Guest post: It is important to distinguish

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Guest post: It is important to distinguish

Oct 30th, 2023 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Sackbut on Not Selfridge’s.

It is important to me distinguish:

– the actions of the Israeli government;

– the state of Israel itself;

– Israelis;

– Jewish people;

– Palestinian people;

– the nation of Palestine (whatever that means currently);

– the actions of the Palestinian government;

– the actions of non-governmental groups.

I keep looking for nuance in the various protests, and in reports of these protests. I keep hoping to see protesters make clear that they are criticizing government actions and not damning the civilian populations. I keep hoping for news coverage to make this clear. But it is distressingly rare. Protests like this one are described as “pro-Palestine” rather than “pro Palestinian people” or “anti Israeli indiscriminate attacks” or similar. And the protests, regardless of what chants or slogans they invoke, seem to show up to harass Jewish people or groups, rather than Israeli government offices. Why M&S, instead of the Israeli consulate? Why banging on the windows of a library harboring Jewish students, instead of anything whatsoever associated with the Israeli government, or with the American government or military, or anything at all relevant to the actual war effort?

“Israel is a terrorist state” could be a slogan used by anti-Zionist Jews assembled at the Israeli embassy. But no, it’s just a slogan used by people who assume “Israel” and “Jews” are the same thing and bear the same responsibility.

6 Responses to “Guest post: It is important to distinguish”

#1
Rev David Brindley
October 30, 2023 at 4:16 pm

But no, it’s just a slogan used by people who assume “Israel” and “Jews” are the same thing and bear the same responsibility.

I bend over backwards to try to make clear my antipathy is to the State of Israel and more particularly the Likud Party, which grew out of the Irgun Terrorists.

However, it is hard to do that when I recall the ethnic cleansing (Nakba) of Palestine in 1948, the Lebensraum Movement, even as the horrors of Gaza unfold, is still attacking the Palestinians remaining in The West Bank, stealing homes, businesses, and lives.

It is hard to do it when I hear the leader of Israel telling the Jews to remember the Amalekites and treat the Palestinians the same. Remember, if the Biblical accounts are true, the Amalekites were the original inhabitants of the Negev, being displaced by Hebrews from Egypt.

In the same way, I distinguish the average Palestinian from Hamas, but I understand how Hamas gives the illusion of hope to to people otherwise without hope.
#2
Athel Cornish-Bowden
October 31, 2023 at 3:15 am

I prepared a comment, but just before I was ready to send it I pressed a wrong key by accident and it disappeared. So I’ll just say that I agree with everything both of you say. The nastiness of the Likud government hasn’t prevented me from having good relations with several Israeli acquaintances.
#3
Ophelia Benson
October 31, 2023 at 3:28 am

Drat. Stupid wrong key.
#4
Athel Cornish-Bowden
October 31, 2023 at 11:24 am

OK, I’ll try to reconstruct what I wanted to say this morning.

We should never forget the Deir Yassin massacre carried out by Irgun terrorists led by Menachem Begin, who later founded Likud, the current party of government, which continues the ideas of Irgun with less overt violence. Likud is largely responsible for the humiliations and hardships that Palestinians suffer every day, starting with the continuing invasion of the West Bank. If some Palestinians feel pushed into retaliating in horrific ways then we still need to ask who is ultimately to blame. A few years ago we had a colleague older than us — well into her 70s and maybe 80s — who was involved in non-violent support of Palestine. She and a group of like-minded people went to the Gaza Strip to see for herself how the the people were living. She had of course to go through Israel to get there and encountered extremely hostile officials who tried to stop her, and considered it quite normal to knock down an elderly woman whose opinions were not ones they approved of.

At the same time not all Israelis are like that. I have quite a few Israeli colleagues and friends, of whom few, if any, would contemplate voting for Likud, I guess. Some were quite vocal about criticizing the colonization of the West Bank when I went to a meeting in Beer Sheba (once a predominantly Christian and Muslim city, but not now) in 2013. The queue for checking in at the airport of Marseilles was interesting. The people going to Tel Aviv were all mixed up with people going to Constantine (Algeria), thus almost half Jewish and half Muslim (plus a few oddities like me). I didn’t detect any sort of hostility between the two groups: it seemed perfectly possible for Jews and Muslims to meet and chat on a personal level without any displays of antipathy.

If one is brought up as a Christian one almost automatically assumes that the Christians are the good guys when they’re involved in a dispute with non-Christians (for example in the current hostility between Armenia and Azerbaijan), but they certainly weren’t the good guys during the Lebanese civil war or during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Everything is more complicated than one may want to think.
#5
Guest post: Everything is more complicated - Butterflies and Wheels
October 31, 2023 at 4:41 pm

[…] a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowden on It is important to […]
#6
Sackbut
November 1, 2023 at 12:16 pm

Regarding difficulties making distinctions:

NYT: Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Criticized for Wearing a Yellow Star of David

Subhead: Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, said Israelis should instead display the country’s flag as a sign of strength.

Excerpt:

The head of Israel’s Holocaust memorial on Tuesday criticized the country’s ambassador to the U.N. for wearing a yellow Star of David patch during an address to the Security Council, saying the symbol, which was used under the Nazis to identify Jews, dishonors both the country and victims of the Holocaust.

Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that “the yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people when we were at the mercy of others” and that Israelis should instead display the country’s blue-and-white flag as a sign of strength.

The Nazis ordered Jews to wear the yellow star badge during the Holocaust as an identification mark, to single them out for isolation and harassment and to widen the rift between Jews and other members of society, according to Yad Vashem.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, wore the badge during a speech at an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Monday in New York in which he accused the council of failing to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,400 people in Israel.

He said the lack of a formal condemnation by the council was reminiscent of a broader international failure during World War II to speak out against the Holocaust.

In the speech, in which he noted that his grandfather had died at Auschwitz, Mr. Erdan vowed that he and his team would wear yellow stars “from now on,” saying that “from this day on, each time you look at me, you will remember what staying silent in the face of evil means.”

Mr. Erdan then pinned a six-pointed yellow star with the words “never again” in capital letters on his left breast. Aides sitting behind him also donned the badge.

Dayan has a point. Erdan has a point. I wish it were easy to say that Israel was attacked, Israel is responding, support or oppose the actions of Israel. But conflation of Israel and Jews is easy and encouraged, both by Israeli authorities and those who attack Israel.