Summary - pity the Palestinians, but don’t say anything to support their struggle.
On Thursday, Students for Justice in Palestine, a network of pro-Palestinian campus groups, is holding Day of Resistance demonstrations across the United States and Canada. A planning document the group posted online refers to all of Israel as a “settler colony” and says, “Settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.”
Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality. Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret.
Spoiler alert: there won’t be, and the libs will continue to downplay it, if not outright support it.
Gonna reference back to this.
Which would do exactly jack shit. This is the lib equivalent of when conservatives gives oh so very sincere and not at all manipulative “advice” as to how Democrats can better win elections. They want a left that’s complacent fits neatly into the liberal order, doesn’t threaten it, maybe produces a few leaders that can be subsumed into the DC blob. I’m glad these left wing and Palestinian organizations aren’t giving a shit about what the respectability libs are demanding of them because they realize it’s a no-win situation.
Moreover, what they’re asking for is precisely what has been done for decades now and it got nothing done. The IDF continued to slaughter Palestinians, settlers continued to steal land. Rich irony in her denouncing the left for being ineffectual while convincing herself that anyone in a position of power gives a shit about the NY Times op-ed page.
And there it is, the old cliche of the antisemitic left, despite that being an overwhelmingly right wing phenomenon. (Also, a concern that goes out the window for libs when it comes to Ukraine).
The biggest load of bullshit in all of this is it’s coming out of the NY fucking Times, the rag that gleefully published Judith Miller’s lies about Iraqi WMDs to justify invading Iraq and killing millions, including countless children. And god knows how many drone bombing operations since then. As usual, the morality of the horrors of war is, for them, is dependent upon it being committed by the institutions of liberalism, whereas they demand that for everyone else it’s a black and white absolute.
Even Jacobin recognizes this: Israel’s Western Allies Have Done Everything Possible to Criminalize Nonviolent Resistance
Word. I’ve been watching bombs fall in Gaza all week. Not craft-made rockets assembled in secret a garage. Big fucking HE and WP bombs precision machined by cutting edge arms firms across the west, dropped with 2-3m precision on targets mapped from space. trying to draw equivalency is beyond absurd.