Israel/Palestine FAQ

With the recent escalation in conflict between Israel and Hamas, social media has been full of all kinds of misconceptions about reality, fueled by very biased western media and other factors. Off the top of my head, I thought I'd try to shine some light on some of this stuff, so it hopefully becomes a bit clearer for some people.

Is the Israel/Palestine conflict an intractable conflict going back thousands of years?

Not really. For the most part it dates back to the rise of the Zionist movement, starting around the turn of the twentieth century. The Nazi Holocaust in Europe then results in a massive increase in the popularity of Zionism, and the immediate post-War period sees the formation of the state of Israel and the forcible displacement of 700,000 Palestinians. Trouble ever since.

Who are these Palestinians?

Mostly farmers and city-dwellers, along with some nomads, a combination of Muslims, Christians and Jews who have lived in Palestine for thousands of years. The modern-day Palestinians include the descendents of the original Jews of the region, most of whom converted to Christianity or Islam over the generations.

Who are the Israelis?

This depends on where you put Israel's borders, which has been a matter of dispute for a long time – dispute between what Israel says and what everybody else in the world says, more or less. The area under direct Israeli military control includes the West Bank and Gaza, which the rest of the world does not recognize as Israeli territory. (It was conquered, occupied, and settled by Israeli Jews after 1967 – illegally as far as the UN is concerned.) So if we're talking about the whole of Israel plus what the rest of the world knows as the Occupied Territories, then Israel's population is roughly half Jewish and half Palestinian Arab. About one million of those Palestinians live within Israel as second-class citizens, and the rest – the vast majority – live under direct military occupation, can't vote, and aren't citizens of anywhere.

So the Israeli Jews, who are they?

Overwhelmingly, they are people of European descent, who moved to Palestine before, during or after World War II. They have been identified as or have self-identified as Jews (or both) in Europe or North America, where most of them are from (or are descended from). The Jewish religion claims Jerusalem as it's holy land. Jerusalem was ruled by a Jewish king for a little while a long time ago, and for a much longer time was ruled by the Romans, Ottomans and others. It's the home of at least three major religions. The European Jews who lay claim to it are generally not related to the Jews who lived there before – the Palestinians who they have displaced are, however.

Is Israel a democracy?

Not in the modern sense. By Roman standards, yes. But by modern standards, no. A very large percentage of the adult population of the land controlled by Israel cannot vote. Not because they have a criminal record or don't qualify for voting for some other reason, but because they are Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza. They're not even subject to civilian rule, but instead, direct military rule.

But if they let all the Palestinians vote, then Israel wouldn't be a Jewish state anymore, right?

Correct. So the Palestinians need to be occupied, ethnically cleansed, not allowed to have rights, etc., naturally. The Jewish state must have a Jewish majority if it's to be a “democracy.” So they can't let the Palestinian majority have the vote.

So what's the game plan for Israel here, with regard to the Palestinians?

No matter what kind of leadership the Palestinians have, whether religious, secular, collaborationist, oppositional, etc., the Israeli game plan, as made very clear by Israeli practice, is to take most of the remaining Palestinian lands away from the Palestinians, forcing the remaining Palestinian population into crowded cities, much like the bantustans under Apartheid South Africa, except these bantustans are surrounded by very high walls with heavily-armed Israeli soldiers on top of them in guard towers. There is no question that the Palestinians can't under these circumstances have anything you could call sovereignty, or a “two state solution.”

Do Jews run the world?

No. There are many Jews in very powerful positions politically and economically, but currently, the only country in the world you could say is run by Jews is Israel. There are other groups, such as Cuban Americans in the US, particularly in Florida, who have a disproportionate political influence because many of them have a common political agenda, as do many Jews in the US, though not most of them. There are periods in the history of some countries in eastern Europe when Jews had a very disproportionate influence on politics and economics, much like, say, the Chinese minority in Malaysia does today. But that was a while ago.

After the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, don't Jews deserve to have their own country?

The Nazis killed millions of people. They killed people for their political beliefs in very large numbers, and for being gay or lesbian, for being disabled, and for many other reasons. The idea that every group victimized by the Nazis needs to run their own country afterward seems like a strange solution. Better to learn from what happened in Europe that gave rise to the fascist movement, and prevent that from happening in the future. In any case, if you're going to take millions of people and move them somewhere else in the world, where shall they go? Probably somewhere already occupied by other people. And then the new occupants are supposed to run the show? The people from whom they're taking over, by force, might not like that.

But if Israel stops oppressing the Palestinians, and gives up the idea of a Jewish state in favor of a real democracy, what will happen to the Jews? Haven't Muslims and Jews always had problems with each other?

They haven't. In fact, there were many thousands of Jews moving into Palestine during the first few decades of the Zionist movement. There were tensions of all kinds, but for the most part, the indigenous Palestinian population and the new arrivals from Europe got along OK. Which is surprising, given the large numbers of new arrivals, and the superiority complex many of them had.

Furthermore, going back over the centuries, while Jews and other nonbelievers were being ruthlessly slaughtered by Inquisitors and Crusaders in Europe, the Jewish refugees from Spain and elsewhere went to places like Istanbul, where they prospered for hundreds of years, an accepted part of Ottoman society, which was a very multicultural, multilingual, multireligious society, with a Muslim majority that was almost incomparably more tolerant than their Catholic and Protestant counterparts in Europe.

But Hamas doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist! What about that?

Hamas's leadership has never said that Jews shouldn't live in Palestine. In fact, Hamas activists and Jews live peacefully side by side in places like Nablus, the biggest city in the West Bank, where there is a longstanding Palestinian Jewish community. But asking Hamas or any other Palestinian organization or governing entity to recognize a state which won't itself tell anyone else where their own borders are, a state which is continually, illegally stealing more and more Palestinian land for Jewish-only settlements, a state which itself won't recognize the right of the Palestinians to have a state, this is different from recognizing that Jews have a right to live in Palestine alongside other people.

But if a Jew sets foot in Gaza, he'll be shot, right?

No. Lots of Jews, and others, regularly visit Gaza, when the Israeli or Egyptian authorities will allow visitors in. Many of them are activists with groups like the International Solidarity Movement. Others are journalists, UN employees, etc. They are welcomed with open arms by the people of Gaza, including Hamas, and face no discrimination for being Jewish, let alone violence or threats thereof.

But I've seen videos where people in Gaza say things like, “The Jews are coming. God is great. Kill the Jews.”

For a lot of regular people in Gaza and various other refugee camps, people who have never had the opportunity to leave their refugee camp in their entire lives have the impression that their enemy is “the Jews.” This is mainly because the only Jews they've ever seen have been driving tanks, shooting at their kids, and bulldozing their homes. When they say “the Jews” they are talking about the Zionists or the Army, but this distinction, for them, seems very moot, under their extreme circumstances. Even so, many Palestinians, especially those who have had a chance to travel outside of the Occupied Territories, end up meeting nice people of Jewish lineage, and learning that all Jews are not Zionist soldiers trying to kill them.

But the settlers left Gaza years ago, and now Hamas is shooting rockets at Israel. What's up with that? What's their beef?

The settlers left, but then the fighter jets moved in. Gaza was and is still very much occupied. An embargo is an act of war. Gaza has been subject to a merciless embargo maintained by the Israeli military for many decades. And then drones fly overhead constantly, firing at people whenever someone in the control room in Israel wants them to, usually killing women and children more often than their supposed “terrorist” targets.

But as long as Hamas is firing rockets, doesn't Israel need to defend itself?

Hamas is firing rockets in the first place because they don't know what else to do to try to end the siege of their home by the IDF. The siege needs to end, the Palestinians need to be able to breath, to build, to eat, to travel freely within Palestine, to have a port with access to the outside world, so they can go visit Turkey like so many Israelis love to do. Then most people won't want to fire rockets at Israel anymore, and the people who do want to do that won't be able to get traction, because most people will be living too comfortably to want to fire rockets at anyone.

But doesn't Hamas want to stop girls from going to school and nasty stuff like that?

No. You're thinking of the Taleban. Hamas is not the Taleban. There are big, big differences between different Muslim organizations in the world. If you don't know this, you are either ignorant or Islamophobic or both. Why would you want to be an ignorant Islamophobe? Much more interesting to learn about how the world really is, in all its glorious diversity!

But isn't Hamas a terrorist group that's oppressing their own people?

Well, first of all, if they were, it might not be up to Israel or anyone else to rescue them. And if it were up to someone, Israel would be the wrong choice, in any case, as would all of the former/current colonial powers in the region (US, UK, France), who have a proven record of messing everything up every time (usually on purpose). But in fact, Hamas is a popular political party that was democratically elected by popular vote to lead the Palestinian Authority throughout Gaza and the West Bank just eight years ago, the last time there was a fair election held in the Occupied Territories. Throughout most of its existence, Hamas has been dedicated to distributing food, running hospitals, and fighting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. All very popular activities among Palestinians at home and abroad. This is not to say everybody loves them. There are lots of secular Palestinians as well as Christian Palestinians who are uncomfortable with the religious emphasis within the party. But Hamas is not a terrorist group according to the United Nations, and is popularly-elected, and very popular, and they believe in educating girls, too.

So what does this whole thing have to do with us in the USA, anyway?

Israel is only able to conduct itself as it does because it has the political and military backing of the US. These daily atrocities are committed with our tax dollars, with weaponry we sent them. Plus a lot of the people running Israel were born and raised in New York and they have dual citizenship.

So maybe the whole thing is unfair, but shouldn't the Palestinians just accept defeat and move on?

Many of them have been trying to do that for decades, but Israel won't let them. If Israel had allowed the Palestinians to have a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza (22% of the original Palestine), things might have turned out differently. But Israel insists on taking almost all of Palestine, and controlling all of it. History shows that if Jews can share the land, so can Muslims and Christians – even if the Jews in question are not from the region and have no reasonable historic claim to any of it. That's some pretty impressive sharing! But it's not good enough for Israel.

But aren't you a bleeding heart liberal self-loathing Jew middle-class unrealistic white guy from the suburbs of New York?

Nope. I know what I'm talking about. I've studied the history of the region, and I've been there, and seen the Israeli occupation up close. I've spent time with lots of regular people from the region, not just members of the intelligentsia, including members of all the major Palestinian factions.

This is all so different from how I understood the situation. Where can I learn more about how things really are there?

Turn off your American news programs, forget about your American education, and start paying attention to the rest of the world. Get your news from a variety of different sources, from different countries, most of which have an English broadcast. Variety is better, and you won't get that from US news sources for the most part. You can also read some good books, like anything by Robert Fisk, Nicholas Guyatt or Phyllis Bennis.

Announcing new CD: FALASTEEN HABIBTI ("Palestine, My Love")

Falasteen Habibti: Love songs for Palestine

A fundraiser for the Independent Middle East Media Center

I am releasing a new 21-song album, both digitally and in CD form, a compilation recording of just about all the songs I've written about the Palestinian struggle from 2000-2014, representing songs from 13 different CDs I've put out over the years.

I feel like I should explain why I'm doing this in some depth. (But if you don't want to hear about it, scroll down to the bottom for how you can concretely support this project, buy the CD, etc.)

Every effective social movement in history that I am aware of has had music at its core, from the Civil Rights movements in the US, Ireland, or South Africa to the Palestinian struggle from 1948 to the present. At every level of successful social movements, there has been an awareness of the centrality of music – both as a means of communicating important messages in the most impactful way possible and as a means of fostering and maintaining a sense of community and a sense of the vitality of the movement among its participants.

A little more on that. Communicating messages. What is the way forward for Palestine? Israel is able to function as the Apartheid state that it is because of massive support from countries like the US and the UK. In order for that support to be seriously challenged, in order for the governments of these sponsor nations to change their egregious policies, first the people of those countries need to truly, viscerally understand what is wrong with them.

Hearts and minds in the English-speaking world must be won. And in order to win one, you have to win the other. At the risk of sounding superior, this is my area of expertise. Words, when sung, go directly to the emotional centers of the brain. Short of being there yourself, there is nothing that can transport someone's heart and mind better than a song. Songs can get under the rhetorical radar better than any newscast, I'll wager.

And, contrary to popular mythology, the choir needs preaching to. Cheerleaders are important. When you're surrounded by pro-Israel TV anchors and their many rabid followers among the US population, your culture is your primary antidote, your primary way to keep going, along with taking action itself.

In order to win new hearts and minds or to embolden others, what musicians like me need is access. Unfortunately, there are no pro-Palestinian record labels that have come forward to get this CD played on your local Clearchannel station or sold at your local Wal-Mart. And even more unfortunately, perhaps, you're very unlikely to hear any of these songs in the music breaks on your favorite leftwing radio show from New York City, because they don't understand how to effectively use culture to make their show even better than it is... And no, they're not going to have me on the Daily Show either, it doesn't work that way in America, even on Comedy Central.

There are no shortcuts. It's up to you. I can write the songs (as can many others). But there's only so much (little) I can do to get them out there into the world, to do the educating and inspiring that people keep telling me they do well.

There are things you can do with no money, such as download the album for free on Bandcamp and share the songs with people. You can organize a show on my upcoming tour, where I'll sing songs such as these live, which is always the best way to hear them, they say. 50% of any donations made on the Falasteen Habibti Bandcamp page will go to the IMEMC. (The other half will go toward printing and distributing the CD.)

If you can contribute money, you may click on one of the “buy now” buttons below. For $25 you can order a physical copy of this fundraising CD. Postage is included in the cost, for anywhere in the world. $10 from each of these purchases will go to the IMEMC.

Or you can become a distributor of the CD yourself. Buy 10 or more of the CDs at a time and I'll send them to you for $5 each or less (postage included worldwide for those orders, too). Then you can do whatever you want with them. One suggestion would be for you to sell them for $20 each and use the money to raise funds for IMEMC or some other Palestine-related cause.

Subscribers will get a copy of the new CD in their mailboxes, as with all my new CDs. Please click the link to read more about that if you're not already a subscriber!

Buy one CD for $25

Buy 10 or more CDs wholesale...

How Many?

10 CDs $50.00 USD 20 CDs $100.00 USD 50 CDs $200.00 USD

You are also very welcome to send an old-fashioned check in the mail.  My address:

David Rovics
P.O. Box 86805
Portland, OR  97286
USA

Why a CD of songs about Palestine?

I thought I'd back up and give a little overview, for whatever it's worth, about why I'm putting out this CD, Falasteen Habibti.  (Additional "because" statements welcome!)

Why be an activist?

Because life could be so much better. Because we'll soon go extinct if we don't change everything. Because humans and other animals are beautiful and shouldn't go extinct. Because sitting idly by is depressing. Because it feels good to do something. Because we inherently want to help each other, and that's a good thing. Because the really cool kids are at the demos.

Why play music?

Because we humans are inherently musical creatures. Because it feels good, and feeling good is important. Because it brings us together and helps us feel like we're part of something, and that's crucially important, that sense of community. Because music is central to culture and culture is central to any movement or other community. Because we need it or we'll fall apart (whether we know it or not).

Why write songs about the news and stuff like that?

Because we need to reach hearts and minds at the same time. Because words, when sung, go straight to the emotional centers of the brain. Because people can learn from and listen to songs in a different, and generally better, way than the way we listen to other things. Because a song is the fastest and most effective way to transport someone to a place they've never been. Because people just don't know about a lot of this stuff. Because they'll listen to a song much more readily than they'll read a book or buy a plane ticket to a war zone. Because the rhetoric just turns people off, but songs can slip under the rhetorical radar.

Why write songs about Palestine?

Because it's all very personal, so it's easy to write about. Because Palestinians are people, and people matter. Because the corporate press lies about it every day, and someone has to say something. Because almost no one else is doing it (in English). Because other people are scared or ignorant, and music is the best antidote for both of those things. Because I didn't want to play at your stupid festival, anyway.

Why these particular songs?

1. Because the war in Gaza did not start with Hamas firing rockets.
2. Because the Israeli occupation is the problem, not religious differences.
3. Because Israel doesn't want to say where its national borders are, and nobody talks about that fact on the news.
4. Because the settlements are illegal and immoral and Sodastream should be boycotted.
5. Because there are some shocking similarities between modern-day Israel and Nazi Germany. Because such comparisons, while inexact, are far from ridiculous.
6. Because the founders of the Holy Land Foundation are heroic men who should be running a large foundation, like they were before, not rotting in a maximum-security prison in Texas.
7. Because Israel has a longstanding, proven history of a complete disregard for Arab life, and the IDF systematically and purposefully bombs UN compounds on a very regular basis, and almost nobody wants to point out this obvious pattern of behavior.
8. Because the men and women of the Mavi Marmara were not lunatics, they were heroic people trying to help other heroic people who are resisting a vicious, racist siege by a vicious, racist government.
9. Because the Separation Barrier is an Apartheid Wall.
10. Because Palestinian Christians also live under the brutal occupation, not just Muslims.
11. Because Khader Adnan was hunger-striking against the horrific policy of indefinite detention without charge. Because he was aware of the history of British detention policies in Ireland. Because these comparisons are important in deepening our understanding of the world, as is the fact that Khader Adnan is a knowledgable and heroic figure, not like whatever you've likely been told, if anything, about the man or his hunger strike.
12. Because suicide bombers are human beings, generally motivated by a very real and very deep sense of personal loss, not religion. Because most people don't seem to get that vitally important fact.
13. Because Israel has a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction of the very worst kind – nuclear weapons. Because people should know who Mordechai Vanunu is, because he is an inspiring man and did a very important thing, and is still paying the price for it.
14. Because the Palestinian diaspora has suffered and continues to suffer greatly, especially the millions languishing in refugee camps in squalid conditions since 1948. Because people need to know about them, and events like the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.
15. Because it's a very simple, very basic, human thing that the Palestinians want: they want to go home. Because anything that simple needs to be expressed in a song.
16. Because the image of the old Palestinian woman with a key around her neck to the home she was evicted from in what is now Israel is a powerful, iconic image.
17. Because the story of the brave people from all around the world who keep going to Palestine to stand with the Palestinians as they try to live through and resist the occupation is a story that needs to be told.
18. Because Israeli snipers shoot children on purpose for no reason on a regular basis, and people need to know about that.
19. Because chickens and eggs are important, and people need to know that the event that kicked off the Second Intifada was a massacre of children carried out by the IDF in Jerusalem.
20. Because there is no question that all people, including Palestinians and Israeli Jews and everybody else in the world, have lots in common, and are very capable of coexistence under the right circumstances. Because stories about coexistence and cooperation are important and need to be told.
21. Because for those of us of Jewish lineage, what Jews in Israel are doing in our name feels very personal. Because Israeli conduct since 1948 has been antithetical to the supposed lessons of the Nazi Holocaust for all of us.

Why make a CD with only songs about Palestine?

Because for over a decade people have been asking me at shows if there is a CD that just has all my Palestine songs on one CD. Because I'm finally getting around to it. Because the bombs are falling faster than ever, and I feel even more than usual like something has to be done. Because music is important, and therefore CDs are important, because a lot of people still don't listen to music any other way. Because a CD or other actual physical thing can work well as something to sell to raise money, and I wanted to have some kind of vehicle to raise funds for the Independent Middle East Media Center.

 

Tunnels

Another day of wanton destruction. Over a hundred Palestinian civilians killed in the past 24 hours. Stories of revenge attacks are coming to light, of Israeli snipers killing civilians as they were searching for buried or dead family members. Their commanders told the snipers that killing the civilians searching for their dead was a form of therapy, to help them recover from the loss of their IDF comrades.

The loss of their comrades. Over 1,100 Palestinians killed, overwhelmingly women, children and the elderly. Several dozen Israelis killed, almost all of them soldiers. Killed by people coming out of tunnels. Tunnels that the soldiers are bombing and blowing up.

Back in Eretz Israel a small antiwar protest is physically attacked by a much larger, violent mob of rightwing extremists. We can't call them fascists, they're Jews. Jews can't be fascists, can they? Even when they chant, “kill the Arabs” and “gas the Arabs,” as they're beating up leftists, pacifists and random Palestinian passersby? They're not actually gassing the Arabs. They're just talking about it. Well, aside from using deadly chemical weapons like white phosphorus on civilians hiding in UN compounds.

In my mind I keep coming back to the tunnels. Tunnels are such a powerful image, with so much history. The Vietnamese won the war against the US invaders partially through the widespread use of tunnels. Of course Kissinger would complain incessantly of Soviet aid to the Vietnamese guerrillas being the problem. That sounds much better than admitting that you're facing a very poorly-armed enemy that's beating you through sheer determination, ingenuity and courage, despite all your weapons of mass destruction.

The public line was the Vietminh was a small part of the population that needed to be dealt with. That if they could just destroy their infrastructure, the invaders would win. Secretly the American leadership knew this wasn't true. They knew their enemy was the people of Vietnam, and they prosecuted their war with this in mind, targeting broadly all of the civilians of that poor country, and their neighbors as well.

But destroy the infrastructure – they did that, too. And what was that infrastructure? Planes, helicopters, tanks? No. Rocket launchers? A few. Antiquated rifles? A few more.

Tunnels. Mostly tunnels. And courageous, desperate refugees. Refugees living in a walled-off ghetto, subject to an almost complete embargo, with no electricity, overflowing sewers, very little food, who are being incessantly bombed.

When facing a determined opponent, “infrastructure” or the “infrastructure of terror” has a very different meaning than how the term is usually understood.

The infrastructure, the Israelis now admit, is not the ineffective, home-made rockets. Not the paltry collection of guns. The infrastructure are the homes that people live in. Especially the ones around Gaza's inland perimeter, which the IDF is now annexing with tanks and bulldozers. The infrastructure is the homes, and the tunnels beneath them.

The thing about fighting a determined enemy in an urban setting is you can only make the best use of your superior firepower if there aren't any buildings in the way. People can hide behind buildings. So you have to destroy them all, which is what the Israelis are doing. Which is what the US did in Fallujah, and in Hue, and is what the Nazis did in Warsaw.

I'm no military expert or anything, but I am a history buff, and I believe the main difference between Fallujah, Hue and the Warsaw Ghetto is in Fallujah the resistance didn't build tunnels prior to the battle. In all those cases, though, the only way to win the battle was to completely demolish the cities, one building at a time.

In Warsaw, after the buildings were all burned to the ground and the ghetto was nothing but rubble, the resistance continued, albeit on a small scale due in part to a complete lack of food or firearms. The reason any resistance was able to continue was down to the tunnels.

Tunnels are a bit like buildings that way. You can hide behind a building, and if you're really lucky, you can ambush soldiers when they come around the corner. If you're really, really lucky as well as very skillful, you might get close enough for hand-to-hand combat. Which is necessary when the other side has all the firepower.

You can also hide in tunnels, before you come out and engage in your mission to attack the enemy before the enemy inevitably kills you in return. It's almost always a suicide mission. You show yourself, you die, but maybe you kill first, if you're ready to die, and very lucky and very skilled.

In Warsaw, the tunnels were how some of the ancestors of some of those IDF soldiers survived the Nazi Holocaust. The tunnels were how they managed to get some food into the ghetto from outside the ghetto walls. And even a few guns, and very home-made bombs. Beneath any well-stocked kitchen sink are the explosives necessary to have your own little “infrastructure of terror,” after all. Even in Warsaw, 1943. If you went outside the ghetto, where such chemicals could be purchased.

So, destroy the buildings, destroy the tunnels, and face the conundrum that as long as people are able to buy food, fertilizer, gasoline, and Draino, they'll be able to make explosives. As long as there are people there will be terrorists.

So “gas the Arabs” becomes the natural conclusion. It's the only way to have security. If you don't want to give them sovereignty, you have to kill them all. How close to “kill them all” are the Israelis willing to go?

Around the world people watched and sometimes protested as the Nazis destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto, as the US military destroyed Hue and later Fallujah, and so many other cities and towns across the world, directly or through their proxy dictatorship armies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia. And their proxy pseudo-democracy in Israel. We knew, and we know, what's happening. It's not that we don't know, or didn't know before.

People watched and protested, just as we do now. In Spain in 1937, tens of thousands of people from around the world went to fight alongside the besieged Spanish democracy, and died there alongside the Spaniards. But that's the exception, not the rule. And when that sort of thing happens today we don't say nice things about them. “Mujahideen” had a nice ring to it in the US media when the enemy in Afghanistan was the USSR. Now they're “foreign fighters” or “jihadis,” both of which are automatically supposed to inspire revulsion.

And sure, there was a handful of brave foreign fighters willing to die in the fight against the American military in Fallujah. There were a few non-Jews fighting alongside the ZOB in the Warsaw Ghetto. Were they foreign fighters? Anti-fascist jihadis? There were no foreign fighters in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said he appreciated the offer, but he turned them down, on the grounds that housing them would be too expensive, and they'd stick out if they didn't look Vietnamese enough. This mattered, because the Vietnamese had only the element of surprise in their favor, just about nothing else.

For the most part, with some fairly minor exceptions, all the resistance fighters in Warsaw and Hue had to comfort them as they died was the support of their people. And the tunnels.

The Pattern (Musically Annotated)

I'm getting older, and the pattern is now a familiar one. Israel starts committing war crimes on a daily basis in Gaza (or the West Bank, or Lebanon). “In response” to Hamas missiles. (Or Hezbollah provocations, depending. But always in response.)

The war of words heats up. Israeli and US leaders are all over the airwaves, saying Israel has a right to defend itself and that Hamas is responsible for all deaths on both sides. The news organizations feel they have to have some reporters in Gaza for a change. They keep trying to spin the news in Israel's favor, but once they're showing even a little bit of the reality on the ground, it all starts looking really bad for the Israelis with each new dead Palestinian child buried beneath the rubble. The US Secretary of State goes to Israel and defends the regime there.

A few days of Israeli atrocities later, he or she starts to make slightly less fanatically pro-Israel noises. The Israeli spokespeople stick to their guns (and their drones, helicopters, fighter jets, tanks, and destroyers). As the hours and days pass with all the nonstop news coverage, the Israeli spokesgenerals and politicians start looking rabid, even to many of their apologists in the west.

Across the globe, the ever-nascent, uncomfortably diverse movement of people in solidarity with Palestinians protests. In some places they attack synagogues, believing that Israel represents the Jews of the world, as its leaders have been claiming every day since 1948. They are denounced as anti-Semites. (With some apparent justification in this case.) In other places the occasional Israeli embassy gets overrun by angry protesters. In most places, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people or more gather weekly, sometimes more often, to decry Israel's war crimes.

The Israeli spokesgenerals remind us that not only must Israel defend itself from foreign terrorist aggression, but how can Israel even think about talking to Hamas, when Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist? The term “right to exist” is never explained by them, or by the vast majority of the western media outlets, ever. No one ever asks where are the borders of this state called Israel. Such an obvious question, but you'll rarely find it asked anywhere outside of Pacifica Radio or Al-Jazeera. How can they recognize a country that refuses to acknowledge where its own borders begin and end? It's a non-question, that goes perpetually unanswered by anyone but the terrorists and their apologists.

I ask that question, and I'm called a terrorist sympathizer for doing so. I sing at the protests, wherever in the world I happen to be at the time of Israel's current spate of atrocities. If I'm home in Portland, I sing for dozens, maybe hundreds, of protesters, half of them university students of Arab origin. If I'm lucky enough to be outside of the US at the time – Australia, England, Denmark, Sweden – I sing for thousands. I literally profit, in terms of CD sales and an increased fan base, every time Israel drops lots of bombs on Palestinians. (Kind of like Lockheed, if you remove the last nine zeros or so.)

I hear from old and new friends, thanking me for the latest song about the latest atrocity. I hear from other people who had been fans until they heard the last song, who tell me I'm an anti-Semite, or at the very least, “one-sided.” Social media lights up with praise and denunciations – of Israel, of Hamas, of the BDS movement, of me. To varying degrees of course, depending.

I do gigs, and I sing more songs about Palestine than I normally do. Most people respond with more enthusiasm than usual, especially outside of the US, where the media is somewhere between a little and a lot better, where they're more likely to be tired of seeing pictures of the dead or dying victims of Israel's latest bombing of a UN compound packed with terrified refugees who they've recently made homeless.

The most vocal support comes from Arabs and Jews. The most vocal opposition comes from Jews, too. The handful of people at each gig who don't clap after I sing “Jenin” are Jews who resemble my grandparents' neighbors in Brooklyn. One of them might walk out of the show at that point. The rest stay.

There is some debate in the media. More or less depending on which media, which country. About Israeli history, the plight of the Palestinians in the refugee camps, about UN Resolution 242 and the right of return. There is much more discussion than usual about whether artists like me are anti-Semitic terrorist supporters or brave dissenters against Zionism and empire. The web is more full than usual with racist denunciations, hostile ranting, and the occasional, eloquent defense of a principled position.

Far right Israelis in Tel Aviv and Haifa and on the settlements gather in large numbers, repeating such chants as “kill the Arabs” and “gas the Arabs.” The western media ignores these protests. Jews are holocaust survivors and they don't believe in that sort of thing. They would never say things like that. Even though thousands of them do. On camera.

Bearded men somewhere in Gaza talk about killing the Jews. The only Jews they've ever met have been the ones who bomb them from the air or shoot them from inside tanks, but no one in the media explains that fact. You'll see them chanting about killing Jews, anyway, which is the important bit. You'll see their kids saying it, too. That's how they raise their kids, you know.

Some people make generally sensible comparisons between Israeli policies and Nazi Germany. Mostly the people making those comparisons are Jews, but some others dare make them, too. They are all denounced at crazed anti-Semites (including the Jews).

Other people say Israeli policies are terrible, but there are other countries that do even worse things, so why do you focus so much on Israel? Perhaps this Israel focus is a veiled form of anti-Semitism, because we're ignoring some other place. It's a strange argument.

For some of us, this focus on Israel is partly because it's not some other place. It's Israel. Growing up in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City, I thought Israel was somewhere near New Jersey. Half the people I meet around there have cousins in Tel Aviv. Who are right now killing people in Gaza with American weapons, American money and American political cover. For all kinds of reasons, it's personal. A lot of the people doing the killing have New York accents. Many of the rest are from the part of the world that us Ashkenazis came from. It's personal.

I hear from apologists for Israel who lecture me knowingly about how Israel is “just doing to the Palestinians what you did to the Native Americans.” Which of course makes everything OK. And if that line of reasoning doesn't seem to be working, they tell me about how they're under attack by crazed Islamists and so they have to defend themselves with indiscriminate slaughter of the families of the Islamists, and anybody else who lives nearby. I wouldn't understand, they say. Their line of reasoning there is a bit outdated, since 9/11, but no matter.

Israeli leaders make noises like what they really want to do is completely overrun Gaza to wipe out the “terrorist infrastructure” once and for all. Secretly, they know that the only way this would be possible would be by committing actual genocide, in the sense of actually physically bulldozing the entire place, one building at a time (like the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghetto, or like the US did in Hue and Fallujah), and forcing the entire population to flee across Egypt's locked borders or to die. Secretly, the Israeli government knows it's not prepared for the fallout that would result from that kind of thing. Secretly, they want to have an excuse to call off their murderous campaign.

Hamas will run out of missiles. The US will suddenly find success in their pathetic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire because Israel secretly is in favor of one now, though they don't want to admit it to much of their population, or to the Palestinians. Israel will publicly agree to some of Hamas's demands. They won't lift the siege, but they'll partially lift it. They'll free a few prisoners.

Almost all of the western journalists will leave Gaza. A few weeks later, Israel will go back on everything, collectively punishing the entire Palestinian population for the rogue action of some Salafist through more indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian homes and a reimposition of the embargo. They'll also announce more settlement-building in the West Bank, for good measure.

I'll write another song on the next chapter in the annals of Israeli occupation. This time very few people will notice. There will be the occasional small protest. The hardcore few among the perennial activists will discuss tactics, wondering how it might ever be possible to mobilize a sustained movement against Israeli apartheid.

They'll keep wondering, until the next time enough blood is spilled to warrant the attention of the world's media. Because slow starvation isn't interesting enough.

The Antideutsch and Me: An Open Letter to the German Left

There is a German translation of this piece as well...

Last night another concert of mine in Germany was canceled due to pressure from a political tendency here known as the Antideutsch (Anti-Germans). The show went ahead, in this case, but in a different venue. In previous cases, shows have been canceled due to Antideutsch threats to boycott venues, picket, smash windows and hurt people, depending on the case. All of these actions have been carried out by Antideutsch elements on many occasions throughout Germany over many years now. Their targets over the years have included progressive artists, groups, and venues, as well as members of the very large Palestinian community in Germany.

Since I first encountered the Antideutsch I thought that such a bizarre political tendency couldn't last, and I figured I'd just ignore it and hope it went away. That was a mistake. I'm not sure if their influence is growing, but they're certainly not going away. There may not be more than a few hundred zealous adherents to the various Antideutsch factions in Germany, but their influence in society and especially on the Left is vastly disproportionate to their small numbers, due to the historic guilt that still pervades Germany. They take advantage of this condition to force people to make uncomfortable or even impossible choices, again and again.

The Antideutsch, however well-meaning in their origins, despite the fact that some of what they do is admirable (such as opposing the far right in various ways), is a misguided subculture that has relied on incredibly convoluted logic to evolve into a fundamentally racist phenomenon. Their racism should be rejected. A failure to reject the logic of the Antideutsch is a failure to reject racism.

I'll explain. (I know I have titled this an “Open Letter to the German Left,” but I'll take the time here to give some background that will be obvious to most Germans, but may be news to non-Germans.)

I'm not alone among non-Germans who have spent significant amounts of time in Germany in saying that Germany is the most thoughtful, self-reflective society I have ever experienced. It is a place where a very large proportion of the population understands their history. Some people on the Left here will be quick to disagree with me and talk about all the backward people out there and how much more progress there is to be made. However, if they spend time anywhere else in the world, I believe they will have to admit that their society is one that has, to a vastly greater degree than France, the US, Great Britain, and other countries with very dark histories of colonialism and imperialism, largely come to terms with their history. There are of course notable exceptions, but for the most part Germans today viscerally loathe authoritarianism, war, and everything else the Third Reich stood for.

Most Germans especially loathe anti-Semitism. So much so that the very topic makes people uncomfortable, and any discussion that involves criticizing a person of Jewish lineage or an organization led by a Jew is something many Germans would rather just avoid entirely. Being of Jewish lineage myself, having grown up among survivors of the Nazi holocaust, and having spent a lot of time in Germany, I understand this.

Germans were and are faced with the same contradictions as the rest of us with regards to how to come to terms with anti-Semitism, and how European Jews experienced the first half of the twentieth century, which of course most notably involved being systematically killed by goose-stepping Germans. How to atone for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers? How to make sure a fascist regime doesn't take over Germany again? How to make sure the victims of fascism don't become victims again?

For many Germans, particularly on the Left, the answer to these questions lay in a rejection of authoritarianism, welcoming refugees from dictatorships such as Pinochet's Chile, and opposing wars around the world. For many Germans, this led them uncomfortably into the position of opposing not only the Right in their own country, but the US-led wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq. Not because they supported their own country's imperial ambitions as opposed to US imperialism, but because they opposed anyone carpet-bombing anyone else. Been there, done that, never again – to anyone.

But then, the question of how to view and interact with the new state of Israel posed an even bigger challenge for German society, just as it did for others around the world, such as the Jewish diaspora. Guilt-ridden Germans and traumatized Jews alike faced the question – does “never again” mean “never again” for some people or for everyone? For most people in the world, the answer was the latter – no one should invade someone else's country, force the inhabitants into refugee camps and walled ghettos, etc. Ethnic cleansing was unacceptable anywhere, even if the people doing the ethnic cleansing had recently been victims of an even more horrible ethnic cleansing themselves.

For a significant portion of the Jewish diaspora, and for many people in Germany, however, the main concern was for the well-being of Jews. The Nazi holocaust was directly responsible for Zionism's sudden popularity among Jews. Without the Nazi holocaust, the state of Israel probably never would have come to exist, since the overwhelming majority of Jews before that period of history weren't sufficiently enticed by the idea of abandoning their homes in Europe or North America to participate in the Zionist project. And for many Germans, now that German fascism had played a significant role in forcing Israel to come into existence, the Jewish homeland needed to be supported – even if its very existence meant the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who had nothing to do with fascism in Europe.

On the contrary, for hundreds of years while there were pogroms, crusades and inquisitions in Europe, whose victims always included lots of Jews among many others, during the same period in the Ottoman Empire, Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities flourished. But now these Arabs would have to pay for the crimes of German Nazis, and the Zionist movement's new state – actively supported by the US, Great Britain, West Germany and other actors on the international scene – would be founded upon a fundamentally racist form of governance, a Middle Eastern apartheid system, where Palestinians were forced to flee at gunpoint while Jews got their land. After the 1967 war, when Israel annexed Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, the Palestinians in these occupied territories would become a people forced to live under military rule, with no right to vote, ruled by military courts, military injustice, with settlers daily breaking international law to take more and more of their best land away from them.

Most governments in the world, and most people paying attention, especially on the Left, saw this for what it was, and declared the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza illegal, the settlements illegal, and demanded that the Palestinians should be able to return to the lands from which they were forcibly displaced. But among many in the Jewish diaspora, collectively traumatized as they were by German fascism and anti-Semitism elsewhere, there was confusion on this question. Were the Palestinians victims of ethnic cleansing, or terrorists who deserved their fate? Was Israel an apartheid state run by settlers from overseas, or a nation of long-lost refugees returning home and doing what they had to do to stay safe?

Many Germans (and many Jews and most other people in the world) tended to take the former view, but generally preferred to avoid the issue, feeling like, as descendents of the Nazis, they didn't really have the moral authority to take a position one way or the other. Some Germans, particularly on the Left, took the principled stance against Israeli apartheid, despite how emotionally difficult it was for most of them to do this, given their history, and their intense feelings of guilt.

Enter the Antideutsch. In the days leading up to German reunification, many people in Germany were concerned with the prospect of a powerful new German state. They had reason to be concerned. In the months following reunification, the far right was emboldened in both east and west Germany, and there were many cases of immigrants being attacked and sometimes killed by the far right. The asylum laws in Germany became much more restrictive. Out of this context, the Antideutsch tendency evolved.

As with much of the German Left, they opposed German reunification, opposed the new restrictions on asylum-seekers, and opposed the far right's violent attacks on the homes of refugees. But unlike the more reasonable elements of the German Left, this new tendency proclaimed their unconditional support for Israel. The Israeli state claimed they represented Jews around the world, and the Antideutsch declared that this must indeed be the case. They aligned themselves ideologically with the most far right elements of the Jewish diaspora, such as the Jewish Defense League, proclaiming that anyone who criticized the state of Israel was an anti-Semite and a fascist (as I have personally been told on numerous occasions by Antideutsch activists).

The Antideutsch movement started splitting almost as soon as it came into existence. Some of the more bizarre tendencies to emerge include those who supported the US-led war in Iraq, on the basis that Israel supported it, so it must be good. Other elements of the movement proclaimed that although they considered themselves to be communist, they were opposed to criticism of capitalism, on the basis that criticizing capitalism was a veiled form of anti-Semitism (since apparently everyone knows that when your average anti-capitalist says “banker” they really mean “Jewish banker”).

While it may be easy to ridicule and dismiss some of the stranger offshoots of the Antideutsch, the thing they all continue to agree on is the importance of uncritically supporting the state of Israel. There also seems to be a general agreement on the principle that any serious criticism of the state of Israel must be actively opposed and denounced as anti-Semitic and fascistic.

By pushing this line throughout Germany, throughout the German Left and elsewhere in German society, the Antideutsch are essentially demanding that Germans, and anyone else in Germany, such as Palestinian refugees or anti-Zionist Jews from New York (like me), must take sides. They must either declare their unflinching allegiance to the state of Israel, or they must admit to being anti-Semites. They must avoid being involved with events that include someone who is critical of Israel, or risk allegations of anti-Semitism, smashed windows, beatings, and so on. There is no room for debate, no room for being on the sidelines or not taking a position on this issue, they say. You are either with us or you're an anti-Semite.

That is to say, you must choose: admit to being an anti-Semite, or embrace anti-Arab racism. Support the Nazi holocaust, or support the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the apartheid state of Israel.

These, however, are false choices. There are other options – much more sensible ones. You can use your brain, and think for yourself, without unconditionally supporting anyone or anything. You can acknowledge reality – that the Nazi holocaust was indeed the worst thing humans have ever done to other humans, but that the fact that these horrible atrocities were committed in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century does not make it OK for the survivors of the Nazi holocaust to go and drive 700,000 Palestinians off of their land and into walled ghettos.

You can reject both of these horrors. You can oppose anti-Semitism at every turn, and also oppose ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. You can reject the Antideutsch's false dichotomy. Or you can embrace it, and embrace the idea that anything but unconditional support for Israel is anti-Semitism. But then you must come to terms with an inescapable fact: by embracing this position, you are embracing a virulent form of racism. By embracing a blatantly, fundamentally racist government – Israel – you are yourself a racist.

It's your choice. Your brain. I beseech you – use it. Don't let the Antideutsch turn you into a racist idiot who's not allowed to think for yourself because you were born German. I know you'd rather avoid the whole difficult issue, but the Antideutsch won't let you do that. Reject fascism of all kinds, whether they employ gas chambers or not. Reject imperialism, whether German, US, or British. Reject anti-Semitism, yes, but also reject Israeli apartheid. Reject the Antideutsch tendency. Embrace humanity, in all its forms, including the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who live in your country, and the Jews who don't agree with the twisted worldview embraced by US imperialism, Israel's ruling parties and the Antideutsch.

Disavowing Disavowal: In Defense of Gilad Atzmon

I've been on a concert tour in Europe, so far mostly in Great Britain, for the past month or so. There's nothing like being on tour to connect on a personal, face-to-face level with society, or at least the little subsets of society who come to my shows. Being a songwriter who writes songs about the Palestinian struggle, among other subjects, many of my shows around the world are organized by Palestine solidarity activists of one kind or another. Before the tour began I was getting occasional emails from people asking me whether I wanted to add my name to a group denunciation of jazz musician, blogger and author Gilad Atzmon. Denounce him for what, I asked. For being an anti-Semite, they replied. I'd then ask them to send me what he wrote that they found offensive, which they would then do (sometimes accompanied by an introductory essay explaining the distinction between anti-Zionsim and anti-Semitism). I'd then read every word, and each time, I'd fail to find the anti-Semitic bit. Then, ten days into my tour, the US Palestinian Community Network published a "Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon." Several of the signatories include Palestinian intellectuals and activists I know and admire.

Before and especially after their denunciation of Atzmon was published, several of my gigs in England and Scotland have included people handing out printed copies of the disavowal and telling me and other people in no uncertain terms that Atzmon is an anti-Semite, may be a Mossad agent, and may be (or is, depending on who you ask) a holocaust denier. ("Which holocaust" is not an appropriate question, so don't even think about asking. Just the question alone is enough to get you accused of being a denier in some quarters.)

Well, all the attention Atzmon was getting prompted me to fork up $9.99 for my first electronic book (and I'm very thankful that something got me to read a book again, as somehow or other it's been ages). I'm not a scholar, but I am an avid student of history and politics, and I thought Atzmon's book, The Wandering Who?, was a very thought-provoking read. There weren't any particularly new ideas in it, but it was a very well-organized, well-articulated, contemporary and at times, humorous 200-page analysis of Jewish identity.

From the outset, Atzmon makes it clear that his criticism of various aspects of Jewish tribal identity(s) for the past couple millenia is not aimed at the many people who happen to be born Jewish, but to what he identifies as "third category" Jews – Jews who identify primarily as Jewish, first and foremost. Growing up in the New York area with my eyes open and being of Jewish lineage myself, it is not hard to see that this third category exists, and in abundance, so it's also not hard to see why it's such an interesting subject to write a book about.

A cursory glance at history tells me that narrow tribal identity politics usually suck. Whether it's people defining themselves in terms of their nation, their region, their ethnicity, their football team, their religion, if people have convinced themselves that they're better than you, watch out. What Atzmon is doing here is deconstructing (to use a word he probably doesn't like) Jewish identity politics, specifically. He is not analyzing or denouncing tribalism in general, I assume because you gotta stop somewhere, but maybe he has other reasons, like just wanting to stick to the point, or perhaps a little bit of self-preservation.

Why, then, is Atzmon's intellectual exercise here getting both the Anti-Defamation League and even various good activists so riled up? Well, for different reasons, depending on who's feeling riled. In the case of people involved with Palestine solidarity in one form or another, I'd say it is not Atzmon's non-existent hatred of Jews that is the problem here. It is the fact that, in his position as an accomplished jazz musician and writer, he keeps talking about his views and upsetting people who identify with other narratives of Jewish religion, history and identity than Atzmon's. Some of these people he's pissing off include Jews and others who are involved with the movement to boycott Israeli products, etc. Because he's pissing them off, it doesn't really matter whether he's right, he should just shut up and stop rocking the boat, because he's distracting people from the very worthy cause of Palestinian self-determination.

Now there's where I can sympathize with Atzmon's detractors. There is, I'm sure, great strategic value in as united a front as possible. I'm not an organizer – just a musical cheerleader – so I don't know much first-hand about building a solid movement and that sort of thing, and I'm sure it's extremely difficult. I'm also sure it's extremely necessary. But as someone who has been studying history and politics for many decades, I have to say that Atzmon is only saying the things that so many people already know, and I, for one, am not going to pretend otherwise because shunning someone for stating the self-evident is more convenient for the movement in the short-term. If he is to be shunned for being unnecessarily divisive, or for having too dark a sense of humor, or for being overly confrontational or critical, fine, shun away. But if he is to be shunned because he is an anti-Semite, no, that's just nonsense.

I'm not going to lay out Atzmon's whole thing here. If you're curious, read the book – at least read the first two chapters before you decide to join in the shunning. But as a big fan of world history and the similarities and differences between the development of different societies over the millenia, as I was reading his book I kept thinking of other examples of tribal identity politics through the ages. One of the things I love about the US, despite a perennially despicable government committing one holocaust after another – the African holocaust, the Native American holocaust, the Korea holocaust, the Vietnam holocaust, not to mention the German and Japanese holocausts committed by the USAF – and despite all the efforts of racist pricks in power who do their best to maintain all sorts of divisions within American society – in the end, the US is full of hopelessly assimilated mutts like myself. It is, in fact, to no small extent, a melting pot, and although the bigotry that often is one of the factors that leads to assimilation must certainly be condemned, the fact that the country is full of people who, like me, can trace their ancestry to at least a dozen countries, tribes and historic religious affiliations, is a beautiful thing. It leaves many of us, especially those of us living comfortable lives, who are broadly accepted as part of a given society, perplexed by tribalism. For us assimilated types it doesn't come naturally, and if it is to exist it must be very purposefully ingrained. (Which is why the ADL hates Atzmon – he's interfering with the ingraining process with his book.)

I kept wondering, as I was reading Atzmon's book, what would reactions of the general public be like to a similarly critical deconstruction of Catholic religion and tribal identity? I suspect such a book would be taken very differently depending on the locale -- depending on whether you live in a place where Catholics are disproportionately living in poverty or faced with discrimination, or have been in such a position in living memory, such as Northern Ireland, as opposed to places like the US or the other 26 counties of Ireland. For example, I have never met anyone living in Belfast who would refer to themselves as a "recovering Catholic." Despite the efforts of the historically oppressed Catholic community in the northern six counties to distance themselves from the Catholic tribal identity and embrace a more inclusive, Republican identity (Protestants welcome!), the effect of centuries of anti-Catholic discrimination and oppression has left people with a much stronger attachment to their Catholic identity than most Catholics would tend to have in the Republic of Ireland or in the United States, where you will often meet people who, when asked if they grew up in a religious family or some other such question, will define themselves as a "recovering Catholic."

Most people immediately understand what is meant by "recovering Catholic." The emphasis may vary depending on the person and what their experiences were like, but most likely anyone "recovering" from being a Catholic is trying to recover from growing up in an atmosphere where they were led to believe that sex is bad, everyone else who doesn't believe the way we do is going to hell and should therefore be converted to my religion, abortion is a sin, homosexuality is a sin, etc. Yet if someone were to describe themselves as a "recovering Jew," in many cases the room would become uncomfortably quiet, I imagine, as people gradually walk away from the offending party, lest they be accused of anti-Semitism by standing too close. Except in Brooklyn or Tel Aviv, where being Jewish is quite normal and unexotic, and where most people would understand immediately (whether or not they like it) that this person is recovering from growing up in an environment where everyone who wasn't Jewish was a goy and was not to be trusted and was a closet anti-Semite, where you shouldn't marry a goy, where you're always either too Jewish or not Jewish enough, where you're a failure for not being a doctor or a lawyer, where you're part of a Chosen group of people and you're better than others, but don't say that in public or they'll say you poisoned the wells, etc.

Sticking with the Catholic example here, though, reading the "debate" (if you can call attack and counter-attack a debate) between Atzmon's detractors and supporters (some of whom appear to be lunatics), I was thinking about what a friend in West Belfast was telling me about some things that happened back in the day, during the Troubles. The IRA was, like so many movements, full of inevitable contradictions. So much of the Republican movement had a distinctly socialist orientation, and elements of the Republican movement were very critical of the Catholic church presently and historically, including even critical of the church's stance on abortion and many other still-sensitive issues among many people of Catholic origin there and around the world. But much of the IRA's funding came from Irish-American supporters in the US, who were often otherwise fairly conservative politically and socially as well. So the IRA's socialist message and anyone associated with the Republican movement who was speaking out in support of legalizing abortion was seen as an obstacle to the Republican movement, even if many people quietly agreed with the dissenters.

Many people have made relevant comparisons between the global movement in support of Palestinian self-determination and the global movement in support of Irish Republicanism. There are many more relevant comparisons to be made, and I'd venture to say that this is another of them. In both cases, with the various dissenters within the anti-Zionist movement and the Irish Republican movement, I really do sympathize with both the dissenters and the "united front." I understand that strategic unity is vital for any successful movement. But I also understand that honest debate, freedom of expression, and critical analysis of everything – very much including Jewish identity politics – is also vitally important. I hope that a unity of purpose can be maintained even with such substantive differences in our various understandings of reality and history. Moreover, I hope that Atzmon's honest efforts to disentangle the whole question of Jewishness will lead other people from other tribal backgrounds to do more of the same. And I hope that more people will read his book before they feel the need to call him an anti-Semite.

The Israeli Terror

I was in Olympia, Washington driving towards Evergreen State College when I got a phone call from someone in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. An Evergreen graduate named Rachel Corrie had been killed a few days before by an Israeli soldier in an armored bulldozer, and someone with an Australian accent on my cell phone named Tom was wondering whether it was OK for the International Solidarity Movement to use the lyrics to a song I had just written about the incident on their website. Rachel's murder was followed quickly by the murder of a British ISM activist named Tom Hurndall.

And now, almost six years to the day after the murder of Rachel Corrie, my friend and comrade Tristan Anderson has been critically injured by the IDF. He joins ISM activist Brian Avery, who was also shot in the face. Brian survived, seriously disfigured but otherwise intact. Tristan lies in a coma in a hospital near Tel Aviv and may or may not be as lucky as Brian. His brain was exposed by the tear gas canister fired at close range at his face, and as I write, large parts of his frontal lobe have had to be removed by the surgeons.

Rachel, Tom, Brian and Tristan join the ranks of the thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians killed and the tens of thousands maimed by the IDF since 2000 alone. Being privileged foreigners (at least before they were killed or maimed), they did not have the opportunity to join the ranks of the millions of Palestinians and Lebanese who have been driven into desperate poverty, malnourishment and homelessness by the Israeli invasion and occupation of their lands.

There are many other contemporary and historical examples of genocidal regimes. A few of them – contemporary Turkey, Indonesia or, chiefly among them, the United States – lay claim to the notion that they are democratic countries. Others, such as Saddam's Iraq, apartheid South Africa, and Nazi Germany also made such claims, but nobody believed them. It's challenging to make comparisons between them, at least in terms of trying to figure out which one should deserve the title of Most Genocidal Regime. There are issues of scale, longevity and historical circumstances that make such judgements difficult. Other types of comparisons, though, are not only easy to make, but seem as unavoidable as the elephant in the living room.

It probably didn't help that as the Israeli military was laying siege to the Gaza Strip two months ago I was on a tour of Australia, free from my responsibilities as a father and thus with more free time than I ever have when I'm home these days. I did then what I normally do in my free time – read. The book I happened to be reading at the time was one I had been meaning to read for decades, which I had just picked up at a book store during a visit to Canada – William Shirer's 1,200-page tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Israel's massive armored divisions and ultra-modern Air Force was laying waste to an already-occupied walled ghetto filled with nearly starving refugees armed with nothing more than rocks and the occasional small arms, mostly home-made, I was reading about the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The comparisons are not exact. At the height of what was then widely known as the Nazi Terror, in Auschwitz the SS killed thousands of Jews and Russians every day. No such gas chambers exist or have ever existed in Israel. But for those of you reading this who have not already decided that I am a self-loathing Jew or some kind of anti-Semite, I would like to share with you some of the streams of consciousness that were passing through my head as I was attending protests in Australia against the bombing of Gaza, in between the unavoidable visits to the ubiquitous Australian war memorials and the next chapter of Shirer's history of Nazi Germany.

There I was, bearing witness to the siege of a walled ghetto already under occupation. There have been many sieges of cities over the centuries, but sieges of already-occupied walled ghettoes are far fewer, and for any student of history the similarities are obvious, the comparisons inevitable.

When I first visited Israel in 1999 I was struck by what a nation of trauma survivors it was. I was reminded immediately of my first visit to Ireland some years before, where the great famine that wiped out half the population over a century before seemed like it had happened perhaps a generation ago. In Israel the Nazi Holocaust seemed to have happened yesterday, and in the mindset of many Israelis it seemed as if it were carried out by Palestinians rather than Germans. I encountered anti-Arab racism daily in Israel. When I sang songs about the horrors of the sanctions against Iraq (around a half million Iraqi children dead as a direct result at that point according to UNICEF) I was told by middle-class, middle-aged Israeli folk music fans that killing Iraqi children was OK because they were just going to grow up to become terrorists anyway. I was told that “the Arab mindset” was hopelessly backwards and that They just wanted to “drive us into the sea.” (I even heard Israeli Jews refer to “Latin numerals” when it was clear from the context that they meant Arabic numerals – a Freudian slip I'm sure.)

Most of the Israeli Jews I met seemed confident of the historical persecution of Jews in the Middle East. Actual history bears no resemblance to their version of it, but this did not get in the way of their fantasies. It was in Europe where the Catholic Church and the Nazi movement carried out pogroms and built death camps, not in the Muslim world, but these Jews identified culturally with their European inquisitors, not with their historical Muslim and Christian friends with whom their Arab and Persian Jewish brethren had lived in peace for thousands of years.

And now after decades of the so-called “peace process” Israel's new Foreign Minister openly advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Israel, for the driving out of the million or so Palestinians living within Israel's 1948 borders. In this nation of survivors of the Nazi Terror, race laws reign supreme. There is one set of laws for Jews, and another set of laws for everyone else. As in Nazi Germany, “everyone else” is then divided into groups with relative privileges in comparison with each other (for example, “Israeli Arabs” vs. West Bank Palestinians vs. those condemned to live in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison and the most densely-populated place on Earth).

Like the Zionists, the Nazis also came to power on the backs of trauma and claims of victimhood. For decades, history has been written by the victors, so it is hard to imagine how well Hitler was able to sell the case to the German people (and to many others around the world) that Germany was a nation oppressed by their neighbors as well as by “the enemy within,” the Jews.

Millions of Germans had been slaughtered -- along with millions of Russians, French, Brits, Australians, etc. -- in the War to End All Wars (WWI). German Jews were disproportionately of a leftwing persuasion, and many of the leaders of the social democrats who signed the Treaty of Versailles were, in fact, Jewish. Thus the Jews could be blamed for Germany's defeat (never mind the Kaiser's imperial ambitions) and could also somehow be blamed for the devastating economic depression that followed it (never mind the fact that much of the rest of the world was also in the throes of a similarly devastating depression). The Nazi solution to the “Jewish problem” was to create a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Jews, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military or doing any number of other jobs, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Nazis built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Jewish refugees had fled, laid siege to the ghettoes, starving and ultimately killing most of the residents.

Fast forward a few years to 1948, to Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel's father and others in the Zionist movement. The propaganda to try to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine was that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” but the Zionist movement actually on the ground in Palestine knew better. For them, the Palestinian people were all too real, and were an obstacle, a problem to be fixed through systematic, brutal ethnic cleansing. The Zionist movement in Palestine, followed by the State of Israel, dealt with the Palestinian problem (that is, the problem of the existence of Palestinians), by creating a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Palestinians, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Jews built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Palestinian refugees had fled, laying siege to their cities, ghettoes and refugee camps, starving and killing thousands upon thousands of the residents, oftentimes in the form of wholesale slaughter that in some instances rivalled the intensity of the Nazi genocide.

The Irgun and other groups whom the British administrators of Palestine referred to as terrorists blew up buses full of Palestinian civilians, attacked Palestinian towns and cities with naval bombardment, laid siege to towns with tanks and automatic weapons on three sides in order to force the residents to flee. This is how the Zionist movement formed their state, this was the Israeli “war of independence.”

The Zionists who were flooding into Palestine and quickly changing the demographics of Palestinian society claimed they were being persecuted. There were many isolated incidents that could be called persecution, and many more incidents of Zionist settlers in pre-1948 Palestine persecuting the residents with whom they were sharing a country. By the same token, the Nazis made mostly baseless claims that German-speaking citizens of Poland and Czechoslovakia were being persecuted – the Germans were being persecuted and had to defend themselves by invading their neighbors. By the time the Nazis invaded and occupied France, and Britain finally decided to make good on its treaty obligations and fight fascism, the Nazis could – quite rightly – claim that they had been attacked by Britain. The Germans were the victims of Britain was the Nazi line.

Fast forward again to 1948. The Arab countries neighboring Palestine belatedly sent in a force to defend their fellow Arabs from the Zionists – a force that was numerically and militarily no match for the Zionist army and was quickly defeated. But in the annals of Zionist propaganda this was not Arabs coming to the defense of their brethren who were being slaughtered and driven from their land, it was an “unprovoked attack,” like the British assault on poor Germany. Like the Germans surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on keeping the Germans down, “the Arabs” wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.”

One of Hitler's favorite methods of managing, at least in the Nazi-run press, of appearing to be the voice of reason in the face of his “war-mongering” European neighbors was to make a pretense of “peace negotiations” which were generally last-minute ultimatums that could be accepted or not without any actual negotiating at all. For example, Czechoslovakia (and its ostensible allies, Britain and France) was told it could give up the Sudetenland and other Czech territories and thus avert destruction at the hands of the German military. It actually acquiesced to all German demands (with the encouragement of Britain and France) and was annexed by Germany anyway, on the grounds that the Czechs were being unreasonable, that Czechs were terrorizing ethnic Germans within its borders, etc.

Similarly, the Israeli government regularly asserts that if countries like Syria and Lebanon and political movements like Hamas would only “recognize Israel's right to exist” then there could be peace. The Arab states are consistently portrayed by Israel as the unreasonable parties, and any efforts on the parts of Arab countries to obey the will of the majority of their people and stand up to Israel's daily theft of Palestinian land and slaughter of Palestinian people is portrayed by Israeli leaders as proof that they want to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yet when the Israeli government is asked the very simple question, where are your borders, no answer is forthcoming. Like Nazi Germany, the neighboring countries are expected to acquiesce to all Israeli demands or be portrayed as the aggressors. But how can any reasonable country be expected to recognize a nation that will not itself recognize its own borders? What is Israel, and where does it end and its neighbors' lands begin? Also, on what grounds should Israel be recognized, when it is daily involved in violating all sorts of international laws, daily involved in theft and murder, daily involved with the subjugation of the Palestinian people, and refuses to give back land it took by force of arms from Lebanon and Syria?

Resistance to Nazi tyranny within Germany or in occupied countries was dealt with through incredible brutality. Entire families of dissidents would routinely be sent to concentration camps and often killed. If an occupation soldier was killed, collective punishment was the modus operandi of the Nazi regime. Oftentimes a hundred people in a village would be killed in retribution for the murder of one German soldier.

Similarly, whereas the families of partisans would be sent to the camps, the houses of the families of resistance fighters from the West Bank and Gaza are routinely destroyed. An attack on Israeli territory is routinely responded to (even when the attack itself was generally a response) with massively disproportionate collective punishment, including attacks by helicopter gunships on densely-populated areas where multiple families are killed in order to take out one Hamas or other political leader. Border closures resulting in loss of employment for hundreds of thousands are another routine Israeli response to any resistance to their occupation. Thousands of children and adults are routinely arrested and held indefinitely in Israeli prisons without ever being charged (in courts that are themselves illegitimate anyway). As in Nazi-occupied Europe, no Palestinian man or boy can ever be confident that he will not be dragged out of bed on any given night, taken from his home and arrested.

We are told by the Israeli government not to pay attention to the numbers, that proportionality doesn't matter. There often seems to be a clear effort on the part of the IDF and its political leaders to kill a hundred Palestinians for every Israeli killed, as was the case in the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. If proportionality is irrelevant and morality has no numerical measure, then presumably it would be morally justifiable from the Israeli government perspective if a hundred Israelis were killed for every Palestinian the IDF shoots, but if such a thing were to happen we could be sure to hear from the Israelis all about Palestinian monstrousness, no doubt. This, however, is extremely unlikely ever to happen, since there is no Palestinian military, no Palestinian tanks, no Palestinian Air Force, etc. It's jet fighters versus home-made bombs and ineffective “rocklets” that rarely hit any target.

The Nazis became famous for, among other things, developing methods of torture that make the Spanish Inquisition look humane. Israel has also excelled at developing new ways to cause horrible physical and emotional suffering to human beings. During the most recent Israeli “war” against Lebanon, among the many buildings demolished from the air was the old Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon. When I visited Lebanon in 2005 I toured the Khiam Prison, which was in an area abandoned by the Israelis in 2000 after years of fighting between the IDF, their Lebanese collaborators, and Hezbollah. In Khiam Prison one could see where the US military got its ideas for torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. There were specially-designed boxes just big enough for a man to kneel, far too small to stand up or lie down, in which men would be held for weeks at a time and subjected day and night to loud music, regularly taken out of their boxes to be beaten.

We are told by the Israelis that the massive civilian death toll among Palestinians is unavoidable, since Palestinian “terrorists” hide among the civilian population when they carry out their attacks on occupation soldiers. We are also told that the Palestinians are targeting civilians in the (now almost nonexistent) suicide attacks inside Israel. It's an interesting form of two-faced logic, since the main form of transportation used by Israeli soldiers are public buses. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who takes a public bus in Israel. In this highly militarized society where most men and women over the age of eighteen are either active-duty soldiers or reservists, you can hardly find a public bus that is not transporting at least one uniformed soldier with a machine gun hanging off of his shoulder.

It's also an interesting form of dual logic, since the ghetto fighters of Warsaw so justifiably revered by Israeli society were fighting entirely from civilian areas, since they were themselves civilians, fighting from and for their homes, armed with home-made or occasionally smuggled weapons, just like the Palestinian fighters today.

The Nazis found collaborators within the Jews of Warsaw, who became their Jewish Police, or Judenrat. Prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it was the Judenrat who arrested or rounded up Jews wanted by the Nazis, and brought them to the border of the ghetto, to be safely (for the Nazis) handed over, and generally sent to their deaths. Taking a page from this history, the Oslo “peace process” involved a dividing up of Palestinian territory into areas A, B and C. Area A is the downtown, or the area within the ghetto walls that now surround so many of the bombed-out shells that were once thriving Palestinian towns and cities. Area A is the part that Israelis have generously allowed to be policed by Fatah, which has increasingly become, in the eyes of many Palestinians, Israeli collaborators. Israel regularly invades Area A parts of the West Bank whenever it wants to, but otherwise it tries to get the Fatah police to do their policing for them.

Hamas, which refuses to go along with the program, is then painted as a terrorist group that simply must be wiped out, because they doggedly refuse to be collaborators. Like the Jewish Fighting Organization (the ZOB was their Polish acronym) in Warsaw, Hamas does not deal gently with collaborators or with the Israeli occupation forces. Facing impossible, overwhelming odds and essentially certain death, Hamas does what they can to mount some kind of a resistance to the Israeli Terror. ZOB fighters referred to themselves as the “walking dead.” Like the ZOB and other valiant resistance groups throughout the history of every continent, Hamas also embraces martyrdom. Embracing martyrdom is often painted by Israelis and others as some kind of peculiar trait of “Islamic fundamentalists,” which is ridiculous and completely ahistorical, as well as an insult to the memory of the very ghetto fighters in Warsaw who helped inspire the Zionist state in the first place.

Hitler loved to portray his “Aryan” soldiers as icons of morality and good behavior, which of course was nonsense. Like the IDF, the German soldiers fought very well and bravely, especially from the inside of a tank. And like the IDF, who are also widely viewed within Israel as the world's most moral army, the German soldiers consistently engaged in acts of sadism against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. And like the IDF, they were almost never punished for such acts.

Reminders of the sadism that permeates the Israeli military are never far away, and are often described most eloquently by former occupation soldiers who turned against their commanders in the Knesset. (Thankfully, there are many such soldiers. Unfortunately, there aren't nearly enough of them to make a difference.) The tendency of IDF soldiers to shoot children in the head with live ammunition is well-known and well-documented.

I vividly recall the outrage of many of my Jewish Israeli fans when Ariel Sharon “visited” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, along with hundreds of soldiers, prompting some stone-throwing from local Palestinian youths, to which the soldiers responded with live ammunition, killing many, leading to the Al-Aqsa Intifada and thousands more deaths, overwhelmingly of Palestinian children.

My fans weren't outraged at Sharon, however, they were outraged at me for writing my first of a series of songs about the Israeli occupation, “Children of Jerusalem.” What many people took particular offense to was the line about the general (Sharon) grinning. They told me this couldn't be accurate, because IDF soldiers carried out their duties with a grim sense of necessity, never enjoying the killing of the kids who were always shot because they were in the way of the ubiquitous “Palestinian gunmen” who were always firing first, at the poor defenseless tanks which for some reason were in the middle of their cities. For my outrageous accusations they called me a fascist and all sorts of other things.

But unfortunately they're wrong. The soldiers often are grinning. Like the smirking soldier who was standing in the ambulance that was trying to transport Tristan Anderson to the hospital just a few days ago, refusing to move to allow the medics to close the door. Tristan was only one of a multitude of victims of the Israeli Terror, and this sadistic soldier was only one of many other sadistic Israeli soldiers obeying the whims of a government run by sadistic, racist men and women.

Israel bears many of the hallmarks of a fascist regime. What's more, it is, like Nazi Germany, a very popular regime among its people. Like Nazi Germany, it is justly reviled by people around the world, but actively supported by so many of its people. Like Nazi Germany, governments and corporations around the world prefer to profit from trading with it rather than standing up to it and isolating it. Like Nazi Germany, it is dependent on the outside world for food, fuel and other basic necessities of life.

Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is not going to be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated if the people of the world – especially in the US -- pressure their governments to recognize Israel for the aggressive, racist state that it fundamentally is and has been since 1948, cut off the aid and impose trade sanctions of the sort that were imposed on South Africa under apartheid. The beginning of the process of isolating this small country from the world community that allows it to prosper is to educate people about the true nature of Zionism.

The Middle East has been and must be shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews as it was since long before the Zionist armies expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948. Nothing, including the Nazi Holocaust, justifies what has been done and, most importantly, continues to be done to the Palestinians. The time is long since past to call the Jewish state out for the fundamentally racist regime that it is. In the name of the ghetto fighters of Warsaw, let us strive to see a world where no one needs to die with a stone in their hand trying to defend a starved, walled ghetto against an army of tanks and planes, where people like Tristan don't need to have their brains blown out for trying to prevent a wall from being built around yet another ghetto.