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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
“The resolution suggests that all anti-Zionism—it states—is antisemitism. That’s either intellectually disingenuous or just factually wrong,” said New York Representative Jerry Nadler, who voted present. “The authors if they were at all familiar with Jewish history & culture should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was and is expressly not antisemitic. This resolution ignores the fact that even today, certain Orthodox Hasidic Jewish communities … have held views that are at odds with the modern Zionist conception.”
You brought up South Africa as an example of a nonviolent end of apartheid. Do the Palestinians have a leader who believes in a nonviolent end to the conflict in Israel?
Do you think South African apartheid was brought to an end by one guy?
There have been lots of nonviolent protest movements in Palestine and there are prominent Palestinian and Israeli advocates for one democratic state
Do you think the end of South Africa apartheid would have been nonviolent without nonviolent leaders?
A one-state secular democracy sounds great. How do you get there from where we are now? There are prominent advocates for a lot of things, but none of those people are in power on either side. As long as Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza and Hamas is using their blood to “awaken the revolutionary spirit,” we can’t reasonably expect anyone to compromise without being forced.
There are nonviolent Palestinian leaders, in the West Bank, in the diaspora, and probably in Gaza outside of Hamas. And the movement for Palestinian rights is finally being heard on the global stage.
Israel and Hamas will need to be forced. Nonviolent protest, boycotts, sanctions, are ways of exerting force without fueling the flames of war.
I know it’s hard to believe in the goodness of people and their power to change things for the better, but it is essential when the alternative is brutality
I know it’s worth trying, but I don’t believe it will work, and I don’t believe that everyone calling for an end to Israel thinks that it can be achieved without brutality. That’s my whole point.