With acknowledgement to Professor Ran Greenstein from Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg ….
Naomi Chazan may wish for self-determination for both “peoples”, yet equal rights under the law – individual human rights – precede any presumed collective rights. This is the contradiction which to their discredit, liberal zionists cannot resolve. Yet typically, racism is full of contradictory anomalies. Is it reasonable to oppose equal rights for all as a basic principle of democracy?
There is no customary law which defines a collective “right to exist”. If Israel cannot institute equal rights for all its citizens and cease from being a racist state which entitles some people above others on the artificial basis of ethno-religious identity, it guarantees its own disintegration – such tyrannies of privilege inevitably collapse under the weight of the contradictions required to sustain them.
The two state solution which Chazan proffers is reminiscent of the ‘separate but equal’ propaganda pushed by white South African apartheidists when they attempted to justify their horrific bantustans.
The liberation movement at which liberal zionism baulks and casts as a chimera, BDS, is ethical, legitimised by its grounding in human rights as the unified grassroots call for global solidarity of people of conscience from oppressed Palestinians themselves. BDS addresses the apartheid perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the hideous Occupation, the lack of recognition of Palestinians’ right of return and the lack of equal rights for all in Israel. All these aims are supported solidly by international humanitarian law.
Like the apartheid South African state, Israel cannot halt the inevitable – boycotts, divestments and sanctions are an unstoppable non-violent means to ease the transformation of this belligerent oppressor and its supporters, be they rightwing or cognitively dissonant ‘liberal’ zionists.
Related Links
Samah Sabawi incisively demolishes Chazan’s six major dissonances
Chazan’s efforts to undermine BDS need to be seen in context. At the end of the day, Chazan will go home to Israel where she is a privileged Jewish citizen with all her rights intact. She is part of and an enabler of the establishment that denies Palestinians their basic rights and freedoms, and as such, she is not in a position to be dictating to the Palestinians their methods of struggle or acting as gatekeeper for the international solidarity movements, preaching to them what is allowed and what is not in standing with the Palestinians. As in every human struggle for freedom, justice and equality, that right is the prerogative of those who live behind the walls, hindered by checkpoints and held captive to siege and military oppression.
Naomi Chazan understands that Israel’s fascist anti-boycott law is destructive of Israel and that it means settlement-only boycotters may increasingly back full boycott but clings to her irrational belief that BDS is counter-productive.
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Have current events in the Middle East made a solution more or less likely? Hear both sides of the debate when International and Australian speakers Ghassan Hage, Naomi Chazan, Saree Makdisi and Peter Hartcher discussed recent events in Israel and Palestine and what they meant for the future.
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Goodbye Melanie! Phillips leaves the Spectator as the complaints pile up.