Camouflage: How the Israeli Left continues to hoodwink us with corrupted slogans 

israel protest

To reach the hearts and minds of Americans, the Zionist Israeli Left is manipulating the Black Lives Matter movement. The slogans and images of protestors coming out of Tel Aviv continue to hoodwink the world with a sudden and self-serving concern for Palestinian lives.

Two slogans are circulating among the Zionist Israeli Left: ‘Jewish and democratic’ and ‘Palestine Lives Matter’. These are, simply put, a contradiction in terms designed to whitewash the racist nature of Zionism.

When White supremacists in the U.S. adopted the “All Lives Matter” slogan, everyone quickly understood that the use of it was intended to denigrate the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. The Zionist embrace of “Palestinian Lives Matter” is also a denigration. Palestinian lives suddenly matter to them now only out of fear that Israel’s impending annexation of parts of the West Bank means the end of Zionism and will allow the world to understand the true supremacist nature of the state, which at heart is: “only Jewish lives matter”.

To be truly pro-Palestinian one must be anti-Israel, anti-Zionist. These protestors cling, cynically or out of some delusion, to the notion that to be “Jewish and democratic” is possible, that denying Palestinians equality and return to their stolen homeland is a matter of Jewish national “survival”.

It’s the same lying story or so-called “narrative” that Zionists have long succeeded in imposing on the world by camouflaging Zionism’s racist Jewish supremacist nature and denying the devastation the founding of this Jewish state on Palestinian soil has wreaked on Palestinians. Now that their leaders are up-front with their racist plans and supremacist ideology, they no longer deny, and are even apologetic, but they continue to lie.

Commenting on Facebook, Ronnie Barkan says about the protestors:

They haven’t demonstrated against Zionism — most of them are fascist and Zionist! they simply don’t like the “demographic threat” in losing their cherished ethnic-majority in their cherished race-state via possible annexation. the leftists, ie anti-Zionist and humanist, in that demo are minimal to insignificant in numbers. The overwhelming majority were the “liberal Zionists” mentioned above who dread the notion of equal rights among the ~20 million sons and daughters of this land.

In defense of some of the euphoria of the moment, Christopher Ben Kushka comments:

Jonathan Ofir has pointed out in great detail why larger parts of that demonstration were problematic (to put it mildly). “We can´t breathe since 1948” (on your own wall) plus “Nakba since 1948 — Abolish Zionism” plus “Israel is no democracy but Apartheid (state)” are among the strongest statements I have seen at an Israeli demonstration. And acknowledging that doesn´t turn me … into cheer leaders for the liberal-zionist discourse for whom the 67 occupation is a nuisance to get rid of so they can live their hedonist life style.

Nur Masalha explains:

I think there were a minority of anti-Zionist Israelis and Palestinians in that recent “anti-annexation” demo in Tel Aviv — but there is also a lot of truth in what Rima Najjar says, especially the fact that “Zionism” and “democracy” are a contradiction in terms; that liberal Zionists see the annexation of the West Bank as an existential threat to the “demography” to the self-defined “Jewish state of Israel” — a form of demographic racism; and that liberal Zionists see the “Jewish and democratic” state of Israel as “democratic for Jews” and “Jewish to Palestinians”. Some of the tangible evidence for the presence of anti-Zionist Israelis and Palestinians at the anti-annexation demo in Tel Aviv was the banners: “Nakba since 1948: Abolish Zionism”.

Back in 1964, in an essay titled ‘Zionist logic’, Malcolm X offered Americans a hard-hitting attack on Zionism and explained how it is tinged with messianic religiosity and how it was basically a new form of colonialism in disguise that threatened, not only Palestinians, but also the newly independent African countries that accepted Israeli aid. He wrote:

The Israeli Zionists are convinced they have successfully camouflaged their new kind of colonialism. Their colonialism appears to be more “benevolent,” more “philanthropic,” a system with which they rule simply by getting their potential victims to accept their friendly offers of economic “aid,” and other tempting gifts, that they dangle in front of the newly-independent African nations, whose economies are experiencing great difficulties. During the 19th century, when the masses here in Africa were largely illiterate it was easy for European imperialists to rule them with “force and fear,” but in this present era of enlightenment the African masses are awakening, and it is impossible to hold them in check now with the antiquated methods of the 19th century.

In 1970, The Committee for Black Americans for Truth about the Middle East published ‘An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support for the Zionist Government of Israel’ in The New York Times. In it, they affirmed: “We stand with the Palestinian people in their efforts to preserve their revolution, and oppose its attempted destruction by American Imperialism aided by Zionists and Arab reactionaries.”

Adding: “Zionism is a reactionary racist ideology that justifies the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and lands, and attempts to enlist the Jewish masses of Israel and elsewhere in the service of imperialism to hold back the Middle East revolution.”

In the euphoria of the Black Lives Matter moment and all the slogans it has inspired, let’s not forget that Zionism is Jewish supremacy.

____________________
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.


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