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Month: June 2024 Page 2 of 4

The case of Miriam Libicki’s un-banning is cause for hope (I hope)

Here is an article that is mostly a post-ban interview with the artist Miriam Libicki. It also includes the complete text of the original “accountability statement” in which Libicki’s banning from the Vancouver Comic Art Festival (VanCAF) was announced to the public (but somehow without actually ever mentioning her by name!):
MIRIAM LIBICKI ON VANCAF, BANNINGS, AND POLITICAL PROTESTS by Zach Rabiroff, The Comics Journal, June 12, 2024

And here is another article that gives some further details, including some interesting tidbits of the backlash that forced VanCAF to back down:
VanCAF resignations and board change follow controversial ban of Miriam Libicki by Dean Simons, Comics Beat, 06/04/2024

Personally I see this as cause for at least some measure of cautious optimism. In the current climate of world-wide unhinged hatred for Israel, Libicki’s initial banning was completely predictable. What wasn’t predictable was that there would be sufficient outcry against the banning to force VanCAF to reverse their decision and publicly apologize.

And here is an hour long presentation by Miriam Libicki (“I talk about my whole career and I do a reading from my work in progress at the end”) that she did a year ago:

Libicki’s book, Jobnik! is currently sold out on Amazon:

And here is her page at the Jewish Book Council (where you’ll find more articles by her, interviews, and more information about her work):
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/miriam-libicki

What is Zionism? (Part One)

The melancholy and disgraceful fact being established that, in these closing decades of the nineteenth century, the long-suffering Jew is still universally exposed to injustice, proportioned to the barbarity of the nation that surrounds him, from the indescribable atrocities of the Russian mobs, through every degree of refined insult to petty mortifications, the inevitable result has been to arouse most thinking Jews the necessity of a vigrous and concerted action of defense. They have long enough practiced to no purpose the doctrine which Christendom has been content to preach, and which was inculcated by one of their own race, when the right cheek was smitten to turn the left. They have proved themselves willing and able to assimilate with whatever people and endure every climatic influence. But blind intolerance and ignorance are now forcibly driving them into that position which they have so long hesitated to assume. They must establish an independent nationality …. I am fully persuaded that all suggested solutions other than this of the Jewish problem are but temporary palliatives.

The Jewish Problem, Emma Lazarus, The Century Magazine, February 1883
https://www.jewishideasdaily.com/docLib/20100204_TheJewishProblem.pdf

Emma Lazarus was not the first to embrace and articulate the idea of Zionism before the term had even been coined, which would not happen for another seven years after she wrote her 1883 essay The Jewish Problem, quoted above. It was Nathan Birnbaum who first used the words “Zionismus” and “zionistisch” in his German language journal Selbst-Emancipation (Self-Emancipation) in 1890.

The name Emma Lazarus might not ring a bell, but you are certainly familiar with her work. She wrote the poem “The New Colossus”, which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus published her first poetry collection when whe was just 18 years old (some of the poems had been written when she was just 14). In fact, Lazarus, who died in 1887 at the age of 38, would not live long enough to witness the the first World Zionist Congress, which took place in Basel, Switzerland, in August, 1897. That historic gathering was a direct result of the growing realization so clearly expressed by Lazarus that “all suggested solutions other than this [Zionism] of the Jewish problem are but temporary palliatives.”

In addition to “Zionism”, another new word came into being around the same time: “pogrom”. The first occurrence of the Russian word “погром”, which literally means “to smash, to destroy”, might go back as far as the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire. But the term gained much wider international usage only in 1881 when anti-Jewish violence spread throughout the Russian Empire following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. From 1881 to 1885 there were an estimated 250 separate instances of violent mob attacks on Russian Jewish communities.

It must be emphasized that while the Zionist movement certainly arose as a response to antisemitism, Zionism has always been more than simply “anti-antisemitism”. Zionists, like Emma Lazarus, have always stated very clearly what Zionism is for: the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. In essence then, Zionism is simply the radical idea that the Jewish people have the same right to self-determination as everyone else.

In the decades following Larazus’ 1883 essay, Zionism transformed from an idea into a reality. By the early 1940s, Zionists had succeeded in creating the Yishuv, a thriving community of over half a million Jews living in Palestine. Having established this solid foundation, Zionists hoped that a large portion of Europe’s Jews would begin immigrating to Palestine. But most of those Jews would be dead before this could happen (indeed, many were already dead, for, as Shmuel Ettinger wrote in A History of the Jewish People, even in the early 1940s Zionists had “not yet grasped the scope and nature of the Holocaust“).

Finally in 1947 the United Nations passed (by a 2/3 supermajority) Resolution 181 to partition Palestine into a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State”. While Jews in Palestine and around the world celebrated, the Arabs of Palestine, along with Arabs and Muslims around the world, vowed to fight to prevent such a thing as a Jewish State from ever coming into existence.

And so there was war. The Jews of Palestine were outnumbered 20 to 1 by the Arab League, then comprising (along with the Palestinian Arabs) the seven nations of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and North Yemen. The only real ally that the Yishuv had at the time was Czechoslovakia, from which they purchased the arms that they used to win their independence and establish the nation of Israel. In addition to the arms (which included fighter aircraft, rifles, machine-guns, and ammunition), Czechoslovakia also trained many of the air and ground troops who fought in what would become known as the Israeli War of Independence.

A major differences between the Arab and Jewish armies was that the Jews had nowhere to retreat to. Their only choice was to stand and fight where they were. But the Jewish forces did not simply hold their positions. Having been attacked on every side by forces that vastly outnumbered them, the Jewish fighters (who would become the Israeli Defense Forces) advanced on all fronts. And as the Jewish forces advanced, the Arabs fled their homes and villages. Many fled even before the fighting had started, especially the more well to-do.

Finally in 1949 Israel signed separate armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria. These armistice agreements brought an official end to the shooting war, and established what are now known as the “pre-1967” borders of Israel. But despite the armistice every Arab nation, and especially the Palestinians, remained officially in a state of war with Israel.

Not surprisingly, those who had chosen to fight to prevent Israel from coming into existence in the first place were not welcome in the sovereign state that they were still at war with. These Palestinians had made two choices: (1) to take up arms against Israel, and (2) to flee to safety when the fighting turned against them (an option, it should be repeated, not available to their Jewish opponents). Obviously, the Palestinians who fled never dreamed, unless they were insane, that they would simply be welcomed back.

But Arab Palestinians did dream of “return”. However, this was not based on any notion they would somehow be allowed to peacefully return to Israel. Instead, Palestinians dreamed, and continue to dream, of finishing their war with Israel. Only now it could no longer be a war to prevent Israel from coming into existence in the first place. Having failed to prevent the founding of Israel, Palestinians now committed themselves to eradicating Israel.

What he said (Salman Rushdie)

Below are quotes from a recent (May 16) interview with Salman Rushdie. A video clip from that interview can be found here:
https://x.com/DavidSaranga/status/1792268944000127188

“Right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran.”

“Is that what the progressive movements of the western left wish to create? To have another Taliban, another Ayatollah-like state, in the Middle East, right next to Israel?”

“The fact is that I think any human being right now has to be distressed by what is happening in Gaza because of the quantity of innocent death. I would just like some of the protests to mention Hamas. Because that’s where this started, and Hamas is a terrorist organisation. It’s very strange for young, progressive student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group.”

“I feel that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening. There’s an emotional reaction to the death in Gaza, and that’s absolutely right. But when it slides over towards antisemitism and sometimes to actual support of Hamas, then it’s very problematic.”

Bookchinpalooza

Murray Bookchin was one of the most prominent American leftists to resist the deadly embrace of antisemitism. If you want to know more about him, here are some things to check out:

“Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long History of Arab Conflict” by Murray Bookchin:
https://buddhist-zionists.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/murray-bookchin-attacks-on-israel-ignore-the-long-history-of-arab-conflict.pdf

Introducing Murray Bookchin, the Extraordinary Originator of ‘Social Ecology’ by Janet Biehl
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/05/introducing-murray-bookchin-the-extraordinary-originator-of-social-ecology

A review of Janet Biehl’s “Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin”:
https://roarmag.org/essays/ecology-or-catastrophe-biehl-bookchin-review/

Murray Bookchin “was a true son of the Enlightenment” – Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on The Next Revolution
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1845-murray-bookchin-was-a-true-son-of-the-enlightenment-ursula-k-le-guin-reflects-on

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Foreward” to Murray Bookchin’s “The Next Revolution”:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-next-revolution#toc1

Murray Bookchin’s New Life: Whatever their limits, Murray Bookchin’s ideas should be studied by today’s left
https://jacobin.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-kurdistan-pkk-rojava-technology-environmentalism-anarchy

A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/bio1.html

Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/bizarre-and-wonderful-murray-bookchin-eco-anarchist

Bookchin: living legacy of an American revolutionary:
https://roarmag.org/essays/bookchin-interview-social-ecology/

Turning Up the Stones (Bookchin on Ken Wilber, Nagarjuna, Spinoza, etc.)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-turning-up-the-stones

The Five Double Standards of Left Antisemitism (To understand Buddhism’s antisemitism problem you have to understand the Left’s antisemitism problem, Part Deux)

Below is a quote from: Antisemitism and the Left: Confronting an Invisible Racism Sina Arnold & Blair Taylor
Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 9, 2019
https://transformativestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/Blair-Taylor-and-Sina_Arnold.pdf

The double standard of salience translates into a political context where the left assigns vastly more attention and importance to the issue of Israel/Palestine than any other conflict in the world today. Israel is one of the few issues that unites a typically fractious left. This one conflict is so central to the U.S. left’s self-understanding that that it is often a highly visible element even in demonstrations for completely unrelated topics like climate change, police brutality, or gay rights. This ideological omnipresence suggests that the left views Israel as both a unifying factor as well as a political lynchpin upon which various other forms of oppression rest. Yet at the same time, various other occupations, civil wars, and violent conflicts receive little or no attention from the left–there are no sustained left campaigns targeting other contemporary examples such as India’s annexation of Kashmir, Turkey’s brutal suppression of the Kurds, Russia’s occupation of the Crimea or Iran publicly executing gays. This double standard is even more glaring for North American leftists who target settler colonialism in Israel while directly benefiting from its legacy at home.

The double standard of state foundation marks the foundation of Israel alone as artificial and violent, in contrast to the presumably peaceful and “organic” process of establishing other states. Because it calls for an end not only to the occupation but the very existence of Israel, antizionism has come to represent the obvious “radical” position on the left. Yet this radicalism rests on deeply liberal and ahistorical presumptions about the nature of nation-states. It assumes Israel is a uniquely violent exception rather than the more mundane rule.
ntizionism selectively ignores that every state in existence today is equally “artificial,” birthed and maintained by violence, dispossession, and exclusion.

While the violence that accompanied the foundation of Israel is not unique, the late historical moment (as well as political context) of its establishment is. This brings us to the related double standard of state formation, which sees Israel as anachronistic, a colonial and imperial regime engaged in an outmoded form of colonial expansionism. Yet once again, this feature is not unique to Israel. Borders have been continuously redrawn throughout history to create new states. Thirty-four have been founded since 1990 alone, many of which were the result of civil war or land grabs lacking any legal legitimacy, as evident in the ongoing cases of South Sudan and the Western Sahara. Various existing states are also currently engaged in violent territorial expansion and the suppression of local populations – Turkey, India, Russia, Ethiopia, and Morocco, to name a few. State foundation and expansion are frequently accompanied by forced population transfers, yet the demand for the right of return for Palestinians is almost exclusively directed at Israel. Although this has been a persistent sticking point holding up negotiations for Palestinian statehood, it is rarely a condition for other partitioned states, for example India and Pakistan. Left discourse also seldom discusses the treatment of Palestinian refugees by other states like Syria and Egypt, or mentions the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees exiled from neighboring Arab countries in the wake of 1948. None of these examples serve as justification for Israeli crimes or any other occupation; rather the lack of attention and activism around them illustrates a profound double standard operating within left political discourse, one that happens to resonates with historical patterns of antisemitic exceptionalism.

The double standard of self-understanding results in criticizing Israel as a specifically ethno-religious state. Yet this position ignores that this fact holds true for several other states today, and for most in history. One would be hard-pressed to find leftists who criticize the specifically Muslim nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Almost every nation in history was at one point linked to a state religion, and as of yet every nation enforces restrictive ethno-racial immigration policies. But it is only the Jewish state that is routinely criticized by the left for its specifically religious character and demographic manipulation. While leftists are right to reject both ethno-religious nationalism and restrictive immigration/demographic policies, they are far from consistent, criticizing some forms — U.S. and Israel, Christian and Jewish chauvinism — while ignoring or even rationalizing others — Islamic nations, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist ethno-religious nationalisms.

Lastly, the double standard of self-determination results in acknowledging this right only for Palestinians. A wide variety of movements of Palestinian self-determination are championed by the left – regardless of political content – while Zionism is denounced as synonymous with racism and violence, equally oblivious to specificities of historical form or political content. This holds true more generally for the U.S. left’s view of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a whole; although this history is long and complicated, the double standard of selfdetermination results in an extremely one-sided and simplistic account. Palestinian dispossession and repression is very real, and as the stronger force Israel has the greater power and responsibility to resolve this conflict. At the same time, the left selectively ignores various important historical facts on the other side: that Jews also have historical ties to the region and their own history of displacement; the long subsequent history of persecution, exclusion, oppression, and expulsion, culminating in the Holocaust; that as a result of these historical oppressions Zionism as a national liberation movement and state-building project started late in the game and under historical conditions not of its choosing; the armed attacks on Israel – including civilians – from its inception until the present  (Linfield 2019, Memmi 1973).

Despite this complicated history, most leftists primarily perceive Palestinian suffering, fear, and rage as legitimate. At times this translates into support for reactionary groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, despite their fundamentalist politics. By contrast, the feelings of fear, insecurity, and historical persecution among Jewish Israelis are hardly seen as legitimate. The left often portrays the rise of right-wing Palestinian political actors like Hamas as a regrettable but understandable reaction to violence, while the rise of Likud and Israel’s shift to the right are never interpreted as a bad reaction to anti-Semitism and violence against Jews. Although both groups are irredentist and predicated on their opposition to the peace process, the dominant left position is to only acknowledge this regarding Israel, refusing to admit there are those on the other side who will never accept peaceful coexistence with “the Zionist entity.” In a conflict where there has been trauma and loss of life on both sides, one does not have to equate the suffering of parties to recognize that resolution is impossible if it only considers the claims of one side.

Map produced by BDS activists of Boston showing the locations of Jewish groups in Massachusetts, including schools, community funds, and synagogues. https://www.timesofisrael.com/bds-movement-disavows-boston-project-mapping-jewish-groups/

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