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As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensifies, it is not anti-Semitic to say: not in my name [1]
In the end, it is about blood.
In the end, it is about blood.
by Laurie Penny [2] Published 23 July, 2014
On a morgue slab in Shejaiya in the Gaza Strip a few days ago lay
two anonymous children, a boy and a girl. Their bodies could not be
identified because their parents, according to Sharif Abdel Kouddous [3], a journalist for the Nation magazine,
were already dead. Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza has claimed
hundreds of Palestinian lives and has created 81,000 refugees. I should
support it, according to many Zionist opinionators, because I am half
Jewish. They tell me that those children had to die so that my future
children can be safe. In the end, they say, it’s about blood.
Does it matter what Jews, and people from Jewish backgrounds, say
about Gaza? It does when children are being murdered in our names, and
in the names of family members for whom we have recently said Kaddish.
Jews are better placed than anyone else to articulate a powerful call
for ceasefire that does not fall back on the sort of lazy anti-Semitism
that seems to the Israeli military to prove its point.
People of Jewish descent have every reason to be hyper-vigilant
about anti-Semitic language and it is stupid to pretend that there’s
none of it in the global movement for Palestinian freedom. It’s stupid
to pretend that nobody ever conflates Jews with Zionists, or labels the
Jewish people bloodthirsty and barbarous. And it hurts like hell to hear
hoary old words of hate trickling through a movement that is about
justice, about freedom, about protecting some of the world’s most
persecuted people. It hurts just as much, however, to hear right-wing
Israelis tell Jews around the world that the violence is for us, for our
ancestors, for our children.
It is not anti-Semitic to suggest that Israel doesn’t get a free
pass to kill whoever it likes in order to feel “safe”. It is not
anti-Semitic to point out that if what Israel needs to feel “safe” is to
pen the Palestinian people in an open prison under military occupation,
the state’s definition of safety might warrant some unpacking. And it
is not anti-Semitic to say that this so-called war is one in which only
one side actually has an army.
It is not hate speech to reiterate the wild disparity in
casualties. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed this past week,
most of them civilians. Fewer than 30 Israelis have died, and most of
them were soldiers. To speak of proportionality is not to call, as at
least one silverback columnist has claimed [4], for “more dead Jews[5]”.http://www.newstatesman.com
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