Refugee rights; saying no Israeli racism

The Palestine Chronicle - Ilan Pappe- I begin by thanking all the organizers; I know it took quite a lot of efforts to bring us all together. It is a great achievement, and as Mazin Qumsiyeh and Haidar Eid, mentioned, and Lubna Masarwa, yesterday, you also provided a great opportunity for us to meet and we are very grateful to you for this opportunity to meet you and to meet each other. It is easier because of the Israeli oppression to meet here than to meet in Palestine where we should meet and hopefully one day we will all be there without the need to go to the frozen hills of Stuttgart to create a joint life!

And I think that’s the gist of the Zionist story that it does not allow people to meet normal life and to be normal friends that they need to go through all that hardship in order to fulfill a very elementary human impulse to live together.

We live in very bizarre times. On the one hand, we could not have wished as activists for a better Israeli government. I think that this particular government makes any sophisticated analysis about what Zionism in Israel is all about quite redundant. It is very easy to expose not only the Israeli policies, but also the racist ideology behind them. On the other hand, Israel is the most successful economy in the West in the last three years; it has done much better than the Germany, much better than most of the economic powers of the West; its banking system is very stable, its currency is one of the strongest in the world and it doesn’t suffer at all from all the hardships that had affected the Western capitalist economies in the last three years.

The result is a very bewildering gap between what average and decent people in the West think about Israel and the way the Israelis, specially the Israeli Jews, think about themselves. They think that they live in a very successful society, they believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over, that the Palestinian question has ended, yes, you have a problem in Gaza, yes you have a problem with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this is a global problem, this is not a particular Israeli problem; this is part of the so-called war against terror.

We also live in bizarre times because despite of the – and Mazin Qumsiyeh talked about it yesterday in very details way, so I don’t have to repeat it - , we also live in a time where particular and specific Israeli policies are severely criticized. People go and demonstrate against the massacre in Gaza, people go and demonstrate against the attack of the flotilla to Gaza, and yet, nobody dares to attack the ideology that is behind these policies. There is no demonstration against Zionism, because the European parliament even regards a demonstration against Zionism as anti-Semitism.

Imagine, in the days of apartheid in South Africa, if you were not allowed to demonstrate against the apartheid in South Africa, but only against the Soweto massacre... And this is still a great Israeli success. And Germany plays a very important role in this success, that the main problem and the main reason for the criminal policies is not analyzed, is not discussed, is not touched upon, only the symptoms. I am not a doctor, I am not a physician, but I know that if you deal with the symptoms and not with the cause of the illness, you don’t cure the patient.

So, I think that what we really need as activists, and it’s easier to talk to you than I think to people who know nothing about the conflict or are totally on the other side of the coin, that we have to change a little bit what we are doing. Not in terms of our very successful BDS campaign, or the kind of things that we do in Germany and elsewhere in solidarity with the Palestinian people. I think this is an impressive chapter in European civil society activity, nonetheless impressive as was pointed out yesterday than the chapter in the struggle against apartheid, but we are still most of us, are still not using the right language. We, most of us, are still not employing the kind of dictionary that we should employ in order to drive the message home of what are we dealing with.

Because one of the greatest paradoxes of what goes on in Israel and Palestine, is that on one hand it is not a complicated story – we have been there before, European settlers coming either genociding or kicking out the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this. And on the other hand, Israel succeeded with the help of its allies everywhere, including in this country, to build this complex explanation that is so complex that only they can understand it. And you are not allowed to interfere, especially if you are Germans, you are not allowed to interfere in this analysis, because it is very complex.

No, it is not, it is really not complex. And this is why history is so important. Understanding the not so complex history of what the Zionist movement was and is doing to the indigenous, native people of Palestine is what the story is all about. Yes, there are other stories connected to it, I agree, the fate of the Jews in Europe, the holocaust,… I don’t know, the relations between Christianity and Judaism over the last 2’000 years, but these are sidebars. These are not the main story, they belong to the story, but you don’t begin with these. Read more