Is it possible to be pro Israel AND pro Palestine?
JVL Introduction
Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian author, doctor, academic and, until expelled by Starmer’s Labour Party, an active member of the Party. Her family fled Jerusalem in 1948 and have been unable to return. She has been a powerful advocate for Palestinian rights and Jewish Voice for Labour is proud to work with her. Her latest book is One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, a conclusion more and more people are being drawn to (see, eg here , here and in this Opinion piece from Mustafa Barghouti.
Ghada Karmi writes in the wake of the cancellation of her talk with Lowkey about her new book and, of course, she writes from her own family’s history and within the framework of 75 years of dispossession and oppression for Palestinian people. She raises criticisms of Yachad among many other important points. Yachad, unlike JVL, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and other pro Palestinian rights organisations in the UK and throughout the world, is less likely to be ignored by the mainstream Jewish community and, eg is able even to get a former Board of Deputies President to write this piece for Jewish News headed: Equality before the law in the West Bank is shockingly absent . But Yachad also believes Lowkey needs to be investigated. The Electronic Intifada published this piece in response to the decision by the Balfour Project to cancel the book launch and Yachad have responded to that statement
Here is what Dr. Karmi has written about what happened and that she sees support for Israel is incompatible with support for Palestinians. This is too often interpreted as antisemitism, but it is part of the growing call for a state of all its citizens between the river and the sea.
Dr. Karmi was offered another time to speak but without Lowkey, something she refused to do. JVL believes that Palestinian voices must be heard and that open and respectful debate on the ideas in her book and much more is essential if we are to move forward.
You can buy the book online direct from the publisher Pluto Press
This article was originally published by Novara Media on Thu 25 May 2023. Read the original here.
You’re Either Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine. You Can’t Be Both
Zionism is incompatible with Palestinian freedom, full stop.
If you care about Palestine, what are the limits of that care? Does working with sympathetic Zionists who support some but not all Palestinian rights fall within those limits, or should collaboration with Zionism, however soft it might seem, be 100% taboo? I suspect this question doesn’t often occur to Palestinians and their supporters – but it was a question forced on me earlier this month.
On 11 May, I was due to talk about my new book, One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, at a webinar organised by the Balfour Project. I would be in conversation with the British-Iraqi rapper, Lowkey.
The Balfour Project is a British charity which promotes “lasting peace with justice, and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis alike”. Its website says that, just as in 1950 Britain recognised the state of Israel, it should now recognise the state of Palestine. In its work, the project collaborates with a variety of individuals and groups, including Zionists. One such group is the liberal Zionist organisation Yachad.
Yachad is another British charity and member of the pro-Israel Board of Deputies of British Jews; the group describes itself as “a uniquely Jewish pro-Israel voice”, though insists that “we stand in support of Palestinian voices too”. Yachad claims to support a political resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and aims to do so by helping Israel to “thrive” alongside a “viable and independent Palestinian state”. It works with both sides of the conflict and sees itself as progressive.
Ghada Karmi, Palestinian doctor, academic and writerBut on the evening before my webinar with Lowkey, Yachad complained to the Balfour Project’s board of trustees about Lowkey’s participation in the event and allegedly threatened to withdraw its collaboration with the project if he was allowed to speak, presumably based on spurious charges of antisemitism against Lowkey by pro-Israel groups (in a statement, Yachad said: “We didn’t ask them to cancel event, neither did we make any threats or comments related to our engagement with the Balfour Project […]. What we did do, was flag to members of the Balfour Project that there are significant concerns about Lowkey from within the Jewish community”). Rather than querying the grounds of Yachad’s complaint, the Balfour Project abruptly informed me that the webinar had been cancelled; the subsequent announcement cited “circumstances beyond our control”.
I was insulted and angry that the Palestinian perspective – indeed my own perspective, as a victim of the Nakba – could be shut down so easily to spare the feelings of a Zionist group. Yet, it was important that the incident happened, because it led me to ask larger questions about what it actually means to support Palestinians.
In deciding whether or not to proceed with my webinar with Lowkey, the Balfour Project had been faced with a choice between backing the Palestinian cause and maintaining friendly relations with Zionist groups. They did not hesitate to choose the latter. The same is true of many western individuals, organisations and states that claim to back the Palestinians and also to be friends of Israel. Yet when push comes to shove, they’ll always side with Zionists.
Ultimately, the “pro-Palestine, pro-Israel” position such as that taken by Yachad and the Balfour Project is tenable only if one is ignorant of, or actively ignores, what Zionism is and has done to the Palestinians. The official ideology of the state of Israel, Zionism, was developed in the nineteenth century by a small group of European Jews. At the time the population of Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab. The only way a Jewish state could be created there, as the Zionists intended, was by emptying the land of its majority Arab inhabitants. And so they did.
The Zionists’ aim was largely achieved during Israel’s establishment in 1948, when most of Palestine’s population, including my own family, was violently expelled to make room for foreign Jews. We have never been allowed back, and have been refugees ever since. Zionism will make sure we never return home.
The story does not end there. Parts of original Palestine, the so-called Occupied Territories, were not ethnically cleansed in 1948 with the rest, a matter of regret for Zionists, and are inhabited by 4.5 million Palestinians today. Zionism’s mission remains to complete the job started in 1948 and take those lands, without the natives. Hence the increasing number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (144 in 2023); the 700,000 Jewish settlers purposefully moved there; the ongoing brutal treatment of Palestinians, forcing many to flee the country; and Palestinians’ slow but direct expulsion.Nak
Israel’s ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious government, elected in December, has laid bare the brutality of Palestinians’ abuse, which had in any case operated beneath the surface since 1948. But for liberal Zionists, these recent excesses have offered an excuse to distance themselves from current Zionism’s ugly face. If a more liberal Israeli government were elected tomorrow, they’d be back with full strength.
At this moment of maximum oppression by Israel’s extremist government, with over 130 Palestinians already killed since January, self-proclaimed progressive friends of Israel need to wake up to a fundamental truth: Zionism, even in its “liberal” incarnation, is incompatible with Palestinian freedom. Those who comfort themselves by embodying the friendly face of Zionism in order to spare themselves the challenge of facing its true reality are no friends to Palestinians.
Ghada Karmi (left) and Ellen Siegel, demonstrate the injustice of Israel’s law of ‘return’ in 1973
I agree with what Dr Karmi writes, but we should also remember that human rights attach to individuals and not to states (such as ‘Israel’ or ‘USA’ or ‘Syria’), which have no human rights. It is possible, and indeed necessary, to defend human rights even for individual Zionist oppressors, while insisting that their ideology, and the state and other organisations created in its image, must be completely transformed, so that all can enjoy the fundamental rights in the UDHR (from which, for example, the ‘right of return’ is taken, again talking about an individual who leaves their country, not a nation, which is a social construct, like a state).
‘Liberal Zionist’ isn’t that a non sequitur?
The problem is that many Jews and others who count themselves as Zionists, don’t actually understand or don’t want to understand the meaning and implications of Zionism. How can any person possibly agree with one of Zionism’s tenets, that thousands of years ago, a god of some description promised a certain area of land to a particular sect of people whose decendants have the right to return there to the exclusion of all others. Avigail Abarbanel summed up Zionism well, when she said ‘it is a mental illness, a delusional belief that you have rights which do not exist’.
It would appear that there are quite a few members of the Labour Party, including some MPs, who are afflicted with this mental illness!!!
The land is already-settled. Ethnic-cleansing, colonial-Zionist terrorists are increasingly backed by the army in an accelerated programme of Palestinian dispossession and you call them “settlers”?
I was doing some research yesterday about the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as such, ended up reading the WHOLE of Blair’s WMD speech on March 18, in which he said the following:
Right, so that’s TWENTY years now. Needless to say it was pure B/S! And although he didn’t go so far as to directly accuse Saddam Hussain of being behind 9/11 – as Bush and his neocons as good as did repeatedly – Blair brings it up again and again in his speech.