Fighting the enemy at times means fighting your erstwhile
comrades-in-arms, writes Eric Walberg
The phenomenal success the Boycott Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement has had since it began in
2005 has attracted attention from all corners of the
political spectrum -- for better or for
worse.
Israel is scared. Israeli thinktanks have described
BDS as a greater threat to Israel than armed
Palestinian resistance. At the same time, at the
forefront of the movement against what is now widely
called Israeli apartheid are Jews -- Israeli and
diaspora. This is not surprising, as Jews have
traditionally been active in "political mobilisation
and opinion formation", according to Benjamin
Ginsberg.
So it should not be surprising if the BDS movement itself
experiences turmoil. For several years now, the UK
Palestinian Soldarity Committee (PSC) has conducted a
policy of calling leading activists such as Paul Eisen,
Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir -- all Jewish --
anti-Semitic for daring to point out that those who
persecute Arab Muslims and Christians are not just
Zionists but are invariably Jewish. That the Jews who
have opted to take Israeli citizenship are
increasingly racist, belligerent settlers who use
their new identity to dispossess, terrorise and murder
Palestinians, with the intent of forcing them to leave
even the remaining 12 per cent of the land once called
Palestine.
These Jews have given Judaism a bad name, causing some
"good Jews" to critique their own religious heritage
and even disown it, such as American highschooler and
winner of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr Writing Award
Jesse Lieberfeld, who came to realise, "I was grouped
with the racial supremacists... I was part of a
delusion." For these Jews, Judaism today had been
perverted by Zionism. Paying tribute to Jesse,
ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon said, "Journeying from
choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you
may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and
humanism are there at your side -- for all time."
Atzmon, born and bred in Israel, with holocaust victims in
his family, is the latest victim of the UK PSC, which
earlier ostracised Eisen for his Der Yassin Remembered
group honouring martyred Palestinian Muslims and
Christians of the 1948 Nakba, when thousands of
Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands
made permanent refugees.
After being ostracised, Eisen and Shamir dismissed the
"gatekeepers" in the movement, and carried on with
their analysis and organising from the sidelines,
sidelines which are growing just as fast as, if not
faster than the mainstream and are now firmly centred
on popularising a one-state solution to solve the
Palestine-Israel problem.
Atzmon continued to lock horns with the UK PSC
establishment, hoping to change it, though it is
dominated by the likes of Tony Greenstein with his
J-Big (Jews boycotting Israeli goods). No doubt
Atzmon's Sabra heritage steeled him for battle with
those supporters of the Palestinians who see the
movement as more a way to fight anti-Jewish sentiment
(caused by Zionism) than to actually achieve victory
for the Palestinians. He decided to write an analysis
of his Jewish heritage and how it was transformed over
the past century entitled
The Wandering Who?
(see Al-Ahram Weekly "Jezebel's Legacy").
His book became a
bestseller and he has been touring America and Europe
regularly, speaking out bravely and making hisgilad.co.uk a must read for all who care about both Palestine and
"the plight of the Jews".
Jewish intellectuals such as Ilan Pappe are following
Atzmon's footsteps and leaving Israel, disgusted with
the cynicism and duplicity of the entire Israeli
establishment. Atzmon has attracted many admirers --
too many, it seems -- from among the more mainstream
critics of Israel. Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer
-- both Jewish -- endorsed Atzmon's book, Mearsheimer
recommending that the book "should be widely read by
Jews and non-Jews alike".
On 13 March, near the end of Atzmon's latest tour of
the US speaking to pro-Palestinian groups,
Electronic Intifada
editor Ali Abunimah published a letter at the US
Palestinian Community Network (PCN) signed by 23
Palestinian activists, including Columbia University
professor Joseph Massad and Omar Barghouti, a founder
of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Committee for the
Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and author of
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle
for Palestinian Rights
(currently doing an MA in philosophy at Tel Aviv
University). The letter called for "the disavowal of
the racism and anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon".
Abunimah effectively excommunicated Atzmon from
participating in pro-Palestinian activities of the US
PCN, as he was by the UK PSC. Atzmon wound up his tour
the next day with an interview with (Jewish) history
professor Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State
University, at Washington's Mount Vernon Place United
Methodist Church, where he rebutted the charges
against him.
But just as Muslims are loudly called on to disown
Islamic terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, so must Jews
disown their own Judaic terrorists, reasons Atzmon,
who has been leading the way in this
politically-incorrect battle. Now that the dust has
settled, and support for Atzmon has poured in, the
letter in retrospect looks like an exercise in hasbara
gone wrong. Conspicuous in their absence among
signatories are leading Israel critics Noam Chomsky,
Norman Finklestein,
Democracy Now's
Amy Goodman,
The Progressive's
Matt Rothschild,
Tikkun's
Michael Lerner, and US Congress hopeful Norman
Solomon.
It is possible to critique Atzmon for downplaying the
imperialism behind Israel's founding and support,
which Abunimah does: "Our struggle is with Zionism, a
modern European settler colonial movement, similar to
movements in many other parts of the world that aim to
displace indigenous people and build new European
societies on their lands." However, there is nothing
wrong with critiquing the problem from a cultural
point of view, and the guilty culture just happens to
be Jewish. Sadly, there is more than one way to skin
the Palestinian cat.
Shamir took the debate a logical step further by posing
the question, "To disavow or debate Abunimah". He was
attacked by Abunimah a decade ago, when he "hunted me
out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying that
without Shamir, they will win sooner." After a decade
of unrelenting Israeli crimes, Shamir advised Massad,
Barghouti and other Arab signatories, "Our Arab
brothers will do well if they will stand out of this
debate: let the Jews fight out the battle for their
identity. As it happens, Gilad is their strongest
champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer, not
discourage him."
Perhaps what prompted the letter was fear that BDS was
just not mainstream enough. This was the implication
behind a dismissal of BDS by Finkelstein, who just a
few weeks before the Abunimah screed, called BDS a
"cult" and admonished Palestinians to limit their
struggle to the "two-state solution". While himself
exposing the "cult" of the holocaust, calling it an
"industry" used to promote Israel's aggressive
colonial agenda, Finkelstein disappointed many
admirers by suggesting that BDSers are conspirators
intent on wiping poor Israel off the tattered old
colonial map. "What is the result? There's no Israel!"
But ironically, Atzmon and Finkelstein are on the same
side this time. They are both pro-Palestinian
activists
and
believers in free speech and open debate, not afraid
to point the finger at machinations of their
co-religionists. Before writing his ill-fated missive,
Abunimah, author of
One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israel-Palestine Conflict,
would have done well to ponder Atzmon's defence of
Finkelstein's criticism of BDSers for their
cultishness. "Finkelstein's criticism of the
solidarity movement is largely valid. The recent
expulsion of Palestinians and academics from the UK
PSC proves that we aren't just dealing with a ‘cult'
discourse as Finkelstein suggests, far worse, we are
actually dealing with a rabbinical operation that
exercises the most repulsive Judaic excommunication
tactics."
"Finkelstein is correct when he suggests that the
achievements of the solidarity ‘cult' operations are
pretty limited," continues Atzmon. He looks beyond the
gatewatched BDSers and the larger-than-life critics
such as Chomsky, Finkelstein and himself -- two-state
or one -- and predicts "that the solidarity movement
is already a mass movement ... that the Palestinians
and the Arabs will liberate themselves."
The Lobby is no doubt patting itself on the back, having
through obvious pressure on prominent activists helped
to weaken its foes for the nth time. This tactic is
part of the age-old strategy by those in power of
"divide and conquer". Just as Britian and then the US
and Israel have worked to divide up the Muslim world
to weaken and control it -- even mobilising "Islamic
terrorists" (not to mention "Judaic terrorists") in
their schemes -- so the domestic representatives of
imperialism do the same on the homefront, manipulating
soft anti-Zionists.
The tactic was used in the Cold War, using liberals and
ex-Communists to isolate Communists from movements
critical of imperialism. Now as then, it is necessary
not to boycott each other, but to work together
without responding to provocation. It is to be
expected that the bad guys are going to infiltrate
progressive movements and try to split them.
When Saudi Prince Faisal grilled Hamas Chief Khaled
Meshaal about his alliance with Iran, the Hamas chief
explained:
"Yes,
we have relations with Iran and will do so with
whoever supports us. We are a resistance movement,
open to the Arabs, to the Muslims and to all countries
in the world, and we are not part of any agenda for
regional forces." BDSers may have their differences, but the goal is the
liberation of Palestine. Let a hundred flowers
blossom.
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