Views » February 22, 2009 » Web Only

Israel, Gaza and the Left

By Ken Brociner

One of the left’s most significant ideological failings in recent years has been its habit of issuing shrill and hostile rhetorical assaults against the State of Israel.

Before going any further, let me first establish my left-wing bona fides.

I believe the Palestinian people have the right to an independent, viable and contiguous state of their own that includes the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem as its capital.

I have long been opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I believe that Israel should have never imposed an economic blockade on the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza. And I strongly opposed the Israeli military’s inhumane targeting policies employed during its recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

So why do I feel so strongly that most sectors of the American left (as well as much of the international left) have been so inexcusably wrong when it comes to evaluating Israeli policies?

Let’s begin by looking at the left’s reaction to Israel’s assault against Hamas. One way to get a representative sample of left opinions is to look at what appears on Alternet, as it is one of the left’s most popular online magazines and posts a large cross-section of both prominent and not-so-prominent voices on the left.

By my count, Alternet published 49 articles dealing either directly or indirectly with the situation in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas between December 27 and January 20. Yet only a handful of these articles even came close to fairly conveying Israel’s point of view.

By “Israel’s point of view,” I am referring to Israel’s overall political goals in its conflict with the Palestinians. Most of the writers published on Alternet were unwilling or unable to combine their justifiable outrage at Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza with a recognition of the fact that the current Israeli government has demonstrated a clear desire to reach a two- state settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Do I think that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have been as flexible in their talks with Palestinian negotiators as they should have been since the Annapolis summit meeting in November 2007? No, I do not. But even Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has indicated that he believes that the Israelis have been negotiating in good faith and that both sides are serious about reaching a peace agreement.

But if someone only relied on Alternet’s 49 articles to provide them with a context for the motives behind Israel’s offensive, they would be unable to grasp the complexities involved. For example, some of Israel’s motives are indeed justifiable — such as trying to weaken, both militarily and politically, an organization that not only represents a major stumbling block to a peaceful, two-state settlement to the conflict, but one that is committed to Israel’s destruction and has been launching attacks against Israeli civilians in one form or another, on and off for the past 20 years.

Yet rather than receiving nuanced and measured analyses, readers of Alternet (as well as many other progressive news outlets including In These Times), have in many instances been fed heavy-handed propaganda that demonizes practically every aspect of Israeli politics and history. For people who do not have an extensive knowledge of the Middle East but who tend to trust the progressive media to give them the “truth,” they are bound to come away from such a constant barrage of one-sided polemics with a skewed understanding of the current situation.

And then there are the screaming headlines. To cite just a few that appeared on Alternet: “Gaza is a Concentration Camp” (which has the libelous subtext that Jews are just like the Nazis or that conditions in Gaza even come close to resembling what we associate with the term “concentration camp”); “Is the Gaza Catastrophe Really About Natural Resources?” (there’s always one knee-jerk Marxist in every crowd); “Israeli assault injures 1.5 million Palestinians” (even though the actual number of wounded was bad enough—about 5,000—this writer had to raise the stakes). There were also a number of articles with headlines that include the charge of “war crimes” against Israel, including the impressively subtle: “‘We are very violent’: Israel war crimes mount” (links below).

While one can make a reasonable case that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, it’s notable that the progressive media rarely accuses other nations of war crimes despite all of the other brutal wars being waged around the world that involve far larger atrocities than those that Israel is responsible for in Gaza.

There are so many progressives in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian territories who could have offered Alternet’s readers a more balanced assessment of what is actually happening in the Middle East. To cite just a few examples: Web sites such as J Street, Americans for Peace Now and Meretz USA; and writers like Gershon Gorenberg, Yossi Alpher and other Palestinians and Israelis who write at BitterLemons.org.

The left is supposed to—according to our most cherished values—have a compassionate understanding of the root causes of human conflict and oppression. With this in mind, progressives would do well to heed the words of Johann Hari, who on February 6 wrote in The Independent of London:

“It is essential to remember that the Israelis didn’t end up in the Middle East out of a wicked desire to colonize and kill, as some people now gleefully claim. They are there because they were fleeing genocidal Jew-hatred. That doesn’t justify a single crime against a single Palestinian—but if we forget this, and the unimaginably vast trauma that lies behind it, we cannot understand what is happening now.”

Links to Alternet articles referenced:
“Gaza is a Concentration Camp”
“Is the Gaza Catastrophe Really About Natural Resources?”
“‘We are very violent’: Israel war crimes mount.”
“Israeli assault injures 1.5 million Palestinians”

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• Reader Comments

  I’m not quite sure what the author means when he says the “left.” Is there a distinct group out there that can be identified who share the same practice of using “hostile rhetorical assaults” to criticize Israel? Is he referring to select individuals who personify “left” leaning positions?

  I find that in general the “left,” if we are to assume that the left consist of people who oppose Israel’s military occupation and settlement expansion, want to see a more just solution rather than a biased position favoring those in power, namely Israel and the U.S.

  The question isn’t just whether or not the left has become desensitized to the history of Jewish suffering. The question is what has enabled Israel to become so desensitized to the suffering of Palestinians to inflict such intensive harm militarily, and economically, considering their own history of suffering?

  If the latter question is posed with a tone of frustration then I would hesitate to say that these types of questions can be classified as “rhetorically hostile.”

  Posted by Epistrophy on Feb 22, 2009 at 1:54 PM

  Strange article…

  Posted by sameasuid on Feb 23, 2009 at 6:40 AM

  Ken Brociner takes it to be a “fact that the current Israeli government has demonstrated a clear desire to reach a two-state settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” He offers no argument in support of this alleged “fact”.

  It is not a fact.  One Israeli government after another - Labor, Likud, or Kadima - has acted to stop a viable Palestinian state.  Israel’s policy used to be openly based on “The Three No’s: No to a Palestinian State, No to a return to the 1967 borders, and No to negotiations with the PLO”. Nowadays, they sometimes give verbal assent to a Palestinian state, while sabotaging it in practice.  It was the Labor Party that began the policy of building Jews-only settlements on the West Bank, whose purpose is to prevent the stolen land from ever being returned to the Palestinians. Many of the West Bank settlers are fanatics, they have a lot of clout within Israeli politics, and they have been encouraged (and subsidized) by one Israeli government after another.

  The two-state solution has been endorsed by the Palestinians, by the Arab League, and by every important country on Earth, except two: Israel and the US. Israel has rejected a Palestinian state, and the US has supported Israel. That’s why, in the 16 years (!!) since the Oslo “Declaration of Principles”, no progress has been made towards a Palestinian state. While the “peace process” has produced nothing, the growing network of Jews-only West Bank settlements have rendered a viable Palestinian state more and more unlikely.

  Why is the left hostile to Israeli policy? Because Israel is a racist regime that is ethnically cleansing the native Palestinians. In 1948, Israel destroyed Palestinian society and turned about 2/3 of the Palestinians into refugees. Israeli politicians including Livni and Avigdor Lieberman are threatening to expel the remaining Palestinians (who are second-class Israeli citizens) from Israel proper.
  The left is quite critical of Israeli policy because the left is against racism and ethnic cleansing. Does Brociner disagree?

  The situation is grim, but there are some grounds for optimism. The recent Israeli aggression against Gaza and massacre of over a thousand people has opened the eyes of many people who previously remained silent. A minority of Israeli Jews opposed the Gaza massacre, and their voices are increasingly heard on the American left:  Uri Avnery and Amira Haas, for example.

  The Israel Lobby has started to lose control over the debate, at least outside the Beltway.  Earlier in February, over 1000 American Jews demonstrated in New York against Israel’s attack on Gaza.[1] More American Jews are speaking out in opposition to Israeli policy. For example Michael Ratner, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, recently wrote “For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us have stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel.” [2] Jacques Hersh has spoken optimistically of a “Jewish Glasnost”. [3]

  Not everybody is in favor of Glasnost, of course. Brociner’s article is an attempt to replace “shrill and hostile rhetorical assaults against the State of Israel” with a “balanced approach,” which is “balanced” between oppressor and oppressed. 
  It’s a good thing that Brociner wasn’t in charge of ITT"s coverage of South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle.

  [1] http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/photo-essay-new-york-jews-take-to-th he-streets-in-support-of-gaza/
  [2] http://michaelratner.com/blog/?p=40
  [3] Jacques Hersh: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hersh220209.html

  Posted by Nevada_Ned on Feb 23, 2009 at 8:04 AM

  I agree with Ken Brociner. Israeli governments can be fairly criticized for not doing enough to ensure a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. But this conflict is a two-way street.

  None of us should ignore how Hamas and other terrorist attacks on Israeli civlians over the years—even after Israel withdrew from most West Bank population centers early in ‘96 and enirely from Gaza in 2005—have undermined Israeli good will and reversed political support among Israeli voters for further dovish moves. 

  The point of a constructive left-wing position on this issue would be to examine how bad faith and extremism among both Israelis and Palestinians have undermined the best interests of both sides for peaceful coexistence, and how such pernicious trends can be reversed.

  Posted by rseliger on Feb 23, 2009 at 3:04 PM

  Personally, I think that Hamas, the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the rest are fascists who want to turn back the clock to the Dark Ages—to a past that never was.  I don’t think of them as liberation movements in the progressive sense, no more than the fascists who took over Iran after the 1979 revolution.  Nor can I ever imagine them being sane and rational negotiating partners, or even able to understand the concepts of negotiation and compromise at all.

  That said, I have always agreed that the Palestinian Arabs have a moral right to their own country, while recognizing that every attempt to partition this small area into a Jewish and Arab state since the 1920s has failed completely.  I’m not the person who is thoroughly sick of hearing about this whole issue.

  I agree that the Jews have a right to a state of their own, as a refuge for their people from a world that has often been extremely hostile.  They tend to get blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world, and no matter how absurd the charges, there has never been any shortage of people who found it easy to blame the Jews for their misery.

  That said, i attach no religious significance to Israel, Jerusalem or anything like that, no more than I believe that Moses really wrote the first five books of the Bible (after his death!) or that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and died for everyone’s sins.  those are just all ancient myths and legends, like all organized religion—or like calling the West Bank ancient Judea and Samaria, without even bother to consult the ancient maps which show that it is nothing of the kind.

  Michael C. McHugh

  Posted by mcmchugh99 on Feb 23, 2009 at 3:12 PM

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