Pages

Friday, April 12, 2013

An injury to one is an injury to all

SOYMB came across this article and found it offered a positive perspective on racism and particularly on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is worth extensively quoting from.
In the deep south of Mississippi and Arkansas and the cotton belt states, in the 1930s, poor black and white tenant farmers organized the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and waged a successful strike against the big landowners for higher pay. They were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, that their integrated meetings were declared illegal (the racist Jim Crow laws prohibited them.) The workers' very ability to form the union at all required them to reject the racist ideas that the KKK and the Jim Crow laws were intended to promote and enforce.

Did the racist Jim Crow laws benefitted or harmed the poor whites? Many on the Left will automatically answer that the poor whites benefitted from the racist Jim Crow laws and the same Leftists, not surprisingly, will also assert that ordinary Jews living in Israel benefit from Zionism.
The Zionist claim that Israel is a "Jewish state" is actually a big lie designed to make Jews believe that they benefit from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The truth is that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians makes ordinary Jews easier for the Zionist billionaires and generals and politicians to dominate, control and exploit.
Israel is no more a "state of the Jews" than the United States is a state of “we the people"; it is a state of the ruling Jewish elite.
Ordinary Jews in Israel may not suffer the same magnitute of oppression as Palestinians, but they do not benefit from Zionism; Zionism is no "privilege" enjoyed by ordinary Israeli Jews; it is an injury to them as part of the "all" in "an injury to one is an injury to all." Class economic inequality in Israel (and the U.S.) is greater than in the other "Western democracies" for the same reason that wages for all workers are lower in the American South than in the American North: where the racist attack is sharpest against the "one" the injury is greater to the "all."
Huge Occupy-style mass demonstrations that broke out in Israel in the summer of 2011, against the extreme economic inequality in Israel that is making it impossible for many Israelis to be able even to afford to rent an apartment, constituted a revolt by working class Israelis (mainly Jewish, many light-skinned) against the Zionist leaders. The failure of this revolt to win substantial gains against the Zionist ruling elite was due to the success of the Zionist rulers in using racism (ethnic cleansing) against Palestinians in the name of Jews to make Jewish Israelis fear Palestinians (because they fight back) and view the Zionist rulers as their protectors against the Palestinians. Israel's prime minister Netanyahu understood this very well. He instigated a convenient "crisis" in Gaza and used it to force the Israeli demonstrators to choose between supporting their Zionist leaders against the "real enemy" (i.e. Palestinians) or continuing their struggle against their Zionist leaders. This killed the revolt.
Building a movement of working people that unites all racial groups against an attack on any racial group requires understanding and acting upon what is potentially possible, and not dismissing the possibility merely because it hasn't happened yet. If one dismisses the possibility of building a large working class movement against Zionism, then the only alternative is to rely on the ruling class, i.e. on "international law" and the United Nations and other such things, which is clearly a losing strategy. It's been used for more than 60 years and it has accomplished absolutely nothing towards winning the right of return for Palestinians. The potential exists for mass demonstrations in Israel, such as those in the summer of 2011, challenging the power of the Zionist ruling class and rejecting its racist ethnic cleansing as a divide-and-rule "injury to all." This, indeed, is what the Zionist ruling class fears most of all.
Clearly, the principle that "an injury to one is an injury to all" is as relevant for all struggles against injustice as it is for the struggle against Zionism. This is why the ruling class uses its control of left and liberal media to try to persuade people that the principle is false. There is a whole liberal/left vocabulary that has been injected into public discourse, designed to refute the "injury to one" principle. Liberals and leftists are encouraged to refer to the working class people who are not the "one" who is injured directly by a racist policy as "complicit" in the racist policy, and to assert that they are "privileged" (which means that they benefit from the injustice.) Thus "whites are complicit in racism" and enjoy "white skin privilege" and "Israeli Jews are complicit in and privileged by Zionism."

One can always find some excuse to assert that an injury to one is a benefit to the others. The ruling class absolutely delights in seeing activists to do just that. Activists who do this may not realize it, but by doing so they are essentially declaring that they don't really have any intention to win; they just want to tell the world (and reassure themselves) that they are against injustice. But the point is to abolish injustice, not just to declare it unjust.

No comments:

Post a Comment