Anita Sarkeesian versus Israel
I'd suggest she stick with video games, but honestly I'd rather she didn't...
Here is a rather vapid, rather horrifying tweet from the leading, premiere and most holy of video game feminists, Anita Sarkeesian:
“Israel [in scare quotes] isn’t a country?” a white feminist chick drinking coffee asks her brown-skinned feminist friend, also drinking coffee. Or maybe espresso.
“No,” her friend says, “they are a settler colony.” [Insert audible gasp!] “Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that seeks to replace the native population of the colonised land with a new society of settlers. This is what “Israel” is. Palestine is the country they are colonising [sic].”
Damn girl, that’s some heavy shit. I had no idea Israel isn’t a country but Palestine totally is a country! I’m super happy that I get all my geopolitical information from comic strips, otherwise I might have to read some actual history books before tweeting dumb shit on the internet!
I have a question for Anita, which I already asked her on Twitter:
What do we do with all the Jews, Anita?
If Israel isn’t a country, and this whole region belongs to the actual country of Palestine, where should all the Israelis go? Back to Germany and Poland where they were always treated with such love and compassion? Oh, and Anita—our ancestors colonized the United States. Remember, the United States wasn’t a country before it was a country! Maybe we should all go back to Europe also.
Of course, unlike America, there were Jews in the Middle East prior to Israel’s modern founding as a nation-state. Many others emigrated there from Europe during—checks notes—oh right, during the Holocaust. Jews across Europe fled the Nazi regime and those that didn’t escape were burned in ovens and executed en masse in gas chambers. The Nazis looted their possessions, pried the gold from their teeth, took their treasure and art and burned their homes and business. And before they killed 6 million Jewish people in cold blood, they used them as slaves and manual laborers and tortured and starved them.
None of this justifies Israel’s hard-liners, of course. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Zionism and Israel, In Brief
Zionism was, in the beginning, a socialist freedom and human rights movement that sought to reclaim the historical lands of the Jewish people after a nearly 2000 year diaspora. Jews were scattered to the four corners of the earth, often finding themselves the subjects of vile abuse, pogroms and relentless anti-Semitism. A homeland was, for centuries, little more than a fairy tale—a story they read about in the Torah. Moses leading his people home after years of bondage under various Pharaohs in Egypt.
All this long before Hitler’s Final Solution.
That they were able to come together in the 20th century and stake a collective claim on their ancestral homeland is nothing short of miraculous.
Which is also why it’s such a shame that Zionism transformed into something so much less noble over the years, partly due to understandable circumstances and partly because extremism is a blight on every people, the Jewish people included. More on that in a moment.
I’m not sure if Sarkeesian has bothered to learn the history of Israel from its modern inception in 1948 when it gained independence from the British Empire—the Brits left the Israelis and Arabs to duke things out in one of their more cowardly exits from imperialism, perhaps only rivaled by the mess they left in India and Pakistan—to the 6-Day War in 1967. But it appears that she does not.
The 6-Day War
In the late 1960s’, tensions over water rights (and other issues) led to conflict between Israel and Egypt. Several Arab countries became concerned with Israel’s plans to divert the waters of Jordan River. This was a good excuse for Arab nationalists who had already been calling for Israel’s destruction. Led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who refused to recognize Israel’s sovereignty, the nationalists mobilized and their cause gained momentum.
In 1967, Egyptian forces massed along the Israeli border, expelling UN peacekeepers and cutting of Israeli access to the Red Sea. Other Arab nations followed suit. To Israel, this was a casus belli, a declaration of war. So Israel attacked Egypt preemptively, hitting hard and fast, like a Cobra Kai. Jordan, Syria and Iraq responded by attacking Israel in kind. Four Arab nations descended upon Israel all at once. Four Arab nations were defeated in one of the most striking victories in modern warfare.
I will point out before we go further that Palestine was not among them. This is because there was no Palestinian state in 1967. What we refer to as Palestine now is largely the spoils of the Six-Day War, the scraps of land that Israel occupied after fending off the invaders.
From Jordan, Israel captured the West Bank. From Egypt, Israel claimed both the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. From Syria, Israel took the Golan Heights. These various regions, along with Jerusalem—the holiest of all Jewish cities—are now collectively referred to as Palestine.
It’s important to remember that none of these territories would have been occupied by Israel absent the Six-Day War. Absent Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq attempting to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, there would be no occupied territories.
Of course, that doesn’t justify continued expansion of Israeli settlements into these regions. It doesn’t justify the bulldozing of Arab homes and businesses. It doesn’t justify the politics of Israeli hardliners or the unconditional support of the United States government. Israel had every right to defend its borders, and frankly I don’t blame them for taking strategic regions from the countries that sought to destroy Israel or cut off its access to vital resources. But we will never achieve peace if Israel continues its current expansionist policies, provoking further animosity and tension and terror attacks. Will a two-state solution work? I don’t see how, quite frankly. Giving up what we now call Palestine would result in essentially the same strategic bind Israel found itself in in 1967. The same would be true if Israel gave the lands back to Egypt and Jordan and Syria, though I don’t believe those countries want anything to do with Palestine or the Palestinians now. It’s much more convenient, politically, to have them suffer under Israeli rule than under their own.
This is what we call an impossible dilemma.
A Dream Of Spring
I’ve said this before, but we have the capacity to believe seemingly contradictory things. We can support Israel’s right to exist, acknowledging that it is a sovereign nation (not a settler colony) while also disagreeing with its more militaristic actions. We can be an ally to Israel and still condemn its government. We can try to find some peace agreement while believing that Israel has every reason to want to defend itself, and that holding on to strategic regions is part of its existential struggle to survive in a hostile land, surrounded by enemies. We can believe all that and also that the Palestinian people deserve dignity, agency and self-governance.
What isn’t helpful is vapid progressive nonsense like the crap Anita posts above. It is just as ridiculous as the hardliners and neocons and their blind support of Israel—support that, at times, seems so brazen that one wonders which country they actually pledge allegiance to, Israel or the United States. Israel is our ally, but that hasn’t stopped them from spying on us, stealing our state secrets and taking us for various rides over the years. We can be allies without also being suckers.
Maybe there is no hope for peace in the Middle East. Even without Israel—in an imaginary world where Hitler never came to power and the Jews lived peacefully in Europe and Europeans weren’t historically grossly anti-Semitic—the Muslim factions in the Middle East have been warring for centuries. Shiite vs Sunni. Various empires and caliphates. Toss in a whole bunch of oil, decades of imperialism and war, and you really don’t need the Israel/Palestine conflict at all to keep tensions high and bloodshed rampant.
No, I don’t suppose any of us will see peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes.
But we can at least know our history, try to understand the basics, not lean on memes. Palestine was founded in 1988 and is what’s known as a de jure state—a state in name only, rather than one recognized by the international community. Perhaps it will someday be a true state with a functioning government (aka not Hamas) and the rule of law, and its people will live peaceably alongside their Israeli neighbors and unicorns will dance in the fields at night and the children will sing songs of freedom and love. Perhaps.
I feel deeply for the plight of the Palestinian people—people historically from different nations, different histories and cultures, all lumped together in their suffering. The poverty and anguish they experience is fertile soil for terrorism and extremism. I cannot imagine being occupied by a hostile nation, or paying the price of a past generation’s mistakes pretty much your whole life. I cannot imagine the anger and the depth of despair they must feel in the face of powerful Zionist settlers backed by equally zealous politicians. The whole thing is a huge, impossible mess and I don’t think any of us has the answer to this riddle.
Certainly not Anita Sarkeesian.
P.S. I am also far from an expert on the politics of this region, but I have done a good deal of reading on the matter, following both contemporary events and the history. I think we should be well-read, well-informed and up to snuff before we make bold claims about complicated issues. Just my two cents.