PATRICE GREANVILLE—What on earth is prompting Human Rights Watch, a historicaly centrist/corporatist organization with a demonstrable track record of active propaganda collaboration with the US empire in its hybrid war projects around the globe, to suddenly start denouncing Israel? Is HRW belatedly discovering what everyone with an atom of decency has known for decades, that Israel is an outlaw state and Zionism an apartheid ideology? Given that Israel’s crimes continue to mount and the nation appears more and more on a path of national insanity, maybe the US handlers decided it was time for HRW to come clean and recharge its depleted credibility to re-weaponise the organisation for service against the empire’s much greater problems, China and Russia. At least that’s what appears to make sense, even if neither Finkelstein nor Halper mention it as a probability.
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YASHA LEVINE—This is what happens when a whole group of people gets converted to ethno-nationalism, which has become a kind of secular religion for them — a belief system predicated on messianic ethnic cleansing and blood-and-soil thinking. Most of my old Soviet immigrant friends aren’t religious, but Zionism fills in that gap for them.
I’m not against people trying to forge a new identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. People have to cope somehow, I guess. But this new identity of theirs is predicated on Israel violently displacing an entire people — because they think that Palestinians aren’t of the right kind of blood and weren’t chosen by their God. Israel belongs to Jews, they say. That’s just how it is. And they see resistance to this plan as aggression and terrorism — to be quashed with overwhelming force.
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JIM MILES—One of the more striking ideas was the concept that even as Hamas is criticized for its sometimes coercive and violent control of Gaza, those very acts create and sustain the idea of ‘Palestine’. The inhabitants of Gaza recognize Hamas not just as Hamas but as the government, as the nation – as Palestinian. Even earlier than Hamas’ takeover of Gaza’s government, Sen discusses the idea that the the postcolonial moment began with the Oslo Accords, and in spite of all its flaws and the poverty of its intentions, it put into writing the concept of ‘Palestine’ – undefined and subject to many onerous conditions, but still – Palestine.
Liberation in this context starts well before Oslo. Palestine has been seeking liberation since the end of World War I: first from the British empire and its League of Nations imposed mandate; and subsequently from Jewish settler-colonialism during the mandate and on into the establishment of Israel.
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JONATHON COOK—By not echoing the rest of the western media in entirely airbrushing the Palestinians out of Europe’s post-Holocaust history, Guerin stood isolated and exposed. None of her colleagues – supposedly fearless, muckraking journalists – appear willing to come to her aid. She has been made a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim – one that will serve as a future reminder to her colleagues of what they are permitted to mention, which parts of Europe’s history they may examine and which parts must remain forever in the shadows.
Guerin’s comment was denounced as “offensive” by her former boss, Danny Cohen, who was previously the director of BBC television. No one, of course, cares that the Palestinians’ experience of being wiped out of recent European history and its legacy in the Middle East is deeply offensive. The Palestinians are what historian Mark Curtis refers to as “Unpeople”.
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Israel’s support for the “American” plan is not surprising, B’Tselem would argue, since “the plan eternalises the fragmentation of Palestinian space into disconnected slivers of territory in a sea of Israeli control, not unlike the Bantustans of South Africa’s Apartheid regime”. Human rights abuses against Palestinians – including daily indignities which have been criticised across the world – will continue, the group has argued.
