At what point are we permitted to...?
Five questions, plus a sixth
1. At what point does it become irresponsible not to compare Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people with the genocide westerners know best: the Nazi Holocaust?
2. At what point does shielding Israel from the revulsion its actions naturally inspire not turn into complicity?
3. At what point should western publics be offered proper historical context to make sense of Israel's genocide: one that lets them understand how the Zionist movement was ideologically shaped by its exposure to ugly, century-old European ethnic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism, and how the Zionists chose to mirror those supremacist ideologies rather than reject them?
4. At what point are we allowed to say that Israel cannot continue to exist in its current form, as a racist, settler-colonial state masquerading as the “state of the Jews”, and that it must be remade, as apartheid South Africa once was?
5. And at what point are we permitted to prize Palestinian life over the "sensitivities" of Zionist supremacists?
6. Is the answer: Never?
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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We have long since passed every one of those points. Yesterday I was on a train and I came very close to standing up and addressing the other passengers about the genocide and our collective silence and complicity. But instead, out of some horribly misplaced fear and cowardice, I sat silently. Why? To save myself embarrassment? At what point, I have been asking myself for months, do I finally start speaking out loud, addressing my fellow citizens in super markets, at the bank, on trains about the genocide the U.S. (my country) is enabling? At what point do I find the courage to pollute the polite sanitized silence of public space with the terrible truths and quit allowing myself and others to maintain our comfortable complicit silence.
Thanks Jonathan.
I don't know why this genocide is even still ongoing.............10000's of us all over the world protesting! It's obvious the people should govern not these smarmy duplicitous politicians.
Zionism has to fail.