Why they think we hate Israelis
Paranoid jingoism, Russia, Ukraine and Palestine
“And don’t let anybody tell you that because you love Palestinians and Palestinian babies, that you hate somebody else.”
Dr Cornel West, speaking to demonstrators outside the UN building in New York.
Cornel West reminded us on Sunday that powerful preachers still exist and they need not preach a hyper-personal gospel to bring that prophetic fire of love. He also reminded us that the prophetic, even when talking about urgent issues of justice, need not be po-faced and straight-laced.
“Please, get off the crack-pipe,” he said to the “cowards in Washington DC” as he railed against his government’s failure even to call for a humanitarian pause, never mind a much-needed ceasefire.
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But more, we love to be given pause to think. Why do so many people assume that the reason we stand with Palestinians is because we hate Israelis? Why do some of the more anti-Semitic among them, who conflate Israel with Jewish people, assume we hate our Jewish sisters, brothers and others?
It may be projection. It may be about Russians.
See, some of us have been comparing our societies’ responses to the Ukraine invasion to the siege, bombardment and invasion of Gaza, hoping it would wake people up.
You put up beautiful flags in solidarity when Ukraine was attacked by a superior force, we have argued, why is it wrong for us to display Palestinian flags when the same has happened to them?
We have been shocked that, not only did the argument not land, but those people with blue and yellow flags on their houses and profiles have assumed that our Palestinian flags mean we hate Israelis and Jewish folks.
If you’re not driven by hate, why do you assume we are?
Why they think we hate people rather than unjust systems
There are multiple answers to this question. There always are.
Of course, there are some elements who do hate, who are anti-Semitic. They make up a tiny proportion of current global solidarity with Palestine, and the fact that Jewish voices have, from the very beginning, been at the forefront of criticism of Israeli policy and even Zionism itself, demonstrates this. To take the aberrant (and sinful) minority as the spiritual heart of a movement requires bad faith assumptions of the pro-Palestinian cause. So, why are these assumptions so ubiquitous?
Much of it has to do with the baseline, almost automatic assumption that Israel is the good guy. Half a century of pro-Israel rhetoric from the US and its allies has been used to justify their expensive support for a foothold in a resource-rich and anti-imperialist region. Fort Israel is strategically important, so it must be good.
Also, the post 9-11 division-mongering that has demonised Arabs and Muslims to manufacture consent for invasions, torture and the crushing of civil liberties, has also helped to build the association between Palestinians and hate.
And, of course, no small part of the presumption that pro-Palestinian means anti-Jewish people or anti-Israeli is fuelled by the Zionist ideology that has colonised so many of our churches and popular theologies, anachronistically placing a 75-year-old political state at the heart of biblical prophecy. We Christians must accept our culpability by not calling this relatively new and fantastical heresy out in our churches.
But if we’re going to lay blame for the failure of the ‘comparing Palestine to Ukraine’ gambit, we have to admit to our own failure to realise that many people are motivated by a kind of hate. People are so willing to assume we hate Israelis because they hate Russians.
People are so willing to assume we hate Israelis because they hate Russians.
Hear me out. I’m not saying this hate is core to character, thought out or even recognised by most people who feel it. But I do think there is a deep-rooted othering of Russia and Russians in Britain and the USA, as well as all those who consume e their media and culture. Russia was our adversary in The Great Game of empire across Europe long before it adopted Communism. And once Communist Russia became the USSR and challenged Anglo-American interests all over the world, the national hostility (with all the expected propaganda about how Russia and Russians are fundamentally worse than us) really got going. Even when Russia was an ally, during the Second World War, Britain and America were enacting hostile strategies to weaken Russia post-war.
I grew up with movies and media where Russians were the bad guys. You probably did too (although you may have also had a smattering of Arabs and people from Asian and Latin American countries with socialist governments). We all grew up with pundits warning of the danger of Russia. We have billionaires, Russia has Oligarchs. Etc etc.
This is not to say that Russia is any better than the USA, of course. Its recent record has been pretty abysmal. But we have to recognise that antipathy to Russia runs deep.
Did you not think it weird how people here and in the States got so very passionate about Ukraine? People who had never spoken about the country before and had rarely taken a view on distant international conflicts were suddenly riled up about Russia, calling Putin “evil” and “mad” when his death toll had not even approached that of other world leaders. Were these folks suddenly seized by the spirit of internationalist solidarity? Were they racists, activated by the thought of middle class white people suffering? Perhaps, perhaps.
More likely, though, the ‘bad guy’ in the situation (and Putin was and is undoubtedly the bad guy) was just right. It made it easy. Opposing the invasion of Ukraine was not really about Ukrainians. It was about who was hurting them.
And if that’s your motivation for solidarity, it’s perfectly natural to assume it’s everyone else’s. Psychologically, it is projection. Culturally, it’s paranoid jingoism. Politically, it expresses as doublespeak.
Israeli right wingers and their supporters internationally are calling on the West to let Israel ‘finish the job’ at demonstrations and labelling demos for a ceasefire ‘hate marches’. Spokessoldiers for the Israeli military, which regularly detains Palestinian civilians in buildings with its soldiers and puts Palestinian children on its vehicles, try to justify the civilian death toll by shouting about Hamas using human shields. The state that had killed 23 Palestinian children before October 7th and has killed several thousand Palestinian children since, is rightly criticised by Jewish activists for weaponising the murder of Israeli children by Hamas to justify their own slaughter of the innocents.
So what?
So, what do we do with that understanding? Do we stop comparing the Ukrainian and Palestinian situations?
I think not. It may not be the argument to change people’s minds (perhaps making them aware of Israel’s crimes outside Gaza may be), but it is still an important comparison to bring up when flying the Palestinian flag is met with intimidation and generally demonised.
More importantly, the larger lesson Christians (and all of us really) need to learn is the importance of interrogating national hostilities and patriotic assumptions. The unquestioned mantra, Russia bad, Israel good, is only possible because we assume America good, Britain good. Too often this can lead to a conviction that even our nation’s worst actions, as the prophet Robert Zimmerman said, “have God on our side”.
Christians, of all people, should remember that there is now no Jew nor Gentile, that all human beings are made in God’s image and that it was the dominant empire that executed our Saviour. God is no more on our side, on America’s side, on Israel’s side than He is on the side of Palestine, Russia or anywhere else.
With that as a starting point, and a healthy scepticism towards narratives in which the enemies of God and goodness are also the enemies of our economic and military interests, we might get off the propaganda crack-pipe and see world events with slightly clearer eyes.
More of Cornel West’s address
Personally, I’m often comforted that most of the sermons we hear are not powerful examples of oratory and rhetoric. It makes me feel I can let my guard down a little, that I am not being manipulated or hyped.
But damn, son. This is good stuff:
“We stand in solidarity with anybody who’s occupied. Anybody who’s subjugated. Anybody who’s exploited. And that’s why we focus on Gaza at this moment, because a genocidal attack is taking place. Ten thousand dead and four thousand precious children. And don’t let anybody tell you that because you love Palestinians and Palestinian babies, that you hate somebody else. It just doesn’t follow. We don’t hate Jewish brothers, we don’t hate Jewish sisters. We don’t hate Jewish siblings. We loathe, we hate, a vicious Israeli Occupation. We loathe and we hate a vicious siege against Gaza. And the least we can do at this moment of overwhelming vulgarity is have a ceasefire. And yet you got these cowards in Washington DC, talking about a ‘humanitarian pause’. Please, get off the crack-pipe. Wake up. See the humanity of precious Palestinian brothers and sisters. And the American empire has the nerve, in this building, to veto a humanitarian pause when our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters are being bombed. What kind of country are we? What kind of people are we? And we send a message to precious Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza: you are not forgotten. We see you.”
Latest episodes of the podcast
It feels strange and unnatural, to those of us who have been immersed in argument and news surrounding Gaza for a month, that life might go on and attention might be needed on anything else right now. This is a good instinct. Our governments are complicit in ethnic cleansing and war crimes, so we must not tire of paying attention and speaking out. But other injustices do exist. Like Patriarchy.
Episode 87 of the Beer Christianity podcast is all about ‘Nice, Churchy Patriarchy’ and you can listen to it now wherever you get your podcasts.
Resources on Palestine
Our friends at the wonderful Greenbelt Festival have created a wall of Greenbelt-curated inspiration and provocation about Palestine, Israel and the current conflict. Check it out! They even kindly mention us!
Greenbelt also liked a list of prayer points we put in the show notes for the Beer Christianity episode about marching for Palestine, so we thought we’d share it here, too:
Please pray for:
A ceasefire and end to the military attack on a civilian population
Protection for those still alive in Gaza
The safe release of Israeli and international hostages
All those who mourn
Justice for Palestinians in Israel, Palestine and the OPT
An end to the evil of Anti-Semitism
An end to the evil of Islamophobia
An end to Apartheid, racism and oppression
The doctors and aid workers trying to help a brutalised population
Softening of hearts in Israel, the West and among all those tempted to hate
Individuals and groups showing courage to speak out when government and media seem to be against them
An end to the Settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank
Jewish communities to feel safe
Arab communities to feel safe
Europe, the UK and USA to find moral courage to stop the violence
The Church to awaken to justice in this issue and repent of our complicity in oppression
For God to have mercy on the weak and hurting
The end bit
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Hello there! This is the end of the newsletter/post. This part isn’t important, I just write it for the thorough people. I kinda want to apologise for writing so often. I only ever wanted to write this once a week, but it turns out I’m not really great at routine [laughs in ADHD]. And really, I do know it can be overwhelming and even annoying to get loads of emails, especially from the Hot Take Industrial Complex, of which I guess I’m a card-carrying member. But this just feels too important not to be talking about often, you know? I really am being disciplined, trying not to spam you with every single thought, but I also want to share things that might be helpful, if not in your winning hearts and minds to the cause, then in making you feel less alone among the war-hawks and justice-deniers. Thanks for the encouraging emails and comments, and for buying me beers. They make me feel like I’m part of something bigger. We all are! Peace, love and justice, J.