Oh no you don’t get to blame Netanyahu: Against Germanic bothsideism

Posted by anarcholatina on 2024-10-07

The tale of Palestine from beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

Pappe and Chomsky, “On Palestine”, 2015.

It has now been one year since Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians; one year of watching the most well-documented genocide in history broadcasted in real time on TikTok, one year of reading the last verse of poets and seeing the last thyme sprout of gardeners on Twitter accounts that go silent, one year of hearing Israeli politicians blast openly genocidal rhetoric on Instagram, one year of Germans setting up posh workshops to righteously denounce the supposed “antisemitism on the Left”—a tradition still ongoing as I speak, one year of German autonomists denouncing the “authoritarianism” of war refugees who wear a Palestinian flag before the police drags them away for using the word “genocide”, one year of German “antifascists” whitewashing fascism as long as it’s targeting brown people, one year of German anarchists too afraid of cancellation to speak up. I have no intention to talk here about the grotesque absurdity of the German gentile Zionists who kick Jews out of their safer spaces for “anti-semitism”—for more discussion on that, please check on the recommended reading.[1] Today I want to address rather a longstanding trend on anarchist circles: “both sides are bad because they’re nationalists and I’m against nationalism, dang I am the most ethical”. I want to address a certain softening of the white antifa movement, parts of which are starting to find it hard to keep covering the cracks in the German pro-Zionist narrative with the duct tape of “but Hamas tho”, when they have to do that under the silent stare of 14000+ dead children—more dead children per day and per metre than any other modern conflict. These parts of the movement that have for better or worse commited to “anti-militarism” and now have to cope with their beloved Israel initiating attacks on Lebanon, Iran, Syria and who knows where next.

The current development, the latest in Germanic power-whitewashing, is as follows: That the State of Israel has a “right to exist” and a “right to self-defense”, but, (said nervously, as all these ghosts stare at us), “we cannot condone the actions of the right-wing Netahanyu government”.

No. Fuck that. That isn’t nearly enough. The problem isn’t the “actions” of the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel. The problem isn’t the “right-wingness” of the current government of the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel. The problem is the existence of settler-colonial ethnostates.

The cause of this genocide isn’t the attack of Hamas, the antisemitism of Islamofascists, the patriarchy in Gaza, the fascism of Netahanyu, or the individual culpability of every warmonger who called for the blood of entire populations, of every soldier who shot a civilian for the thrill of power. Those are consequences. The cause of this genocide certainly isn’t the imaginary “thousand years of tribal religious vendettas” that Europeans project in their fantasies of the Middle East, contradicting the history of peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the area for centuries and in Palestine up to the point in the 20th century where the powers of Europe chose to ruin it. The cause of this genocide is 76 years of violent colonial occupation. The cause of this genocide is 800000 inhabitants forcibly displaced from their homes, it’s a system of segregation laws that makes Jim Crow look tame and gives apartheid advocates jealousy, it’s massacre after massacre for decades without end all funded with European and USA artillery. The cause of this genocide is Balfour declaring in 1917 that “Zionism, right or wrong, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”. The cause of this genocide is Theodor Herzl writing in The Jewish State that “We should therefore form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. The cause of this genocide is Churchill writing on Palestine, “I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.” These words aren’t just words; the Marxists are wrong, the superstructure determines the base. These words are barrels of gunpowder being laid under the homes of a population, when Europe needed a scapegoat for the horrors of their own anti-semitism. These 76 years have been just sparks on that fundamental gunpowder.

The cause of this genocide isn’t “Islamism” and it isn’t “the Jews”, either. Jewish people from all over the world have vocally opposed from the start, and continue to oppose today, the settler-colonial project. To assume Jewish folk must be pro-Israel is like saying all atheists must be pro-URSS. The cause of the genocide is colonialism, and the cause of colonialism are the colonialists; no more and no less.

What is not clear to the German Left is what’s painfully, tragicomedically obvious to all of us from the colonial South: The excuses are the exact same. The settler is allowed to take the land because the indigenous inhabitants are: barbaric; primitive; violent; unethical; a danger to women; groomers of their children; believers of an evil religion; unproductive in their use of land; and, due to some mysterious unexplainable bigotry, they hate the settlers, smh. “We have to kill the Indian/Arabness to save the man.” “Sure, all this blood and horror is unfortunate, but such is the burden of progress that we must carry to bring them to civilisation.” The more massacres they suffer, the more the indigenous resort to their own violent retaliations, their own massacres, tortures, their own killings of the innocent. Every time this happens, the settler-colonial project renews the righteousness of its land-grabbing; every time, the settler-colonial project feels more justified in ethnic cleansing. The colonist doing an ethnic cleansing is merely tragic, but the indigenous attacking a settler village is proof of bad blood. Where I come from, we call this the long night of 500 years. Palestine is like watching the 500 years on a speedrun, and it’s downright chilling to hear, in person, so-called antifascists of European privilege, who have never stared at the wrong end of a gun in their lives, comfortably repeating verbatim the arguments we all know from letters to the Spanish Crown.

And no, German anarchists, the fact that the politics of the average Palestinian don’t live up to your enlightened standards doesn’t mean that you get to perch on the fence, high on moral purity, and wash your hands of the whole issue, not when your inaction is part of why the German State gets to finance Israeli weapons. Consider the path that brought you to your politics, and now think if you would have developed your proud ideological sensibilities, had you been born behind that wall and under those bombs. Whatever nationalism, sexism, or other -ism that Palestinians may have doesn’t give Israel the right to take their homes, wall them off, control their institutions and decide when they should die. Palestinians having Bad Takes doesn’t mean that they’re as wrong as Israelis in the so-called “conflict” and you get to feel superior to both. What the fuck. What kind of argument is even that. If a man is beating his wife and she says that he’s going to Hell because he’s a Protestant, I don’t take the time to point out that yes she may have a black eye but she’s showing Catholic bigotry so she’s in the wrong too, I initiate a fucking intervention to stop the beatings. The Black Panthers had serious problems with misogyny and homophobia but none of us question that the cause of Black liberation was the right side. When countries in Latin America prop up fascist dictators, nobody says that this means it’s OK for USA and Norway companies to blow up our forests to mine metals. Most of you are able to understand that you don’t have to support NATO policies or the right-wing Ukraine administration to oppose the horror that is Russian imperialism. Why is it that only in the case of Palestine, suddenly you cannot oppose blatant ethnic genocide without having to say “but they voted for Hamas so they were basically asking for it”? Is it just because you’re afraid of being associated in any way with scary bearded Muslim barbarians, so that you must disavow them at every turn? Is it because you still see Israel as the outpost of European civilisation; is it because you still see the Arab body as fundamentally patriarchal, authoritarian, tribalist, retrograde—the dog in the manger?

The Israeli ethnostate is a colonial enterprise no matter which “wing” of government it props up. Putting a “leftist” government in Israel might give us a much-needed ceasefire but it wouldn’t stop the genocide, any more than the “progressive” governments of Canada stopped their indigenous genocide. The only path to justice and peaceful coexistence in Palestine is the same as in any settler colony: land back, reparations, right of return, and institutional equality, i.e. the end of the Israeli settlement project. Nor would an Arab ethnostate or Iran-style theocracy be a solution in any way, as we know from the bloody history of national liberation. The correct number of states in Palestine is zero,[2] hailing back to before the European colonial project, when inhabitants lived concerned with their own immediate, material communities rather than abstract borders; for example through a program like democratic confederalism, which is born out of Middle Eastern struggles and has proven itself in Syria more than able to bring peace and dignity to diverse communities of multiple ethnicities, religions and identities sharing space in equal standing.[3] Peace and safety for the Jewish and Arab folk alike (as well as the many other, frequently erased identities and religions in the area) will only be achieved in a system like this, where no type of supremacy is enshrined into law and order. To call for the end of States isn’t utopic; rather, the current reality is dystopic. If Northeastern Syria could do it, why couldn’t Palestine? Or, for that matter, you?

As for the Israeli State, it has no rights whatsoever. People have rights, communities have rights, cultures have rights, individuals who rebel against their cultures have rights; but the only right that a State has is the right to be abolished. Abolish all States, and abolish the settler-colonial ethnostates first.

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