From the river to the sea…
Remember the furious response, especially after October 7, to student protesters chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”? The slogan was condemned as calling for the destruction of Israel. Those chanting it and other slogans were “antisemitic” and part of the “Hamas Support Network”. (BTW: Home Shopping Network, you’ll have to rebrand.) Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, and Palestine solidarity activists were attacked by police, expelled from universities, and lost jobs and job opportunities. All in the name of ensuring the “safety” of Jewish students. (But not the safety of Jewish students participating in the protests; they weren’t “good” Jews.)
Then, this screenshot of Israeli Prime Minister at a press conference in September 2024:
In light of President Trump’s desire to expel more than 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn it into a resort, Netanyahu might want to change the Strip’s color.
We could translate this map into a slogan: “From the river to the sea, Israel will be Palestinian free.”
Add to that the 2018 Nation State Basic Law, which says, “The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people,” and “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Translated from the legalese, Israel has not been and never will be the home of all the people who live between the river and the sea.
The blindness of anti-Palestinian racism
Last Saturday, February 15, on Miami Beach, a Jewish gunman, Mordechai Brafman, shot 17 times at two passengers in a car. The police report stated, “while in custody in our interview room, the defendant spontaneously stated that while he was driving his truck, he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both.” The passengers survived with minor injuries.
Only the passengers weren’t Palestinian. They were an Israeli father and son on vacation. The son posted on X that night:
My father and I went through a murder attempt against anti-Semitic background. They tried to murder us in the heart of Miami but the creator of the world is with us so he didn’t go. I want to say thank you to everyone for their support and it is not taken for granted with israel Live 🇮🇱. Death to the Arabs 🙏.
Is this the definition of irony? A Jew tries to kill two people whom he believed to be Palestinians. One of the Jewish victims assumed the shooter was an Arab because “they” want to kill Jews, so he calls for all Arabs to be killed, a popular slogan in Israel. Not only does this incident show the blindness of anti-Palestinian racism, which makes the Gaza genocide possible; it also demonstrates that anti-Palestinian racism does not make Jews safe. Brafman is Ashkenazi (European); the victims are Mizrahim (Middle East/North Africa). If the victims had looked more like him, I don’t think Brafman would have assumed they were Palestinian. If the victims had embraced their Arab Jewish heritage, they would have understood why Brafman tried to kill them and maybe have forgone their call to kill their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
Orly Noy, a Mizrahi Jewish woman who is the chair of the executive board of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, posted an article at 972 magazine, which talks about the sordid history of Ashkenazi Jews assaulting and killing Mizrahi Jews because the latter “looked Arab.” “Mizrahim may continue to deny their Arab identity, to scorn it, to distance themselves from it,” Noy says, “but in the end, a bullet will remind them: after all, you are Arab too.”
Socialist singles mix
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America hosted a “socialist singles mixer” on the night before Valentine’s Day. The headline in the Gothamist was spot-on Karl Marx, if Karl did stand-up: “NYC socialists are seizing the means of reproduction at a lefty singles mixer.” Three hundred people showed up. Someone wore a sticker that said, “Will you free my Palestine?” In a singles scavenger hunt, participants checked the qualities they were looking for, which started with “Find someone who…” and included “is a DJ,” “has baked a loaf of bread,” and “has ridden the Staten Island Ferry.” Yeah, not sure about that last one.
The courts won’t save us
Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent. Earlier this month he posted an essay entitled, “The Courts Can’t Stop the Trump-Musk Coup.” I appreciated his analysis because the corporate media and the Democratic Party seem to be leaning almost exclusively on legal challenges to stop or slow the dismantling of the government, social services, and human rights.
Lawsuits are a necessary part of the anti-Trump movement, but as Mystal points out, relying on the courts is “an excuse for inaction and complacency.” As if to prove Mystal’s point, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told a press conference that the Democratic Party “is not going to swing at every pitch. We’re going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people.” This was after Trump started rounding up immigrants and Musk started gutting federal agencies.
Mystal lists his reasons why the courts will not save us:
1) The only thing slower than the courts deciding something, is Donald Trump trying to read War and Peace. “If we’re very lucky, in a year or two we’ll get final rulings on whether Trump is allowed to do the bad things he started doing two weeks ago”;
2) The courts can’t enforce any of their decisions, especially with a government chock full of people who don’t care what the courts decide. “If courts tell Trump not to do something, he’ll pretend his cell phone dropped the call and keep right on doing it”; and
3) The Supreme Court. “As we’ve already seen with the court’s decision to grant Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, [Chief Justice John] Roberts and his co-conspirators have pre-decided that the best way to handle Trump is to ride it out, generally give him what he wants, and accrue as much power for themselves as possible.”
Mystal is right: “A court order cannot enforce itself. It cannot change a mind. It cannot make white folks less racist. It cannot recapture things that have been lost, or stolen. The only thing that can save us is us.”