The accusations of Anti-Semitism toward the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn was elected seem to be never ending. The complainants like to camouflage the differences between hatred of Jews (for no other reason than they are Jews) and justifiable criticism of an extreme right wing Israeli government. Netanyahu’s hatred of Palestinians has become more obvious as each year goes by. The rhetoric has become in some ways much more honest and he’s able to stick two fingers up at the extremely weak Obama, knowing that he can’t do anything about the huge amounts of ‘aid’ being lined up for Tel Aviv.
Back to Corbyn, this morning I read an article on the independent journalist website, The Canary. Here is a link to it:
I didn’t actually read it all because by the time I’d got a part of the way through it, I’d decided it wasn’t that interesting and that I wouldn’t waste any more time with it. The writer, Alex Mcnamara claimed he is qualified to criticise a column in the Daily Mail that I will link to here:
Mr Mcnamara claims to be very qualified to comment on the issue because he is Jewish and his fathers family were wiped out. Then he wrote this:
“Nothing is black and white. The Israel-Palestine conflict is an extremely complex situation, and only someone quite naive would suggest the conflict is entirely the fault of one side or the other.”
First of all I would argue that it’s not so complex. The Palestinians were living their first (along with a number of Jews, quite peacefully) and after initially ethnically cleansing them, Israeli Jews are now demanding and taking more land from the Arab population and building Jewish only ‘settlements’. Home demolitions are widespread, usually under the pretence of building regulations infringements, checkpoints with caged holding pens for the Palestinians (that’s right, not the Jewish population, they pass through without a problem) are everywhere. The simplest of errands can potentially take hours with no guarantee of success. Israel supplies the vast majority of goods available in the West Bank and therefore have captive consumers. Heaven sent circumstances, if you are the seller. Children are routinely harassed on their way to school by gun wielding settler thugs, even if the IDF are around they seldom intervene. I could go on describing the blatant prejudices for paragraphs, but unlike Mr Mcnamara, I wouldn’t want to over complicate the issues.
I’m sorry that his father in laws family were wiped out but it wasn’t the Palestinians that killed them all and neither his background nor his religion makes him any more capable to discuss Anti-Semitism than anyone else.
“The same is true of even a basic willingness to hear out those who would argue on behalf of the Palestinian people. Israel has undoubtedly committed atrocities, but so have some Palestinian organisations.”
The problem with this statement is that he insinuates that the two sides can even be compared. The Palestinians are the occupied and the Israelis the occupier. One inflicts it’s will on the other. They are legally allowed to resist and the only surprise is that they don’t resist more. Meanwhile, if we want to talk about prejudices, only certain people are allowed to move to Israel and to gain citizenship we would have to be a certain religion.
duplicitousdemocracy.wordpress.com 