[News] Netanyahu’s Victory is an Even Bigger Victory for Palestinian Solidarity Movement
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Mar 26 14:08:07 EDT 2015
March 26, 2015
*http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/26/netanyahus-victory-is-an-even-bigger-victory-for-palestinian-solidarity-movement/*
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A New Opportunity
Netanyahu’s Victory is an Even Bigger Victory for Palestinian
Solidarity Movement
by AJAMU BARAKA
The cover of respectability that obscured the brutal and immoral reality
of the Israeli colonial project may have been permanently ripped away by
Benjamin Netanyahu’s angry declaration that if re-elected, there would
never be a Palestinian state and his racist rant on election day against
his own citizens who happen to be Palestinians.
Many people in the U.S. and Western Europe were shocked by Netanyahu’s
comments. However, for those of us who are aware of the platform of
Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the only thing that was surprising was his
candor. The rejection of a viable Palestinian state has always been
Likud’s position, a position well known in Israel and the basis of
Likud’s appeal, but rarely acknowledged and never discussed in the U.S.
corporate media.
But it is not just the Likud Party – there has never been a serious
commitment to a two-state solution from any of the mainstream Israeli
parties, including the newly-constructed Zionist Union.
The two-state solution was always an illusion. From the beginning, it
was a right-wing political diversion meant to confuse and fragment the
international community and undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian
struggle for one, democratic, secular state for all of the people who
live in the territory. Even after the Palestinian leadership adopted the
two-state position in 1988 that then served as a framework for the Oslo
Accords in 1993, Israeli leaders never seriously moved to finalize the
process.
According to Ali Abunimah,
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-im-relieved-netanyahu-won>
the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, what
distinguishes the Netanyahu victory from the scenario that would have
likely unfolded if the liberal Zionists from the ZU had won, is that
Netanyahu’s win strips away the opportunities for the so-called
‘international community’ to “hide its complicity with Israel’s ugly
crimes behind a charade of a “peace process.”
Abunimah’s analysis reflects the position that for most Palestinians the
cultural and psychological assault, checkpoints, curfews, home
demolitions, torture, targeted killings, assaults from armed settlers
who kill with impunity – the daily reality of life under occupation –
would have continued, no matter what party formation dominated the
Israeli Knesset.
That is precisely why the two-state solution was such a valuable
subterfuge and why liberal Zionists in Israel and the U.S. were so
devastated with the results of the election.
They understood that even though the plight of Palestinians and a
resolution of the conflict was not even a serious topic in the
elections, Netanyahu’s last minute declaration and racist rant — and the
“positive” response it generated among many Israelis — made the
two-state issue and Israeli racism the embarrassing centerpieces of the
election in the minds of the international community.
Even though Netanyahu’s comments only confirmed what everyone knew to be
the real position of all the major parties in Israel, liberal Zionists,
who have always attempted to have the best of both worlds — to enjoy the
privileges of stolen land while simultaneously opposing the more crude
elements of the colonial theft — understood that without the political
cover provided by the endless “negotiations” toward a two-state
solution, Israel could potentially face serious international isolation.
*The Congressional Black Caucus and Black Participation in the BDS movement*
Africans in South Africa make-up the most consistently militant section
of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting
KillingTrayvons1
<http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/>Israel. This is
not surprising, given that Israeli support for the racist South African
regime was only eclipsed by the support that came from the U.S.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the moral voices that opposed apartheid
in South Africa, upset the leaders of the Israeli state when he
characterized Israel as an apartheid state. He has also expressed how
deeply impacted he was personally by witnessing the degradation of
Palestinian men, women and children by Israeli military forces.
According to Bishop Tutu
<http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Desmond-Tutu-Israel-guilty-of-apartheid-in-treatment-of-Palestinians-344874>,
the scenes of Palestinian humiliation that he witnessed in Israel would
be “familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed
and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid
government.”
The principled opposition to Israeli apartheid on the part of South
Africans is in sharp contrast to the immoral support the Congressional
Black Caucus (CBC) gives to Israel.
Until now, members of the CBC were able to avoid criticism of their
slavish support for Israel by arguing that they in fact supported
Palestinian liberation by supporting the peaceful resolution of the
conflict in the form of a Palestinian state.
However, with Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state solution, coupled
with what many African Americans see as Netanyahu’s “disrespect” for
Obama with his speech to Congress, the CBC and other liberal black
formations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), the National Urban League, as well as some members of
the black clergy, are now beginning to face serious questions about
their support for Israel.
This development, along with the new generation of young African
American activists leading the anti-police violence struggle who have
established solidarity links with Palestinian activists, are creating
the political conditions to challenge and reverse the influence of the
pro-Israel forces in the black community that emerged over the last two
decades and to also generate black support for the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) movement, especially among black students.
Netanyahu and the Israeli voters that voted for him gave the Palestinian
solidarity and BDS movement a strategic opening. The election may have
finally stripped the veil of nationalist legitimacy from the racialized
Ashkenazi Zionist project and exposed the genocidal violence, greed and
generalized moral rot that is at the core of this project and at the
center of all European invasions and colonialism since 1492.
For 67 years, Palestinian human beings have been displaced, degraded and
dehumanized. Today the Palestinian solidarity movement has a new
opportunity to intensify the efforts to expose and isolate the Israeli
project as the most morally obscene capitulation to injustice on the
part of the international community since 1945. Let’s thank Netanyahu
for his honesty and take up the challenge we’ve been given.
/*Ajamu Baraka* is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political
analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist
for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons:
An Anthology of American Violence
<http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/>” (Counterpunch
Books, 2014). He can be reached at info.abaraka at gmail.com
<mailto:info.abaraka at gmail.com> and www.AjamuBaraka.com
<http://www.AjamuBaraka.com>/
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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