This week’s postings@JfJfP.com


October 23, 2016
Sarah Benton

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This week, 17th-23rd October, 2016, there happened to be two interesting articles about Britain’s imagined role in the Middle East, both suggesting that more power is projected onto this former imperial power than it has actually exercised since 1945. The 1917 Balfour Declaration is a particular paper tiger.

Chris Doyle of CAABU is taken aback by just how much power is attributed to Britain today and Ruth Eglash finds that most Palestinians think the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate were the causes of all their ills. There is no knowledge of how far the British army went in trying to control Jewish emigration to Palestine or how consistently the (pro-Arab) Foreign Office said they had to protect Arab interests in Palestine – until the British army was hastily withdrawn and both Britain and Palestine came under the American hegemon:
Delusions of British power in MidEast

Support for Palestinians has consistently risen in Britain (and elsewhere) since the siege of Gaza, and the series of devastating IDF attacks on the impoverished Strip. Israel never felt it owed anything to Britain and now many Brits are deported from Israel after interrogation as they are suspected of support for Palestinians:
Pro-Palestinians barred from entry to Israel

Israel always justifies its attacks on Gaza, regardless of who and how many it kills, as ‘the right to self-defence’. We post a chapter of Ben White’s new book The 2014 Gaza War: 21 Questions & Answers in which he deals with this justification:
Rockets from Gaza

Meanwhile it seems that the Israeli establishment is quite happy to destroy the Palestinian community in Gaza by destroying what it can of their shrinking economy – in this case agriculture:
Slow ruin of Gaza’s agriculture

Israel’s control over Gaza comes from its control of all the borders. Its control over the West Bank comes also from border control as well as its direct control over Area C, 61% of the West Bank. Here it squeezes the Palestinian population by controlling all movement – and control over water and infrastructure. Palestinians who want to build anything – including water cisterns, pipes and channels – have to apply for permits. This takes them into the unbounded space of Israeli bureaucracy:
No pipes, no water

The everyday resistance to Israeli military and civil policing is left to the young, for whom it’s a rite of passage. The number of youngsters arrested, held, and interrogated with great harshness, including torture, is going up. Controlling them takes up a lot of IDF time – are these boys Israel’s existential threat?
Rise in torture of imprisoned children

The Israeli women’s initiative, Women Wage Peace, successfully organised a March for Hope last week. It went through Jericho where many Palestinian women joined in – even though they couldn’t do the final stretch because of checkpoints and permits:
Women, Arabs and Jews, march for hope

Any demonstration against anti-Arab racism has value so deeply imbued in Israeli minds that Arabs are the existential threat. Barak Ravid finds in Wikileaks a frank exchange of views that it was Netanyahu’s resort to a popular phobia about Arabs which won him the 2015 election:
With Bibi, it’s racism stupid

Zionism, what it is and how it’s manifest is always in, or just behind, the headlines. We have two rather conflicting articles. Noam Rotem of +972 says Zionism is ‘a nebulous idea’ but at the moment is shown in the drive of Israeli Jews [not all] to fence themselves into a space where they can enact their supremacy in the land. He implores the Israeli left to break with the Zionist idea:
Zionism today is the fence encircling Israel

Asa Winstanley thinks the Zionist idea is quite clear, is always an accusation and should always be opposed. It thrives on the morsels of antisemitism it can find – for who needs Zionism when Jews are not being persecuted?
Zionism needs antisemitism

The new public forum of social media is of course a great space for all racists and haters, including antisemites. Jewish journalists in the US – a land where people could imagine no antisemitism existed – have been at the receiving end of an outbreak of foul antisemitism from ‘White Nationalists’ surfing on the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign:
Trump leads surge in antisemitism

Anshel Pfeffer, who writes for Haaretz and the Jewish Chronicle, welcomes the report from the Home Affairs select committee. The readiness of a parliamentary body to deal with the subject is, he thinks, a sign of the attitudes which result in his judgment:
UK least antisemitic country in Europe

This may be the view of most Jews, or those who know most what real antisemitism is like. But, says JfJfP signatory Jonathan Rosenhead, the Labour right-wing chose to create a moral panic about antisemitism in the British left though no-one has found enough evidence to bring a single prosecution. Reality is not the strong point of those who are carried along on the belief that Labour antisemitism is now an established fact:
Juggernaut narrative of Labour antisemitism

And more besides, including Political heritage of holy sites  on the Unesco resolution and a planned week of action against Hewlett Packard (HP sells info on every Palestinian’s body to Israel).

 

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