Tuesday, June 18, 2024
From Ian:
Israel Is Not a Colonial State. If Anything, It's the Reverse
Israel Is Not a Colonial State. If Anything, It's the Reverse
The distorted narrative painting Israel as a country of "colonizers" is a tawdry falsehood.NGO Monitor: Commission of Inquiry’s 5th Report: Denying Security Threats to Israel
Given that many Israelis were driven out of surrounding Middle Eastern countries and many others were survivors of the Holocaust, branding them "colonial" is laughable.
My own grandfather was nine when, in 1935, his parents managed to get him out of Mashhad in Iran - a city where being Jewish was punishable by death.
Following pogroms in Mashhad a century earlier, those who weren't murdered or didn't manage to escape were forced to convert to Islam.
At home, his family preserved their identity and traditions. My grandfather would tell me about their underground synagogues, clandestine matzah baking on Passover, and secret Shabbat observance.
In Baghdad, my husband's grandfather wasn't having a great time either. After Iraqi independence, Jews were no longer allowed to hold public office, their houses were regularly looted.
Riots saw them murdered and abducted. Most of the Jews fled, leaving everything they possessed behind.
If you can spot a colonialist in this story so far, please do stop me.
Some 850,000 Jews were driven out of their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Iran and Libya. The Holocaust survivors also don't fit the colonial bill.
On June 12, 2024, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC)’s permanent “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel” (COI) published its newest report detailing Hamas’s brutal attack in Israel on October 7th and Israel’s defensive military response. The report contained two accompanying “conference room papers” – a 59-page report on “attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel” and a 126-page report on the “military operations and attacks carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 7 October to 31 December 2023.” While the COI discusses the Hamas atrocities, it minimizes their severity, ignores the geo-political context, draws false moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, engages in victim blaming, and denies Israel’s right to self-defense and self-determination. Absurdly, the COI ultimately concludes that while both Israel and Hamas are guilty of war crimes, only Israel is guilty of “crimes against humanity.”Welcome to The Omnicause, the fatberg of activism
In one of the most egregious lines from its report, the COI claims, “there is no evidence suggesting that the events of 7 October, as tragic and outrageous as they were, at any time posed a real threat to the continued existence of the State of Israel or of the Jewish people.” The COI seems to be ignoring the multitude of Hamas officials’ public statements claiming “October 7 was just a rehearsal” and “The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its October 7 onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” The COI also disregards that the Hamas Charter clearly calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and the elimination of the Jewish people.
The Commission has consistently minimized and negated Israel’s right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism, implying that terrorism is not a valid justification for Israel’s security concerns and claiming that the term “is not clearly defined under international law.” It has also whitewashed terrorists as “human rights defenders,” abusing this framework. The COI’s last report (October 2023) also placed scare quotation marks around the words terrorism, terrorist, and terror every time they appeared, belittling the term and discounting Israel’s legitimate security measures. It similarly ignores the role of Iran and the ongoing and serious security threats posed by Iranian proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Hamas.
The COI itself also must be held accountable for its role in inflaming the conflict. By denying Israel’s right to self-defense against terrorism, drawing equivalences between Israel and Hamas, and denying the existence of Palestinian terrorism, the Commission ultimately emboldens and encourages terrorist organizations and violent acts against Israel, such as what occurred on October 7.
Methodology
The report relies heavily on unverifiable, anonymous testimonies and politicized NGOs. It is unclear if and how the COI attempted to independently corroborate these sources and to what extent it engaged in any investigation beyond a narrow selection of source material and individuals confirming the COI’s predetermined conclusions.
According to the report, “The Commission conducted remote interviews with victims and witnesses and consulted other sources of information inside Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and in several other countries…the Commission was able to gather valuable first-hand accounts, including from children, of acts committed in Gaza since 7 October 2023. It met with more than 70 victims and witnesses, more than two thirds of whom were women.”
Moreover, the COI claims that “Information that met the criteria of reliability and authenticity was included and analysed under the standard of proof of ‘reasonable grounds to conclude’.”
I’d like to talk about The Omnicause. Oh, you haven’t heard of The Omnicause? How embarrassing for you, because it’s quite the dernier cri! The Omnicause is, simply, every cause you must care about if you’re A Good Progressive rolled into one, because everything in the world is connected.
So trans rights are connected to Palestinian rights are connected to environmental concerns, and any self-respecting progressive who cares about one has to care about the other two. Queers for Palestine; headlines in the Guardian such as “Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have immense effect on climate catastrophe”; standfirsts in the New York Times such as “In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.” Too long, didn’t read? “Everything that I don’t like is fascism.” I’ve lost count now of the number of Democrat senators whose social media biographers finish with “she/her. Palestine.”
Gender, environment, Gaza: they’re all the same, even though LGBT people live under the threat of death in Palestine, and I haven’t heard too much from Hamas about the environment. According to The Omnicause, they’re all magically connected. It’s the fatberg of causes, and the fat gluing them all together is Western narcissism.
Fossil Free Books, for example, is very much part of The Omnicause. You have doubtless read about FFB: the shadowy pressure group that has decided the best way to fight climate change is to campaign against wealthy investment companies from funding arts events. Yeah, shut down a little book festival in the north of England: that’ll fix the environment! But of course, FFB aren’t only interested in the environment – that would be impossible. Despite their name, their social media feed suggests their main interest is – can you guess? - Palestine, or, more specifically, campaigning against Israel. Their main complaint against Baillie Gifford, which – until FFB had its way – supported most book festivals in the UK, was that it had a tiny amount of investment in companies connected to Israel.
If you had any doubt of the clod-hopping, philistine stupidity of Fossil Free Books and all who travel on its dead-end coattails, Jeremy Corbyn has been cheering it on, tweeting triumphally after Barclays withdrew its funding for UK music events, “We will continue to demand all arts festivals stand on the side of humanity and peace.”
Ah yes, because there’s nothing that screams “war-mongering genocide” more loudly than, say, a music festival in a London park on a summer’s evening. Still, it must be hard for Jeremy to care about the arts when his cultural hinterland begins with regular appearances on Russian TV and ends with similar gigs on Iranian TV. Thank God he’s taken a stand against that true cultural evil: British book festivals.
