UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that the “Holocaust” threat mentioned in the letter was based on a mistranslation.
Taking a minute from my vacation to post this letter, which is incredibly important. Do read the entire thing — I’ve reproduced it in full, but it can be found at Religion Dispatches.
An Open Letter to All Feminists: Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women.
Piya Chatterjee & Sunaina Maira
As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians. This war has targeted women and children, and all those who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and are also denied the right to freedom of movement, health, and education.
We stand in solidarity with Iraqi women whose daughters, sisters, brothers, or sons have been abused, tortured, and raped in U.S. prisons such as Abu Ghraib. Women in Iraq continue to live under a U.S. occupation that has devastated families and homes, and are experiencing a rise in religious extremism and restrictions on their freedom that were unheard of before the U.S. invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in 2003.
At this moment in Afghanistan, women are living with the return of the Taliban and other misogynistic groups such as the Northern Alliance, a U.S. ally, and with the violence of continuing U.S. and NATO attacks on civilians, despite the U.S. war to “liberate” Afghan women in 2001.
As of March 6, 2008, over 120 Palestinians, including 39 children and 6 women (more than a third of the victims), in Gaza were killed by Israeli air strikes and escalated attacks on civilians over a period of five days, according to human rights groups. Hospitals have been struggling to treat 370 injured children, as reported by medical officials. Homes have been destroyed as well as civilian facilities including the headquarters of the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions. On February 29, 2008, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a “bigger Shoah,” the Hebrew word usually used only for the Holocaust. What does it mean that the international community is standing by while this is happening?
Valnai’s threat of a Holocaust against Palestinians was not just a slip of the tongue, for the war on Gaza is a continuation of genocidal activities against the indigenous population. Israel has controlled the land and sea borders and airspace of Gaza for more than a year and a half, confining 1.5 million Palestinians to a giant prison.Supported by the U.S., Israel has imposed a near total blockade on Gaza since June 2007 which has led to a breakdown in basic services, including water and sanitation, lack of electricity, fuel, and medical supplies. As a result of these sanctions, 30% of children under 5 years suffer from stunted growth and malnutrition. Over 80% of the population cannot afford a balanced meal. Is this humanitarian crisis going to approach a situation similar to that of the sanctions against Iraq from 1991-2003, when an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children died to lack of nutrition and medical supplies, and the woman who was then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, proclaimed that the death of a half million Iraqi children was worth the price of U.S. national security?
As feminists and anti-imperialist people of conscience, we oppose direct and indirect policies of ethnic cleansing and decimation of native populations by all nation-states.
In the current climate of U.S.-initiated or U.S.-backed assaults on women in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we are deeply troubled by one kind of hypocritical Western feminist discourse that continues to be preoccupied with particular kinds of violence against Muslim or Middle Eastern women, while choosing to remain silent on the lethal violence inflicted on women and families by military occupation, F-16s, Apache helicopters, and missiles paid for by U.S. tax payers. This is a moment when U.S. imperialism brazenly uses direct colonial occupation, masked in a civilizational discourse of bringing Western “freedom” and “democracy.” Such acts echo the language of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines and Pacific territories in the 19th century, not to mention the genocide of Native Americans. U.S. covert, and not so covert, interventions in Central, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have devastated the lives of countless indigenous peoples, and other civilians, in this region throughout the 20th century.
The U.S., as well its proxy militias or client regimes, has inflicted violence on women and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged the deaths of its soldiers by its own “honor killings” that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq.
It is appalling that in these catastrophic times, many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on misogynistic practices associated with particular local cultures, as if these exist in capsules, far from the arena of imperial occupation. Indeed, imperial violence has given fuel to some of these patriarchal practices of misogyny and sexism. They should also know that such a narrow vision furthers a much older tradition of feminist mobilizing in the service of colonialism–”saving brown, or black women, from brown men,” as observed by Gayatri Spivak.
While we too oppose abuses including domestic violence, “honor killings,” forced marriage, and brutal punishment, we are disturbed that some U.S. feminists-as well as Muslim or Middle Eastern women who claim to be “authorities” on Islam and are employed by right-wing think tanks-are participating in a selective discourse of universal women’s rights that ignores U.S. war crimes and abuses of human rights.
While some progressive U.S. feminists claim to oppose the hijacking of women’s rights to justify U.S. invasions, they simultaneously evade any mention about the plight of women in Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Their statements continue to focus only on female genital mutilation or dowry deaths under the guise of breaking the “politically correct” silence on abuses of women in the “Muslim world” that the Right disingenuously laments.
Some progressives may support such statements with good intentions, but these critiques ignore the fact that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim feminists have been working on these issues for generations, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationalism.
Their work is ignored by North American feminists who claim to advocate for a “global sisterhood” but are disillusioned to discover that women in the U.S. military participated in the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.
We are concerned about these silences and selective condemnations given that the U.S. mainstream media bolsters this imperialist feminism by using an (often liberal) Orientalist approach to covering the Middle East or South Asia. For example, on March 5, 2008, as the death toll due to Israeli attacks in Gaza was mounting, the New York Times chose to publish an article just below its report on the Israeli military incursions that focused on the sentencing of a Palestinian man in Israel for an honor killing; the report was deemed worthy of international coverage because the Palestinian women had broken “the code of silence” by resorting to Israeli courts.
The implications of this juxtaposition of two unrelated events are that Palestinians belong to a backward, patriarchal culture that, rightly or wrongly, is under attack by a modern, “democratic” state with a legal apparatus that supports women’s rights. Others have shown that the New York Times gave disproportionate attention to the Human Rights Watch report in 2006 on domestic violence against Palestinian women relative to its scant mention of the 76 reports of Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli organization, B’Tselem.
Similar coverage exists of women from other countries outside the U.S. that are portrayed as victims only of their own cultural traditions, rather than also of the ravages of Western imperialism and predatory global capitalism. No attention is paid in the mainstream U.S. media to reports such as that in Haaretz documenting that Palestinian women citizens of Israel are the most exploited group in the Israeli workforce, making only 47% of the wages earned by their Jewish counterparts in Israel, and with double the rate of unemployment of Jewish women. Little is known in the U.S. about what the lives of Iraqi women are really like now that they are pressured to cover themselves in public or not work outside the house, nor of Afghani women whose homes are still being bombed in a war that was supposed to have liberated them many years ago.
We stand in solidarity with feminist and liberatory movements that are opposing U.S. imperialism, U.S.-backed occupation, militarism, and economic exploitation as well as resisting religious and secular fundamentalisms.
We also support the struggles of those within the U.S. opposing the War on Terror and racist practices of detention, deportation, surveillance, and torture linked to the military-industrial-prison complex that selectively targets immigrants, minorities, and youth of color. We are grateful for the courageous scholarship of academics who are at risk of not getting tenure or employment because they do research related to settler colonialism or taboo topics such as Palestinian rights and expose controversial aspects of U.S. policies here and abroad.
At a moment when U.S. military interventions have made “democracy” a dirty word in much of the world, we strive for true democracy and for freedom and justice for all our sisters and brothers.
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The all problem facing the people worldwide is not only the matters for weak nations but is the problem of all people in world.Either your country facing it direct or indirect you have thinks it carefully because if you don’t do it well it be problem for your children.Washington is dose not care,he is arming his allies all around and preparing his missel positions all around his enemies position and the worst of all he teaching the hatred all around other nations boarders so that you should first fight yourelves than weakness you through his sofe weapons like Human Right and United nations. Than he and his allies will continous with his wick imperialism over you either direct or indirect.
The claim that Mr. Valnai threatened Palestinians with genocide is blatantly false, and is one of those slanders that needs to be nipped in the bud before it spreads out of control.
Contrary to Ms. Chatterjee & Maira’s assertions (which I don’t necessarily blame them for, as it looks they are working from bad reporting by the British media, which originally promulgated this story — although one could argue that you should be especially careful to check sources when you’re accusing Jewish actors of wanting to reprise the Holocaust), the Hebrew word “Shoah” does not “usually” or even primarily refer to the Holocaust. “Shoah” is the Hebrew word for “disaster.” “Ha-Shoah” translates to “the disaster”, which is an idiom for the Holocaust (which makes sense, from a Jewish perspective, The Holocaust is The Disaster). But without the “ha-” (“the”) prefix, it’s merely the standard Hebrew word for “disaster.”
Translated correctly (and in context) then, Mr. Valnai’s statement was that, if Palestinians continued to fire rockets into Israel, it would be met with “an even bigger disaster” from Israel. Not exactly hearts-and-flowers (or even language we should necessarily support), but pretty standard military tit-for-tat posturing and certainly a far cry from genocide.
It’s extraordinarily important to not make mistakes like this, for a huge chunk of otherwise sympathetic folks (including myself — a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist who nonetheless opposes the blockade as inflicting unnecessary suffering on the civilian population in Gaza) are going to bolt when they see allegations of specific genocidal intent inaccurately thrown out like this. And, speaking as a Jew and a feminist, and as someone who thinks we need to be dedicated in our struggle against all forms of oppression, I see it as nothing short of anti-Semitism when people are so quick to believe that the Jews (or a major Jewish institution) are really actively plotting genocide, and are willing to pass along these claims without any substantive verification.
In this case, as in all of the other ones that purport to reveal an active Israeli genocidal plot against the Palestinians, it wasn’t true. It hurts me that people who I’d normally count as allies would believe that it’s true. And it’s proving a major barrier to “solidarity” that we can’t move beyond the old anti-Semitism when engaging in these conversations.
Yeah, what David Schraub said. So much of this letter had me nodding my head, saying yes, yes, yes — but the word “genocidal” has a very specific meaning, and it is misused in this instance. Like David, I want to stand with Israel when I can, and I condemn the Gaza blockade. Inhumane? Yes. Immoral? You bet. Genocidal? No.
It would be sad if a little tinge of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (the two don’t need to go together, but all too often in the global left, they do) spoilt an otherwise impassioned call to solidarity. The point that western feminists too often allow negative stereotypes about muslims to affect their views of Middle Eastern women and American policy in the region is well-taken indeed.
I agree that the specific meaning of the word needs to be part of the discussion, but I think it’s still pretty cowardly to threaten to bring a “a bigger disaster” to a mostly civilian population with about one hundredth the fire power.
Also, I don’t think it’s antisemitic to call Israel’s practices genocidal (even though as a Jew, it makes me sick to admit it). European colonization and violent displacement of Native Americans is considered genocidal, and Israel has used extremely similar tactics in carving out its territory.
I find Chatterjee & Maira’s anti-imperialist intentions highly commendable. Their spotlight on the right wing hypocrisy of selectively condemning the abuse of women under ‘enemy’ regimes while ignoring that which occurs under ‘friendly’ regimes is extremely important.
Unfortunately, to buttress their emotional appeal they apparently felt compelled to rely on hypocritical premises of their own. Their assertion that the violent U.S. interventions in these areas specifically or inordinately target female populations is quite simply false. As Daran at FC discovered last year, for example, well over 90% of the civilian casualties in Iraq appear to be male. (Interestingly, this was also true in the specific example given in the OP above where 73 of the 79 adult Palestinian victims of Israeli air strikes in Gaza were also men, though it’s unclear to what extent those dead men and women were civilians or non-combatants.)
For avowed feminists to rely on latent chivalric impulses that only “women and children” matter in an otherwise laudable effort to end the deplorable violence unleashed by the current (and past) administrations strikes me as both hypocritical and ultimately counterproductive.
@ David S –
I think where the confusion lies is that while in Hebrew “Ha-Shoah” means the disaster, specifically the Holocaust, there is the film SHOAH which is about the Holocaust.
When I read that piece I immediately connected “Shoah” to the film and its subject material – the holocaust.
Perhaps a better choice of words was needed on part of Mr. Valnai. If they openly acknowledge the Palestinians equate their plight with that of Jews during the Holocaust, why use such verbage?
While I have a deeper understanding now of the hebrew meanings/difference between shoah and ha-shoah, that I did not have before, perhaps Mr. Valnai still should have used a different word to avoid any misunderstanding.
A Lot more people know of the film, Shoah, than they do of Hebrew.
Not an excuse, just
ETA – for I forgot to finish my last sentence…
Not an excuse, just perhaps the way a lot of people would understand it having not known Hebrew.
“It would be sad if a little tinge of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (the two don’t need to go together, but all too often in the global left, they do) spoilt an otherwise impassioned call to solidarity.”
I agree with The Girl Detective. I won’t argue whether Israeli policies towards Palestinians constitute genocide or not. I agree genocide has a very specific meaning (for example, Amnesty International does not recognize the killings in Darfur as genocide). You can disagree with that designation, but it is absolutely disingenuous to call it anti-Semitism. And no anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism don’t often go hand in hand “in the global left”, that is just the kind of bullshit (along with the “self-hating Jew” epithet) that is used to silence all criticism of Israel’s polices.
The idea that I should automatically stand by these causes because of my gender is insulting. It says that my reproductive organs should define my political views. No. I will not side with the Palestinians because they are in the wrong. They place their militants with civilians. When Israel attacks them, as it has to do or let its civilians die, non-combatant deaths are inevitable and on the Palestinians’ heads. (International law agrees with me.) Meanwhile, as well as occasionally attacking Israeli soldiers, the Palestinians launch attacks on Israeli citizens, including children. They deliberately target these non-combatants. The Israeli policies are not genocide, they are a defence against an attempted genocide.
I support Israel. It’s a postage stamp in a very hostile land where they’re focusing a lot of good works for their people. They must protect themselves always. This is only one side of a story. I hate to say this but other countries there support Arab, Muslim and have never done a thing for women. If we’re focusing on women’s issues, lets call to those countries to help. Tell me where a Jewish woman can turn to in that region for help if not Israel.
I would also like to point out another error… The Palestinian people are not in fact indigenous. Most of them are very recent additions to the area. That is why the UN had to define their refugee status as having lived in Palestine for 2 years since 1948. -Thats not to say, however, that they shouldn’t be given their own state. Certainly, even if they’re only a recent people, they’ve become a people. Like all people, the Palestinians are entitled to the same basic human rights as everyone else. Its just this idea of “from time immemorial” seems to be used as a way of stirring up emotions and preventing rational discourse. Either you’re for indigenous Palestine and against Israel or you’re supporting big brother. This issue always divides me from other liberals, and makes me feel very uncomfortable in “the camp.” Like David and Hugo said, I would have an easy time supporting pressure against the blockade, but I loath that I’d have to sign on to misinformation and anti-antisemitism to do so.
This is a very atrocious and sick strawman. Because a Jewish Israeli woman can receive assistance from her government who is willing to sell out her Arab Israeli counterpart, this makes it “better” somehow? To whom? And on what premise do you counter that one’s worth is more valuable than the other.
Freedom for all, otherwise it’s oppression all the same.
This open letter, an attack on one national government, would be more compelling if it were up front about what it wanted to happen in response. Not just platitudes– “true democracy,” “freedom” and “justice”–but specifics along the lines of the specifics the letter attacks. The military blockade is hideous, but it does have something to do with Gaza’s being used as an airstrip to launch rockets at civilians across the border. So, letter writers, which changes would you like to see, and how would Arab and Muslim women be better off afterwards?
Yeah, that was my one issue with it too. I thought it was valuable to let these authors speak in their own words and not undercut them in the post, so I didn’t pick apart the wording. I think it’s a powerful piece nonetheless.
If I remember correctly, aren’t there parts of Israel where women still have things bad due to Judaism? It’s not all shiny happy good stuff in any religion, because of hundreds of years or putting up top and women on the bottom.
But at any rate, no, I don’t think it’s right for Israel to do what it’s doing, I’ve never thought it was right for them to just bomb another country, targeting all kinds of areas because of a few attacks. I also don’t mean to belittle Israel’s position either, in that they have to protect themselves, but not at the cost of bombing civilians, men and women alike.
I also know I may be missing somethings in discussing this, as well as what it’s like to live over there, but I have studied and I have read about the huge displacement of people over in Afghanistan, and what some mothers have had to do living in shantytowns in order to survive, because they’re too poor to get back into Afghanistan. It’s horrible.
I think for either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to pretend they have all the moral right on their side is ludicrous.
I’m sick of the Palestinians assuming that their well-nurtured grievances give them carte blanche to slit the throats of anyone they choose. And I’m equally sick of the Israelis pretending that they’re not every bit as bloodthirsty and vicious, just because their rockets are fired from the air instead of the ground.
“I would also like to point out another error… The Palestinian people are not in fact indigenous. Most of them are very recent additions to the area. That is why the UN had to define their refugee status as having lived in Palestine for 2 years since 1948. ”
Ah! Again the Propaganda Machine at work. Yeah, Palestinians just appeared out of the blue as soon as they saw the Jews have developed the empty dessert into livable heaven. I can’t believe people are still repeating this kind of baseless nonsense. Palestinians are the indigenous people. They had lived in that land for hundreds of years. I suggest you read Shlomo Ben-Ami, Zionist historian and former Israeli foreign minister.
This letter is so beautiful and horrible and important. I think it’s so important for feminists to pay attention to the way that women are the targets of genocide and women’s bodies become the battlegrounds for genocide. The murder by neglect of Palestinian women at checkpoints, the murder by neglect of immigrant women in custody in the US and Australia, the coerced sterilization of indigenous women in the US, Canada and Australia, the brutal chemical sterilization of Bangladeshi women and the coercive C.R.A.C.K. program are all connected to the same web of colonialism that is killing women in Gaza right now. It’s especially connected because one of the most disgusting myth about women in Gaza is that they are bad sociopathic mothers who don’t love their children (and the implication that they don’t deserve to have children). It’s all connected to the idea that if these women would just die, would just stop having children, then the genocide would be complete and we wouldn’t have to fret about it anymore. In the US, Canada and Israel we’ve got these disturbingly powerful national myths that not only is the genocide complete and done with but that it was never really a genocide because our victims never really had a culture or society. The lives of Palestinian women prove what a lie this is.
Women like me, women who are colonizers need to get our minds right about how we and our bodies and our reproductive capacity are being treated like weapons against other women and when we are fighting for abortion access and birth control access and the right not to be treated like breeders for imperialism, that other women are threatening the imperialistic worldview just by being alive.
First, on the ambiguity of “Shoah”: The problem, I suspect, lies in that English-speaking Jews only use “Shoah” to refer to the Holocaust — but even almost invariably we say “The Shoah” (mixing Hebrew and English). That translates to “Ha-Shoah” (the Hebrew prefix for “the” being “Ha”). But our lack of other usage of “Shoah is because we don’t speak Hebrew, so we’re unlikely to use hebrew words in any context but specific idioms. To a Hebrew-speaking-Hebrew, as is the Deputy Defense Minister, I don’t think the usage would be at all ambiguous with the omission of “ha-”.
@ Jill: I’m not sure I agree with you that you weren’t obligated to at least put a disclaimer out on this particular false statement (or at least are now, now that it’s been brought to your attention). This slander is teetering on going viral, and once it escapes from its box, there’s no putting it back in (we still haven’t managed to wrestle The Protocols down). For whatever reason (I’d argue ingrained anti-Semitism in global society — more on that in a moment), Jews seem to be particularly vulnerable to these sorts of malicious falsehoods, which are part and parcel of our ongoing global oppression. Many people believe, or are all too ready to believe, that Jews really are bloodthirsty, genocidal maniacs who want to kill non-Jews at the first opportunity, and use that as justification for anti-Semitic violence. When you allow that sentiment to go unchecked (or, by reprinting it unadulterated, aid in its transmission), you directly threaten Jewish bodies. Insofar as we’re committed to fighting the oppression of all people, we have an concurrent obligation to try and stop new blood libels from emerging. Silence in the face of anti-Semitism is not neutrality. Had these two women said something flagrantly racist towards African women, I don’t think it would have gone untouched.
@ The “you’re throwing the anti-Semitism card” people: It bothers me to no end that the same people who (rightfully!) would be up in arms at silencing an oppressed people’s naming of its oppression are so, so, so quick to assure everyone that there is no or negligible intersection between anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic ideologies. “I’m not an anti-Semite, but….” is the name of the game. To be blunt, we wouldn’t accept these really stock reactionary arguments (“[X minority group] labels even the most legitimate criticisms as prejudice against [X]. I’m being silenced!”) in any other context — but when it comes to Jews we’re still stuck at 101.
Anti-Semitism is a structural oppression with an international scope that constrains Jewish lives and threatens Jewish bodies every day. It is nourished by a deep network of stereotypes (bloodthirsty Jews, “wandering” Jews, greedy Jews), fictions (the Jews killed Christ, the Jews run the media, the Jews are plotting genocide in Palestine), biases (I firmly believe the international community, at root, accepts a certain baseline of Jewish blood being shed as being normal and okay, and only gets outraged by extreme deviations from this norm — the deviation of the Holocaust, yes, but also it seems the deviation of Jews being perfectly safe), and institutional alienation. That putative allies on the left are so resistant to recognizing this structure of domination only adds to the marginalization, and it is something that anti-oppression workers need to recognize in themselves without resorting to the old dodges.
What exactly is Israel supposed to do? They cede land, they are then attacked from this land. In order to defend themselves they have to attack those who attack them. Unfortunately the palestinians hide their military equipment and personnel among civilians, especially among women and children so that when Israel does attack, in a highly sophisticated and surgical manner, the palestinians can trumpet the deaths of women and children and say Israel is oppressing them. They do this over and over. Why are there no stories or letters coming out thanking Israel for keeping the water turned on and the food coming into areas where people are attacking them from? Why no news of all the palestinians who receiver Israeli healhcare in Israeli facilities? My area of focus is Iran and even a lot of them dont buy what comes out of the palestinian side of the house, feminist or not. Its hard for me to read this letter without thinking about the possible greater political machinations behind it. Especially when yet again they talk about the women and children to tug at our heartstrings, as if men, who make up the majority of victims, are worth nothing. Reminds me again of all the coverage of the kosovo rape camps, go for the gut, not the mind.
“Jews really are bloodthirsty, genocidal maniacs who want to kill non-Jews at the first opportunity”
Sigh. Except the authors of the letters did not say that, neither did any commenters here.
“Jews killed Christ, the Jews run the media, the Jews are plotting genocide in Palestine”
Yeah I actually agree “the Jews are plotting genocide in Palestine” Sounds anti-Semitic. However, again, that’s not what anyone here claimed. “Israel’s policies towards Palestinians are genocidal” (irrespective of whether or not it is true) is not the same thing as “the Jews are plotting genocide in Palestine”. The phrase “plotting” which implies conspiracy is not used in the former. Moreover, “Jews” and Israel are not one and the same. So id someone claimed “China is a genocidal regime”, would you accuse of anti-Chinese racism? I doubt it. What about when someone claims Hammas is no different than the Nazi’s? (As many have done, I can remember Sen. Chuck Schumer saying that off the tip of my head.). Is that his anti-Arab racism, would you say? I very much doubt it.
“What exactly is Israel supposed to do? They cede land, they are then attacked from this land.”
What are Palestinians supposed to do? They were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 and have been living under occupation or in refugee camps ever since. Here is what I think Israel is supposed to do: Honor the countless UN resolutions. Go back to their pre-1967 borders. Honor the right of return for refugees, or when that’s not possible compensate those people. That would be a good start.
They ceded Gaza? Oh, how very generous. They ceded land that rightfully belonged to them.
“In order to defend themselves they have to attack those who attack them.”
Um, have you heard of proportional use of force, as in, there shouldn’t be 100 casualties on one side and 4 on the other.
“Unfortunately the palestinians hide their military equipment and personnel among civilians, especially among women and children so that when Israel does attack, in a highly sophisticated and surgical manner, the palestinians can trumpet the deaths of women and children and say Israel is oppressing them. They do this over and over. “
Again, that is simply bullshit propaganda. Can you provide proof that they “hide” their military equipment purposely near women and children? Mixing of combatant and non-combatant is, to large degree unavoidable in guerilla warfare. WHAT ARE PALESTINIAN’S supposed to do? How do a people without an army fight an occupation?
To be clear, I do not by any means support the targeting of civilians for absolutely ANY cause. I also am convinced that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not have a military solution. I am just using the analogy to show how absurd your reasoning is.
“Why are there no stories or letters coming out thanking Israel for keeping the water turned on and the food coming into areas where people are attacking them from? Why no news of all the palestinians who receiver Israeli healhcare in Israeli facilities? My area of focus is Iran and even a lot of them dont buy what comes out of the palestinian side of the house, feminist or not.”
Eh? “Thank you so much Israel, for keeping us barely alive”. Just compare this to “Why wouldn’t those unappreciative Indians ever thank the Brits for …,I don’t you fill in the blank” it’s easy. Israel is the occupier. As for Gaza, it still controls all borders. Under International law every occupier has a responsibility towards the occupied people. It doesn’t mean the occupied people need to crawl on their knees and show their thankfulness for every bone that is thrown for them.
And with that, I am outta here. It seems impossible to ever have a reasonable conversation on this subject, even in the most progressive of environments.
sojourner,
ethnically cleansed from “their” land? I dont see it that way. You want them to go back to pre-1967 borders? You know what happens if they do that right? Hundreds more attack only now the attacks will be even more deadly.
Have I heard of proportionality of force? Hmm I think I heard about that somewhere along the way in my 10 years of working military intelligence with a mideast specialization. How are the counterattacks not proportional? Explain to me how taking out a rocket launch base with a surgical attack is not a proportional response to having dozens or hundreds of rockets lobbed on your head.
Unfortunately it is not bullshit propaganda that they hide their military assets amongst civilian personnel, specifically women and children. It is simply not, if you believe its propoganda youre fooling yourself, if you wish you can sign-up, get the language skills and clearance and read the reports yourself, would only take a few years.
Comparing the palestinians to native americans? No, I dont think so. Not the same situation and if you think you can reduce it to something so relatively simple youre fooling yourself. Why the need to go if someone doesnt agree with you? Youre claim of ethnic cleansing is a stance derided by many and supported by many but im always up to debate it. Again you say hiding among women/children is BS, well I’m sorry but I was in a position to know and that was exactly what was going on. The palestinians have used the plight of women and children for years in order to win their PR war, an important part of any resistance.
l
Soujourner (assuming that you’re still around to read this),
Surely you are aware that Israel was entirely within its pre-1967 borders for the first 19 years of its existence (1948 – 1967), and that the Gaza Strip and West Bank were under ARAB occupation (by Egypt and Jordan, respectively). The Palestinians, and the powerful Arab nations supposedly on their side, had almost two decades to create a separate, autonomous Palestinian State, if that had been their real goal.
Unfortunately, their only mission during that time was the complete destruction of Israel. When Yassir Arafat created the PLO in 1964 — three years before the Six Day War — his only stated goal was Israel’s annihilation. Neither he, nor any other Arab leader, said a word about giving the Palestinians control of either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
The Arabs began to talk about a two-state solution only after they finally realized that Israel could not be militarily defeated in the foreseeable future. However, many Arabs see this “solution” as only a temporary maneuver, until Israel can finally be eliminated forever.
If you think that what I’ve wriiten is mere propraganda, listen to the actual words of Hamas and Hezbollah. This is what they are saying, out loud in plain language to anyone who will listen. Since these anti-Israeli, anti-Western terrorists are your ideological allies, why don’t you take them at their word?
@ Sojurner (22): Here’s the relevant line from the letter:
“On February 29, 2008, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a “bigger Shoah,” the Hebrew word usually used only for the Holocaust. What does it mean that the international community is standing by while this is happening?
Valnai’s threat of a Holocaust against Palestinians was not just a slip of the tongue, for the war on Gaza is a continuation of genocidal activities against the indigenous population.”
Now, first, as I pointed out, the quote is incorrect. More importantly, the quote is, in fact, alleging a specific plot to engage in genocide — they’re saying that Valnai (who was not just slipping his tongue because he’s speaking for consistent Israeli policy) is actively and specifically supporting genocidal activity.
The rest of what you’re quoting is from my section where I lay out how international anti-Semitism is operationalized. We all swim in these waters, so the fact that nobody in this thread is specifically alleging (though seemed willing to believe the allegation) that Jews stand at the ready to commit genocide is as relevant as nobody specifically reiterating the “Black men are bestial” stereotype — that doesn’t mean the sentiment doesn’t exist, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the sentiment plays a huge role in how the lives of Black men are constrained in the American and global polity.
Finally, Israel being the Jewish state, it’s extraordinarily naive to assume that structural anti-Semitism will or can be divorced out from discussions of Israel. That doesn’t mean we stop criticizing, but it does mean we should be open to critique and the potential for how our perspectives, assumptions, and agendas may be infected by latent anti-Semitic ideology. This is particularly risky when these agendas seem to mimic the manifestation of the prejudice. To use your China example, if we were talking our relationship with China in language that was premised on how the government is uniquely sneaky and can’t be trusted (but maybe their woman can be, because they’re pliable and docile), then I’d say we should take a close look if Chinese theorists accuse us of racism. Similarly, if our discourse on Israel is that they’re especially blood thirsty and prone to killing outsiders, or (to use something that has popped up on this thread) that they are colonizers on the land because they are essentially outsiders (where, precisely, are Jews insiders? Or is this perhaps infected by the “wandering Jew” trope?), we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea that structural anti-Semitism may be playing a role here.
jamesPi says:
March 18th, 2008 at 7:43 pm – Edit
sojourner,
ethnically cleansed from “their” land? I dont see it that way.
The facts of the 1948 displacement aren’t really disputed anymore, you’re going to have a hard time making a case against them.
Do you encourage the same level of self-reflection and fortitude about the sometimes “latent” and sometimes overt anti-Arab racism that informs many who agree with you? If so, how? Have you started examining your own writing for traces of “latent racism”? And how should one react to this sort of racism when one encounters it?
Certainly, we should examine structural anti-Semitism wherever it exists. I agree with you there. But why does the anti-racist concern seem to end with anti-Semitism? And why is so much anti-racist criticism of the state of Israel arbitrarily accused of anti-Semitism?
I view the linked letter as anti-racist criticism of just that sort. I believe you are unfair to call it “anti-Semitic.” And please… Could those being threatened with “a Shoah rather than the Shoah possibly be forgiven for missing the nuances of the Hebrew context? Particularly when the government making these warnings is a nuclear power? Neither Holocaust nor disaster seems particular palatable or acceptable to me.
I’m not sure who you think “agrees with me” (who are my peers? What school do you think I run in?), but nonetheless, I think I can pretty comfortable answer that question yes: See here, here, and here.
Where I disagree with you is that the criticism of anti-Israel attacks as anti-Semitic is necessarily “arbitrary”. Needless to say, I don’t see most of it as arbitrary at all — I see it as pointing out very real nodes in the network of Jewish subordination. When folks are all too ready to believe that Jewish institutions are looking for a chance to commit genocide (and all I wanted out of this post was a disclaimer so that this bad claim — which I didn’t even blame the authors for in my first comment — isn’t propagated), what grounds are there that I’m engaging in (to borrow from Jerome McCristal Culp) “shrill craziness” to assume that might be connected to latent anti-Semitism? When I see the UN host conferences with flyers lamenting the failure of the Holocaust — but kicking out pro-Israel attendees, am I being arbitrary for wondering about anti-Semitism? When I see far far too many people who seem to view Jewish lives as forfeit because they have the temerity to believe they should not be eternal wanderers, am I being arbitrary then? Or maybe, just maybe, there is some denial going on here?
In general, I’m not sure what makes it arbitrary aside from the (mostly non-Jewish) targets of the critique label it so — raw power politics if it ever existed. I’m not sure where you appropriate the authority to determine which criticisms are (really, truly) anti-Semitic and which ones are hand-waving. I think that when a goodly percentage of a given oppressed community expresses its view that it is being victimized by anti-Semitism in a particular context, we have an obligation to take that view seriously. But what I see instead is an arrogant assertion of privilege on the part of mostly non-Jewish speakers (assisted by a few Jewish allies) to determine the boundaries of our own situation.
I also, now that I think of it, disagree with the implicit view (in this passage: “why does the anti-racist concern seem to end with anti-Semitism?”) that anti-Semitism is a superordinate part of general anti-racism/anti-oppression discourse. I could regale you with books, articles, scholars and activists dedicated to structural, left-ward accounts of racism, of sexism, of heterosexism, of anti-Colonialism, of Israeli evil … the list goes on (and that’s a good thing). The amount of leftist scholarship operating in the critical vein on anti-semitism I can count on my fingers — the amount focusing on Israel specifically (as a focal point for structural anti-Semitism), one hand. It strikes me as frankly bizarre the idea that the left-wing community in its writings and scholarship on oppression might be focusing too much the issue of anti-Semitism. By and large, it’s the oppression-study that wasn’t. It hasn’t been engaged with the same level of seriousness we accord to other identity axes, which is probably we’re still sitting at the 101 level topic of whether or not Jews are just nutsos who see anti-Semitism behind every (anti-Israeli) rock.
I wonder where were these blog posts when the Iranian president made similar threats against Israel. Why were so many leftists so eager to explain them as mistranslations whereas here they insist the translation is what they want to see in it?
Wow, that was insulting. I see a government depriving a population of food, water, medicine, and electricity and agree that it can be considered a genocidal activity. And now I’m helping arrogant know-nothings constrict anti-semitism? Brilliant.
And again, you can’t question the illegal actions of the Israeli government without being called anti-semitic. How convenient. I guess its anti-semitic to point out that Israel stole land where Arabs had lived for thousands of years based on a book, that half the world doesn’t even believe in. I guess its anti-semitic to say that children starving and not receiving medical treatment, and forcing a group of people to live as third world citizens is anti-semitic. I guess talking about the Palestinian homes and villages that Israeli’s tore down to make settlements for themselves is anti-semitic. Wow, maybe Muslim states should claim that the west is anti-Islamic and we’ll stop bombing their countries. Oh no, thats right, they don’t read the same book of myths that we do.
The “President” of Iran is no more than a puppet. It’s the ayatollahs that run the show. Sometimes I wonder why the American media never mentions that.
That’s a bit of a generalization. There’s several leftists that support a war on Iran, such as Clinton.
First, let’s remember what sparked this in the first place. I asked that an inaccurate claim that an Israeli governmental official specifically threatened Palestinians with a reprise of the Holocaust be disclaimed as false (nobody at this point seems to dispute my rendering of the proper translation). I specifically said that the authors probably were working from a bad translation furnished by the British media, but I noted that these types of mistakes have a tendency to go viral, that when they do they pose a significant risk to the safety of Jews world-wide, and so we kind of have an obligation not to propagate them. Thus far, I haven’t heard anyone dispute any of that syllogism directly.
***
Girl Detective: Yeah, you are. How ’bout we channel some of that righteous indignation towards dismantling your privilege, rather than getting so very upset about being called on it?
Sabrina: Ditto. Annihilation of Jewish experience (including 3,000 years of unbroken presence in what is now Israel), condescendingly waving it away as “based on a book” (presumably, the actual Jewish bodies who inhabited the land and were violently exiled from it [stolen, you might say!] are non-entities) is anti-Semitism. Obliterating the actualities of how Israel was established, particularly its interplay with the Holocaust (was that just a book that most folks don’t believe in too?) is anti-Semitism. Ignoring the role of the Arab world, particularly the Palestinian leadership, in allowing (indeed, specifically supporting) the Holocaust (among other anti-Semitic acts) is anti-Semitism, as is ignoring their role in threatening Jewish bodies — Israeli or no — the world over today. Pinning the entire blame for the situation on Israel (are Qassam rockets manna from hell? Where do you think they come from?), with no acknowledgment of the existence of any countervailing forces is anti-Semitism (and frankly racist insofar as it denies Palestinian and Arab agency). This whole discourse is hell-bent on erasing Jewish experience and ultimately Jewish bodies as non-entities; it is viciously colonialist (ironically masked in anti-colonialist guise — but that’s because Jews, being eternal outsiders, can be nothing but a colonizer. Even in land they too have lived in for thousands of years, they are irredeemably foreign, eternally marked as an other whose lives are forfeit); it is marginalization and the exercise of privilege in its rawest and most crude form.
This obnoxious whine of the privileged — “you can’t criticize this group without being accused of prejudice! I’m so oppressed and silenced!” — is spectacularly grating. It’s grating when it’s used by right-wing hawks who are dehumanizing Arabs and Palestinians. It’s grating when it’s used by neoconservatives justifying racism against Blacks and sexism against women. And it’s particularly grating when it’s used by putative liberals who Just. Can’t. Fathom. that they might be complicit in the nexus of oppression that operates on Jews around the world.
Adopting from George Yancy: “[the gentile] admits of no ignorance vis-à-vis the [Jew]. Hence, there is no need for [gentile] silence, a moment of quietude that encourages listening to the [Jew].” It is assumed you can speak for us. It is assumed that you can define our own past, our own present, our own future, and our own reality for us. It is assumed that you have the right to roll dice with our bodies and our lives on the line. In short, it assumed that you have a right of dominance and control over us.
You don’t. And until you accept that, you’re every bit as complicit in a hierarchy of oppression as the settlers you loathe so much.
@ Sylvia: You’re right. A Jewish woman is no more important than any other (or less). But the fact stands that there is really no other place that will warmly embrace any Jew in that region. Or even accept for that matter. Israel has fought from it’s conception for the right to exist with the ultimate goal of safety and peace. Rolling over isn’t an option.
And when we question if Israel has the right to blockade, to prevent aid and services, consider first what role they consider Palestine. What do you consider terrorism? If they were to extend aid to women and children would it come back to harm them?
Question. Why do so many commenters keep insisting that the only thing Israel’s government does to people on Palestinian territory is surgical strikes?
I keep hearing people refer to just Israel’s surgical strikes when they defend the proportionality of Israel’s governmental response to rocket launches.
But…that’s not all the action Israel’s government is taking against people on Palestinian territory.
So why do people keep saying that it is?
I JUST.DON’T.GET.IT.
No snark from the peanut gallery, please.
If any of you who’ve said such things are still reading the comments…PLEASE tell me why.
A Jewish woman is no more important than any other (or less). But the fact stands that there is really no other place that will warmly embrace any Jew in that region. Or even accept for that matter.
Well Morocco and Iran actually have Jewish populations that AFAIK aren’t being persecuted, Morocco’s King has always extended an invitation to it’s Jews that left after the creation of Israel to return, so I suppose it depends on your definition of “warmly embrace.”
not if it’s true.
a simple test might be to forget about all this balfour declaration crap, and everything afterwards just tell me:
who has been kicking who out of the land since 1967? who’s been bulldozing homes and replacing them with homes for themselves? arabs aren’t kicking jews out of their land. they aren’t bulldozing any jewish homes and replacing them with homes only for jews.
yet that is precisely what is happening in the w. bank and jerusalem (and up until recently gaza).
forget about everything else, and tell me that that is not ethnic cleansing.
Setting the start point for exiling as “since 1967″ is like setting the start point for racial preferences at, well, at 1967. Who’s been giving affirmative preferences at colleges and workforces? Whose had civil rights acts passed for their protection? Black people! What a compelling argument! And it works so well if I forget everything prior to 1967 (as well as a good deal of blindness towards contemporary racism/anti-Semitism).
Or hell, let’s make it “since 2005″, in which case most people who were kicked out of their homes were Gazan Jews (replaced with an entirely Judenrein territory). Anything can be argued out of context. Insofar as the PA demands that Jews leave the West Bank and Gaza (or all of Israel, depending on their mood), is that a call for ethnic cleansing? Was the Gazan pullout ethnic cleansing? Or is that a gross misreading of the situation?
We don’t selectively “forget everything else”. We situationally locate events, including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, within histories and matrices of oppression including anti-Semitism (and Orientalism). To talk about Israel without locating it within the entire history of the region and the peoples who inhabit (including the mass Jewish exile from the Arab world after 1948) is just a silly way to do history or ethics.
David Schraub, your comparison makes no sense. Colonization by euro-whites of land in the Middle East is the same thing as affirmative action for black people? Don’t pretend like you understand Orientalism, cus it’s clear that you and others who agree with you have no interest in listening to third world feminists about what the consequences of colonialism are for women.
Secondly, why would people who are anti-semetic (which i believe is based on the idea that European Jews are “not quite white enough”) favor Arabs, who are not European by definition?
Some of the Zionist language does have parallels to White American language around extermination of Native peopls – that they “don’t use the land productively like we do”, and also animalization “two legged beasts”, “bloodthirsty savages”.
I know I’m a little late to this party, but…
It strikes me that this open letter basically says “there are women in these countries that are being oppressed. Therefore, this should be an inssue for feminists.”
That has the effect of stripping feminism of any meaning. The central conceit behind feminism, though obviously it plays out in different ways, is that there are structural objects and mechanisms that deny women the ability to receive treatment that comports with the actor’s chosen concepts of justice in a way that differs from those objects and mechanisms as they relate to men.
This open letter, unless I’m reading it wrong, seems to say that “feminism is about justice, and there’s injustice here, so it’s an issue for feminism” without discussing how the structure of the various conflicts, and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, affects women in a way that is substantially different from how it affects men.
To my reading, this post obviously indicates that I sympathize with Israel, and so to round out that fact, I’d just also like to point out the ways that the resistance methods of Palestinians affect Israeli women disproportionately (for example, by often bombing markets, mid-day, when religious women who work mainly as home makers are the ones most likely to be killed). Rallying feminists to this conflict cuts both ways, and pretending that any action against Israeli women is justifiable because their male-dominated government institutions are acting against Palestinian society does exactly what feminism is dedicated to avoiding: punishing women just because they live in a societal structure that disenfranchises them.
Bq: “Colonization by euro-whites of land in the Middle East…” I’ll stop you right there, because the majority of the Jewish population in Israel is not of European descent (and you’re going lecture me about Orientalism? You don’t even seem to realize non-European Jews exist, let alone that they constitute the majority of the Israeli Jewish population). I’ve been stressing in this thread the erasure of Jewish experience as a form of intellectual colonialism, writing your history onto my body so as to delegitimize me and my life. You’re biting right into that, hardcore.
I define Anti-Semitism as the individual or structural condition, practice, or belief that denigrates, dehumanizes, or disadvantages Jews vis-a-vis non-Jews. It stems from a variety of sources (the “not quite White” flowing out of a particular branch of Enlightenment anti-Semitic ideology) and manifests itself in a variety of ways. Obviously, in a racist polity being seen as “not quite White” is one way of accomplishing anti-Semitism, but it’s hardly exhaustive (it also renders problematic your original assertion that the European Jews in Israel are “Euro-Whites”. Are we part of White Europe or are we not? This phantom like ability for the oppressors to place Jews in whatever category is most convenient for our ongoing domination is quite annoying). Such a restrictive definition makes very little sense for a variety of reasons, the first being that European anti-Semitism chronological predates the establishment of European White Supremacist ideology (see George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003]), the second being that it obliterates (though this almost goes without saying at this point) the existence of anti-Semitism against non-European Jews, the third being that it doesn’t seem to speak to even many of the most well-known forms of anti-Semitism (shadowy world-dominating Jewish cabals or Jewish bloodlust, for example, fit only hazily). Certainly, one can be anti-Semitic without being a White supremacist, as the strong presence of anti-Semitism in communities of color make clear (just as you can be Jewish and still racist or sexist, all oppressions cross-cut in this way, again, we’re stuck at 101).
My point about affirmative action was simply to note the old progressive demand that context is critical. You forget about the context of American racial apartheid, and affirmative action looks really bad. You put it in context, and it becomes essential to equality and liberation. You forget about the context of Jewish experience (in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, and elsewhere), and Israel seems like an unnecessary thorn in the world. You put it in the context of centuries of (on-going) anti-Semitic ideology, oppression, and domination, and it becomes central to the Jewish liberation project.
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