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After police killings of African Americans and Palestinians, an increasingly integrated white nationalist, Evangelical and right-wing Orthodox Jewish coalition blames them for being shot
By Joshua Shanes*
I haven’t slept these nights. When the Shavuot festival ended, I read about unrest across America, a reaction not only to George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, but also to systematic repression and police brutality in response to peaceful protests.
Then I read about a 32-year-old autistic Palestinian who was shot dead by an Israeli soldier meters from his school because “he looked armed” (he was not) and when he was called to stop, he jumped behind a garbage to hide.
It’s personal to me. That could be my son. He might have reacted that way. He is the smartest person I have ever met who can go to school perfectly and would probably have responded to the screaming in a similar way. Frankly, that would have been likely if he hadn’t enjoyed white privilege; I can think of more than one occasion when his skin color probably saved his life.
And then I read an answer to Eyad Hallaq’s murder by a prominent Israeli lawyer who claimed that his parents were to blame for “admitting” a person with special needs alone. A man who then accuses the Palestinians capitalizes that they are so stupid and violent and force “us” to kill them.
I’ve come across this “Cool Hand Luke” argument before: It’s the perpetrator’s argument – “Why are you making me hurt you? I don’t like it more than you.” But never in such a grotesque way and never in a way that touched me so much.
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Rana, mother of Iyad Halak, 32, on the way to a nearby school for people with special needs killed by the police, holds his photo in her home at Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem, May 30, 2020 Credit: Mahmoud Illean, AP
I wish I could take this person who knows nothing about autism other than the word itself to Eyad’s parents to dare to tell them in the face. Parents who may (wrongly) blame themselves and suffer the additional outrage of a house search even though their son was apparently killed for no reason.
I have always resisted the overlap between police violence against African Americans and Israeli violence against Palestinians. I think this is an anti-Semitic fusion based on wrong connections.
The line between anti-Israeli rhetoric and anti-Semitism is crossed when Israel is blamed for global grievances, as Jews have traditionally been blamed for global grievances, or when they stage a global conspiracy to achieve this goal.
Israel is not responsible for racism or the system of racial oppression that has shaped America in different ways for over four centuries. Israel * is * responsible for weapons it delivers to oppressive regimes, but otherwise it is only responsible for what it does in its own borders and occupied territories.
Why does racial oppression in America and Israel / Palestine melt for me now beyond my emotional connection to Eyad Hallak?
I think the answer is that there are parallels. They don’t cause each other, but they share similar characteristics, and their supporters are increasingly merging into one camp, the Evangelical Orthodox Jewish / Trump-White Nationalist context.
First, in both cases there is a group that is empowered over another and, in particular, is empowered to use violence almost with impunity. It is systematic, involving generations of expropriation and violence, and those who benefit in both cases do not seem to be able to recognize this privilege and instead blame the victim for their status.
In both cases, this includes those who enjoy it, who are enthusiastic about its superiority and privilege, and those who deny it, those who react to the most extreme examples when pushed in the face – but ONLY these most extreme examples – but refuse to recognize its systematic causes and manifestations and therefore obviously refuse to do anything serious to address them. “So bad.” “One day it will be better if they change.”
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Terrence Floyd sits silently at the intersection in Minneapolis, Minnesota where his brother George Floyd was killed in police custody. June 1, 2020 Credit: Bebeto Matthews, AP
Second, in both cases there is the phenomenon of accepting protest theoretically, but only if it is non-violent. But not like this. Or so. Or so.
Hence criticism of quietly “taking a knee” at the national anthem. With regard to Israel, even the economic boycott – the quintessence of the non-violent protest and a core element of the American civil rights movement – is described as “violent” and prohibited. And when violence inevitably explodes, be it mass violence or a tiny cell, they see circular evidence that the suppression is justified.
Don’t forget that “Come on, let’s be smart with these people so they don’t get up” (Exodus 1:10) was the logic of every dictator and genocide from Pharaoh to Hitler and South Africa and beyond.
Third, in both cases those of the armed forces authorized to use violence will do so. In some cases, the military and police attract volunteers who want to use violence. In other cases, users are systematically forced to use it as soon as they are authorized, especially if the system encourages it.
In addition, the culture continues to circle the wagons and protect the abusive comrades from the aftermath. Whether fellow officers, fellow soldiers or too often, when Jews see Jewish violence in Israel, fellow Jews.
It is inevitable. It is human nature.
Fourth, in both cases there is groupism and dehumanization everywhere. Starting with the president, there are attacks on “left scum”, immigrants as snakes, attacks on “thugs” that replace the n-word, and of course assumptions by Palestinians as something less than equal, even less than human, and certainly less than a nation that is worthy of equality.
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Protest against the murder of Iyad al-Halak, an unarmed autistic Palestinian by the Israeli police, and the murder of George Floyd by the US police in Minneapolis last week. Jerusalem, May 31, 2020 Credit: Emil Salman
I don’t know the answer beyond trying to move society beyond ethnonationalism and racism towards humanism. Society needs security forces to function, but the system here and there is based on race contracts, as Adam Serwer recently explained. In both cases, society and the state (open in the case of Israel) are organized in such a way that one group benefits another.
Neither of the cases is responsible for the other, but these similarities are striking, and the millions who support one of them here explicitly support the one there and vice versa.
Israel has by far the highest support for Trump in the world and the evangelical movement (with their right-wing “pro-Israeli”, pro-Trump Jewish allies) represented by groups like Christians United for Israel and racist preachers and politicians like John Hagee and Mike Huckabee specifically views Israel as a white outpost against Muslim barbarism, the proxy border of the Western Christian world.
May the families of Iyad Halak and George Floyd soon find peace. May the memory of her lost, as Joe Biden put it, soon put a smile on her lips before it brings tears to her eyes.
And may these two societies – American and Israeli – soon decide together that the lives of blacks and Palestinians are important and as important as any other.
*Joshua Shanes is an associate professor of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston and director of the Arnold Center for Israel Studies
Note that the views expressed in these articles are these of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Palestinian Media Center In Europe
Source: +972 Magazine
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