When ABMN first attempted to gather money for a good cause we were overwhelmed by your response and then realised some money was left over and then gave it again to a different good cause. Still, you somehow didn’t seem to stop donating even after we closed off the benefits so we somehow ended up with more money than we initially asked for. Well, it is time to put those to good use too, by donating almost 1000 dollars to the Middle East Children’s Alliance for the aid of Palestinian children and families in Gaza, made even more urgent with the coming winter. No, we won’t post receipts cause we’d prefer not to doxxx ourselves. We are also working towards a donation to Palestinian prisoner advocacy and relief, a cause that sadly is not new and will continue to be urgent even after this genocidal offensive ends. Sadly, our non-legal entity status limits who we can donate to (because fuck banks) but feel free to donate directly to Addameer Prisoner Support and the Palestine Red Crescent Society, two orgs that will not only help the humanitarian crisis in Gaza but will also help the struggle in the West Bank and Israeli prison camps.
We would also like to take this chance to address a few things, well, one specific thing. Ever since the Israeli state decided to use the deadly Hamas attack as an excuse to further increase its policies of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, anyone who dared show support for the plight of the Palestinian people (NOT Hamas) was mobbed and attacked by a certain faction that dresses itself in antifascist colours, primarily but not exclusively from a specific country in the western imperial heartland.
The first reflex was obviously to try to debate these people with evidence, historical and current, the testimonies of actual Israelis and diaspora Jews attesting to the apartheid and its consequences etc, but here’s the thing, it doesn’t work. These people do not care for truth, class analysis, or Marxist and antifascist perspectives, they are entrenched. In a sense, they aren’t much different than QAnon fanatics believing Trump will save them from the rich elites, including similar levels of cognitive dissonance.
The testimonies and opinions of thousands of antifascist and leftist Israelis and diaspora Jews (never mind leftist, secular Palestinians) were not enough to convince them. Hundreds of testimonials and reports from human rights organizations were not enough to convince them. The Israeli state itself using blatant fascist rhetoric and admitting to war crimes was not enough, decades of historical data were not enough, and nothing will ever be enough. The ghost of Golda Meir herself can appear screaming “WE MADE A HUGE MISTAKE, THE DREAM IS NOW A NIGHTMARE” and they would ignore her and label her an anti-Semite.
This is doubly ironic considering they not only did not object but seem to accept one of the most blatant acts of antisemitism, one supported and proposed by Israeli state-supported media themselves, the call to make the Jewish identity one conditional to one support of Zionism and the Israeli state, calling for the “ex-communication” of all Jews who oppose the apartheid regime and its treatment of Palestinians, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews threatened with a denial of their culture and religion, relegated to a status of “un-Jew” (their own literal words). Holocaust survivors like Hajo Meyer who opposed the Israeli apartheid would find themselves stripped of their Jewishness in the eyes of Zionists because being Jew enough for Germans to send you to Auschwitz with a tattoo on the arm is apparently not enough to count as a Jew, you need to submit to the right-wing Zionist version of Manifest Destiny. Want even more irony? The first example of an “un-Jew” according to the right-wingers in support of this is Rosa Luxemburg herself, and these supposed “antifascists” did not bat an eye to that.
They hear “From the River to the Sea” and interpret it as genocide in the same manner as those white people who heard “Black Lives Matter” and interpreted it as “You will be replaced”, the same manner as those men who heard “Me Too” and interpreted it as “You no longer have rights, women are your rulers”. And of course, they respond with their own version of “All Lives Matter”: “Free Gaza from Hamas” they chant, as if Hamas, for all its shittiness, was the one manning the border, bulldozing the houses, denying water and power and freedom of movement. As if levelling Gaza to piles of rubble and killing thousands of innocents is “freeing” them. Apparently the lessons of Operation Iraqi “Freedom” stuck.
They think the Israeli state as it exists is there to protect Jews, not realizing that it’s a colonial capitalist state not protecting but using Jews as cannon fodder and human shields of Western imperialism, they think that the war on Gaza is a clash of civilizations and not what it really is, capitalists using their population as sacrifices and prolonging a bloody conflict on purpose so they can finally gain control of crucial areas for their natural gas extraction and desalination plants without sharing with pesky brown people, and making some money along the way for their military industrial complex. Who cares how many innocent Israeli Jews die in the process as long as a few of them gain money and power.
These people are not leftists, they may use the lingo and the symbols, but they are about as leftist as Nazbols and about as antiracist as the white liberals in the movie “Get Out”. They stand for Western chauvinism, orientalism and white saviour racist narratives (complete with reproducing anti-immigrant rhetoric citing fears of “Islamist” influence). They are not our comrades, and these last months only made it even clearer. Maybe one day they’ll wake up and see all the damage they were part of, realize how wrong they were, and try to repair some of the harm they did and make amends, we are not holding our breath, but if they do, we’ll talk. Until then, our response to their bigotry is a plain “Fuck off”. Nothing more, nothing less needs to be said.
We are committed to the fight against antisemitism and for a free Palestine both, to quote Marxist-feminist scholar Tithi Bhattacharya, “Safety of Jewish people and freedom for Palestine is the same issue. Only Zionists and anti-Semites see them as separate”. Because when we say Never Again we mean Never Again for EVERYONE and by ANYONE.
If you would like to donate, here are some recommended organisations:
- https://www.mecaforpeace.org/
- https://goodbricks.org/campaign/palestinianyouthmovement.com/donate-2022
- http://mhpss.ps/en/organization/the-palestinian-prisoners-society/MJEN2Ysg-hs=
- https://samidoun.net/donate-page/
- https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donation-details/484
- https://pay.lahza.io/PRCS-Donation?lang=en
- https://www.palestinercs.org/en/Donation#numbers
- https://www.addameer.org/about/Support-Addameer
- https://support.anera.org/a/givingtuesday-2023