{"id":24389,"date":"2023-05-03T14:18:14","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T14:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=24389"},"modified":"2023-05-08T11:35:10","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T11:35:10","slug":"from-ukraine-to-palestine-the-poisons-of-denialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/03\/from-ukraine-to-palestine-the-poisons-of-denialism\/","title":{"rendered":"From Ukraine to Palestine: the poisons of denialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article, written by David Finkel, an editor of\u00a0Against the Current<\/em>\u00a0and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace \u2013 Detroit chapter and the Ukraine Solidarity Network. It was was first posted by Against the Current.<\/a>\u00a0The article makes a powerful case against the politics of Campism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

FROM PALESTINE TO UKRAINE \u00a0– THE POISONS OF DENIALISM<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Exploding over the \u00a0past year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel\u2019s escalating violence and ethnic cleansing in Palestine have become two centers of a deepening global crisis. For the international left, the Ukraine war and Palestine catastrophe, both on their own and together, pose very big tests of theory and more importantly, of\u00a0politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

A question has bedeviled the left: Is it possible to support both the Ukrainian and Palestinian struggles, and oppose imperialism, at the same time? Actually, the question should be reversed: How is it possible for a genuinely internationalist left\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0to support both of these struggles for self-determination and national survival?<\/p>\n

Obviously, the degenerative bloody spiral in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Russia\u2019s drive to destroy Ukraine are both international emergencies. Beyond that, the situations are very distinct of course. I will argue, however, that there are also important parallels and connections.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, the biggest difference lies in the stance of U.S. imperialism and its allies \u2013 giving massive military support to Ukraine\u2019s war of defense and applying economic sanctions against Russia, while at the same time, for more than five decades now, enabling the Israeli state\u2019s drive to crush the Palestinian people\u2019s aspirations for survival and self-determination.<\/p>\n

For some of the left, sadly, global struggle revolves\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0around the crimes of U.S. imperialism and its allies \u2014 to the point that not only the role of other imperial oppressors, but the agency of real people and oppressed peoples fighting for their own freedom, fades to irrelevance. From that point of view, for the left to simultaneously support both Ukraine\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0the Palestinian struggle seems like a hopeless contradiction.<\/p>\n

The hypocrisy of Western rhetoric about the \u201crules-based international order\u201d and \u201cdemocracy against authoritarianism\u201d is, of course, overwhelming. But this is neither new nor surprising in the light of centuries of colonial and imperial history.<\/p>\n

For those of us striving to be consistent anti-imperialists, the starting point isn\u2019t which imperialist camp happens to be stronger or \u201cthe main enemy\u201d in some global schema, but rather\u00a0the rights of nations and peoples and their legitimate struggles.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I begin this discussion with a vital parallel between the Ukrainian and Palestinian struggles \u2014 the\u00a0denial<\/em>\u00a0of Ukrainian nationhood by Vladimir Putin, calling it an artificial creation of the godless Bolsheviks, and the\u00a0denial<\/em>\u00a0of Palestinian nationhood by all the Israeli and Zionist movement ideologues who maintain \u201cthere was no such thing as Palestinians\u201d (Golda Meir) and \u201cthere was never a Palestinian state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ideologies of Denial<\/strong><\/p>\n

Are we equating Ukraine and Palestine? Certainly not \u2013\u00a0denialism<\/em>\u00a0is what we\u2019re talking about. In each case it\u2019s about denial of the right of self-determination. This kind of twisted ideology has consequences, up to and including de-humanization that paves the road to mass murder.<\/p>\n

In the case of Palestine, denialism facilitates a myth \u2013 absurd on its face and long discredited, but still widely circulated \u2013 that the native Palestinian population was mostly comprised of recent arrivals drawn by the prosperity generated by Zionist settlement. Although factually vacuous, it serves as a convenient ideological backstop for the continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and property for the sake of \u201crebuilding the Jewish homeland.\u201d<\/p>\n

This narrative stretches across time and politics from the Labor Zionist Golda Meir to the present Israeli Finance Minister, the extreme religious-nationalist Bezalel Smotrich:\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Rightwing U.S. Christian nationalists pick up the theme: \u201cThere\u2019s really no such thing as the Palestinians,\u201d\u00a0says former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.<\/a><\/p>\n

This attempted erasure of the Palestinian people\u2019s reality reached its climax, at least in U.S. circles, with the publication of a screed by Joan Peters (or ghostwritten for her),\u00a0From Time Immemorial<\/em>\u00a0(1984). It was debunked\u00a0in toto<\/em>\u00a0by Norman Finkelstein, and discredited by scholars including Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath who called it a \u201csheer forgery,\u201d but as a useful Zionist narrative it has continued to circulate.<\/p>\n

Peters\u2019 thesis took a new lease on life when its falsehoods were lifted, without attribution, by Alan Dershowitz for his 2003 book\u00a0The Case for Israel.<\/em>\u00a0(Norman Finkelstein returned to the exposure of both Peters and Dershowitz in his 2008 book\u00a0Beyond Chutzpah.<\/em>\u00a0Dershowitz denied attempting to pressure University of California Press not to publish Finkelstein\u2019s book. Among other things, in retrospect the affair illustrates some aspects of Dershowitz\u2019s character that ultimately drew him to Donald Trump.)<\/p>\n

For many liberal (Jewish and other) friends of Israel, the brutality of the Occupation when it\u2019s impossible to ignore becomes a cause of alarm and handwringing, but the idea that Palestinians are something \u00a0less than a \u201creal\u201d nation serves as a partial anesthetic. They can rationalize the \u201cviolence on both sides\u201d as the result of Palestinians\u2019 unreasonable \u201crejectionism\u201d (i.e. refusal to accept the theft of 80 percent of their homeland).<\/p>\n

It also has debilitating consequences for Israeli politics, as we\u2019ll see below.<\/p>\n

In the Ukraine war, Putin\u2019s claim that Ukraine is naturally part of \u201cthe Russian heartland\u201d is historically ridiculous, but since it\u2019s promoted by powerful state propaganda \u00a0doesn\u2019t need to be backed up by facts. The myth puts a gloss on Moscow\u2019s annexationist claims on the provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as well as Crimea.<\/p>\n

In his July 2021 essay \u201cOn the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,\u201d Putin wrote regarding the \u201ctime bomb\u201d planted in the Soviet Union at its founding:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe right for the republics to freely secede from the Union was included in the text of the Declaration on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, subsequently, in the 1924 USSR Constitution. By doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the CPSU was gone, the party itself collapsing from within.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Back in April 2008 at a NATO summit in Bucharest,\u00a0Putin reportedly claimed:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cUkraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but part, a considerable part, was a gift from us!\u201d<\/p>\n

The noted scholar of European history, Donald J. Trump, was reported to have exclaimed in an August 2017 briefing that Ukraine \u201cwasn\u2019t a \u2018real country,\u2019 that it had always been part of Russia.\u201d (Washington Post,<\/em>November 2, 2019, \u201cA presidential loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inqury\u201d)<\/p>\n

Denial of Ukraine\u2019s nationhood helps enable the most ignorant and dishonest sectors of the global left to label Ukrainian nationalism as led by \u201cNazis\u201d worthy of extermination, while more pacifist-oriented elements regard Ukraine\u2019s territory as bargaining chips to be negotiated in order to stop the carnage.<\/p>\n

If Ukraine is regarded as an artificial construct \u2014 regardless of what Ukrainians may think \u2014 how much then should it really matter if Donetsk is part of Ukraine, or Russia, or semi-independent? Thus we see, for example, how CodePink and allied groups calling for \u201cpeace\u201d systematically refuse to answer the simple question, \u201cIs Ukraine a \u2018real country\u2019 and does it have the right to defend itself?\u201d<\/p>\n

This refusal makes it more comfortable for pacifists who sympathize with Ukrainians\u2019 suffering, but don\u2019t understand the popular depth of Ukraine\u2019s resistance, to plead for \u201cpeace negotiations\u201d that would amount to Ukraine\u2019s territorial amputation. They also seem blind to the reality that such a \u201cpeace\u201d would lead to massive re-arming on all sides for a next, bloodier round.<\/p>\n

The issue here isn\u2019t what terms the Ukrainian people might decide to negotiate \u2013 which is their right, and theirs alone \u2013 but the political and moral bankruptcy of \u201cpeace\u201d advocates lecturing them about the need to surrender.<\/p>\n

Whether or not western imperialist powers, which we know are infinitely treacherous, will ultimately move to impose some \u201csolution\u201d in the name of \u201crealism,\u201d remains an open question. For the left, that shouldn\u2019t affect a principled defense of Ukrainians\u2019 right to determine their own future.<\/p>\n

The Main Differences<\/strong><\/p>\n

The parallel denials of Palestinian and Ukrainian nationhood and rights to self-determination don\u2019t mean that these struggles themselves are identical. Obviously, Ukraine is not Palestine \u2013 and much less is it Israel, as Ukraine\u2019s president Zelensky claimed when he was hoping to get more support from that quarter:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2020, Zelensky took Ukraine out of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and, in a speech to the Knesset, he linked the existential right of the Ukrainian nation to that of the Israeli nation, both fighting an enemy bent on the \u2018total destruction of the people, state, culture.\u2019 In a passionate response, the Palestinian university of Haifa professor Asad Ghanem accused Zelensky of reversing the role of occupier and occupied. While expressing Palestinian support for the Ukrainian people\u2019s resistance to the brutal Russian invasion, he said that Zelensky\u2019s words were a \u2018disgrace when it comes to global struggles for freedom and liberation.\u2019\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(Liz Fekete,\u00a0Civilisational racism, ethnonationalism and the clash of imperialisms in Ukraine,\u201d\u00a0Race & Class.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Geopolitical pundits can explain all the differences between the war in Ukraine and the so-called Palestine-Israeli \u201cconflict.\u201d At their core, however, the differences between these modern states and nations are clear enough. Please note: we say \u201cmodern\u201d states and nations, because we are not speaking here of wars of European kingdoms and state borders from past centuries, let alone the medieval Kievan Rus or the myth-encrusted history of ancient Israel. All of these are of interest, but belong to separate discussions.<\/p>\n

The main difference between Ukraine and Israel is that\u00a0the modern Ukrainian state was not founded on the dispossession and the land of another people,<\/em>\u00a0whom it expelled\u00a0en masse<\/em>\u00a0and proceeded to impose a brutal occupation regime with colonial and apartheid-like features.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the big difference between Ukraine and Palestine is that Ukraine\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a nation-state with the well-demonstrated capacity to defend its territory against an imperial invader. Being in the middle of Europe has also enabled it to get necessary military assistance. Palestinians do not have state institutions, or an army, or any strategic military option to win their freedom.<\/p>\n

More than that, Palestinians have no great-power friends, and U.S. imperialism in particular is entirely indifferent to their fate as long as things stay relatively \u201cquiet\u201d (i.e. invisible). In fact, Palestine is essentially collateral damage in every international crisis, including the present war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The Palestinian people attract a great deal of important global popular solidarity, but no support from \u201cgeopolitical\u201d actors in the region or anywhere else. They are an essentially unarmed population confronting, on their own, the enormous power of the Israeli colonial state.<\/p>\n

For its own reasons, of course, U.S. imperialism assists Ukraine\u2019s war while simultaneously enabling Israel\u2019s crushing of Palestine. That\u2019s an illustration of cynical great-power policy, but no reason for the left to simply turn that policy inside out. The widely acclaimed heroism of the Ukrainian people, and the generally unrecognized heroism of the Palestinian people, are equally deserving of solidarity from those of us who oppose\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0imperialism and colonialism. That\u2019s all the more important now.<\/p>\n

Reactionary Feedback<\/strong><\/p>\n

A further parallel is that the invasion of Ukraine and the disaster in Palestine cannot be separated from the internal political crises in Russia and Israel respectively. In each case, the regimes\u2019 efforts to crush another nation feed directly back into their own societies.<\/p>\n

Too many liberal \u201cfriends of Israel\u201d can\u2019t grasp the reality that the Jewish-supremacist amalgam of rightwing nationalism and religious extremism in the new Israeli governing coalition represents the authentic destination toward which political Zionism has been heading for a very long time.
\nOne can have a long and complex discussion over whether a different destination was possible \u2013 if the post-1967 Occupation had been quickly ended \u2013 but that possibility is long dead, along with the zombie \u201ctwo-state solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Israeli military and settler murders are a daily reality in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, at the same time an unprecedented confrontation has exploded in Israeli politics over the government\u2019s peremptory move to seize control over the nomination and powers of the country\u2019s judiciary. Israeli \u00a0state president Herzog\u2019s warning of \u201ccivil war\u201d shows the extent of the crisis.<\/p>\n

The \u201creform\u201d threat has brought hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens (almost entirely Jewish) into the streets, blockading highways and ports, openly calling the government scheme \u201cfascist.\u201d They see the fight as a life-and-death struggle to save Israel\u2019s democracy. \u00a0With capital fleeing the country,\u00a0Amjad Iraqi of the Israeli online\u00a0+972<\/em>magazine<\/a>\u00a0calls the spreading revolt, ironically, \u201cone of the most impressive BDS campaigns ever witnessed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democracy does exist, for Israel\u2019s Jewish citizens; to a much more limited degree for the country\u2019s Arab citizens; and not at all for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who live under military-apartheid conditions. A movement for Israeli democracy is inevitably strangled so long as the denial of Palestinian nationhood remains in place either openly or by default.<\/p>\n

For prime minister Netanyahu, judicial \u201creform\u201d means exempting himself from criminal prosecution on multiple corruption charges. Netanyahu is effectively a captive of his religious-extremist coalition partners, for whom it\u2019s about seizing control of \u201cJewish identity\u201d issues and removing any (weak) restraints on murderous military and settler assaults on Palestinian towns, \u00a0unlimited settlement expansion, and power to ban Arab-led parties from future elections (as parliamentary electoral commissions have previously attempted but been overruled by Israel\u2019s Supreme Court).<\/p>\n

Palestinian and progressive critics have accurately pointed out that the fight to \u201csave Israel\u2019s democracy\u201d is essentially over maintaining a\u00a0status quo<\/em>\u00a0that\u2019s already lethally anti-democratic for Palestinians. Given such limitations, its prospects for substantive success are clouded \u2014 although the prospect of weakening judicial authority is causing serious capital flight, while Israel\u2019s supreme protector, the United States government, now seems seriously concerned by the implications of Religious Zionist cabinet ministers\u2019 overtly genocidal appeals. Both these factors are bad for business and \u201cstability.\u201d<\/p>\n

One interesting comparison between Israel and Russia has been the public indifference of most of their populations \u2013 in the Israeli-Jewish case, to the disaster unfolding in the Occupied Territories, and in Russia\u2019s case to the horror in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

For many years now, most of the Israeli-Jewish public has been conditioned to ignore the facts of the Occupation, even when they\u2019re freely available. In Russia, state media and police repression keep the war\u2019s brutality hidden. The degree of freedom inside Israel makes possible a civic arousal, while inside Russia the invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by the disappearance of the remaining vestiges of democracy.<\/p>\n

The Putin regime is now the global mothership of white Christian Nationalism, for which it is so admired by much of the MAGA faction of the U.S. Republican Party. As is widely discussed, Russia is moving increasingly toward some form of fascism, a trend which is only likely to accelerate unless its invasion is defeated. (We\u2019ve discussed this trend in Zakhar Popopvych\u2019s recent article\u00a0\u201cRussia\u2019s Road Toward Fascism?\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

As for the impasse of Russian society itself, it\u2019s deepened by the catastrophe of Putin\u2019s war of choice. As sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe year that has passed since the beginning of the war has clearly shown that the political system needs a radical change. An alternative to reforms can only be the growing disintegration of state institutions and the degradation of an already sick economy, which does not suit anyone. But the only way to change course is to remove Vladimir Putin from power.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(On the First Anniversary of the War.\u201d)<\/a><\/p>\n

Prospects<\/strong><\/p>\n

Indeed, any prospects of a democratic future for Russia are inseparably connected to the outcome of the war \u2013 in particular, they depend on the\u00a0defeat<\/em>\u00a0of its imperialist, annexationist ambitions in Ukraine. Ukrainian democracy is equally dependent on the war\u2019s results \u2013 but in its case, on the\u00a0victory<\/em>\u00a0of its resistance to the invasion. And the outcomes of these events will have ripple effects for all of us.<\/p>\n

While Ukrainian labor and left forces are fully engaged in the war, they are also forced to resist the Zelensky government\u2019s anti-worker policies. A Ukrainian victory would open the\u00a0possibility<\/em>\u00a0(there are no guarantees) of permanently overcoming the cycle of oligarchic factional politics that dominated the country following its 1991 post-Soviet independence. On the other hand, a tragic defeat or amputation of Ukraine is more likely to shatter its emergent national unity \u2014 and bring on a resurgence of far-right forces.<\/p>\n

For Israel, preservation of its\u00a0formal<\/em>\u00a0democracy depends on its\u00a0substantive<\/em>\u00a0expansion. That means first of all, a movement that confronts the reduction of Arab citizens\u2019 rights \u2014 and apartheid-colonial rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories \u2014 in law and practice. This requires nothing short of a political revolution to shatter the doctrine of the \u201cnation-state of the Jewish people\u201d that the current governing coalition is guiding toward its ultimate unspeakable conclusions.<\/p>\n

As under any other ethno-religious regime, Jewish supremacy and democracy will not peacefully coexist. The violent settlers who carried out the pogrom in Huwara, and commit daily atrocities that don\u2019t make the international headlines, understand this perfectly. No doubt they will rush to join the \u201cnational guard\u201d that Netanyahu has gifted to the extreme racist cabinet member Itamar Bem-Gvir.<\/p>\n

The question for Israeli society is whether it can confront the consequences of the Zionist movement\u2019s denial, from its very inception, of the Palestinian nation. That struggle requires assistance from the outside, through the BDS (boycott\/divestment\/sanctions) and other actions of solidarity for Palestinian rights.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Russian denialism of Ukrainian nationhood can only be defeated on the battlefield, and that requires international solidarity, including weapons, with Ukraine\u2019s war for survival. Russia and NATO may be waging an element of a \u201cproxy war\u201d \u2014 which thanks to Putin, NATO is winning \u2014 but what\u2019s of decisive importance is that Ukraine is fighting a\u00a0people\u2019s war<\/em>\u00a0that every left force should support.<\/p>\n

Contrary to Biden\u2019s shambling rhetoric, the issues in this war aren\u2019t about global states standing for \u201cdemocracy versus authoritarianism.\u201d That\u2019s a struggle that exists not between states but\u00a0within<\/em>\u00a0every society, including (especially) our own. \u00a0Let alone is it about the pious fraud of a \u201crules-based international order,\u201d where the United States makes the rules and gives the orders.<\/p>\n

The left must not be diverted: First and foremost in Ukraine and Palestine, the struggle is about the rights of peoples and nations, and the poisonous consequences when those rights are denied.<\/p>\n

1.5.23<\/strong><\/p>\n

_____________<\/p>\n

also see<\/p>\n

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The following article, written by David Finkel, an editor of\u00a0Against the Current\u00a0and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace \u2013 Detroit chapter and the Ukraine Solidarity Network. It was was first posted by Against the Current.\u00a0The article makes a powerful case against the politics of Campism. FROM PALESTINE TO UKRAINE \u00a0– THE POISONS OF DENIALISM…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1858,1867,1845,1868,1848,1870],"tags":[9202],"class_list":["post-24389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oppression-liberation","category-emancipation-liberation-and-self-determination","category-us-imperialism","category-against-imperialism","category-ex-ussr","category-middle-east-and-north-africa","tag-author-david-finkel"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/mastodon.scot\/@rcfscotland\/110305181417243082","error":""},"views":1103,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24389"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24394,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24389\/revisions\/24394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}