What is unclear about the mission and potential of a state that is founded on the principle of race, on the principle that all are obviously, historically, and legally not created equal and are not entitled to equal rights? Israel has made a case that race and religion are synonymous, and is inherently an exclusive state. I can't understand how any argument could exist that would suggest that the state of Israel is not inherently and by definition racist. I also can not understand how racism could ever be non-violent. Those two points together provide a very simple, clear case for how the state of Israel inherently engenders violence, and that violence is to be expected from such an entity. Its very nature allows for no other reality. No state that is by its nature at its creation exclusive, placing one group of people above another, can be anything other than violent. And it is just a matter of observing the reality of the Palestinians to see that the expectations have been fulfilled.
i feel like finally its being called for what it is. i read an article in haarezt about whether or not the "A" word is appropriate in describing the occupation. Someone wrote, opposing the use of the word, that you can't even begin to compare the situation with that of South Africa because of the nature of the resistance that both states shared. The author contends that because the nature of [some] of the Palestinian resistance to the occupation includes an armed component, then it is inherently different than that of the South African situation which employed only non-violent tactics or at least did not target civilians.
This argument is of course problematic, to say the least, but it is a very common approach used when supporting the Zionist state and its violence. First of all, the argument is a failure because it intersects the conflict at the point of the resistance, not at the point of the origin of the oppression, which is the root of the resistance. By carefully avoiding the root and focusing on the nature of the resistance it is easy to criticize. Second, the nature of the resistance has nothing to do with the nature of the oppression, which is where the parallels are drawn between Israeli and South African Apartheid. And we don't have to look very far to see that Israel was among the nations that supported the South African apartheid state.
Other thoughts:
I feel very tired of engaging in this conflict in a responsive way. It is demoralizing and devastating when we begin to engage once violence has begun. We can not wait for Israel to attack again, because we should know that our outrage and taking to the streets in protest does not halt a war once it has begun. We urgently need to be directly acting in a way that sends a message to our "leaders" that ignoring us is very problematic, to put it lightly. NOW is the time to be in the streets, before a war starts, because if we aren't getting out there now, we will only be useful to mourn the dead and wonder why this has happened. It is no longer my intention to intervene in this conflict many steps removed from the point of violence. Standing in front of an embassy or writing to my congressperson means that I am many steps removed from the violence that is about to befall Palestinian women, men, and children. Our intervention, at every level, must demand accountability. People must understand that complicity is violence. That is what Egypt was so intent upon avoiding - an awareness of their violent complicity in the siege. But now at least Egyptians know, and hopefully so does the rest of the world. But the others who are complicit are harder to pin down. It is harder to bring the light to the dark corners where politicians sit and make their decisions, far from the battlefields and dropping bombs. But its clear as day that they have the same responsibility in this as we ALL do.
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I so agree with everything you've written here. I think the argument you make about how no tactic used by the oppressed should justify support for the oppressors is a key one.
It is also worth pointing out that South Africans resisting apartheid sometimes used violent means; the ANC had an "armed wing" or militia as well, and they sometimes attacked civilian targets. And that does not make the struggle against apartheid any less justified or worthy of support. I think there is a tendency, at least in the US, to talk about South Africa as the "good" national liberation struggle that won international support because it used only nonviolent means--instead of pointing out that it won international support because the cause was just and the world woke up to the reality of what was going on.
The ANC had a theory of struggle called "four pillars of resistance." The four pillars were armed struggle, underground organizing, mass nonviolent protest action, and international solidarity. They saw all of these types of resistance as working together, with some being more or less important/useful at particular times depending on the context of the struggle. I think this is a really useful framework for thinking about Palestinian resistance as well. We have so much to learn from the South African struggle and most of us are just beginning to get our heads around how to apply those lessons.
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