Read these two articles and then my take.
"This is not a time for exclusionary thinking. It is a time for complexity thinking and pragmatic thinking: How do we get to two nation-states for two indigenous people?"
"My problem is not that the protests in general are “antisemitic” — I would not use that word to describe them, and indeed, I am deeply uncomfortable as a Jew with how the charge of antisemitism is thrown about on the Israel-Palestine issue."
I also like this Jerry Nadler article. Good perspectives to put stuff in context.
Fred’s take
Good on Friedman to throw cold water on the antisemitic line. Students are overwhelmingly not that. IMO he’s right, that’s not even close to the primary issue here. I also agree with Friedman that Hamas is not an organization I would ever support, that even before their brutal Oct 7th attack.
I stand by my I-T opinion editorial, that to get to a Sonoma ceasefire resolution, blame and side taking has to be dropped. This is too complex and hot to unpack in a council debate on a Ceasefire Resolution, which needs to be simple to pass. We aren’t getting to a resolution because local advocates are pouring gas on the fire from each side with partisan inflammatory comments. Issues get cross-conflated and the water gets muddy fast.
A general US and world antisemitic claim is reasonable given the backdrop of recent synagogue attacks and Zoom bombing and of Shir Shalom receiving aid to fortify their buildings against attack from Trumpist Christian nationalist forces. These types of attacks don’t come from generally liberal college kids.
One part of the Gaza-Israeli student protest narrative that may fuel resistance to a Sonoma city council ceasefire resolution is that of the larger power struggle between Iran, Shiites, Sunnis, and Iran's alliance with Hamas, Russia, and China has to be factored in. This opens up further partisan divides over what is an accurate view of US history?
Friedman, while saying he is a pragmatist, also has his line standing in service of US patriotism. He’s on the US team and tribe. In this drama, Iran is the enemy.
IMO, while I don't back Iran's religious autocracy, I understand how it came about. Iranian people were oppressed by the brutal US-backed Shah, in a previous iteration of US Cold War alliances against the USSR where the US backed extreme right wing dictators (Pinochet/ CIA assassinations for example) so that communists would not take over, domino theory and all that.
People like me would have been jailed in the McCarthy era, for being a realist about US history. My 1960s elders were jailed and beaten for standing up to be counted in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Because I see US corruption does not mean I support communist oppression. Because I see the US as in many ways corrupt does not mean it can’t stand for good things as well. I’m with Friedman, the Netanyahu extreme right wing government and Hamas are locked in a codependent, downward spiral race to the bottom. What needs to be opposed here is this whole dynamic, not just the Israeli side of it. Being for peace means disengaging from the partisan heat that makes war, yet fighting over stuff is what people do best.
One big part of unpacking all this is that the Israel-Gaza war hits on all the basic moral pillars that all people have: liberation, purity, loyalty, harm, fairness, and respect for authority. See moral foundation theory. All people have these same moral pillars but the content differs, especially depending on what team we are on, as with in-group, out-group dynamics. Why is the Israel-Gaza issue hard to unpack? Because all have different ideas about loyalty, harm, fairness, purity, liberation, and authority and act is if their own views were the only center of the universe. See Genesis 11:1-9 Tower of Babel metaphor.
Past US Cold War support for right wing, autocratic dictators on the world stage has poisoned the water against the US and for this many in the world, including US citizens, see the US as a hypocritical force calling for freedom and democracy. Especially since the US's own internal history and policies vis-a-vis segregation, Jim Crow, slavery, genocide, nativism, racism etc. is hardly a beacon of freedom and democracy.
The US Right has reduced the views I see as realistic to one word, “woke.”
This objective view of history, as compared to a patriotic view that justifies US moral and ethical failings, can at least say the US lost its moral compass in Cold War power politics by recapping western colonialism with US imperialism. There is a tension in historical analysis between realists, pragmatists, idealists, moralists, and patriots as to what would have been and what is the right course of action and why? It pays, IMO, to draw from each of these buckets when trying to figure out what is going on and why.
What we have then on the world stage is a large fractalian fued, a feud writ large, with US imperialistic excesses as fuel for all manner of resistance by former colonized peoples, and for great power competition with China and Russia. Peoples and nations ruined by world power politics are forced to make Faustian Bargains with one pole or the other, and then become a new form of a subject colony.
Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Let us break their bonds asunder!
In this post WW2, post Cold War international landscape came the creation of the state of Israel, in the wake of one of the greatest tragedies of humanity ever, the Holocaust, that piggy-backed on a 2000 year history of Christians vilifying Jews in an intimate enemy fight for the ages. See the works of Elaine Pagels, great reading.
The Jews, like all peoples and like Rodney KIng just want to get along. I agree with Friedman that the two-state solution is a worthy goal because it puts self determination as a top value. It is non-representative governments, ones that represent only the top 1%, the top 10%, the moneyed interests, that drag us all into these endless struggles for power and control.
The irony of the Jewish state is that the world’s greatest underdogs turned into oppressors themselves with the 1967 War and the occupied territories. In this they are really no different than any other peoples. See the Bantu expansion.
Israel has recapped the exact same colonial patterns as its western colonial/ imperial patrons, (British Empire, US Empire.) In a patriotic view, this is OK because this is how pragmatists and realists do business. Might is right. The Anglo West sees itself as smarter, more hard-working, manifestly destined, ,morally justified by a Christian God or justified by Social Darwinism.
Who’s land was it for Great Britain to give away? What and why was the post-colonial landscape and how did it get there? People who can analyze history from a non-US patriotic view are free to see power politics for what they are, a near Hobbesian struggle in a war of all against all where morals and ethics are mere window dressing for our inner apes. Only in-groups matter; patriotism (loyalty) plays well to the crowd; liberation is the breaking of the bonds asunder…
Basically this whole current world stage, and human history itself has been one big fight and one big war over the control of territory. That’s the take-home point I got from my history degree. Any of us who have had neighbor issues or struggled with local politics knows that people are exceptionally good at fighting and not getting along; this is a property of humanity, not of any single person or people. Want to blame? Look in the mirror, evil cuts through all our hearts.
So, the allegation that student protestors are "siding with Iran and Hamas" is to an extent true, but the siding is not from naive support for brutal religious autocrats like the Ayatollahs and Hamas, it’s rather a siding with an underdog faction that has autocratic dictators as their perhaps unwanted representatives.
For a 196o9s throwback, don't forget the Who’s great lyric, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It’s much easier to go for power and control than it is to go for peace, and the peace advocates end up dead and jailed because a peaceful protest is an oxymoron. The powers that be, like the city council, end up not listening, not responding. So how long to protest peacefully until you have to force the issue to be heard and get a response? Then the response is mass oppression, like with the Arab Spring, and like it will be with Trump if elected.
You wouldn’t expect students to have a seasoned perspective. Students and the young are also not fully indoctrinated and can see right from wrong patterns in the world in a more acute way. They may not necessarily have developed a full context for why this is all unfolding as it is, with Gaza/ Israel as a flashpoint indicator of all that is wrong with us as a race, but they do see that the US is a big part of the problem, especially with other corollary factors like western profligate consumption-caused climate change, financialization, AI, no good jobs, no housing, head in the sand wine drinking and partying while the world goes to hell etc., so that the US comes off as one huge corrupt entity.
So, asking the Sonoma city council to resolve for peace, a ceasefire, humanitarian aid etc. should not in and of itself be a hard ask but given that the council has a diverse make up and has patriots on it, this makes all the objective analysis of history like mine fall on deaf ears.
Statist patriots will be tempted to take the side of US interests and of its ally Israel. That’s at the state level, not an ethnic or religious level. Champions of underdogs take sides as well. I’m an underdog guy. Is this a battle of the corrupt colonial entities, autocratic dictators, and religious zealots? What side to take? Where to come out when as Frank Zappa said, we are dumb all over?
If students et al want a local ceasefire resolution they need to deal, as in all politics. They need get their speech under control to win patriot votes and Israeli-supporter votes. They have to make it clear they are not supporting Hamas tactics equally as to not supporting Netanyahu tactics.
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