Complexity in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Source: BBC

As a young man, it was easy to be concerned about terrible events in the world in a black and white fashion. As my thinking has matured and my understanding of systems theory has evolved, I’ve increasingly learned that simplistic, binary thinking is unhelpful in addressing some of our most protracted crises. One of the most fraught debates is that concerning Israel and Palestine. I’ve long been a critic of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, in much the same way that I’ve been critical of many states and governments around the world responsible for repression and human rights violations. And, of course, as many of you will remember, I’ve suffered setbacks to my career as a result: such as having my contract at The Guardian unilaterally terminated because I dared to report on Israel’s interests in illegally exploiting Gaza’s gas reserves, an issue I’ve continued to cover. I’m still one of the only journalists in the world tracking this matter closely.

But one thing that has increasingly alarmed me is the extent to which erstwhile critics of Israel repeatedly fall into antisemitic tropes in their eagerness to vindicate the Palestinian cause. We saw this in full swing during the Labour antisemitism crisis, which many on the left still to this day deny and attribute instead to a ‘Zionist conspiracy’. As a second generation minority whose parents were born in Bangladesh, and a Muslim, I understand how devastating it can be when language and action homogenises people in a way that groups them simplistically into categories that make their demonisation easy. So, while we might want to disagree with Zionism, for instance, that doesn’t justify making broad and sweeping and derogatory statements about ‘Zionists’. In the Labour Party, we saw that many people who see Zionism as problematic believed that this justified the constant depiction of pro-Israel views among British Jewish citizens and Labour Party members as part of a state-backed conspiracy, justifying labelling them agents of Zionist plotting. The term ‘Zionism’ which for most Jews is a term of pride relating to their belief in the need for a Jewish national homeland in Israel, is then deployed as a catch-all derogatory term.

And deploying the term Zionists in this way does become antisemitic, because it homogenises a whole group of people and their beliefs in a simplistic and inaccurate way. Because whether or not we agree or disagree with Zionism, it is not a homogenous belief system, but contains variety and complexity.

Many of the most credible Jewish critics of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories are Zionists. Anti-Zionists not only represent a tiny minority of Jews in general, they also represent a minority of progressive Jews who are critical of Israel. Most Jewish critics of Israel believe that Jews should have a right to live in a Jewish state - but they don’t believe in apartheid, or racism, or illegal occupation, or human rights abuses of Palestinians.

For instance, recent polls show that while a quarter of American Jews surveyed believe that Israel is an apartheid state, with a third believing Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians is racist, about 67% believe that denying Israel’s right to exist is antisemitic. Another poll shows US Jews overwhelmingly identifying as pro-Israel - i.e. Zionist - but that over half of them are critical of Israeli policy. So let me repeat: most Jewish allies of the Palestinian cause are not anti-Zionists, but are Zionists.

As Jonathan Shamir put it eloquently some years ago in an openDemocracy piece, Zionism is a contested and evolving concept, and it has different interpretations. For the many Zionists fighting for Palestinian rights, they envision an inclusive Jewish homeland living in peace with Palestinians in some way, shape or form, and they abhor racism and violence.

“For so many, identification as a Zionist is a red line: the person in question is immediately considered racist. Yet so many of these so-called Zionists are at the forefront of the fight for justice for Palestinians. Similarly, anti-Zionism is also loaded with nasty connotations of anti-Semitism,” writes Shamir. “These polarising terms should therefore be shelved, and taken out only when we are discussing political philosophy, which most of the time, we are not. It is too charged, and too ambiguous, to lead to any productive dialogue.”

My first job as a human rights campaigner started with the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) when I was about 19. I worked for them as a researcher for about a year or so, and wrote several reports for them. One of my contributions was a report on the ‘apartheid’ nature of Israeli policies toward Arabs and Palestinians. I was able to travel to Durban, South Africa, to participate in the UN World Conference Against Racism. This was an exciting time for me, and one of my earliest experiences as a young man wanting to make a difference in the world. I remember hanging out with the staunchly anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox rabbis of Neturei Karta, of whom IHRC were massive fans (and vice versa). But I was being fed a simplistic view of the world that didn’t fit with the lived reality of both Jews and Palestinians. I would learn during my time at IHRC that the organisation’s founder had close personal and political ties with the Iranian state, and that the bulk of its funding - so I was told - was coming from sources close to the Iranian government. There was open talk inside IHRC of exporting Iran’s ‘Islamic revolution’ into Britain and the West through the discourse of human rights. Even at the time, although I was young and naive, I found IHRC’s inability to criticise Iranian human rights abuses strange for an organisation so ostensibly committed to Islamic authenticity. If the commitment was to promoting justice, why were we not trying to advance justice in Iran, too? Surely the ‘Islamic republic’ would welcome such critique if it was genuinely interested in justice?

It was only after leaving the organisation and gaining experience beyond that limited field that I was able to recognise how toxic IHRC’s approach really was, that it was aligned a specific geopolitical agenda. In effect, the only good Jew in the narrative emerging from such activism is a non-Zionist, if not a rabidly anti-Zionist Jew who believes that Israel has no right to exist; by extension, this toxic narrative says, Zionism=racism and all Zionists (which is most Jews in and outside of Israel) are racists; by further extension anyone who recognises that this simplistic equation is dangerously antisemitic and demonising of most Jews (who are perfectly capable of disagreeing with Israeli policies, including racist policies, while also recognising that Jewish people have a right to live in Israel), can be seen as engaged in ‘Zionist propaganda’. And this sort of toxic narrative has spread far and wide in many parts of both Muslim communities and the left, especially those campaigning for the Palestinian cause. And this is the biggest danger. That just as some right-wing Zionists are becoming radicalised into a far-right view of seeing all Arabs and Palestinians as inferior, dangerous and an irredeemable threat linked to some sort of overarching Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy; some leftwing activists are becoming radicalised into what can legitimately seen as a ‘far-left’ view of seeing the only ‘good Jew’ as an anti-Zionist Jew, and all other Jews as de facto, in effect, ‘bad Jews’ who are in some capacity agents or fronts for Israeli state machinations. That results in people like Chris Williamson claiming that findings of antisemitism in Labour, for instance, were simply exaggerated deliberately by people with an axe to grind (namely, Zionists - once again feeding into the idea of a Jewish conspiracy). But Williamson is on record having repeatedly defended people making sweeping, derogatory statements about either Jews or Zionists (e.g. he wanted to “give a chance” to a man expelled from Labour for talking of “Jewish companies” with “Jewish blood” like Tesco and Marks & Spencers).

And thus, the irony is that fanatical groups on both sides subsist precisely by perpetuating these stale, homogenous and exclusionary binaries about each other: ‘Zionists’ are like this and ‘Islamists’ are like that. Ironically, the Islamist and Israeli far-right are natural bedfellows because their mutual animosity feeds off each other and inflames a cycle of violence that justifies their polarised existence.

Solving the Israel-Palestinian question, first and foremost, is going to be about learning to see each others’ point of view with compassion. That doesn’t mean necessary accepting it as utterly true or valid. It doesn’t even necessarily mean ‘respecting’ it, or ‘tolerating’ it in some sort of passive aggressive, banal fashion. But until we are able and willing to see each other, and engage with each other, we will not be able to move past the impasse that is growing deeper today.

As a Muslim, I am opposed to Islamism from both a moral and philosophical point of view, as well as due to a fundamentally religious perspective grounded in my readings and understanding of sacred Islamic texts. My fundamental disagreement with and opposition to Islamism doesn’t mean I see all Islamists as irretrievably evil - Islamism, too, represents a diverse set of views about Islam and politics. Some of these views are more benign than others, and even fascinating; while others are deeply dangerous. Even while I overall unequivocally oppose Islamism as a project and see it as in many ways completely confused about Islam’s views on the Divine relationship to politics and society (arguably, the Prophetic model instantiated the first religiously-sanctioned basis for a secular constitution in which diverse religious groups including ‘pagans’ co-existed together in peace), I recognise the importance of holding nuance in how Islamist movements actually operate in the real world.

I of course don’t have the same sort of religious-textual engagement with Zionism. As someone who is not a Jew, I can’t see myself being in a position to hold a meaningful judgement on the Jewish tradition, Zionism and anti-Zionism. It’s not my place.

But as a systems theorist, journalist and international relations scholar, I can certainly form informed judgements about the Israel-Palestine conflict today and the role of political ideology in it. While I can recognise how certain interpretations of Zionism may have been toxifying for the conflict, certain strains of anti-Zionism - not least the one advocated by Islamist groups like Hamas - have too been toxifying. To this day, there are people in and outside Israel who see the solution to the conflict as the subjugation and expulsion of Palestinians, and they are inflaming the conflict; but so too are Palestinians and their supporters who believe that Israel has no right to exist, implying (but usually without explicitly admitting it) a need to drive out all Jews who currently live there.

Much is often made on the left, and rightly so, of statements by senior Israeli politicians which demonise Palestinians wholesale. But when the left ignores genocidal antisemitic comments by Hamas officials, that does no service to either Jews or Palestinians. Hamas may have changed its original antisemitic founding charter, but it continues to not recognise Israel at all - and worse, its officials have continued to demand the deaths of all Jews (in Israel and worldwide), and never retracted such incendiary pronunciations. In 2012, Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar, deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, delivered a televised sermon where he prayed: “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one and kill them all, without leaving a single one.”

That same year, Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, told the Jewish magazine Forward that Hamas would not necessarily honour any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, even if it was ratified by a referendum of all Palestinians. “We will not recognize Israel as a state”, he said. “It will be like the relationship between Lebanon and Israel or Syria and Israel”, in other words, an ‘armed truce’, that Hamas could violate at any time: hardly a viable guarantee of a real peace deal.

So what many on the left fail to recognise is that Hamas’ extreme antisemitic position is a genuine, fundamental obstacle to dialogue and peace. This doesn’t obviate the role of far-right Israeli politicians in also scuppering opportunities for dialogue and peace. But denying that serious problems on the Palestinian side exist in such a complex conflict also cannot work.

And this extreme polarisation between homogenously defined ‘Zionists’ and ‘anti-Zionists’ is making it increasingly impossible to pursue real opportunities for dialogue about the mutual future of the inhabitants of the region. The challenge is simple - can we develop our political ideologies and frames in a direction that is more inclusive? What is an inclusive approach to Zionism? What is a Zionist vision for the region that sees Jews and Palestinians as living together in peace and love for each other? What is an inclusive approach to anti-Zionism? What is a non-Zionist or post-Zionist vision for the region that sees Jews and Palestinians as living together in peace and love for each other? Are such approaches possible? What can make them possible? How can these different perspectives and visions begin to engage each other, critically and constructively?

I believe, fundamentally, that all people have a right to live and prosper on the earth together as equals. There is no just solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict that involves forcibly throwing people out of their homes, whether they are Jewish or Palestinian, or whatever identity they hold. Any vision for justice and peace must be about how Jewish and Palestinian people can live together as equals, seeing each other as brothers and sisters, before the Divine Reality they both believe in.