🧵Five reasons I am a non-Israeli, non-Jewish, two-state Zionist (a thread)
1/ First, Sean Matgamna
It was Sean Matgamna – or ‘Rebbe Matgamna’ as some in the Union of Jewish Students affectionately called this brilliant Irish intellectual and former Docker at the time – who woke me from my dogmatic One-State slumber in the mid-1980s. Sean was the leading theoretician of Socialist Organiser, the far-left group I had been a member of since 1980. Out of a clear blue sky he walked in one day with a paper arguing that we should drop the demand for a ‘democratic secular state’ and embrace ‘two states for two peoples.’ After a long internal debate – the sophistication and seriousness of which I was never to find in academia – his arguments prevailed. 2/ “It seems to me,” Matgamna wrote, “that the terms of the only just solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are clear and unmistakeable. Unless you think the interests of one side should be entirely sacrificed to the other – that is, unless you are either an Arab or an Israeli chauvinist – there is only one acceptable solution. Each nation should have self-determination in the territory where it is the majority. I understand that to mean, essentially, the 1967 border. There should be full equality for members of each nationality in the other’s state. The demand for a “secular democratic state” [– the so-called one-state solution, ‘from the river to the sea’ -] necessarily involves replacing the Jewish state of Israel with another arrangement in which Jews will not have a state. The goal is not only to secure Palestinian rights by putting an end to Israeli rule in the Palestinian territories, but to deprive Israeli Jews of their national rights.”

🧵Why do so many 'clever' people in the West hold Israel and only Israel accountable for everything ?(a thread)

1/
The Anti-Zionist Ideology has warped the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West. At its heart is an assumption about the very Being of Israelis and Palestinians. It goes like this: Palestinians (and Arabs per se) do not have agency and choice, and so cannot be held accountable and responsible for their actions. Israelis do; always, and exclusively. More: Palestinians are a driven people, dominated by circumstance and emotion, lacking choice, below the age of responsibility, really, so never to be held accountable. Israelis are the opposite; masters of all circumstances, rational and calculating, the root cause of everything, responsible for everything 2/ The assumption is pushed by the public intellectuals who have shaped much of the debate about the conflict in Britain. Here are five illustrative examples. First, When the Israeli novelist (and Peace Now founder) Amos Oz complained that incitement by extremist Palestinian intellectuals has led some Palestinians to be “suffocated and poisoned by blind hate,” the anti-Zionist writer Yitzhak Laor was outraged, accusing Oz of “incitement” against the Palestinians! Just the act of seeking to hold some Palestinians to account for their actions was enough to condemn as Oz as beyond the pale.

🧵Framing Israel as a ‘settler colonialism’ erases everything you need to know to understand the I-P conflict. Why? Because it ignores everything that distinguishes the Jewish return to Palestine from White European Settler Colonialism. Here are 4 key differences. (1/10) The first difference is the intimate Jewish relationship to the land. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. (2/10)

Thoughts about ‘Islamophobia Month’
in 9 parts.
1/
After every Islamist attack on our free societies there is a rush to displacement. It's just too politically difficult and socially awkward to talk about the killers’ ideology, or the place of religion in that ideology. So we talk about *anything* other than the brute fact that the murderers shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’. 2/
Of course, we need to condemn every form of racism against Muslims. We should seek unity between Muslims and non-Muslims against extremism of all kinds. But we *also* need to discuss the elephant in the room: the radical and sectarian, often violent, often misogynist, and sometimes fascistic political ideology and global movement of Islamism and its relationship to Islam. Denying there *is* a relationship is to hide from reality.

🧵Ilan Pappe’s ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases everything one needs to know to properly understand the I-P conflict. It misses everything that distinguishes the Jewish return to Palestine from White European Settler Colonialism. Here are the four key differences. (1/10) The first difference is the intimate Jewish relationship to the land. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. (2/10)

🧵On the Absurdity of the ‘One State Solution’

(1/7) First, the one state solution is absurd because it is anti-democratic. The two peoples *don’t want* the one-state solution, but one-staters simply ignore both peoples. The late Tony Judt invited Israel to give up its "anachronistic" attachment to the nation-state and Saree Makdisi has expressed his disdain for "those Palestinians who cling to what is manifestly an outmoded form of political thought… centred on the nation-state". The democratic right to self-determination goes out the window with one-staters. We Know Best takes its place. (2/7) Second, the one state solution is absurd because forcing the two peoples into a single state neither of them wants would be a recipe for permanent civil war. The one state solution ignores a century of bloody conflict between the two peoples in a well-meaning but wilfully naïve John Lennon-esque spirit, singing ‘imagine there’s no countries, it’s easy if you try’. As the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland puts it – and he is a sharp critic of Israeli governments, past and present – the one state solution is rather like advising a couple that can no longer bear the sight of each other that the answer is for them to get married.

🧵Chapter Extract from ‘Left Alternatives to Left Antisemitism: a conversation between Alan Johnson and Philip Spencer’
TROTSKY VERSUS ANTISEMITISM
AJ: (1/8) Trotsky already knew about, and had fought against, Christian antisemitism and the Tsar-licensed Black Hundred pogroms, about which he wrote powerfully in his book 1905. And he had written movingly about the antisemitic Beilis ‘blood libel’ trial in 1913. The 1917 revolution taught him that antisemitism was present among the revolutionary as well as the counter-revolutionary armies. He suffered right-wing antisemitic abuse from the White counter-revolutionaries and then, soon enough, left antisemitic abuse from the Stalinist counter-revolutionaries. About the latter he said this in 1937: ‘Of course we can close our eyes to the facts and limit ourselves to vague generalities about the equality and brotherhood of all races. But an ostrich policy will not advance us a single step … All serious and honest observers bear witness to the existence of antisemitism, not only of the old and hereditary, but also of the new “Soviet” variety’.
@paulmasonnews @workersliberty @DavidHirsh @centre_as @lynngmb @daverich1 @simon_schama @Baddiel @simonmontefiore @Freedland (2/8) In the 1930s, in the face of Nazism and Stalinism, in that awful midnight of the century, when Trotsky was in exile and ‘on the planet without a visa’, he managed to carry out a 'global revision' of the classical Marxist approach to antisemitism that was so radical that he alone on the left predicted the Shoah and embraced a kind of proto-Zionism before his death in 1940. This notion of a 'global revision' I take from Enzo Traverso, whose intellectual history The Marxists and the Jewish Question argued that Trotsky’s was, though not systematic, ‘the most profound analysis of antisemitism that Marxist thought produced in the interwar period'.

🧵 Chapter Extract. Sean Matgamna, ‘What is Left-Wing Antisemitism?’

We need to specify what ‘left antisemitism’ consists of, in order to debate, educate, and clarify. These, I think, are its main features. First, the belief that Israel has no right to exist. That is the core of left antisemitism, though it comes in more than one version and from more than one root, ranging from the skewed anti-imperialism of the Orthodox Trotskyists through Arab nationalism to Islamic chauvinism. Advocacy of the destruction of Israel, which is what separates left-wing and Islamist antisemites from honest critics of Israeli policy, should not be tolerated in the labour movement and in the serious left. (1/8) Second, the belief that Israeli Jewish nationalism, Zionism, is necessarily a form of racism. That this racism can only be expunged if Israel, Zionists, and Jews abandon Israeli nationalism and support of any kind for Israel. That Jewish students, for example, can only redeem themselves if they agree that the very existence of Israel or of an Israeli Jewish nation is racist. (2/8)

🧵 EXCLUSIVE. Scandalous Indoctrination: Inside a Kings College Counter-Terrorism Course for UK Civil Servants. Read Anna Stanley's story (1/4) @fathomjournal
fathomjournal.org/scandalous-ind… It confirmed my fears – that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.

Underpinning their presentations, some of the lecturers relayed typical post-modern identity politics.

The course began with the issue of definitions. What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’

I posed to the room: ‘Surely we can acknowledge subjectivity while being able to come up with a collective understanding of what terrorism is?’ Some 40 civil servants looked at me blankly. No?

I wondered why we were there. (2/4)

🧵Book's last words. "I am pessimistic about the future of the radical left. Social democracy once thought the task of the left was not to trash the civilisational gains of the twin revolutions, industrial & democratic, but to preserve them & extend their fruits to all” (1/13) And the left looked not to middle class ‘activists’, tenured radicals or the churn of ‘revolutionary’ students, but to popular movements, trades unions and mass workers’ parties to be the core of a great international movement of rational reform. (2/13)

🧵 The Nazi analogy seen on the demonstrations renews the core motif of antisemitism, that the Jews are not just ‘Other’ but also malign. (1/7) The supposed content of this Jewish malignity has always changed with the times and the needs of the antisemites. (2/7)

🧵The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases everything one needs to know to properly understand the I-P conflict. It misses everything that distinguishes the Jewish return to Palestine from White European Settler Colonialism. Here are the four key differences. (1/10) The first difference is the intimate Jewish relationship to the land. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. (2/10)

🧵Anti-Zionism meant one thing in the early 20th century: an argument among Jews, mostly, about how best to meet the threat of antisemitism. It has come to mean something entirely different after the Holocaust and after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. (1/10) ‘Anti-Zionism’ has come to mean a programme of comprehensive hostility to all but a sliver of world Jewry, a programme for the eradication of actually existing Jewish self-determination. (2/10)