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dchan87 · 1 year ago

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Peace in the israel-palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state. Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must. How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

#israeli palestinian conflict #israel #palestine #decolonize

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 11 months ago

Text

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israeli war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

Intersectionality and Postcolonial Theory have always been bogus and fraudulent, even just at the level of US society, where they were concocted by ignorant idiots and ideologues. The fact people are using them to interpret geopolitics - but not, for example, Syria or Nigeria - is idiotic and a failure of education. Or, more accurately, the capture and corruption of education, as this is not accidental.

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nicklloydnow · 1 year ago

Text

“Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

Very strange company for leftists.

(…)

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

(…)

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

(…)

“The idea in this case is “settler colonialism,” a term that appears often in the pro-Hamas statements collected by the Anti-Defamation League. Various chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have decried “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and called to “decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea,” a slogan that, by invoking the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. Mondoweiss, an anti-Israel online publication, has called the Hamas attack “part of the Palestinians’ century-long struggle for liberation” from “Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism.”

Like all theoretical terms, “settler colonialism” can mean different things to different people. But most who use it would probably agree with the definition offered by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute: “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” The paradigm case is the European colonization of the Americas, where over centuries many indigenous peoples were displaced or killed as Europeans took their land.

(…)

What makes settler colonialism a potent political concept is that, as the Cornell definition says, it is “a system rather than a historical event.” In other words, the displacement of the indigenous population is not something that happened centuries ago but something that is still being perpetrated today, by all the non-indigenous inhabitants of the land and by the culture and institutions they have created.

The Southern Poverty Law Center makes this point clearly in its magazine Learning for Justice: “Understanding settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not. Understanding settler-colonialism as both a historical position and a present-day practice helps students see how they fit into a settler-colonial system—and how that system shapes the impact of their actions, regardless of their intent.”

This principle makes today’s anticolonial ideology more radical than the anticolonial movements of the post-World War II era. At that time, national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia were directed mainly against European powers that did not settle the territories they ruled. When the Viet Minh fought the French in Vietnam, or the Congolese National Movement fought the Belgians in Congo, they wanted to reclaim national sovereignty from foreign rulers who had no connection to the country other than the right of conquest.

Freeing a settler-colonial society is a very different prospect, since it would presumably mean expelling many millions of people who were born in the land they are said to have colonized. Modern Jewish settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, English settlement of North America in the 1600s. If the descendants of those first arrivals are still considered settlers in 2023, then the word no longer has its ordinary meaning. Instead it is a permanent, inheritable marker of guilt, like “bourgeois” as a class label in the Soviet Union.

Under the workers’ regime, a bourgeois was not a person who owned a certain amount of property, but anyone whose background indicated that they might be hostile to the working class. That put them outside the realm of moral concern, and they could be killed for any reason or none. The reaction of many anticolonial activists to the massacre of Israelis suggests that a similar logic is at work today.

Even advocates of anticolonial ideology know that there is no prospect of actually “decolonizing” the U.S. The most they hope for is symbolic expressions like Native American land acknowledgments, which have become standard practice at many academic and arts institutions. These statements are often historically ill-informed, but they are not really about historical facts. They advance a political thesis: that in a just world, every territory would be occupied only by the people who belong there.

Ironically, while anticolonialism conceives of itself as a progressive, left-wing ideology, this understanding of the relationship between people and land is similar to that of fascism, which was also obsessed with the categories of native and alien. The Nazi slogan “blood and soil” conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.

Anticolonialists would of course reject this analogy. But they are proudly indebted to Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French writer whose analysis of anticolonial struggle was born from the Algerian rebellion against French rule in the 1950s. For Fanon, a psychologist, anticolonial movements must be violent, not only because they lack other means of achieving their goals but because violence itself is redemptive and therapeutic. “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence,” Fanon wrote in his classic 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth.” “For the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities.”

When Western sympathizers excuse or endorse the actions of Hamas, it is because they see it in these terms, as a liberation movement fighting a settler-colonial regime. And it is true that Hamas frames its struggle in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence—though sympathizers usually overlook the fact that it understands these things in religious fundamentalist terms, which are totally incompatible with other left-wing commitments like LGBTQ rights.

The group’s charter, adopted in 1988, declares that only Muslims are indigenous to the land that is now Israel, so Jews can never belong there: “The land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” Likewise, it states that “peaceful solutions…are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Hatred of settler colonialism, like hatred of capitalism among communist revolutionaries, believes that it is morally impeccable because it is grounded in genuinely moral instincts: indignation at violence and oppression, hope for freedom and equality. It seems perverse that such instincts should lead to approving the mass murder of children and the elderly.

But like other totalizing ideologies, anticolonialism contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.

Most observers of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, regardless of whose “side” they are on, don’t fall into these traps. But those who do are increasingly vocal—a bad sign for the future of peaceful coexistence, and not only in the Middle East.”

“Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.

All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.

The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.

Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.

The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.

(…)

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”

Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large, never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.

In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early 19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.

A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?

Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more recently from the Arabization of the broader region.

What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.”

#israel #gaza #hamas #palestine #war #antisemitism #anti zionisim #racism #wokeism #decolonisation #montefiore #simon sebag montefiore #Lowry #rich lowry #settler colonialism #fanon #franz fanon #marx #karl marx

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tindang · 4 years ago

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Nico!

3/28/21- It's been a week out from my visit to the emergency department at MGH. Blisters have formed since then, flowering from the red/brown patch of skin on my left thigh, where I had spilled boiling water in a terrible accident. I was in a lot of pain yesterday, but I woke up today to shrunken blisters and pruritus in-and-around the area. I'm sad to miss Palm Sunday mass and to have spent the whole weekend room bound. I've been trying to find some positives, but life has not been too kind lately. I'm back in a state of rollercoaster emotions and I'm waiting to get off.

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4/5/21 - Deviating from the Ideal: U.S. Migration Policies in the Context of Rawlsian Principles of Justice

In "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders", the philosopher Joseph Carens begins his argumentation with the following epigraph:

Many poor and oppressed people wish to leave their countries of origin in the third world to come to affluent Western societies...[and] there is little justification for keeping them out.

He goes on to examine three distinctive political theories--Nozickean, Rawlsian, and utilitarianism--and applies them to the issue of immigration. Though distinct, Carens finds that all three approaches evince the moral failures of militarizing borders and restricting the movement of peoples, suggesting that a world without borders is one that respects the idea of moral equality.

I found Carens's Rawlsian argument most compelling, insofar as it goes furthest in laying the framework for thinking about this issue transnationally. He does this in two ways: first, by arguing that people in Rawls’s “original position”--a tabula rasa -esque scenario in which people first come together to decide how they wish to be governed--would consent to principles of equal liberty and social redistribution if cloaked under a “veil of ignorance” that erases distinctions like race, class, sex, and most pointedly, national origin; and second, by refuting objections to the application of the Rawlsian veil to global contexts (Rawls had only intended for the original position to apply to certain societies with a “particular understanding of moral personality”, not all).

I posit that the analytical power of Rawl’s original position, as it is applied to transnational affairs, comes from the tensions inherent in upholding principles of equal liberty in real-world settings. Of course, Rawls had predicted such conflict, and sought to address it by drawing distinctions between ideal and non-ideal theory: in ideal theory one assumes that people will abide by the principles chosen in the original position, even after the “veil of ignorance” is lifted; in nonideal theory, one considers the historical and human behavioral challenges of staying true to original-position precepts, which is more reflective of everyday problems and situations. I believe that these tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory serve as useful tools for critiquing restrictive U.S. migration policies. By exploring the deviations from ideal theory--in the context of U.S/Mexico border policies--towards the practicalities of non-ideal praxis, I hope to reify my understanding of border issues and justify (to myself) Carens’s conclusion, that there is little justification for restricting immigration.

It is no surprise that current U.S. immigration and border policies fall far from the ideals of liberty envisioned in the original position. The question has always been how did we get here? The answer most likely predates any explanation that the Enlightenment might afford us, lying deep in the consequences of American settler colonialism and chattel slavery. Though I acknowledge this history and its foundational impact on modern American society, let me first flesh out my understanding of the gradual legal push away from ideal theory--while remaining always fully aware that the law is but one avenue through which principles of white supremacy and racism are encoded. If we are to then start with the legal perspective for answering the question posed above, we might begin with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Chinese Exclusion Case (1889), which contains the nation’s very first declaration of national sovereignty over immigration and vested Congress with plenary power over such matters. Sarah Song, a law professor at UC Berkeley, traces the philosophical tradition undergirding this decision to ideas espoused by Swiss author Emer de Vattel, whose Les droit des gens (The Law of Nations, 1758) outlined the parameters of sovereignty in the case of international law. Vattel writes:

The sovereign may forbid the entrance of his territory either to foreigners in general, or in particular cases, or to certain persons, or for certain particular purposes, according as they may think it advantageous to the state. There is nothing in all this, that does not flow from the rights of domain and sovereignty.

In staking this claim, Vattel followed already established notions of the state as being like a “moral person,” first laid out by German jurist/philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf, and later further developed by German author Christian Wolff. This personification of the state sanctions it with “an understanding and a will of which it makes use for the conduct of its affairs”, namely, as Vattel reasoned, in the interest of its self-preservation and self-perfection. It’s worth noting that Vattel understood that this self-interest deviated from the ethos of being a “moral person”, which if taken to its logical conclusion with regards to the idea of “moral state(s)”, would result in a “universal republic” in which “a real friendship [would] be seen to reign among them” (II.12). Here, it is not lost on me that this utopian conclusion mirrors the conditions of Joseph Carens’s ideal theory--that is, a global community void of hierarchical distinctions. In this sense, Vattel’s swing towards non-ideal realism, defined by state self-interest, may be at the heart of today’s polemics over immigration.

Indeed, I believe this is so. Public anxiety re the economic burden of migrants on American social institutions and fair wage have led to communitarian objections to increased migration from both conservatives and social democrats--while attending a protest against the Trump administration in 2017, I fondly remember standing next to a supposed feminist who, while rallying against the now former president, also expressed a resolute “no” when the crowd began reciting “Immigrants are welcome here.” The fixation on self-preservation may explain far-right popularization of terms like “chain migration” in lieu of “family reunification,” and the 2019 revision of the public charge rule which would have expanded the definition of being a “public charge,” and would have thus restricted poorer immigrants from either being admitted into the U.S. or attaining Legal Permanent Resident status. And, not surprisingly, today’s fears were enshrined in law vis-à-vis other, past Court decisions that occurred soon after that seminal 1889 case: in Nishimura Ekiu v. United States (1892) and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Supreme Court again expanded the U.S. government’s power over immigration, citing further elaborations of Vattel’s theory of sovereignty (Song 2017); within the latter decision, these two passages from The Law of Nations are cited in their entirety:

Every nation has a right to refuse admitting a foreigner into her territory, when he cannot enter it without exposing the nation to evident danger, or doing her a manifest injury. What she owes to herself, the care of her own safety, gives her this right; and in virtue of her natural liberty, it belongs to the nation to judge, whether her circumstances will or will not justify the admission of that foreigner. (I.230)

Thus also it has a right to send [asylees] elsewhere, if it has just cause to fear that they will corrupt the manners of the citizens, that they will create religious disturbances, or occasion any other disorder, contrary to the public safety. In a word, it has a right, and is even obliged, to follow, in this respect, the suggestions of prudence. (I.231)

In other words, the state, by virtue of its personhood and the rights accorded to moral persons, has the right to exclude those it deems dangerous to its self-interest. As many scholars have pointed out, the right to exclude is essentially a property right; and the commensuration of individual property rights to collective, state territorial rights has been the source of much debate (See Carens’s Nozickean argument for open borders).

All this is to say that the principles of state sovereignty that underlie American immigration policy were founded under non-ideal theory conditions, which privilege human interest over ideal theory egalitarianism. The effect of this philosophical turn cannot be overstated; because while it is one thing to erect borders and deny access in the name of self-interest, it is another to punish those seeking opportunity and/or asylum for similar reasons.

To explain today’s punitive approach to immigration, it is incumbent on me to outline another ideal to non-ideal theory transition: This time, I mark as my starting point the Bracero Accord, a U.S./Mexico bilateral program that, between 1942-1964, facilitated over 4.5 million temporary labor contracts to male Mexican workers in an effort to redress previous, depression-era deportations of Mexican-American citizens and to address labor shortages that appeared during and after World War II. Though imperfect (the program was ultimately deemed exploitive), this bracero initiative may have came closest in realizing the tenets of justice that ideal theory conceptualized, formalizing (now questionable) protocols for far pay and anti-discrimination; that is, in setting aside the dehumanizing experience that braceros encountered, we might think of the legal protections granted to these workers, and the imperative that the U.S. government showed in trying to repair its relationship with Mexico, as a promise towards an ideal--a quasi- “veil of ignorance” that ended up being unrealistic, ineffective, and violent. So, it might be here within the context of the hopes of the Bracero Accord and the porous border through which hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers made their way each year that we locate our ideal beginning.

From this point, the rapid progression towards non-ideal theory, which again takes into account the “historical obstacles and the unjust actions of others” that seek to undermine liberty and justice, paradoxically began during the civil rights era of the 1960s, when a) the termination of the Bracero Program and b) amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act effectively ended the legal and cyclical migration patterns of years past. Princeton sociologist Douglass Massey summarizes:

Whereas in the late 1950s, some 450,000 Mexicans had entered the United States each year as Braceros and 50,000 as permanent residents, by the late 1970s the Bracero Program was gone and legal visas were capped at 20,000 (Massey 2014)

A closed door, however, does not mean a locked one; notwithstanding new restrictions on migration, former braceros continued their northward journey through unauthorized channels, paving the way for what has become considered “illegal” migration. In his article, Massey provides this useful figure, which takes data from DHS to assess Mexican migration to the U.S. in the three categories shown below:

The noticeable inverse between trends in temporary labor migration and unauthorized migration (measured by the annual number of apprehensions divided by the number of Border Patrol officers, expressed per thousand) in 1964 reveals the unspeakable harms of supposedly benevolent updates to U.S. immigration policy. Despite the tapering of unauthorized migration since 1986, shown above, the wide-ranging consequences of the 1964 recategorizing of what were once “legal” guest workers to now “illegal” trespassers on the political, social, and individual levels of society deserves pause and reflection.

At the broad level of the body politic, the rising number of annual border apprehensions in the mid-1960s effectuated closer federal scrutiny of the border. At the behest of political racketeers, members of the U.S. Border Patrol, and a changing landscape of public opinion surrounding undocumented migration, Congress enacted a litany of measures that further restricted entry: 1986′s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), while granting amnesty and Legal Permanent Resident status to 2.7 million former undocumented migrants--subject to conditions of learning English and seeking citizenship--criminalized undocumented hiring and signed off the first of a series of significant increases in appropriations for the Border Patrol; 1994′s Operation Gatekeeper militarized the busiest border sector in San Diegos (See also ‘prevention through deterrence’ strategy); 2001′s PATRIOT Act made it easier for the government to employ immigration rules to detain or deport non-citizens without resort to the lengthy procedural regulations of the criminal justice system (Akram 2006). Juliet Stumpf and others have mapped these measures to a phenomenon they call “crimmigration,” which describes the American merger of criminal and immigration law that has happened since 1875 when the first federal statute was passed to restrict immigration of Chinese women. Since then, Stumpf writes, “the relationship between immigration and criminal law has evolved from merely excluding foreigners who had committed past crimes to the present when many immigration violations are themselves defined as criminal offenses and many crimes result in deportation” (Stumpf 2006). Indeed, today, immigration prosecutions outnumber all other types of federal criminal prosecutions, including prosecutions for drugs and public order violations (See “Prosecution/Courts”).

Interwoven into the political and structural realignments of U.S. migration policy during this time was the effect that legal/illegal discursive shifts had on White Americans. As politicians seized on the expediency of showing strength against the "Mexican Menace” and “alien invasion”, and as journalists found success in characterizing undocumented border crossers as “illegals” set out to “inundate” American society and “swamp” its culture (Chavez 2001), it becomes easy to imagine the kind of social re-engineering that must have taken place: As Mae Ngai reminds us in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Mexicans were once considered legally white and enjoyed migratory privileges not afforded to Asian migrants (Ngai, 38, 2004); but, as UMASS-Amherst professor Moon-Kie Jung might say, racial differentiation happens when people come to hold schemas for “separating human populations by some notion of stock or collective heredity of traits” (Jung, 64, 2006). Viewed in the light of American genocide, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, the racialization of Mexicans based on notions of in/exclusion was par for the course. We might find then, within the border debates of the mid to late twentieth century, the seed of today’s social animus towards Latinx migrants, which has encouraged bias in enforcement of immigration law and (most likely) inspired Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (Read more about state/federal collaboration and interdependency when it comes to developing and enforcing immigration law in Judith Resnick’s “Bordering by Law”).

The human impact of these policy adjustments should not be forgotten, nor go unnoticed. For it is at the individual--and for some of my friends with undocumented parents, personal--level that federal immigration policies harm. This case is explicitly made in Jason de León’s The Land of Open Graves, which lays the blame for migrant deaths along the border squarely in the hands of the U.S. government. It is described in this podcast during which a university student talks about her experience growing up living in fear that her parents could be deported at any moment; and again, in the harrowing stories that undocumented child migrants have told, as documented by Valeria Luiselli in Tell Me How It Ends; and perhaps, more recently, in the iconic image of Yanela, the 1-year-old Honduran girl, who was captured crying for her detained mother. Between these examples, one thing is clear: U.S. immigration policies violate, if not the ideals of moral equality that America was founded on, then international human rights.

De Leon writes: “The benefit of the chronological distance from the pain and suffering of past migrations is that many Americans today have no problem putting nationality before humanity” (Leon, 26, 2015). In this blog post/essay, I make the case that this antipathy for life, or explicitly for the life of Others, has as much to do with historical myopia as it underlines the principles of self-interest that lie behind our legal and social interpretations. When people hear that undocumented migrant children are being separated from their families yet still defend the action as just since “They came into our country illegally,” I see this perverse rationalization as but a product of self-preservation. Mae Ngai has spoken about the consequences of normalizing such principles of sovereignty in immigration affairs, suggesting that it “generates the view that immigration is a zero-sum game among competitive nation-states” (Ngai 2004). Not only does this view fuel anti-immigrant resentment, it discourages us from seeing the moral worth of our neighbors and prevents us from coming together to form humane and bilateral coalitions for tackling transnational problems.

Against the backdrop of U.S. human rights violation, and the radical transition away from the conceptions of justice laid out in Rawls’s original position, I remain cautiously hopeful that there will come a day when justice will be served. It might not happen during my lifetime, but I’ll be on the vanguard of this fight.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

The current moment is what happens when you get your information from courses ending in "Studies."

#Simon Sebag Montefiore #Israel #Hamas #Palestine #islam #jihad #islamic terrorism #terrorist organizations #religion #decolonization #decolonize palestine #decolonize #decolonise palestine #defund gender studies #religion is a mental illness

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