The Zionist left in crisis

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By BRUNO HUBERMAN

The genocide in Gaza deepened the crisis of the Zionist left. In Israel, where they have been removed from power since 2001

The expression "shooting and crying” (shooting and crying, in English) was born from the remorse that Israeli soldiers express for the violence used against Palestinians in an attempt to absolve themselves of their crimes. Fábio Zuker, in your answer ao my article — both posted on the website the earth is round —, maintains this tradition that seeks the most different ways to atone for Zionist responsibility for the colonization of Palestinians since the Nakba.

A Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – was the expulsion of 750 Palestinians and the destruction of 500 villages at the founding of Israel in 1948. For decades, Palestinians claimed to have been expelled by Zionist militias. Israel's history, however, said that the Palestinians fled voluntarily.

In the 1980s, the declassification of Israeli documents proved the Palestinian narrative. As demonstrated Arlene Clemesha in an article in Folha de S. Paul, official documents prove that the Palestinians were victims of a planned process of ethnic cleansing. The revelation of its colonial role in Nakba provoked a serious identity crisis among Zionists.

However, Israeli historians, such as Avi Shalim, sought to atone for Zionist responsibility in Nakba. He blamed the Palestinians for his own catastrophe due to mistakes by his leadership. Regarding this manipulation, Palestinian Nur Masalha writes: “Palestinians should share the blame for their own Nakba. Of course Shlaim is right to point out the strategically disastrous leadership of the Mufti, Haj al-Husseini. The very idea that Germans and Jews bear shared guilt for the Jewish Holocaust would rightly be considered a profound offense. When it comes to […] the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, completely different ethical standards are applied.”

As Nur Masalha notes, holding any Jew responsible for the Holocaust would be absurd. But the same ethical standard is not accorded to Palestinians because of Israeli colonial racism. Historically, colonizers represent the colonized as “good” and “bad”, demonstrates Arun Kundnani, to justify violent measures against the “bad guys”.

If in the past it was necessary to invent that Haj al-Husseini would have convinced Hitler of the extermination of the Jews, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, today this “bad” Palestinian is Hamas, also portrayed as a Nazi by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Unlike the weak lies of the right, the Zionist left acts in a sophisticated way. For them, the right-wing militias Irgun and Stern were responsible for massacres and expulsions of Palestinians in the Nakba. The objective is exempt the Zionist left establishment from responsibility for ethnic cleansing.

In the peace process of the 1990s, the Zionist left recreated the narrative of blaming the Israeli far right and the Palestinians, now in the form of Hamas, for the supposed failure of the creation of the Palestinian State. Thus, Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who stated in a speech to the Israeli parliament, in 1995, that the Palestinian “entity” would be “less than a State”.

Today, the Zionist left repeats the formula by placing Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinians, again through Hamas, as “co-responsible” for the genocide, according to Fábio Zuker. In his rejoinder, he reaffirms the importance of “not confusing the Palestinians with Hamas” when blaming the victims for the extermination in Gaza.

For Fábio Zuker, the only way out for the Palestinians is to wait for international pressure to see how much land Israel would be willing to “give up” for peace. The author reduces decolonization to an act of generosity on the part of the colonizer. And he constructs the “good” Palestinian as the moderate who waits for Israel and the US to decide when he will be free. Thus, it erases the agency of the Palestinian who fights for liberation, which is not what Edward Said, famous for throwing stones at Israel, advocated.

Annulling the agency of the colonized is a paternalistic strategy of the colonial left. Anti-colonial intellectuals Frantz Fanon e Aimé Césaire They broke with the French left because of the support given to the French State for the repression of Algerian national liberation under the justification that the National Liberation Front's resistance would be excessively violent.

Like the French, the Zionist left rejects the real Palestinian to justify colonial violence. Fábio Zuker positions himself as a defender of the Palestinian cause, but copies the far right by reducing the Palestinians to those manipulated by Hamas, ignoring that Israel is the jailer of the open-air prison called Gaza.

He further states that those who support the violence of the Palestinian attack must “accept[r] that this will be the path of response”. Ssecond research, 61% of Palestinians want Hamas to govern Gaza and the West Bank. This forced Fatah, the “good” Palestinian who administers the West Bank, at the behest of Israel, to make a “national unity” agreement with Hamas. Would everyone now be “bad” Palestinians who must have their death justified?

Without a doubt, it is necessary to condemn the crimes that occurred on October 07th. However, the racist representation of Hamas as a demon “co-responsible” for the genocide serves to dehumanize and divide Palestinians, justify Israeli extermination and exempt the Zionist left from responsibility.

Crisis of the Zionist left

The genocide in Gaza deepened the crisis of the Zionist left. In Israel, where they have been out of power since 2001, the Labor and Meretz parties have seen their votes fall with each election. This forced a merger between the parties for the next election.

Furthermore, there is the global strengthening of the extreme right, as seen in the affiliation of Brazilian Jews to Bolsonarism; the growth of anti-Zionist Jewish movements, which led the fight against genocide in the USA; and the abandonment of Zionism by the left, as demonstrated in the support for the cut Brazil's relations with Israel.

Fábio Zuker's texts are part of Zionist left's struggle for survival. His claim to Zionism as anti-colonial and Jews as indigenous It's a strategy of the Zionist left around the world of creating a nativist myth to confront the radical left and the extreme right.

The project of the right, of annexation of the West Bank and apartheid, and of the left, of a single democratic state, threaten the Zionist left's vision of Israel as a democratic state with a Jewish majority. Rejection of the two-state resolution is growing.

The Zionist left wants to save the Israel that they imagine existed until 1967. For them, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza would have Zionism distorted. The defense of the end of the occupation seeks to save what is at the root of the Nakba: the Jewish ethnic majority obtained with the expulsion of 750 Palestinians.

However, even without the occupation, Israel is not a liberal democracy: the Palestinian minority is discriminated against by more than 40 laws and systematically expelled from their lands; and there is no civil marriage, only religious. Ethnocracies, points out the Israeli Oren Yiftachel, are, by definition, anti-democratic.

For Frantz Fanon, the idea of ​​return in history is reactionary because it starts from an idealized representation of the past. The attempt at reconstruction results in violence against groups that do not form part of this image.

The exclusion of non-Jews, the Palestinians, is not a deviation from Zionism or something exclusive to the extreme right. It is organic to the Zionist effort to restore Israel.

Ancestry is fundamental as a historical horizon to build a future without oppression, not to reconstruct the past. A future of peace involves the abandonment of mythological projects, be it the biblical Land of Israel, the pre-1967 State of Israel or pre-1948 Palestine. For a future where everyone, from the river to the sea, is equal and free under a democratic, secular and plurinational regime.

*Bruno Huberman He is a professor of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). Author of The neoliberal colonization of Jerusalem (EDUC). [https://amzn.to/3KtWcUp]

Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.


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