Very good text.
Thank you.
Maria Ines Azambuja

Em qua., 18 de out. de 2023 11:13, Rahim Thawer <[log in to unmask]>
escreveu:

>
> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/israel-gaza-war-manufactured-consent.html
>
>
> ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/tags/israel-hamas-war/> OCT.
> 16, 2023
> Explanations Are Not Excuses
> By Sarah Schulman <https://nymag.com/author/sarah-schulman/>
>
> I was born in 1958, and like many of my generation, my parents had
> experienced a world in which Jews were murdered, brutalized, and abandoned.
> My father knew his mother and father to have been helpless peasants living
> under pogroms and without rights in the Russian Pale of Settlement. On my
> mother’s side, my laundry-worker grandmother was financially unable to save
> her two brothers and two sisters in Poland from extermination. My parents
> raised me with the idea that Jews were people who sided with the oppressed
> and worked their way into helping professions.
>
> They could not adjust the worldview born of this experience to a new
> reality: that in Israel, we Jews had acquired state power and built a
> highly funded militarized society, and were now subordinating others. No
> one wants to think about themselves that way. As a Jew and an American who
> has gone through the complex, painful, and transforming process of facing
> the injustice against Palestinians committed in my name and with my tax
> dollars, I have had to change my self-concept. I have had to deprogram
> myself from the idea that Jews continued to be victims when, in some cases,
> we had become perpetrators.
>
> This shift in perception would have been unbearable for my parents. The
> idea that Jewish soldiers could march into villages and commit atrocities
> was incomprehensible. Yet, for 75 years, Palestinians have been murdered,
> incarcerated, and displaced with escalating violence by Israeli soldiers,
> and more recently by settlers. On October 7, these unending, untenable
> conditions exploded when Hamas broke through Israel’s imposed barriers.
> They reentered the land they consider home. They attacked formerly
> Palestinian villages and cities, now under the control of Israel. After
> decades of being on the receiving end of highly organized violence, they
> switched roles and became the murderers and kidnappers of more than 1,300
> Israeli children and adults.
>
> Among political and institutional leaders, there has been a collective
> refusal to see this horrible violence as the consequence of consistent,
> unending brutality — paid for by the United States in billions of dollars
> in aid to Israel per year. Instead, a familiar fog has overtaken so many.
> They pretend these decades of injustice never took place. That Gazans were
> not forced against their will to live under siege. That instead, a group of
> them suddenly — out of nowhere and with no history or experience —
> emerged as monsters and murdered people who had never hurt them in the past
> and held no threat over their future.
>
> Selective recognition is the way we maintain our own sense of goodness. Today,
> we see this process of denial in every aspect of our lives. In this moment,
> it has become a tool to justify the sustained murder of thousands in Gaza,
> where the current death toll
> <https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-15-23/h_5ffdc1e34bd73b76bcf13bed20d3a5c8#:~:text=More%20than%202%2C600%20people%20have,humanitarian%20aid%20to%20get%20in.> sits
> at over 2,600 people. As Israel began its relentless retaliation last week,
> an accompanying image of Israeli and American moral cleanliness was put
> swiftly into action. This is called “manufactured consent” — Noam Chomsky’s
> term for a system-supported propaganda by which authorities and media agree
> on a simplified reality, and it becomes the assumptive truth. We’ve seen
> this erasure of history in the uniform responses by western world leaders,
> university administrations, heads of foundations, and even book fairs over
> the past week. President Biden called
> <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/10/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-terrorist-attacks-in-israel-2/> Hamas’s
> attack “an act of sheer evil” without acknowledging the decades of colonial
> repression that make this violence legible. Instead he summoned another
> history, saying, “This attack has brought to the surface painful memories
> and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the
> Jewish people.” He then assured Israel it could count on the United States’
> military support, as though having been through genocide entitled them to
> commit it.
>
> Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under Trump, might be
> Biden’s political opponent for the presidency, but she reinforced his claim
> of American-Israeli righteousness when she announced
> <https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1711443043998466376> that “Israel
> needs our help in this battle of good vs. evil.” This is the binary that
> has set the tone: *We* are pure, that is to say that *we* have done
> everything exactly right and do not have to question ourselves. Last
> Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took a question
> from journalist Phil Wegmann. He asked her about the president’s attitude
> toward members of Congress who connect Palestinian violence to the Israeli
> violence that preceded it and have called for a cease-fire. Jean-Pierre
> replied
> <https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/omar-and-tlaib-israel-gaza-statements/>,
> “We believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe
> they’re disgraceful.” Here we have a new equation: To ask for the ceasing
> of bombing and killing thousands of people is not a reasonable thought to
> consider. Instead, to stop killing is repulsive. To stop killing is a
> national disgrace.
>
> Within this framework, any public outcry by Palestinians or allegiance
> with them becomes criminal. France
> <https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/europe/france-ban-pro-palestinian-intl/index.html>
>  and Germany
> <https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-ban-pro-palestinian-protest/video-67085200> banned
> people from showing compassion, solidarity, or pain for Palestinians in
> public marches. United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman called for
> monitoring displays of Palestinian flags. “At a time when Hamas terrorists
> are massacring civilians and taking the most vulnerable (including the
> elderly, women, and children) hostage, we can all recognize the harrowing
> effect that displays of their logos and flags can have on communities,” she
> said
> <https://hyperallergic.com/850134/british-politician-wants-to-criminalize-waving-the-palestinian-flag/>.
> Aside from the freedom-of-expression issues, there was a symbolic politics
> being deployed here. A flag that unites millions of Palestinians who live,
> not only in Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, in refugee camps and in Israel,
> but in a global diaspora from Brooklyn and Detroit to London to the UAE —
> all of these people become unrepresentable.
>
> This continues in the realm of education and ideas, where there have been
> visible examples of individual writers and anti-occupation groups arguing
> for context. On Friday, Semafor reported that MSNBC quietly removed
> <https://www.semafor.com/article/10/13/2023/inside-msnbcs-middle-east-conflict> three
> Muslim anchors from hosting duties, despite some at the network believing
> they had the most expertise on the conflict. *Harper’s Bazaar* editor
> Samira Nasr was forced to apologize
> <https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/harpers-bazaar-editor-samira-nasr-apologizes-for-insensitive-instagram-post-on-hamas-attack/> for
> calling Israel’s move to cut power to Gaza “the most inhuman thing” she’s
> ever seen. The Frankfurt Book Fair rescinded
> <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/15/palestinian-voices-shut-down-at-frankfurt-book-fair-say-authors> an
> award it had chosen to give to Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. Donors
> have threatened
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/us/university-of-pennsylvania-israel-palestine.html> the
> job of the president of the University of Pennsylvania because a literary
> festival called Palestine Writes took place there in September. Books,
> literature, ideas, discussion are all considered appropriate fodder to the
> manufacture of consent.
>
> Humans want to be innocent. Better than innocent is the innocent
> victim. The innocent victim is eligible for compassion and does not have to
> carry the burden of self-criticism. Almost every person with authority or
> at the helm of an institution has declared that Israelis are innocent
> victims and that Palestinians are not. On *60 Minutes *Sunday night
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/15/biden-israel-occupy-gaza-big-mistake/>,
> Biden reaffirmed his support for Israel while appearing to paint
> Palestinians as worthy of our compassion, too. He assured the American
> people that he was confident Israel would follow the “rules of war” and
> that “innocents in Gaza” would have “access to medicine and food and
> water.” But in the real world, Israel has cut off the flow of medicine,
> food, and water
> <https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-civilians-humanitarian-crisis-shortages-fuel-water-937b474fa16970f36ac44615e9797fbc> in
> Gaza. Water has already run out at U.N. shelters in the territory. Biden’s
> comments only reinforce that as far as the war is concerned, there are no
> innocents in Gaza.
>
> At the root of this erasure is the increasing insistence that
> understanding history, looking at the order of events and the consequences
> of previous actions to understand why the contemporary moment exists as it
> does, somehow endorses the present. Explanations are not excuses — they are
> the illumination that builds the future. But the problem with understanding
> how we got to where we are is that we could then be implicated. And
> innocent victims cannot have any responsibility for creating the moment.
>
> What is so ironic is that since 2005, Palestinians have been offering a
> nonviolent solution: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Just
> as many of us grew up not buying grapes so that farmworkers could have a
> union or refusing to purchase South African products to help end apartheid,
> Palestinians have been asking the rest of us to put economic and cultural
> pressure on Israel through nonviolent boycott, to encourage them to move
> away from violent separation and toward negotiation and coexistence. The
> message here, too, was strategically twisted. The Israeli government and
> its supporters have led global campaigns to make supporting this boycott
> illegal. They have developed confusing worldwide messaging claiming that
> criticizing Israeli apartheid is the same thing as antisemitism. Every
> aspect of nonviolent organizing for a more equitable solution has been met
> with distortion as a tool of repression.
>
> There is always, of course, the choice to end the siege of Gaza and the
> occupation of the West Bank and end the second-class reality of
> Palestinians living in Israel. Make everyone equal citizens with the same
> rights to vote, passports, roads, universities. The reason this solution of
> just reconciliation, known as “One State,” is not yet on the table is
> because of this selective reality: this panic that equalizing Palestinians
> in Israel would be allowing an enemy in, one that is fundamentally opposed
> to Israeli existence. But what this fear overlooks is that Palestine, like
> every society in the world, is a multidimensional society. Like Jews and
> Americans and Israelis, Palestinians contain multiple factions and
> religious perspectives — Muslim, Christian, Druse — and they hold a wide
> variety of political visions. The only thing they share is the desire to be
> free. They would never be able to act like a united block and all vote in
> the same way, for example, in the same way that we cannot. Because they are
> human, as we know ourselves to be. To fear unanimity is to imagine they are
> different from everyone else on earth.
>
> The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to
> the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence.
> Every person has to face their own complicities, and we start this by
> listening to whoever is suffering. Even if it is by our own hand. It is
> this transcendence that can lead us all to a better place.
>
> ---------
>
>
> warmly,
>
> Rahim Thawer MSW RSW
>
> Affective Consulting & Psychotherapy Services
>
> affectiveconsult.ca
> To leave, manage or join list:
> https://listserv.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=sdoh&A=1
>
>

To leave, manage or join list: https://listserv.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=sdoh&A=1