Theatre of the Palestine solidarity movement

Self-righteous Westerners and Israel-hating Jews are playing a deadly role.


Galway, Ireland. They stood huddled in the corner of the lecture theatre whispering ominously. A final pep talk perhaps, or a hasty revision of tactics. Then the leader surged forward, arms flailing, voice bellowing, clad in the colours of Palestine. ‘Get the f–k off our campus, now, you f–king Zionist, f–king prick,’ his body literally convulsing with rage. His acolytes obediently pounded the desks in wild approval. ‘We don’t want your Israeli money around here.’

Professor Alan Johnson, a respected political theorist and one of British Labour’s most astute thinkers, stoically continued his address, speaking in his characteristic soft, measured, thoughtful tones. He presented his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unsparing in his criticism of both sides, and stated the progressive case for peace: two states for two peoples.

But the protestors weren’t there to engage with ideas, or to advance a negotiated, peaceful outcome to the conflict. They were there to ‘resist’. What they were resisting in that lecture theatre on the western coast of the Irish Republic is not clear. Common sense and tolerance perhaps? But there they were. Seething westerners draped in keffiyehs and kitschy woven Palestine bracelets, the essential uniform of today’s fearless ‘revolutionary’.

Brendan O’Neill, the British libertarian agitator (and Speccie columnist) calls this phenomenon the ‘politically correct form of blacking up’. Ashamed of their ‘white privilege’, the activists appropriate the symbols of a people they see as noble and downtrodden; reducing them to a crude stereotype, a positive one in their minds, but an insulting, racist caricature nonetheless.

For the Israel-haters, Palestinians are helpless victims, totally without agency and therefore without fault. They exist only as an abstract construct of untarnished innocence, an idealised nation of goatherds and olive farmers. But this deception is only one half of the equation. To complete the resistance fantasy, one must conceive of a villain worth opposing, ‘the Zionist Jew’. This equally mythical figure, evil beyond redemption, has been invented just so that it can be slain. It is as far removed from reality as the caricature of the Palestinian as pure victim. All-powerful, menacing, insatiable and lethal. The ‘Super-Jew’, as London Times columnist David Aaronovitch calls it. If the traditional racist stereotype of the Jew is greedy, ruthless and cunning, wait till you meet the Zionist.

Yet Zionism is no more or less than the secular, national movement of the Jewish people. Like the national movement of the Palestinians, it sees the nation-state as the expression of a people’s right to self-determination. It makes no immutable claims regarding the State’s borders. Israel has twice traded territory for peace treaties (with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994). It does not seek to deny equal citizenship rights for members of ethnic or religious minority groups. It does not aspire to impose the religion of the majority on others. But fighting real Zionism, a people’s inalienable right to self-determination, hardly qualifies as the noble struggle about which self-righteous westerners fantasise, and would thus leave their pretentions to heroism unfulfilled. It is a far more intoxicating prospect to defeat imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, fascism and Nazism in one dizzying swoop. Slay the Zionist beast and redemption is achieved


http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/theatre-of-the-palestine-solidarity-movement/

So bang on the money this article as its evident from the Rhetoric promoted by the usual suspects.