Monday, August 29 2011|Yossi Gurvitz
Israeli and international radical left: Time for a divorceWhy the ad hoc alliance with international left activists is unhelpful to the Israeli left, and should end
One of the phenomena characterizing the coverage of the J14 protests from the beginning was the long faces of a significant number of notable international peace activists. But…but… but you’re not talking about the occupation, they demanded of the marching Israelis. They were soundly ignored, the protest became a mass success, and they became much more bitter.
At one point – it was during the third or fourth week of the protests – one of them wrote it was a struggle “about the price of cottage cheese”. I politely invited him to join Netanyahu’s PR team. He was gravely insulted, and I sincerely hope he won’t forgive me; yet the claims of many international activists against J14 were greatly similar to those of Netanyahu’s PR. We were told it’s the protest of people living in luxury, who fail to deal with the only real thing around here. Netanyahu’s bureau would call it The Second Independence War/The Second Zionist War/The Great War against the Dark Palestinian Conspiracy; the international activists just call it by that much more common name, the occupation.
As the protest grew stronger, they grew ever more bitter, spending much of their time mocking it.
This behaviour raises two questions: One, just what sort of a leftist spends so much energy on opposing a protest intended to bring about a social-democratic regime, which did much to bring together Jews and Palestinians, and the only protest in the last decade – at least – which presented to a crowd of several hundred thousand Jews Palestinian speakers. The second question is: Just what the hell happened to your sense of solidarity? Why can’t you show some good will towards people who stood by your side in the West Bank, and consumed alongside you bulk quantities of CS gas?
The depressing answer is we’re not dealing with leftist, but rather with Palestinian right-winger. They suffer from tunnel-vision: All they see is the occupation. As if there wasn’t an Israel beyond it, as if people did not live and breath and love and die here, who had other issues on their mind. The never-ceasing demand from J14 to speak about the occupation, one begins to suspect, is intended for one thing only: Division of the protest movement. Then we’ll be pure and just again. Admittedly, there’ll be only about a dozen of us, but ideological purity should conquer all.
more...
http://972mag.com/time-for-a-changing-of-the-guard/comment-page-1/#comments
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
