I’m writing this in good faith with the belief that most of the friends, acquaintances, employers and followers I have who are committed to the Palestinian cause are motivated by the absolutely heartbreaking stories and images of the suffering of Palestinian innocents. The horrific story of Hind Rajab. The unspeakable death of Mohammad Bhar. The IDF soldiers who sexually abused a Palestinian man in detention (and who, it should be noted, are being prosecuted by Israel for this crime). The revulsion is understandable because I feel it too, as would any right thinking person. Some, some people devoted to the cause ARE anti-semites, like a prominent white Australian feminist who I won’t do the honour of naming, who continues to speak over brown, Muslim women asking her to not eg: dox 600 Australian creatives for the crime of being Jews - which she equates to Zionism which in HER terminology equates to being murderers.
Anti-semitism is the one prejudice that changes shape for each generation. It projects onto Jews the very worst thing a person can currently be accused of. So once all Jews were communists. Or all Jews were capitalists. During the Holocaust Jews were non-whites infecting the pure race. Now Jews are “white colonialist settlers”. Again, it doesn’t help for campus protesters to say “We mean we hate Zionists not Jews” since anyone who believes Jews have the right to self-determination in the land to which they are indigenous alongside an equal state for Arabs is a Zionist. Zionism does not mean racist murderers, just because antisemites say it does. FFS Bernie Sanders, who has held Israeli governments to account for decades now, is a Zionist. Nick Cave, close to achieving Sainthood in the culture of late, has gone on public record as a Zionist as well as explaining why, as an artist, he rejects BDS (boycott, divest, sanction of Israeli art and Professors).
Here’s where it gets complicated and here’s where I am asking my friends and readers to think hard. The worst thing you can be today is no longer a communist, it is a white colonialist. So all Israelis, including the hostages being tortured and executed underground, can be dismissed as evil “White colonialists”. And yet you can see from the 250 hostage posters that the majority are brown people. There are some red heads, as there often are in Gaza, there are some white passing, like the former hostage Mia Schem (like the celebrated Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi who has blonde hair and pale blue eyes). Jews and Palestinians have different culture and religion but are the same genetic people because we come from the same place. Hamas had to ask the rescued Muslim Bedouin hostage, Farhan Alkadi, to point out who the Jews were because it is not possible, visually, to tell an Israeli from a Palestinian (he refused and was shot and made to crawl for his heroism before they took him underground for 11 months). It is inherently antisemitic to say “Jews should just go back to Poland” because Jews exiled from the middle east settled in Poland and the Nazis could see from looking at them who they were and killed them almost in their entirety. It is a reprehensible thing to say.
A mind like the aforementioned white feminist cannot accept the complexity (because it would harm her “white saviour” complex and income) that the other reason Israelis are predominantly brown is that the ones who had not always been there came from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, where Jews could stay if they accepted being second class citizens, but were eventually viciously persecuted and had their homes taken until they were driven out - the definition of apartheid states, right? They arrived in the newly formed modern state of Israel as refugees. Their descendants make up over 60 percent of the population.
Let me say this as clearly and calmly as I can: you diminish your cause when you describe brown people as white simply because it’s the worst thing you can say about them.
(Pictured from top, rescued hostage Farhan Alkadi, rescued hostage Noa Argamani and her Father, executed hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, executed hostage Eden Yerulshami, Hersh’s parents).
Thank you for writing this.
Thanks for writing. X