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De Lege en Soms Bloedige Handen van de Israel Lobby

Onder de kop 'Kan ik mijn kinderen straks beschermen?' probeert Parool-columniste Natascha van Weezel het beroep op haar gecultiveerd slachtofferschap nieuw leven in te blazen, nu haar joods-zijn van haar 'liefde' voor de zelfbenoemde Joodse staat Israel een grove onbeschaamdheid heeft gemaakt. Ik bedoel hoe kan iemand die weigert zich expliciet te distantiëren van de genocidale politiek van deze bloeddorstige Apartheidsstaat zich nog portretteren als het slachtoffer van de machtigen? Elke propaganda voor het volkje, dat claimt uitverkoren te zijn, dreigt voortaan een contrair effect op te leveren. Het publiek blijkt dan steeds kritischer te reageren nu Israel zijn ware gezicht publiekelijk heeft laten zien. De Joden in Israel, en de joden in de diaspora zijn niet langer meer in staat met enig fatsoen deze fascisten in de volle openbaarheid te steunen. Er is een definitief einde gekomen aan het verkopen van de massale, geniepige terreur die mede met steun van westerse politici en hun mainstream media 75 jaar lang verborgen werd gehouden.

En daar staan zij nu, Natascha van Weezel, haar moeder Anet Bleich, die zichzelf tot 'linkse jodin' bombardeerde, plus Natascha's inmiddels overleden vader Max van Weezel, de voetbal-journalist Frits Barend, en al die andere joodse Nederlanders die meteen kunnen worden opgetrommeld zodra er een al dan niet vermeend onrecht tegen joden waar dan ook ter wereld wordt bespeurd, maar die momenteel met lege handden staan Hoe nu verder, nu hun propaganda doorgeprikt is, en hun heilstaat Israel gewoon een 'rogue state' is en niets anders, zoals ondermeer de ruim 44,000 slachtoffers, het merendeels Palestijnse vrouwen en kinderen dagelijks aantonen. Ineens hangt rondom hun pathetisch slachtofferisme, waaraan geen eind leek te komen, een uiterst verdacht geurtje en moeten zij zich nu verdedigen tegen iets waar zij voorheen zich niet hoefden te verdedigen. Sommigen denken nog steeds dat Netanyahu de politiek van de bloedbaden heeft gewonnen, niet beseffend dat ook Hitler totaan Stalingrad eind 1942 meende de strijd gewonnen te hebben.
Volgende keer meer over wat de joodse propagandisten in Nederland kunnen gaan doen om hun handel te beschermen.

Ta-Nehesi Coate: the Message

Coates argues that the story of Jewish reclamation of Eretz Israel is also imbued with myths of what British Occupied Palestine looked like before 1948. There are many stories of Zionist leaders coming to a land without a people, of a savage desert needing to be tamed, of a barbaric, aimless people who needed civilizing.

And these myths persist in the present where Israel is portrayed as a land of Birthright parties, Jewish harmony, and democracy for all.

The truth behind these myths is inevitably more complicated. The innocent martyrs of Masada were actually fanatic Sicarii, hunted by the Romans not for being Jewish, but for being assassins who killed Romans and Jews alike. Viewed through another lens, Bar Kochba was less of a brave military leader, and more of a reckless narcissist who almost caused Jews to be wiped off the map. The land without a people or civilization was actually very much populated with communities with their own, developed ways of life. And the nation full of parties, harmony, and democracy has been grappling with injustice and internal divides for years.

While critics like journalist Jonathan S. Tobin have accused Coates of writing “woke propaganda” and making a one-to-one comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the American Black-White paradigm, Coates explicitly says this is not the case, and acknowledges that the story of Jews in Israel is much more complex. He relates to Jews both in his own experience of a Black American in Africa, as a people yearning for their homeland and a nation where they can truly feel like they belong. But he also shows the similarities between Jews who refuse to acknowledge anything but a picture-perfect history of Zionism and Israel and the white Americans who see any acknowledgment of the country’s prejudiced past as an attack on their identity.

While reading The Message, I kept being reminded of a meditation from the Kol Haneshama prayer book I studied this Yom Kippur. Attributed to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, it asserts that neither a person nor a people can “be redeemed until it sees the flaws in its soul and tries to efface them. But whether a person or a people, whoever shuts out the realization of her/his flaws is shutting out redemption.”

Coates provides a number of statistics and laws that exemplify the injustice in our mythologized utopia: Jewish citizens of Israel who marry non-Jews from other countries can pass on their citizenship to their spouse; Palestinian citizens cannot. In the city of Hebron, Jewish settlers and Palestinian citizens are under the jurisdiction of different courts even when they commit identical offenses. Water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Coates is persuasive when he warns of the dangers of buying into fabricated histories. When people in the Jewish community rush to defend a fictionalized perfect Jewish state instead of responding with calls to do better, it is a disservice not only to the Palestinians who have been displaced and killed by Israeli policy, but to ourselves. As the Kol Haneshamasays: “There is a sense in which you can destroy yourself by not saying yes to the reality that actually exists.”

In his first essay, Coates argues the social function of great writing is to “make people feel all that is now at stake.” In one of the most tumultuous times in Jewish history, that is certainly necessary, even if the message comes from a writer with whom readers may disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates says 'I don't give a fuck' about backlash for speaking on Palestine

Ta-Nehisi Coates says 'I don't

give a fuck' about backlash for

speaking on Palestine

Award-winning author tells MEE he would not urge people to vote for Kamala Harris, labelling the Democrats 'cold and inhumane'

By Mohamed Hashem and Imran Mulla

Published date: 1 November 2024 10:19 GMT | Last update: 1 month 1 week ago

African-American writer and public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has said he doesn't "give a fuck" if he is sidelined in the media for calling Israel's war on Gaza a genocide.

In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Middle East Eye's Real Talk series, the award-winning author discussed his new book, The Message, his evolving views on Israel and Palestine and the 2024 US election, amongst other issues.

For several years, Coates - who established a wide readership at The Atlantic, where he wrote about racism against African Americans - considered himself a liberal Zionist. In 2008, he even published an essay praising Israel called "The Negro Sings of Zionism".

But after receiving criticism for his 2014 essay "The Case for Reparations", which called for America to pay reparations for slavery and racial discrimination, drawing an analogy with Germany paying Israel reparations for the Holocaust, Coates said that he started to read more about the issue and begun re-evaluating his views on Zionism.

"I was just dumbstruck," he told MEE when describing his May 2023 visit to the occupied West Bank. "I couldn’t believe what I was seeing."

Coates said that he was shocked by seeing enforced segregation and hearing testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the violence they perpetrated against Palestinians.

He recalled that he was even stopped by a soldier who demanded to know if he was Muslim.

How Ta-Nehisi Coates broke free of liberal Zionism

But the 49-year-old said that what shocked him the most was the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who gunned down between 30 and 54 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994.

Coates said that he was stunned to see that Israelis visit the tomb "and they honour him for murdering Palestinians while they prayed."

"This is not somewhere out in the wilderness," he stressed. "This is in a settlement that enjoys subsidies from the Israeli state."

He quickly concluded that Israel is not a democracy. "That was just immediately obvious," he told MEE. "You tell me you've got one set of laws for one part of the population and everyone else abides by a varying set of laws?"

It was also, he thought, a deeply violent society. "The amount of guns - there was something about the air that felt like this situation doesn't go well," he said.

'The conclusions of colonialism'

In the interview, Coates also said that he had completely reevaluated his views on Zionism. "There are people who will tell you that the Zionist project at its core had a fundamental goodness to it, and it got corrupted when certain people got their hands on it, and now we're at this point.

"But to me, [the situation in Gaza] follows the conclusions of colonialism. It follows the notion that certain people's lives are worth less."

He said that after he visited the occupied territories, Coates felt ashamed of his previous position on Israel.

"I fucked up," he said. "I don't know how I fucked up.

"I'm a writer and so it's one of these things that can't really be corrected by going to a march, or releasing a statement or signing an open letter. It has to be corrected in writing."

This helps explain the content of the author's new book, The Message, which is about writing. Part of the book - the section which has garnered the most interest and criticism in the American press - details his 10 days spent in Israel and occupied Palestine.

A month ago, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil suggested the book promoted "extremist" views in an interview that quickly went viral on social media, triggering widespread outrage.

CBS News executives found a week later that the interview did not meet the network's editorial standards.

'I wish Kamala did better'

Since Coates is one of America's most celebrated essayists, his book has attracted significant attention in the run-up to the election on 5 November.

Coates weighed in on the issue of people preferring to vote for third-party candidates instead of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, because of the Biden administration's unequivocal support for Israel's war on Gaza.

"I get it," he said. "I don't think it's gonna work but I get it. I get the feeling.

"I don’t think the pragmatics of it are good, but I get it. I'm not gonna be the one to go out there and say: 'Shut up and fall in line', as somebody who comes from a community that has been told repeatedly to shut up and fall in line."

He added: "I wish Kamala did better. I was there at the DNC [Democratic National Convention] when they wouldn't even allow a Palestinian speaker to get on the mic.

"I think that was not just a mistake - I think it was cold and inhumane."

Later, Coates said he doubted that a Harris administration would diverge significantly from Joe Biden's policies towards Israel.

What it means to be a writer

MEE put it to Coates, who calls Israel's war on Gaza genocidal, that genocide is a term many in the US media might avoid out of fear that they could be sidelined or ostracised - and that Coates himself could find himself no longer being interviewed by major networks in the future.

"I don't give a fuck," he said, adding that "I would rather be here [talking to MEE]."

Coates insisted that he refuses to allow his writing to be "guided by how many powerful people are gonna get angry at me.

"If we're going to write then we should say what we see, and people getting mad at you is part of the process.

"There are a great many things in America that are not said, but the reason those things are not said are not for any reason that any writer of integrity should respect."

He noted that he appreciates being invited onto major networks to make his case.

"But at the end of the day, I close up my computer, I kiss my beautiful wife, I call my lovely son, you know what I mean? I hang out with my beautiful friends.

"We model this notion that being a writer means people with power and people with platforms are supposed to like you, want to put you on or whatever. What I want is to be respected by my people."

In the interview, Coates also said that he had embarked on a moral mission.

"The fight to see Palestinians as human beings is at a different point in America than the fight to see African Americans as human beings," he told MEE.

"Jim Crow is not happening now" in America, he noted, referring to the laws that once enforced racial segregation in the US.

"You see it there [in Palestine]. This is about right now."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ta-nehisi-coates-does-not-care-backlash-speaking-palestine

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.

zondag 15 december 2024

Mark the Publication Date: 29th of may 2018

Jonathan Cook: 'A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towaeds the Abyss

BlogviewJonathan Cook Archive

A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss

JONATHAN COOK • JANUARY 31, 2019

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Bernard-Henri Levy

A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they warn, “is falling apart before our eyes”, as Britain prepares for Brexit and “populist and nationalist” parties look poised to make sweeping gains in elections across the continent.

The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elite’s European house journals, newspapers such as the Guardian. “We must now fight for the idea of Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” their document reads. Failure means “resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be “the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster”.

The manifesto was penned by Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and devotee of Alexis de Tocqueville, a theorist of classical liberalism. Its signatories include novelists Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Shama, and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.

Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist right in Germany.

Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the manifesto’s signatories – not least Henri-Levy himself – have a well-known passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two world wars last century.

Instead let us focus on their claim that “populism and nationalism” are on the verge of slaying Europe’s liberal democratic tradition and the very values held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope, presumably, is that their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an irreversible turn for the worse.

Liberalism’s collapse

In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically.

These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the inevitable outcome of this shrinking elite’s continuing promotion – against all rational evidence – of liberalism as a solution to our current predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying us.

Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.

But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism’s abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal’s political project.

The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.

Humanitarian resource grabs

The liberal’s professed concern for others’ welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism’s humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims’ inheritance.

Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources.

At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a global scale.

Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet’s wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.

Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.

And so the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder nature’s riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on, that new balance – what we limply term “climate change” – will necessitate that we are stripped from the planet.

Nadir of a dangerous arrogance

One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all. But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilised, as primitive.

Liberalism isn’t the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual’s good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.

The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberal’s relentless and exclusive focus is on “progress”, growth, accumulation.

What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the centre of our social organisation.

This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism, not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.

Status-quo cheerleaders

As a result, we now have three clear political trends.

The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of liberalism’s latest – last? – manifesto. With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how we might extricate ourselves.

Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately as “populism”, as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.

This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two alternatives.

Those among the elites who understand that liberalism has had its day are exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.

The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalism’s failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.

The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.

Where hope can reside

The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the “dissenters” – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.

Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilise. But the liberals and authoritarians understand this as a threat to their own privilege. Under a confected hysteria about “fake news”, they are rapidly working to snuff out even this small space.

We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.

We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers, historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.

We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears to their siren song.

There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our infinitely small corner of the universe.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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