After Gaza?

December 22, 2023December 31, 2024 ~ The Koboi Project

Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.

Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-02/israel-gaza-palestinian-american-history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-escalates-huwara

https://historyguy.com/list_of_wars_middle_east.html

Ethnic Cleansing by Expulsion or Extermination

November 17, 2023November 17, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation leads to foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”

This intervention in the form of an advertisement first appeared in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1967. It was inserted and signed by 12 members of Matzpen which was an organization consisting of Jewish and Arab activists who were committed to a socialist revolution in Israel, opposed to Zionism, and champions of Palestinian rights. Sadly, it’s warning about the escalatory causal mechanics of the Zionist/ Palestinian conflict seems prophetic in light of the horrific events of October 7th and what has ensued.

In the video below Moshé Machover, the document’s only surviving signatory explains that it was not a moral statement but a definition of a process. He says,

” … It is inherent in this process that it escalates because the victims of oppression resist and the perpetrator of oppression, the colonizer, can only find one way of dealing with this resistance and that is to increase the repression. Increased repression creates more resistance, escalates more resistance, and this is a dynamic process … it escalates…”

This escalatory process has led to what is happening in Gaza today, to what Machover describes in another interview as ethnic cleansing by expulsion or extermination.

Image: http s ://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/ethnic-cleansing-in-the-current-conflict/

https://matzpen.org/english/about-matzpen/?mc_cid=c0f61aa411&mc_eid=c19c9f61fe

From the River to the Sea 2

November 16, 2023November 16, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

” a) The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

This is the first tenet of the Nethanhayu’s Likud Party’s original Platform statement of 1977. Any claim by Zionists that From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free is a call to genocide is disingenuous and obfuscatory. In 1942, European and American Zionist’s set forth the seminal Biltmore Conference Declaration which laid claim to the whole of the British Mandatory Palestine for their new settler colonial state –

“8. … The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.“

Indeed, it is the Zionist version of From the River (the Jordan) to the Sea, that is founded on acts of ethnic cleansing, starting with the Nkabah of 1948 and continuing on through the last 75 years by way of sustained apartheid oppression, relentless settlement activity, crushing military rule, and murderous wars on civilian populations. It is Israel, that is an exclusive and exclusionary ethnocracy. Before the imposition of this Jewish state upon its territory, Palestine was a multiethnic, multireligious land of Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, Bedouins and Jews. There is nothing to suggest that either contemporary Palestinian national aspirations or the slogan uttered in this cause, is genocidal or hateful in any way. It is not a call for ridding the land of Jews. From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free should be understood in the context of the above declaration and the second tenet of the Likud Party Platform which explicitly refuses the establishment of a Palestinian State anywhere on this land.-

” b) A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel. and frustrates any prospect of peace.“

While it must be acknowledged that a liberation slogan can mean different things to different people, From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free, when interpreted in its proper historical context, is simply a cry for freedom, across all the land, for all the people.

Zionism ≠ Judaism

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, who is the rabbi of a congregation in Queens, New York, explains the relationship between Judaism and Zionism, and sets out the basis of the Orthodox rejection of Jewish nationalism and the Jewish State. First, he defines the Jewish people as being a religious community as opposed to an ethnic or linguistic grouping. He then goes on to explain how Zionism was built on a self-loathing of Judaic piety, an atheistic nationalism, whose very secularism negates the claim to a promised land, and a Christian Zionist eschatology that predates the Jewish Zionist movement. Rabbi Shapiro shows how contemporary antisemitism is sustained by its tethering to antizionism and helps explain the West’s unwavering support of Israel, even as this support approaches complicity in genocide. As of November 9 (07:30 GMT), it is estimated that 10,812 Gazans (including 4,412 children and 2,918 women) have been killed in the ongoing Israeli invasion.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Witness to Slaughter

November 9, 2023December 20, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

Matteo di Giovanni is of particular interest in the present series of posts (see links below) as his reputation as a significant Renaissance artist is based on his being the author of four monumental versions of the Massacre of the Innocents. The detail above is from the version painted for the Sant’Agostino Chapel in Siena. The foreground of this image (see the full image below) is filled with figures, entangled in the violence of the massacre. There are anguished mothers, resisting mothers; there are babies, both dead and dying; there are the soldiers, thrusting and slashing their way to fulfilling Herod’s sinister decree.

In the selected detail, which, judging from the lighting, is a focal point of the composition, a soldier is shown thrusting his sword into a baby’s mouth, its point exiting out the infant’s skull. As the soldier concentrates on his action, his expression and stance suggest that he recognizes the disproportionality of his weapon to his task. The baby is shown, with blank eyes, in the throes of a horrific death. The anguished mother looks at us in mute resignation. Behind the mother, is an odd figure who may or may not be attached to one of the disembodied weapon-wielding arms glimpsed through the mass of writhing humanity, stares out at the viewer, engaging with us in a manner that is not uncommon in the Rennaisance Istoria (History painting). He communicates with us as if to say, “you see” or perhaps, “you are a witness”, or even “you are complicit.”

In the contemporary massacre that is ongoing in the land of the very Book referenced in this image, the number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza stands at 8,663 (UpdatedDecember 19), and we are all witnesses to this slaughter of innocents, as it happens on our screens.

The Conflation of Judaism and Nazism

November 7, 2023November 7, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

Max Blumenthal introduces the incendiary neologism ‘Judeao-Nazi’, coined by Orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who had a critical view of the developments in the state of Israel. Leibovitz was an unusual Zionist who had a paradoxically nonsectarian and secular vision for his nation. In the recording presented above, from the late 1980s or early 1990s (Leibovitz passed away in 1994), he says, “the entire world knows … that we use torture … to make Arab prisoners talk. That’s what I mean by ‘Judeo-Nazi’ … If I raise my voice it’s because some people still don’t know, that’s why I shout it out loud. Judeo-Nazis do exist.” Blumenthal explains how Leibovitz had predicted that Israel would eventually run concentration camps and insinuates that Leibovitz’s terminology is now fully justified by the situation in Gaza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshayahu_Leibowitz#cite_note-stanford-7

From the River to the Sea

November 2, 2023November 10, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

The national motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” which translates to “From sea to sea,” marks the occupation of a land which the prior occupants still call Turtle Island. While this proprietary geographical imagery derives from the Biblical Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth,” its eschatological sense of “dominion” has been repeatedly transposed into an imperial one throughout the Common Era. The territorial imagery of “A mari Usque Ad Mare,” is evoked again in ‘America the Beautiful’, a popular patriotic song often confused with the American National anthem,

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This proprietary boundary symbolism seems to be an identifiable feature of European settler colonial imagery and lore. Indeed, European settler colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated in 1452, when Roman Catholic Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the lands and the lives of non-Christians. While Zionism does not derive from this Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the founding of Israel in the violent displacement of native Palestinians by non-native European Jews, can be seen as the last significant instantiation of such an ethnopolitical ‘dominion’.

Given both the history of settlement and erasure of Palestinians from their lands and the fact that in the past month, 10,733 Palestinians have been killed (10,569 in Gaza and 164 in the West Bank, November 8, 10:50 GMT Update) with the complicity of the collective West, I wonder if it is a guilty self-projection that underpins the interpretation that the freedom slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a call for genocide (mass killing or other form of eradication with intent)? In fact, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has recently explained, this is not a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, but “a call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ for everybody.

Image: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/from-sea-to-shining-sea.html

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/2/from-the-river-to-the-sea-what-does-the -palestinian-slogan-really-mean

The Shame of the Sunaks

October 31, 2023November 8, 2023 ~ The Koboi Project

European settler colonialism was initiated in the 15th century, on the premise of a divinely ordained white supremacy¹, and the founding of Israel in the land of the Palestinians during the British Mandate in the 20th Century was the last significant instantiation of this mode of ethnopolitical domination, albeit it might be seen as a species of settler colonialism all of its own.² The current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, removed Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Paul Bristow from his post for rebelling against the government’s position on the ongoing war in Gaza. Bristow had expressed his support for a ceasefire and called on the PM to push for an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas. That Sunak, who rose to his high station in the British polity from Indian origins, and who should, therefore, be alert to the inhumanity of subjugation, would be complicit in Israel’s genocidal colonial expansion in the 21st century, is a shame unto him, his family, and their origins.

This theocratic doctrine was initiated 1452, when Pope Nicholas V issued a bull Dum Diversas which authorized King Afonso V of Portugal, to subjugate the lands of non-Christians.
While, it can be argued that Zionism does not derive directly from the Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the ethos of populating lands of non-Jews with European Jewish settlers under the auspices and geo-political designs of the British Empire, in my opinion, within the bounds of a broad notion of settler colonialism.

Image: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/rishi-sunak-piles-pressure-on-spineless-keir-starmer-as-he-sacks-parliamentary-aide-paul-bristow-for-defying-him-with-demand-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza/ar-AA1j6jnu

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/

Post-tradition in Canadian Politics

September 17, 2021September 17, 2021 ~ The Koboi Project

The revivification of religion in contemporary society leaves me with a sense of foreboding with regard to the future of humanity. There has been a resurgence of religious values in the politics of the 21st Century as theocratic and quasi-theocratic modes have made an impression, even in what were once staunchly secular democracies. The Christian right has brought socially conservative positions to the forefront of the politics of the USA. The Hindu right has turned India’s avowedly secular democracy into a nation-state steeped in Hindutva (Hinduness). Before these developments, there were the theocentric formulations of Islamic fundamentalism and Zionism. Tragically, all of these ‘post-traditional’ hybridizations of religious truths with modern politics have resulted in the division and alienation of peoples.

There are, however, examples of a more integrative incorporation of religious values at the forefront of human affairs. Canadian politician and leader of the NDP (New Democratic Party), Jagmeet Singh, is an exemplar of this more inclusive post-traditionalism. In a 2017 interview with GQ magazine, he articulates his religious approach to contemporary secular society, “My Sikh spirituality … influences my political style. We strongly believe in social justice as an element of our founding philosophy—that there is one energy and that we are all connected, kind of like the force. So if I see someone else suffering, as a Sikh I see that as me suffering. There’s this morality that flows from this idea that we are one and connected, and we celebrate diversity and people of different backgrounds, cultures, and religions..” He underscores his point by citing a Sikh mantra that wishes for the “betterment of all humankind.”

https://www.gq.com/story/jagmeet-singh-interview

Mahathir’s Error on the Jews

March 22, 2019April 17, 2019 ~ The Koboi Project

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s reputation for being ‘antisemitic’, was recently brought to mind by the problems experienced by his family in the movie business (in the context of investments made in the production of the film Dr Strange). In the interest of the truth, of his legacy, and perhaps even of his family’s business interests, I urge him to make one specific correction in his world Jewry rhetoric. As evidenced by the Senator Ilhan Omar affair, there is an urgent need to cleave in two the confused referent/s of these signifiers – ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist.’ In fact, as explained by Rabbi Dovid Weiss in the Al Jazeera interview above, the conflation of these signs serves the cause of Zionism. Haderim (Ultra-Orthodox) Jews are amongst the firmest and truest defenders of Palestine and Palestinians. Many Muslim nations, communities and leaders have been fair weather friends of the Palestinians, but not these gentle, archaic and God fearing Jews. Just listen to the humility, clarity, love and courage expressed by the Rabbi, bearing in mind that his people resist Zionism from communities across the world and even, at great risk, from the within the heart of Israel (Haderim Jews constituted over 12% of Israel’s population in 2017). While I am tickled by the reflexive candour of Mahathir’s taxonomy of noses and comprehend the political expediency revealed in his explanation that ‘the people’ will understand better if he says ‘Yahudi‘ (Jews) instead of ‘Zionist’, I am nevertheless perplexed by, even ashamed of, his perpetuation of this Zionist conflation, not least because it obscures the diversity of positions held by the Jewish peoples, amongst whom are these staunch allies of Palestine! I hope that the good Dr. will be more nuanced in his use of the terms ‘Jewish’, ‘Zionist’ and even ‘Israeli’ before he ends his time on the world’s stage.