{"id":671,"date":"2012-11-21T12:49:08","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T11:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=671"},"modified":"2012-11-22T16:24:37","modified_gmt":"2012-11-22T15:24:37","slug":"from-the-river-to-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/from-the-river-to-the-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"From the river to the sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PSC<\/a>At first glance, who could oppose the Palestine Solidarity Campaign?<\/p>\n

The very name implies one of the most noble human aspirations —\u00a0solidarity with a people. And in particular a people like the\u00a0Palestinians, whose suffering is genuine. No doubt many people who\u00a0join the PSC, attend its demonstrations, donate money to it or\u00a0encourage their unions to back it are expressing their support for the\u00a0idea of solidarity with the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

But there’s a difference — a huge one — between showing solidarity\u00a0with the Palestinians and supporting the PSC. Despite the PSC’s best\u00a0efforts to convince everyone that these are one and the same thing,\u00a0they aren’t.<\/p>\n

And this becomes obvious whenever things heat up in Israel and\u00a0Palestine, and when war is in the air.<\/p>\n

Last week, I found myself at the demonstration of the PSC opposite\u00a0the Israeli embassy in Kensington.<\/p>\n

The call for the demonstration focussed on the Israeli air offensive\u00a0against Gaza and was issued at a time when the only casualties seemed\u00a0to be Hamas fighters, in particular Ahmed al-Jabari, the leader of the\u00a0Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.<\/p>\n

Still, by the time demonstrators began to arrive at the embassy,\u00a0things had gotten worse and a number of civilians — on both sides —\u00a0had been killed.<\/p>\n

The demonstration would have focussed on those killings, right? It\u00a0would have called for a cease-fire or something like that, wouldn’t\u00a0it?<\/p>\n

But the very first thing I heard was not a call for an end to the\u00a0violence — which would have been understandable and would have gotten\u00a0sympathy from anyone — but instead was the chant, “From the river to\u00a0the sea, Palestine will be free<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

From the river to the sea?<\/p>\n

Sorry, but there’s no way to be polite about this. That chant, and\u00a0the PSC’s own logo of a map of Palestine from the river to the sea,\u00a0and the subsequent chanting of “Israel out of Palestine” really could\u00a0mean only one thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The demonstrators, or at least the people leading the chanting and\u00a0making up the slogans, were supporting a one-state agenda<\/strong>, a solution\u00a0to the century-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians by\u00a0demanding that one side pack up and leave.<\/p>\n

As it’s unlikely the Israelis are going to do this voluntarily,\u00a0realistically what the demonstrators were calling for was the\u00a0expulsion of the Jews from Palestine<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Not from the illegal settlements in the West Bank — no one mentioned those.<\/p>\n

The Jews are to leave “Palestine” — from the river to the sea.<\/p>\n

This is an exterminationist agenda.<\/strong> I don’t think that’s too strong a term.<\/p>\n

These are not people who dislike Israelis or Jews, or who want to\u00a0discriminate against them, or put them in their place, or treat them\u00a0as second class citizens. That would be ordinary anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

This is a different kind of anti-Semitism, the kind that imagines a\u00a0Palestine without its six million Jews, from the river to the sea.<\/p>\n

An exterminationist anti-Semitism whose solution to the\u00a0Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be another Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Of course one expects to see radical Islamists at a demonstration like\u00a0this — after all, that’s been their agenda for decades.<\/p>\n

But it’s not the agenda of the mainstream Palestinian national\u00a0movement, not anymore. It’s been nearly a quarter of century now\u00a0since Arafat and the leadership of the PLO embraced the two-state\u00a0solution, which paved the way to the Oslo accords.<\/p>\n

Palestinian President Abbas isn’t calling for driving the Jews into\u00a0the sea. The Palestinian trade unions aren’t calling for that.<\/p>\n

But that’s what the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was doing in\u00a0Kensington — that’s their agenda.<\/p>\n

So what was the Socialist Party doing there — a party which\u00a0historically opposes the boycott of Israel and which supports a\u00a0two-state solution? On their website, they write that “The\u00a0Palestinians and the Israeli Jews have a right to their own separate\u00a0states.” They don’t say that one of those states will be in
\nPalestine, and the other — in the sea?<\/p>\n

And what was the SWP doing there, for that matter? Do they too\u00a0support the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine?<\/p>\n

It is fitting and proper for people who are shocked by the violence,\u00a0and angry at the decision of the Israeli government, to protest and to\u00a0show their solidarity with Palestine.<\/p>\n

But to do so by chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state is to\u00a0do the Palestinians no service.<\/p>\n

For socialists to participate in such a demonstration is a disgrace.<\/p>\n

\n

This article appears today in Solidarity<\/a>.\u00a0 It has also been published on Harry’s Place<\/a> and on the 4theMembers<\/a> blog.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first glance, who could oppose the Palestine Solidarity Campaign? The very name implies one of the most noble human aspirations —\u00a0solidarity with a people. And in particular a people like the\u00a0Palestinians, whose suffering is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}