Member Newsletter
This may seem like old news to some people. But I wanted to go back and reread some of the initial reactions to the massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. They are notable in themselves. And I read at least some versions of them in real time. But I felt the need to reread them now to understand the progression of events in North America over the last 5 weeks if not necessarily in Israel/Palestine.
National Students for Justice in Palestine is the national umbrella group which supports and coordinates messaging for over 200 Students for Justice in Palestine campus groups across North America.
On the day after the October 7th attacks, the organization issued this statement as either their first or one of their first statements on the massacres in southern Israel.
“Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”
A couple days later the group released a tool kit for holding demonstrations and protests around the US. That toolkit included the following statements among others …
“On the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, the resistance in Gaza launched a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy which disrupted the very foundation of Zionist settler society. On the morning of October 8th, the Palestinian resistance stormed the illegitimate border fence, gaining control of the Gaza checkpoint at Erez, and re-entering 1948 Palestine.”
A central message of the document is that all of the Israeli state is made up of occupied territory and that all residents of Israel are “settlers.” It goes on to argue that no Israeli civilians have protections as civilians since all are in fact “military assets.” “Settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land. Responsibility for every single death falls solely on the zionist entity.”
A few days after the October 7th attacks I saw a tenured professor at Yale explicitly endorse this argument that no citizen of Israel can be considered a civilian or be entitled to the protections accorded to civilians in wartime.
Another quotation …
Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms— armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
Settlers are already fleeing the land, their ‘dedication’ to the settler colony is easily broken. The dedication of Palestianians for their national liberation is unshakable.
A few thoughts.
“From the River to the Sea …” is a staple of SJP rhetoric. I don’t think you can read any of this and seriously believe that the phrase means everyone currently living in Israel-Palestine living together with freedom and equality.
Of course that doesn’t mean that everyone uses the term as SJP or Hamas does. I believe it was a big mistake to censure Rashida Tlaib for her use of and defense of the phrase. We don’t censure people for unpopular or what we believe are bad beliefs. (It was primarily a Republican effort, with a few under three dozen Democrats voting in favor.) But her explanation wasn’t credible. That and similar phrases have been used for decades on both sides of the conflict as defenses of and statements of maximalism. It doesn’t ‘mean’ expulsion or genocide. It’s intentionally not that specific. It’s how both sides of the conflict say, ‘we get everything.’
The other thing that stands out is the use of a kind of Maoist revolutionary rhetoric. The graduate student colloquium discourse is strong with these ones.
I generally consider it a cardinal rule not to get excited or too critical about things said by college students. College is a time of experimentation, enthusiasm, frivolity. College kids saying silly things is the ultimate dog bites man story. I hold to that precept as a general matter. But SJP is the main, though certainly not the only, organizer of recent campus protests and they’re a lead organizer of many of those off campus as well.
It seems absurd to imagine that these claims, arguments and demands would not seem to Israelis and to the great majority of American Jews who feel an affinity towards Israel (if not its governments policies) as bristling with hostility and even latent violence. For Israelis in Israel, certainly not terribly latent violence. Palestinians have received far more than their fair share of history’s malevolence and brutality. So the sentiments, angers, demands are no mystery. But this whole tableau speaks to a grand battle of destruction in which only one side will or can be left standing.
It’s hard not to ask: if this is the framework, what possible logic could there be to Israel ever agreeing to a ceasefire? Who agrees to a ceasefire in a battle in which the enemy’s aims are existential?
My advocacy of partition — two states — has always been based on the belief that Israel is strong, entrenched and not going anywhere and can afford to lay aside maximalist aspirations in the interests of a lasting peace. There are things you’ll do when you’re back is against the wall that you would never and should never do otherwise. One of the ironies of Zionism and Israeli history is that the true heartlands of Jewish history are not on the coastal plain where most of Israel was built but in what we now call the West Bank. But there’s a Rolling Stones logic here. You can get maybe what you need but not necessarily what you want. Zionism was based not only on history but for Jews on necessity. What the Zionists needed they got. It’s precisely that river to the sea maximalism that has been eating away at Israel from the inside since 1967.
As I said at the top, this whole post is mostly about North America rather than Israel-Palestine. There Israel remains by far the stronger power, with all that flows from that, though perhaps more vulnerable than some of us imagined. But here in North America I don’t think we can look away from the eliminationist thinking at the core of SJP rhetoric, albeit dressed up in cant of post-colonialism. I don’t believe that the great majority of those calling for ceasefires or shocked and outraged by the carnage in Gaza believe the stuff I’ve noted above. But the core of this movement in North America clearly does. And there’s no reason to forget that.