a chant for peaceful co-existence, it is a chant for the destruction of the Jews, You are relying on a very narrow group of "scholars" for your information.
False and baseless.
1.) “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (that is, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea) means exactly what is says: freedom within those boundaries where, Palestinian rights, including freedom of movement, is now and has been obstructed by illegal occupation by the zionist settler colonial project, which now also includes apartheid. The phrase origin, as expressed by Najla Said, Palestinian artist who happens to be the adult daughter of the late scholar Edward Said, is purposeful co-optation of “the old zionist slogan that said ‘from the Euphrates to the Nile’, which means from Iraq to Egypt”, a stated goal for its colonialism. Najla Said goes on to say “They [settler-colonialists] were the only ones wanted to get rid of anyone.”
Palestinians in the diaspora were restricted from landing even in the airport on the land - of course it means From the river to the sea FREEDOM. The world sees through your zionism as Jewish supremacism, violent racism and dehumanizing attempts in order to steal the rest of the land a.k.a. “hasbara” and and rejects it.
2.) Hasbara does not stand up to the reality before our eyes. I reject your disinformation while noting how sick it is to try generally keeping the genocide going and particularly during the Rafah slaughter of indigenous Palestinian people including children. #SuperBowlMassacre
The world sees and now knows that the zionist’s false belief embedded in hasbara is that Jews lives are of more value than others and; we understand zionists are delusional supremacists in this belief since everyone on this planet is EQUAL. In desperation the genocidal zionists spout the nonsense you just put forward that the real genocide is of Israelis though anyone can check the record well documented in the various human rights organizations reports, e.g., Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; even B’tselem. Zionists don’t represent Jews and illegal occupation and apartheid of the indigenous Palestinians doesn’t provide security for anyone, which has everything to do with the universally human inclination to defend one’s rights to freedoms and nothing to do with religion.
3.) The indisputable facts of the diplomatic record, which anyone can look up for themselves are as I outlined. Every word stands.
Everyone on this planet is not equal. We all care about others unequally. And that is how it should be.
With that said the US should not fund and arm Likud nor diplomatically support a ethno theocratic state in Palestine.
False. Every single human on this planet is equal and that is how it is. It’s called a single consistent standard.
A moral standard can be consistent and not everyone equally measures to that standard. If my standard for human worth were entirely based on how small their ears are, then some people are going to be of greater worth according to that single consistent standard. I wager you don’t like that single consistent standard though.
Humans are not viewed as equal by other humans in practice as clearly demonstrated by the way people differentially relate to humans. And that includes how you relate to people differently. It’s simply not possible to value everyone equally. We all are finite beings with limited resources. And we also shouldn’t value everyone equally. A serial killer should not be valued equally with any random child.
The assertion that humans are equal is generally just a vague and meaningless expression of piety.
But, regardless of disagreement about meta-ethics, I think it is usually more important people agree on the concrete stuff, like that the US should not be support an ethno theorcatic state in Palestine or fund Likud.
You're mistaken.. From the river to the sea is the slogan of the Likud party... Are you saying they're genocidal... ok, makes sense!
From what I’ve found the slogan for Likud was specifically “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Pretty much the same meaning but different words.
I really like Zaid, I appreciate him and I agree with him on around 95% of what he writes. But on this issue he and I are miles apart, as are Lee and myself. Doesn't mean I can't learn from reading both and try to gain perspective by doing so. Thanks for bringing him on to write this, Lee.
Decades ago a small newspaper reported that four (4) Mideast reporters for the NYT, including their Mideast Bureau Chief, had children serving in the IDF. After six months of hounding the NYT, they finally admitted it. They tried to argue that having children in the IDF did not influence how the reporters wrote about the conflict with Palestinians !!
If you do some research you'll find that the Biden WH is riddled with rabid Zionists.
And Trump's son-in-law Kuschner, a major Zionist financing expansion in West Bank, has ILLEGAL Israeli settlement playgrounds named after him.
For apartheid Israel Zionists, it's like owning both boxers - no matter who wins, THEY can't lose !
"In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States" – Vladimir Putin in interview with Tucker Carlson -- https://substack.com/home/post/p-141567310
I don't know what's more strange - the fact you so fervently remember the details of an entirely inconsequential event from decades ago or the fact you give a shit in which army the children of reporters is serving.
This story neglects to mention the big money behind Palestinian activism; many of the protesters are paid, and sometimes recruited via Craigslist. Signs are nicely printed in a uniform font, and masks and flags are provided.
It seems likely that protesters are guaranteed legal help, as well - you don’t start shaking the fence at the White House, as Palestinian protesters did last month, without being very sure someone is ready and able to get you out if you are arrested.
Where is the money to finance these protests coming from, and does the source of those funds really care about the Palestinians at all? Or is there some other goal?
Can you elaborate a bit more on the good sides of ongoing genocide of Palestinians?
Maybe you can stop making bad faith arguments first.
Yet another dumb comment from someone who claims to care about the welfare of Palestinians. Online, you are your own worst enemies; I doubt you convert anyone at all.
My comment doesn't address the rightfulness of the Palestinian cause. Instead, addresses the sincerity and legitimacy of protesters in the US who claim to be pro-Palestinian.
My guess is that many of them are the same old anarchists who are paid to turn up at almost any left-wing protest.
Who funds it? Good question. Wealthy divorcees and widows like Mackenzie Scott and Laureen Jobs donate a great deal of money to "social justice" causes, and I doubt they can track where all of it goes. In addition, outsiders like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss donate enormous amounts to left-wing causes in the US. (The New York Times says Wyss "has been a leading source of difficult-to-trace money to groups associated with Democrats.")
Left-wing heirs to big fortunes are another source of funding, such as James "Fergie" Chambers, a scion of the Cox family, who openly funds anarchist causes like Stop Cop City.
Why does it matter if there are genocide protests that receive funding? I’d be more concerned about the people paid to defend it. It’s like being upset that there were mercenaries fighting the Nazis in WW2.
I think you ought to back that up.
The ads on Craigslist have been widely shared on social media. The going rate appears to be $30 an hour, which is nice money for a student or unemployed person. Not sure if taxes are deducted.
Paying protesters in the US isn't anything new. Back in the day I saw Al Sharpton personally distributing white envelopes after a protest, and I doubt there were birthday-party invitations inside.
The martyrs families are well compensated as well.
It’s widely shared on social media that the earth is flat. Back it up. (And yes, paid canvassers, phone bankers, etc are a side gig on Craigslist. Show me something that says that we are paying for people to go to protests on behalf of Palestine.)
Here's a recent article in the Toronto Sun saying precisely that. Enjoy. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/kinsella-protesters-paid-to-take-part-in-pro-palestinian-demonstrations
How much do you think the Toronto Sun is paid to publish pro-genocide propaganda?
That article is laughable.
From The Free Press:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/american-marxists-funding-pro-palestinian-rage?r=18oafz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Zaid's got the right idea but he's too generous to the fanatical racist Jew hating rampaging protesters. In my opinion, it appears the protest movement has gone way beyond caring about Palestinians. (Hamas doesn't care about Palestinians so why should they?) And it IS a movement that is cheering on bigger ideologies like Marxism, anti-capitalism/colonialism/imperialism, anti-West and now we learn about funding from Communist Worker's groups outside the US. The "Pro Palestinian Protest Movement" is is woefully under-informed about the intricacies of Israel, it's founding and ethos. It's a pernicious movement and has little to do with Palestinians and caters to wannabe revolutionaries. And as it is with these pro-Marxist movements, it always ends with Jews who are responsible for the world's ills. It's really obvious.
None of this objection to genocide has anything to do with ‘hating Jews’ and quite honestly, that dog doesn’t bark any more. I don’t ‘hate’ Americans, but I loathe the government of the US at this point. I don’t hate Italians, but I detest the fascists that are now holding office. I don’t hate Jewish people (in fact, I have several Jewish people whom I absolutely adore) - but I hate hate hate hate that Israel is now committing a genocide, and I weep that I see people so whipped up in blood-thirst that they are in denial over their nation’s commission of the same war crimes that they, themselves, were victim to.
Now, we could dive into Marxism (as I recall, there were many respected Jewish scholars in the Marxist movement), socialism (I understand that Israel actually has socialist health care - unlike the US), anti-colonialism (a grand idea, in fact.)
Jews aren’t responsible for the world’s ills. An elite group engaged in end-stage, zero-sum capitalism is. Israel, however, is currently responsible for a genocide. This requires no understanding of Israel’s founding or ethos; all decent people should be opposed to the slaughter of innocents.
The hundreds and hundreds of protests throughout the world by "Pro-Palestinian" people have been, to me, a catastrophe for Palestinians.
I have seen countless videos and attended an actual protest to watch. At no time have I seen remonstrations against Hamas. It is Hamas which immiserates and exploits Palestinians, and which refuses to hold elections.
And don't forget that Hamas siphoned off probably hundreds of millions of $ to build circa 350-400 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza, turning it into essentially a military installation. A war crime in and of itself. And now it has become undisputably clear, that the UN via UNRWA, is up beyond its collective eyeballs in bankrolling and covering up for terrorism and Hamas.
Yeah, you ought to read a book about the issue before you opine about no complaints about Hamas. You sound ridiculous.
Great...thank you, sir. Please provide links to those many complaints about Hamas voiced by protestors against the current war. Merci bien!
No. Your comment is cringeworthy. Why aren’t you embarrassed? You have no idea what or who is “Hamas”. Nobody will be answering to you. To be in this conversation you’d need to know. Now. Let’s have it. Your condemnation of the apartheid regime and its US sponsor for the EIGHT 10/07-type terror attacks it has carried out on the indigenous Palestinians in Gaza between 2004-2022. You know the ones that massacred more people than were murdered (by militant fighters/their activists and Israeli forces) on 10/07 including more Palestinian children than all of them; next for the 5,000 Palestinian hostages the illegal occupier held prior to 10/07 including hundreds of CHILDREN, in fact more children than all of the hostages taken on 10/07, and including 1,200+ who never even were charged some after years despite the already sham military court that convicts the indigenous at a rate of 95+% for absurd and unproven things (as apartheid colonizers do)
Did you see any remonstrations against Likud for consciously cultivating Hamas so that it could use the inevitable atrocities that Hamas would carry out to carry out a genocide against Palestinians?
Netanyahu is on record claiming Hamas is a strategic asset. It is clear why he claimed that—because useful idiots like yourself.
Hi Jeffrey, thank you for your response. Much appreciated. Praise the Lord!
Correct me if I am wrong, I thought Israel has not been occupying the Gaza Strip militarily for a number of years now.
Incorrect. Gaza has continued to be occupied by apartheid Israel this their birth and death records exist with illegal occupier Israel as their water, food, electricity has been rationed at the whim of the Israeli regime which controls every meaningful aspect of the indigenous Palestinians’ lives in what Giora Eiland calls “the highest concentration camp”. Thank you for asking as this is an important point.
OMG....played the "indigenous" card. Whatever "indigenous" means.
Yes, show us in more ways that you know nothing about this subject. Go on, blow some hot air on the next thread; you’re surely making the rounds. Nevertheless, for the scrollers. In 1880 there were people living on the land called Historic Mandate Palestine whose people had been there a thousand+ years, a minority of Jews (20k) and a majority of Arabs (480k) whom coexisted peacefully enough. Balfour Declaration (look it up), WWII and the holocaust of the wholly innocent Jews, and the aggressive zionist movement imposes its plan based on the lie “A land with no people for a people without a land.” Zionists unleash brutalizing violence upon the indigenous taking their own sociopathy and post-holocaust humiliation and rage out on the innocent in the land they forcibly established an apartheid ethno state.
Take author Rich Forer’s observations.
“Whenever someone asks me if I believe Israel has a right to exist, I reply that all human beings should have a right to live wherever they want as long as they do not disrespect the rights of people who might already be living there. Israel exists and its people are not going anwhere so the question is moot. Nations are legal constructs, names on a piece of paper. If you changed the name of Israel it would not change the habitats of the people who live there. Do I think the establishment of Israel was a mistake? Yes, because most European Jews did not want to migrate to Palestine after WWII. They were forced to by the international Zionist organizations in order for the Yishuv in Palestine to have enough of a population to convince UN states to vote for the UN Partition Plan, which they begrudgingly did under pressure. Had Zionist orgs not blocked FDR's proposal, agreed to by western European nations, to resettle 100% of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, there would be no Israel. After WWII ended a survey of Dachau concentration camp survivors revealed that only 15% were open to migrating to Israel and, based on previous migrations, it is likely that 50% would have returned to Europe. Also, pre-Israel Jewish terrorist gangs led by future prime ministers Begin and Shamir, pioneered bombs in the marketplace, drive by shootings, and bus bombs, and were so vicious they probably killed more Jews than any other demographic. Jews who were friends with Arabs, Jews who did buisiness with Arabs were all targets.”
To make it easy one for you. What indigenous is not = European and American zionists from, say, London, New York (the Hamptons), etc. Lol
The word "occupation" gets thrown around like the word "genocide". I have heard it said that by "occupation" people mean things like control of air rights, control of what goes in...along with Egypt (which is always forgotten)....and so on.
But I am not sure. Would you trust Hamas having air rights to fly air craft over Tel Aviv????? Ha Ha Ha.
Apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, collective punishment, these are all correct terms. So is Jewish supremacy in the ethno state. What a stupid thing to say that Hamas, which is the running of the concentration camp, such as water, garbage retrieval, schools, etc. (Qassam Brigades is the militant resistance fighters) and whom are people born with the exact same inherent rights as you ought to have your ill-informed opinion dictate whether they get…an airport? Bwahaha! It is the genociding colonial, apartheid Jewish supremacist illegal occupier and the United States’ military outpost that cannot be trusted given their entire history since inception when the zionist terrorist gangs led by Israel’s eventual leaders went around murdering indigenous Jews and Arabs. Read a book about the issue before opining about something you are seriously confused about.
I personally think that if the left of center and right of center could do away with some idealism and hard-lining, much could be done about many issues. No one likes either of these sides very much but there are some issues that could make this a very powerful voting block, maybe extremely powerful. Just a thought.
This is the key to fixing many of the problems we are facing today. We need a group of people in the center who are willing to work together and come up with some serious fixes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what neither Party in the two party system wants.
Wendy, historically, when has the center ever accomplished anything? Especially if not pressured by the right or the left?
Great article, lots of respect for Zaid. I do have to wonder tho, if the majority of actual Liberals are invisible bc we’re not being courted by anyone with a PAC / Deep State ghouls / a bunch of social media clout etc. ?
I think the far left crazy people are annoying, and while some have good intentions most of them are idiots repeating gibberish as a show of belonging. They give zero fucks about making anyone’s life better; they have a large hole in themselves they’re trying to fill with misplaced anger and fear. I don’t know if they’re driving people away from issues like justice for Palestine, but they certainly aren’t interested in helping anyone who doesn’t know their secret handshake, or who hasn’t drank enough kool-aid to send away for the secret decoder ring.
On the other side are the suburban neoliberals who loyally consume MSDNC and recite litanies about Trump and Putin and whatever during the Two Minutes Hate. They’d probably drop bombs on civilians themselves if someone let them, as long as Maddow or some other milquetoast fashy-wannabe told them it was ok. Some of them could probably be convinced with reason and information, but first you’d have to deprogram them of the lies about Russian spies supporting a ceasefire like Nancy says…
So where are most of us with functioning brains who want these bullshit wars to stop? Where are the majority of people who want basic justice and human rights for everyone? Why aren’t there enough of us to matter? Why can’t we form a voting block to unfuck our country and government??? Probably we’re being ignored by and silenced by the mainstream bc we’re the only threat to their dominance. And most of us are too poor, sick and sad to do anything about it besides being angry in the comments.
So how do we break on through and make ourselves heard?
“ Where are the majority of people who want basic justice and human rights for everyone?”
The “majority of people” don’t really care about any of that. They mostly want feed their families, become more prosperous or at least maintain their standard of living, be safe from crime, raise their children and be left alone. Those that do care about the other stuff, most of them blindly support their tribe, and while some do post ( predominantly platitudes ) about Ukraine or Israel, there’s nary a peep about Syria ( many, many more dead Muslims than Gaza ) the slavery in Libya, oppression of the Kurds, the oppression of Falun Gong and the Uyghurs, and any number of African genocides and wars. The “majority” isn’t on Twitter or posting on Substack, let alone paying any attention to mainstream news, or even the “current thing”. It’s an illusion. A luxury that young people, the PMC, and the media have time for…
Same as it ever was.
“The “majority of people” don’t really care about any of that. They mostly want feed their families, become more prosperous or at least maintain their standard of living, be safe from crime, raise their children and be left alone.”
Fair enough - but why is that mutually exclusive from supporting human / civil rights??
My question still stands, why are regular mf’ers who want justice being shut out if we’re (hopefully) the majority?
I’m with you, but “regular mf’ers” don’t really care until something affects them personally, and that is the majority🤷♂️ I mean most USians don’t even vote.
Of course most don’t vote. They’d be voting for this criminal or that criminal, this genocide or that war. This Wall Street or that Wall Street, this Big Bank or that Big Bank, this globalized corpratocracy or that one. Lol That’s the fault of the corrupt parties that choose not to offer something to voters.
What a crock. Unless you were looking in the mirror as you opine about filling an empty hole by repeating nonsense not caring about improving life conditions. The colonization of indigenous (whose politics aligned to “leftists”), the meddling in to overthrowing leftist’s governments, mass rapes, torture, murders of leftists on this planet in the last 100 years alone have been sponsored by the United States and apartheid Israel. Theirs is the extremism and it’s collapsing our ecosystems as it persists in disappearing leftists/de colonialists and disposing of us. Why? Because said leftists uphold that equality is for everyone.
“only I have a functioning brain” Lol
Thanks for proving my point by way of example. Remember to drink your kool-aid.
Thank you, Lee and Zaid.
Timely and much needed — as we watch a televised US-supported genocide and while the US “elite” and US security state feverishly “fight for democracy”.
Lies after lies, horror after horror….
There is no "genocide" going on in Gaza. That's such a tired, shopworn and easily disproven accusation I am surprised anyone is still making it.
What do you call 100,000 people dead or injured, mostly women and children?
1. I don't accept that figure as being even close to realistic. And of course Hamas, which controls Gaza, is going to say Israel is killing mainly women and children - it's in their interest to do so. But in reality, for the length and intensity of this campaign - I think the IDF is doing an excellent job of keeping civilian casualties low.
That sort of reminds me of all the anti-semites who challenge the numbers of the first holocaust. Sorry, Shane - but yours is a bad faith argument. You are either a paid bot here to interrupt the adults, or you are the sort of person who will watch as hundreds of thousands of people die and keep muttering about how Israel needs to ‘defend itself’ and no number of mass graves, dead children, slaughtered families, destroyed buildings is ever going to move you.
Apartheid Israel terrorizes Palestinians for 70+ years.
Gaza civilians were slaughtered on MANY times in the past — this time it is apparently a “Final Solution”. The bipartisan fascist US War party is totally supporting two Nazi-dominated governments (U and I).
Stick to the conspiracy theories on Aaron Maté's blog - you're out of your depth in the real world.
No, I'm someone who is trained not to respond to base appeals to emotion, which is what your entire comment was based on. And Lee knows me, I am anything but a "bot." I tend to find that when that accusation is lobbed at someone, it's because the person lobbing it is losing the argument.
I only lib that argument when people are spreading specific false talking points as if on copy/paste. No one disputes those numbers except hasbara. The UN, WHO, and even the US government don’t dispute those numbers. And a potato can look at the moonscape that is Gaza and see that tens of thousands of people who are dead.
You are a liar. If you are doing it fir money it’s disgusting. If you are doing it because you want to believe your own lies, you are mentally ill. Now, as I do with any holocaust denier, we’re done here.
Did Netanyahu support Hamas? Fund Hamas ? For leverage..
I thought in terms of bodily harm, as opposed to culture, genocides dealt with death only.
And how many of the dead aren't Hamas combatants? Why isn't that distinction clear? Is it just another manner in which Hamas uses civilians as human shields?
Hey Shane, There’s some brown stuff all over your teeth.
I really appreciate your effort here. I have not been persuaded though. I do agree that the Palestinian protestors need a completely new approach to move the needle in their direction.
I think most Americans and probably most westerners are done with large protests marching through our streets disrupting civil society as they scream outrageous demands.
Adding insult is that many of the protesters are recently arrived from other countries or indoctrinated college students who are filled with idealist views without any nuance to a complicated subject.
They often dismiss any criticism of the damage that Hamas has done to not only Israel but even more importantly to the Palestinians. That issue has to be addressed between the two countries or I doubt there will be no good ending.
I abhor mob mentality and that is what I see here just as we saw with the riots after George Floyd.
Zaid, it sounds as if you are saying to those groups "pretend to be closer to mainstream until we win". I'm not sure how I feel about that. And what is winning to you and all these groups? Do you even all agree? Sounds like, perhaps, not.
A lot of this is sensible political advice, and the idea that "the worst thing for Israel’s government would be for Americans to start to see it as more analogous to the region it lives in than a North American democracy" is a really stellar insight. However, I'm very skeptical of the idea that turning rallies into a "sea of Israeli and Palestinian flags" would be feasible or even desirable. Asking Palestinians to fly the flag of the regime that's repressing them is a humiliating prospect. A much more reasonable ask would be for Palestinians to fly the American flag next to their own.
Turning Palestinian rallies into unity rallies also confuses the messaging. The argument that "an endless occupation only endangers Israel in the long term," while it may be true, is also not a silver bullet. Part of the problem in American politics *is* that the Palestinian issue is seen through the lens of what's best for Israel. (After all, as you say, there are "few political campaigns that have ever succeeded by embracing the opposition’s framework.") Americans need to start thinking of the Palestinian nation as an actor that carries moral weight in itself and whose condition affects U.S. interests directly.
This is way beyond figuring out how to moderate a proPalestian movement that appeals to common sense and common decency as AIPAC has had years to manipulate public opinion and there’s no catching up. Until America stops sending money and weapons, the Europeans grow a backbone and MSM shows the country the extent of the carnage I don’t know how this can be stopped. I watched CBS news last night and there was a 45 second report on Gaza sandwiched in among the Super Bowl hype, Taylor Swift and a weather report. And Biden’s dementia.
I needed to take some time to think about this article. And, you know - I think I’ve decided that it’s poppycock. Yes, SJW campus movements ought to be more focused. Yes, adding 5 more colors to the rainbow flag has ridiculously and unnecessarily diluted the pride flag and its message. Totally agree about being focused. BUT - during the vietnam war, nothing would have happened to end it had the protestors focused on persuading the valium moms - and quite honestly the scolding of the protesters was not much different that the scolding Zain is dishing out. Ditto that protests against the dirty wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The gay rights movement started with a riot, and men in dresses taking to the streets (the HRC only came on board once activists had made the space safe for the pink polo shirt set.) In fact, the HRC actively interfered with AIDS activists and delayed treatments for AIDS because they wanted to go along to get along; it was ACT-up that was willing to be obnoxious and cause enough trouble that something needed to be done.
I’ve been a part of enough protest movements at this point to realize that appealing to soccer moms and appeasing mainstream liberals is pointless until critical mass is achieved. If wine-swilling Karen can look at the endless stream of dead babies in Gaza and state that ‘Israel has to defend itself’ Karen can just fuck off.
The settler-colonial Zionists who emigrated to Palestine never had any intention of living peacefully with the indigenous Palestinians. This is clear from history as well as the well documented quotes from their Zionist leaders. After all, the they were “God’s chosen people,” and Israel was their “promised land.” Why would they share this land with people that were not “chosen?” As a result, the history of Israel has been one of discrimination, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide. The establishment of a homeland for Jews may have started with good intentions but that experiment in social engineering (with zero input from the Palestinians) has proved to be a disastrous mistake, leading to unending hatred’s wars, and death. Time to admit the obvious.
The only reason that these Zionist extremists have been able to carry out such inhumane and deadly policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians is due to the full financial, political, military, and diplomatic support of the United States. Without that, Israel would long ago have had to make peace with their neighbors and recognize the human rights of Palestinians. So, instead of fecklessly decrying Israeli Zionists we should be demanding an end to all support for Israel on every level. Not one more dime of foreign aid, not one more protective veto in the UN Security Council, not one more bomb or bullet for these murderous fanatics. Israel has lost the right to exist and our US leaders who support this genocide should be tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Either the Israelis learn to live in peace and harmony with Palestinians or they need to emigrate. Let’s ask that US suburban mom how she likes her tax dollars and politicians supporting the bombing of women and children inside the Israeli-controlled Gaza concentration camp for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes in other parts of Palestine.