Published: 15 April 2024
Last updated: 16 April 2024
For more than 40 years, I have argued that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have legitimate rights to national self-determination, and so any realistic conflict resolution strategy has to advance and protect the national rights of both peoples. Unfortunately, that moderate two-state perspective is no longer the dominant view on the Australian Left and has probably not been since September 2000 when the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada induced many progressives to retreat to a binary view of the conflict.
Instead of seeking a win-win solution that involved saying “Yes to Israel and Yes to Palestine”, many regressed to a zero-sum approach based on chanting “Yes to Palestine and no to Israel”.
In essence, the new pro-Palestinian orthodoxy assumed that national and human rights for Palestinians could only be advanced by harming Israelis and denying their national and human rights. That binary perspective was informed and reinforced by a number of political and ideological factors and events:
- The emergence of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement from May 2002, which framed all Israeli Jews as an evil oppressor people, and conversely infantilised Palestinians as oppressed victims without any agency;
- The rise of the ultra-right racist Hamas group as the most dynamic group within Palestinian politics;
- The associated collapse of the mainstream Israeli Zionist Left, which has fallen from 56 seats for Labor and Meretz combined in 1992 to four seats in the current 120-person Knesset;
- A general end to any realistic hopes that moderates on both sides could forge a peacefully negotiated compromise settlement.
Since October 7, that unqualified endorsement of the hardline Palestinian nationalist agenda seems to have become the new norm, not only in segments of the fringe Marxist Left where it was always prevalent, but in far wider sections of the Australian community.
Comments7
Ian Katz17 January at 01:57 pm
It’s sad to see that after the rape massacre torture and abduction of 2000 innocent people including babies and children on Oct 7 2023 , that there are so many anti semitic useful idiots for Hamas child rapists and murderers on this site and that have showcased their ignorance bigotry hypocrisy arrogance and Jew hatred here. Whatever spin the anti Israel crusaders espouse about Arab grievances the facts are they voted for Hamas, they celebrated in the streets the Oct 7 atrocities, they ransacked the kibbutzim and they hid and mistreated the hostages. They also voted for Hamas and seemingly continue to be ardent supporters of these murderers, if surveys are anything to go by.
And the so called Palestinian “ moderates” that Mendes talks about happened to be the PA that walked away from the offers of Barak and Olmert in 2001 and 2008 respectively without any counteroffer or negotiation. They started the intifada in the context of the Oslo Accords, and the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza when billions of dollars of resources and agricultural equipment was left and gifted to the Arabs: well we know how that went. The Palestinian Arabs, irrespective of any historical land claims and grievances and their legitimation ,have demonstrated they are not interlocutors in any peace process time and time again, and only a particularly stupid or partisan person would not see this. And the so called moderates that Mendes loves talking about are the same Palestinians who in Arabic talk about the end of Israel, and pay a lifetime stipend to the family and proxies of suicide bombers and terrorists. They don’t sound very moderate to me or I would suggest anyone who is not eaten up with some quixotic fantasy world .
And one final thing that needs to be said even though of course we are not meant to mention these things. What have Hamas done to their own people? Well even the Jew haters who are indifferent to Hamas slaughtering Israeli children don’t seem to have anything to say about how Hamas militarise civilian infrastructure, hide behind human shields, fail to build one single bomb shelter for their own people, fire rockets and fight from schools and hospitals, indoctrinate their own children to hate and kill, torture and slaughter homosexuals and gender diverse individuals, steal from their own people and line their Swiss bank accounts, and have liquidated the Palestinian Christian population. And the same pro Palestinian , Israel hating miscreants have nothing to say about the 850000 Jews liquidated from a litany of Arab countries starting in the late 1920s , or the Palestinian collusion with Hitler from 1941 onward. These same pro Palestinian crusaders are notably and equally pathetically laconic about the plight of one million Chinese Uyghurs, the murder of minority groups women and gays in the Muslim world, and the millions killed by Muslims in Africa, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Burma, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Turkey , Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. That’s all we need to know about the Palestinian victim brigade and their supporters.
Kevin Judah White18 April at 01:42 pm
Fair comments, though asserting in point 4 that it’s ‘nonsense to say that most [sic] left-liberal Jews are indifferent to Palestinian suffering or their legitimate national claims’, would be true if I actually made that bold claim – I used the word ‘many’. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I am dismayed by those left-liberal Jews who I encountered that are dismissive of Palestinian grievances and suffering, particularly in relation to the current conflict in Israel/Gaza.
Ann18 April at 01:50 am
Yes to your article. Thanks for articulating the views that acknowledge and make space for the rights of Arabs and Jews. You advocate for the rights of Palestians and Israelis, rather than this simplified binary analysis that dominates, of anti Israel and pro Palestine. This entrenched polarisation cannot deliver peace.
philip mendes17 April at 09:46 am
KEV,
Firstly, the dodgy PEP concept has been well and truly debunked, see here:
https://fathomjournal.org/the-jibe-progressive-except-for-palestine-pep-is-a-cynical-political-strategy-to-exclude-moderate-progressives-from-debates-on-resolving-the-israeli-palestine-conflict/
Secondly, I am not arguing that the wider Australian community endorse the ultra-nationalist Palestinian view. I am talking only about committed progressives. All the surveys suggest most ordinary Australians totally reject this extreme view.
Thirdly, most of the people that endorse that hardline “From the River to the Sea” view seem to have jumped on that bandwagon a long time ago well before current events. My article was an attempt to explain why.
Fourthly, it is nonsense to say that most left-liberal Jews are indifferent to Palestinian suffering or their legitimate national claims. Where is your empirical evidence for that? That cohort overwhelmingly favour compromise and reconciliation between the two equally legitimate Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab national movements.
Jo,
Please read what I say carefully. I don’t say that at all. My article is not a discussion of current events in the Middle East, it is an explanation of how and why those events have influenced a major outbreak of xenophobic Pauline-Hanson style blaming the victim anti-Semitism in Australia. Anti-Zionism means different things to different people. There is no reason why anti-Zionists cannot stand in anti-racist solidarity with the Jewish community here, and condemn without qualification the perpetrators of that racism.
Kevin Judah White16 April at 09:32 am
Some good points raised here by Prof Mendes, but I’m not convinced that there’s now an ‘unqualified endorsement of the hardline Palestinian nationalist agenda’ in the wider, Australian community. In any case, he seems to ignore the most obvious reason why there has been an uptick in support for the Palestinians and corresponding condemnation of the Israeli Government’s war in Gaza, viz. the horrendous death toll of Gaza civilians, most of whom had nothing to do with the massacres on 7 October.
And if we want to invent acronyms, I propose that PEP should stand for ‘Progressive Except Palestinian’ – the puzzling tendency of many left-liberal Jews to be progressive on a range of issues such as climate change, same-sex marriage, an Australian republic, AUKUS, the Voice, etc. but be indifferent to Palestinian suffering and dismissive of their legitimate grievances. Go figure …
Milton David Fisher16 April at 09:05 am
Any state established based on self-determination is a state ruled by only a part of the population and is not democratic. A two-state solution means two undemocratic states. A democratic state is one state based on neither religion nor ethnicity with equal rights for all its citizens.
Jo Thomson16 April at 07:40 am
None of those alternatives apply to me, and I note the writer equates rejection of Zionism with anti-Jewish sentiment, also inaccurate in the case of every progressive pwrson I know, including Jews.
My conversion to anti-Zionism started when I witnessed the treatment of Palestinians first hand in Israel. I have only really abandoned hope of a 2 state solution because of the expansion of Israel into land ‘meant’ to give Palestine a state.
As an old lefty progressive and feminist I am sad to see what Israel’s supporters have made of Ben Gurion’s vision.