You know that on May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Floyd’s murder was the latest in a normalised history of police abuse of Black, brown, Native American, immigrant and other marginalised communities, carried out with impunity by American previous administrations and encouraged by the racist incitement of United States President Donald Trump and his white supremacist administration.
In response to the murder, people took to the streets against endemic police brutality, which enforces the systemic white supremacist subjugation of Black Americans. Solidarity protests were held across the world, including in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Brasil, New Zealand, Australia, Palestine, Greece, Germany and elsewhere.
As these spontaneous, grassroots protests were met with savage, occupation-style crackdowns by police – and as military forces and the mainstream media and political elites tried to smear protesters as “looters” and “thugs”, it was difficult not to draw parallels between this fight against anti-Black racism and the Palestinian struggle.
In fact, some important lessons can be drawn from the decades-old anti-colonial Palestinian struggle that could help ensure the success of the American uprising.
The white supremacist, settler colonial projects in the US and Israel share core tenets, oppressive tactics, aggressive strategies, propaganda techniques and apparatuses. As part of this cooperation, police officers in the US regularly train with their Israeli counterparts. In fact, the dangerous chokeholds used to murder George Floyd and before him, Eric Garner, are frequently inflicted on Palestinians by Israeli forces.
Joint training is complemented by an ideological cooperation between Israel and the US. Israeli media outlets, as well as liberal Zionists and major Zionist lobbies, have also participated in the smear campaign against the protests following George Floyd’s death, accusing them of anti-Semitism.
Zionist propagandists have claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is being used in a political campaign against Israel, conflating principled anti-colonialist views expressed by anti-racism activists with anti-Semitism.
All this is happening within the context of the Trump administration’s efforts to further the relentless campaign against peaceful acts of resistance by the Palestinian people and their allies. It has officially declared a false equivalence between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and encouraged state-level campaigns to criminalise anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activism, including the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
By equating Zionism and Judaism, President Donald Trump has not only served Israeli interests, but has also fuelled white supremacism and hurt civil liberties at home.
Trump has done so by scapegoating advocacy for Palestinian human rights on university campuses and attacking constitutionally protected freedoms such as the right to protest and boycott Israeli government speakers, investments and goods. Further, his policies have bolstered pro-Zionist efforts to force employees of US companies seeking cooperation with Israeli counterparts to sign pro-Israel, anti-BDS oaths as conditions of employment.
The equation of so-called religious rights promoted propagandistically in Zionism with civil rights fits well with a goal of enacting a white supremacist patriarchal ethnostate supported by settler-colonial manifest destiny doctrine, and it may serve as a precedent for the repression of progressive agendas and other anti-colonial movements such as Black Lives Matter.
In addition to the collaboration between explicitly reactionary forces in the US and Israel, the continued oppression of marginalised communities hinges on the liberal bourgeois class, a group of people Martin Luther King Jr referred to as “white moderates” in his letter from Birmingham Jail. Preaching the necessity of reforms, yet serving to undermine leftist revolutionary agendas under the guise of “practicality”, these complicit moderates afford valuable time and support for further entrenchment of oppression.
The ongoing racism, inequality and injustice in the US (which is no different from Brasil, under the current Bolsonaro's administration) leading to the current uprisings demonstrate the inadequacy of liberal reformist approaches in improving the material conditions of marginalised people. Further, present strife highlights the dire need for a revolutionary socialist agenda to replace intrinsically white supremacist capitalist tyranny, to achieve permanent equality and justice.
In Palestine, the failure of the Oslo accords is a clear example of the price Palestinians have paid for reformist attempts. The Oslo accords were the culmination of dealmaking between liberal Zionists and a Palestinian leadership willing to settle for a nebulous version of autonomy with lofty, unmet promises, such as the “two-state solution”. The disastrous results of this compromise can be seen today: entrenchment of apartheid and expansion of Palestinian dispossession and oppression, with illegal, US-backed annexation on the horizon.
Further, liberals in the US and their liberal Zionist analogues in Israel serve as propagandists for white supremacy in the US and Israel, providing a “modern”, “tolerant” and “diverse” facade for a fundamentally racist system.
Liberals persistently shift the discussion away from a systemic analysis of the state’s daily displays of violence to a focus on isolated events and perceived civility of revolutionary tactics, conditioning their allyship on commitments to non-violence and respect for state representations and commodities.
Protests falling for this trap are quickly co-opted by liberals and their associated politicians with pie-in-the-sky promises of reform, resulting in net losses for the left. When acts of resistance are limited to non-violent displays, while the far more substantial and pervasive systemic violence is ignored and excused, retaliatory and often defensive acts at the hands of protesters are vilified, resulting in dangerous reactionary précédents.
On June 6, thousands of people took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against the Netanyahu government’s plans for annexation of parts of the West Bank. Speakers included the head of the Joint List, Ayman Odeh, the Chairman of the liberal Zionist Meretz party, Nitzan Horowitz, and a special video appearance by US Senator Bernie Sanders.
Although the protest consisted of a broad coalition, including anti-Zionist groups, the inclusion of liberal reformists inevitably doomed any sort of efforts to stall or thwart counter-revolutionary efforts. On the contrary, such displays serve to deflate any revolutionary momentum into a collective vent for frustrations.
The Zionist “left” is an integral part of the oppressive Zionist propaganda apparatus, whether those involved in the endeavour are aware of it or not. The supposed left, “liberal” wing of Zionism, comprising Israeli political parties, non-profit organisations and media organs in Israel and outside it, serves to promote Zionist propaganda, which renders occupation, apartheid and the genocide of the Indigenous Palestinian people palatable to audiences in Israel and worldwide. The Palestinian liberal bourgeoisie, especially those within the Green Line, tend to fall for this mirage time and again.
By contrast, the BDS movement has wisely adopted a strict anti-Zionist, anti-racist platform. A resistance to oppression through the formation of intersectional alliances built on a clear understanding of systems of oppression incorporates lessons of past anti-colonial movements and breaks apart the fictitious, divisive political narratives of white supremacy, imperialism, racism and patriarchy.
The recognition that various oppressed peoples have common enemies serves to reinforce solidarity and cooperation between them and assists in principled grassroots movements, such as BDS and Black Lives Matter.
The anti-Zionist, anti-racist framework intrinsic to the BDS movement has yielded far more impressive gains for Palestinians than any collaboration with white saviours and/or liberal Zionist entities.
Leaders of the current uprisings in the US can engage in a fruitful exchange of knowledge with the Palestinian resistance, in line with past efforts of groups such as the Black Panther Party. Adhering to revolutionary principles while refraining from alliances with counter-revolutionaries can deliver a chance to abolish capitalist racist oppression.
"An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I can’t breathe.”
There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only minor attention – even in Israel.
An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds like an aberration – a peculiar case of mistaken identity – quite unlike an established pattern of police violence against poor black communities in the US. But that impression would be wrong.
The man attacked in Jerusalem was no ordinary Israeli diplomat. He was Bedouin, from Israel’s large Palestinian minority. One fifth of the population, this minority enjoys a very inferior form of Israeli citizenship.Ishmael Khaldi’s exceptional success in becoming a diplomat, as well as his all-too-familiar experience as a Palestinian of abuse at the hands of the security services, exemplify the paradoxes of what amounts to Israel’s hybrid version of apartheid.
Khaldi and another 1.8 million Palestinian citizens are descended from the few Palestinians who survived a wave of expulsions in 1948 as a Jewish state was declared on the ruins of their homeland.
Israel continues to view these Palestinians – its non-Jewish citizens – as a subversive element that needs to be controlled and subdued through measures reminiscent of the old South Africa. But at the same time, Israel is desperate to portray itself as a western-style democracy.
So strangely, the Palestinian minority has found itself treated both as second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality. That has resulted in two contradictory faces.
On one side, Israel segregates Jewish and Palestinian citizens, confining the latter to a handful of tightly ghettoised communities on a tiny fraction of the country’s territory. To prevent mixing and miscegenation, it strictly separates schools for Jewish and Palestinian children. The policy has been so successful that inter-marriage is all but non-existent. In a rare survey, the Central Bureau of Statistics found 19 such marriages took place in 2011.
The economy is largely segregated too.
Most Palestinian citizens are barred from Israel’s security industries and anything related to the occupation. State utilities, from the ports to the water, telecoms and electricity industries, are largely free of Palestinian citizens.
Job opportunities are concentrated instead in low-paying service industries and casual labour. Two thirds of Palestinian children in Israel live below the poverty line, compared to one fifth of Jewish children.
This ugly face is carefully hidden from outsiders.
On the other side, Israel loudly celebrates the right of Palestinian citizens to vote – an easy concession given that Israel engineered an overwhelming Jewish majority in 1948 by forcing most Palestinians into exile. It trumpets exceptional “Arab success stories”, glossing over the deeper truths they contain.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been excitedly promoting the fact that one fifth of its doctors are Palestinian citizens – matching their proportion of the population. But in truth, the health sector is the one major sphere of life in Israel where segregation is not the norm. The brightest Palestinian students gravitate towards medicine because at least there the obstacles to success can be surmounted.
Compare that to higher education, where Palestinian citizens fill much less than one per cent of senior academic posts. The first Muslim judge, Khaled Kaboub, was appointed to the Supreme Court only two years ago – 70 years after Israel’s founding. Gamal Hakroosh became Israel’s first Muslim deputy police commissioner as recently as 2016; his role was restricted, of course, to handling policing in Palestinian communities.
Khaldi, the diplomat assaulted in Jerusalem, fits this mould. Raised in the village of Khawaled in the Galilee, his family was denied water, electricity and building permits. His home was a tent, where he studied by gaslight. Many tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in similar conditions.
Undoubtedly, the talented Khaldi overcame many hurdles to win a coveted place at university. He then served in the paramilitary border police, notorious for abusing Palestinians in the occupied territories.
He was marked out early on as a reliable advocate for Israel by an unusual combination of traits: his intelligence and determination; a steely refusal to be ground down by racism and discrimination; a pliable ethical code that condoned the oppression of fellow Palestinians; and blind deference to a Jewish state whose very definition excluded him.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry put him on a fast track, soon sending him to San Francisco and London. There his job was to fight the international campaign to boycott Israel, modelled on a similar one targeting apartheid South Africa, citing his own story as proof that in Israel anyone can succeed.
But in reality, Khaldi is an exception, and one cynically exploited to disprove the rule. Maybe that point occurred to him as he was being choked inside Jerusalem’s central bus station after he questioned a guard’s behaviour.
After all, everyone in Israel understands that Palestinian citizens – even the odd professor or legislator – are racially profiled and treated as an enemy. Stories of their physical or verbal abuse are unremarkable. Khaldi’s assault stands out only because he has proved himself such a compliant servant of a system resigned to marginalise the community he belongs to.
This month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself chose to tear off the prettified, diplomatic mask represented by Khaldi. He appointed a new ambassador to the UK.
Tzipi Hotovely, a Jewish supremacist and Islamophobe, supports Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the takeover of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She is part of a new wave of entirely undiplomatic envoys being sent to foreign capitals.
Hotovely cares much less about Israel’s image than about making all the “Land of Israel”, including the occupied Palestinian territories, exclusively Jewish.
Her appointment signals progress of a kind. Diplomats such as herself may finally help people abroad understand why Khaldi, her obliging fellow diplomat, is being assaulted back home."
PALESTINA
