“THE ONLY WAY TO CREATE A JEWISH-MAJORITY STATE IN AN ARAB-MAJORITY LAND WAS TO FORCE OUT LOTS OF ARABS AND EXPEL MOST OF THE NATIVE PALESTINIAN POPULATION WHO HAD LIVED THERE FOR GENERATIONS.”
Recent weeks have seen controversy over the sharing of an article by Labour Shadow Minister Rebecca Long-Bailey and a tweet by Plaid election candidate Sahar Al-Faifi around cooperation between US and Israeli police, Labour Shadow Minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle forced to apologise for past social media posts describing Zionism as a “dangerous nationalist idea”, while two officers of Jewish Voice for Labour are being sued for libel by John Ware over their criticisms of the BBC Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ Labour, Plaid Cymru and Welsh Government have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples of antisemitism.
While the left must oppose all racism, and be clear on the boundaries between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti Jewish racism, this piece argues the IHRA definition is itself racist towards Palestinians, denies an oppressed people the right to talk about their own history and experience of oppression, and should be opposed by anti-racists. It is a shocking fact that when deciding how people may speak about Israel, neither Labour, Plaid Cymru or Welsh Government consulted any Palestinians.
“Israel is a racist endeavour”.
A friend asked me to explain to him in ‘simple layman’s terms’ what was the issue with this particular IHRA example of antisemitism.
1. The roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict are that in 1917 one people (the British state) promised another people (Zionist settlers) the land of a third people (Palestinian Arabs) without their consent.
2. Following the horror of the Holocaust -where six million Jews were exterminated in concentration camps run by the Nazis- western public opinion swung behind the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But this ignored the rights of people already living there, as Arabs don’t count in the Western colonial racist mindset. For years this racism rendered Palestinians simply invisible.
3. The only way to create a Jewish-majority state in an Arab-majority land was to force out lots of Arabs and expel most of the native Palestinian population who had lived there for generations. Palestinians naturally regard this as racist.
4. In 1948 almost a million Palestinians were forced from their land and homes to create the state of Israel.
5. Israel then passed racist laws to prevent them ever returning to the land of their birth or seeing the land of their ancestors ever again.
6. 400+ Palestinian villages were completely demolished in Israel to wipe out even the memory that another society had existed there for centuries.
7. This was followed by enacting more than 60 other racist laws denying true equal citizenship to the remaining Palestinians – currently one-fifth of the population of Israel – as non-Jews in what was and is now a Jewish state.
8. In 1967 the rest of Palestine became subject to a violent AND racist military occupation by the state of Israel. Since 2007 Gaza has been subject to an inhumane economic blockade that threatens to make it uninhabitable in the near future. The history of Palestinians from 1948 – 2020 is punctuated by racist massacres at the hands of the state of Israel.
9. Israel could only be created by denying the human rights of the Palestinian people already living there. From the standpoint of universal human rights, achieving self-determination for one people by denying self-determination to another people is racist, and is not true self-determination. As a Jewish socialist named Karl Marx once said, a people who oppress another cannot themselves be truly free.
10. Some Palestinians, allies and Jewish anti-Zionists argue that it would be best if Israel and its occupied Palestinian territories be superseded by a single democracy based on equal citizenship for Arabs and Jews.
As this would deny Israel’s right to exist the topsy-turvy IHRA examples would regard replacing racism with full equality between Arabs and Jews as racist.
Adam Johannes is an ant-war activist with Cardiff Stop the War Coalition. @DrRoundglasses
