‘What’s our common language?’ Jewish and Palestinian thinkers on where the left goes from here
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/21/whats-our-common-language-jewish-and-palestinian-thinkers-on-where-the-left-goes-from-hereI am an American Jew, but I’ve also lived in Israel for several years and have family and close friends there. I’m also part of a leftwing, anti-occupation community there that does a lot of solidarity work.
In some ways I’m wary at this point of delving into this because what’s happening in Gaza is so horrifying and I don’t want to detract attention from it. But as this time has gone by, I’ve reflected more on my own positioning. What disturbed me in the immediate aftermath of what happened on October 7 wasn’t primarily the reaction of the Palestinians I know. It was the reactions of some leftwing activists, most of them in America and not Palestinians, who I felt were very quick to celebrate during a time when all of the Israelis I know were dealing with the gravity and horror of what Hamas was doing.
The left that I believe in and feel like I’m a part of is a left that abhors the killing of civilians. But the debate that ensued was not even about the legitimacy of armed resistance, which everyone seemed to take for granted – but simply whether you could condemn the killing of civilians. That discourse had slid in a direction I felt was morally untenable.
I think a lot of armchair activists – and I don’t want to speak derisively – read books about Algeria and Franz Fanon, but they don’t really have a view of what horrific violence means, or what it means to invite a set of conditions in which a lot of young people, babies, are dead. You kind of want to ask them – what do you mean precisely? The end of Zionism? Absolutely. I’m on board. Violence, community violence, ethnic violence? No, that’s not what I’m about.