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Yes, I know that the Furedi gang are (is?) berserk libertarian
nutters but every once in a while they achieve a kind of
uber-berserkness that is worth noting, like Charlie Sheen getting
arrested for having sex with an ostrich or something. In this
article Brendan O'Neill twits the British left for raising the
question of Palestine on pro-Egypt demos. Amazing.
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The Australian, February 16, 2011 12:00AM
Palestine an obsession of radical West, not Arabs
"UNTIL the Palestinians are given back their rights we're going to
have instability throughout the Middle East," declared John Pilger
on ABC1's Q & A last night. "That is central to everything."
Yet, one of the most striking things about the uprising in Egypt
was the lack of pro-Palestine placards. As Egypt-watcher Amr
Hamzawy put it, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere there were no signs
saying "death to Israel, America and global imperialism" or
"together to free Palestine". Instead, this revolt was about
Egyptian people's own freedom and living conditions.
Yet on the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday, there
was a sea of Palestine placards. "Free Palestine", they said, and
"End the Israeli occupation". The speakers had trouble getting the
audience excited about events in Egypt, having to say on more than
one occasion: "Come on London, you can shout louder than that!"
Yet every mention of the word Palestine induced a kind of
Pavlovian excitability among the attendees. They cheered when the
P-word was uttered, chanting: "Free, free Palestine!"
This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. In
recent years it has moved from the realm of Arab radicalism, where
Egyptians and other peoples frequently demanded the creation of a
Palestinian state, and has instead become almost the exclusive
property of Western middle-class radicals, such as Pilger.
Emptied of its nationalist vigour and militancy, the Palestine
problem, it seems, is now of little immediate interest to
protesting Arabs and is instead the ultimate cause celebre for
Western liberal campaigners who like nothing more than having a
victimised people they can coo over.
The power and allure of Palestine in Western radical circles is
extraordinary. Palestine is the only issue they get excited about.
But there is nothing progressive in their pro-Palestine fervour.
It is not driven by future-oriented demands for economic
development in a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank or Gaza.
Instead it is driven by a view of Palestinians as the ultimate
victims, the hapless and pathetic children of the new world order,
who need kindly, wizened Westerners to protect them from Big Bad
Israel.
Today's pro-Palestine leftism is more anthropological than
political. It treats Palestinians less as a people who ought to
have certain democratic rights and more as an intriguing tribe to
be prodded and preserved. Some Western radicals have even adopted
the fashions of their favourite tribe. Step on to any university
campus in the West, or join any left-wing march, and you'll see
concerned-looking youths wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, a
politically correct version of blacking up.
This is the politics of pity rather than solidarity. Groups of
Western middle-class youth have taken Palestinian pity holidays in
the West Bank and Gaza. They turn up and marvel at the dignity of
this beautiful besieged people, like those wives of old Victorian
colonialists who discovered they rather liked the African tribes
they had been sent to Christianise. "I've never met people like
the Palestinians. They're the strongest people I've ever met",
gushed British peace activist Kate Burton, who hit the headlines
in 2006 after being kidnapped by a Palestinian faction in Gaza.
Of course, Westerners have often gone on moral adventures
overseas, whether as missionaries or revolutionaries. What's
different about Palestinian pity tourism is that these Westerners
seek neither to convert Palestinians to a religion nor to take up
arms with them, but simply to empathise with them, to immerse
themselves in what they consider to be the ultimate victimhood
experience. One pity-tripper wrote in the New Statesman about her
experience living "under siege" in Bethlehem. "I'm beginning to
understand what it must be like to be a Palestinian," she said.
That is the ultimate aim of these empathy tours, to have an
experience that makes real the politics of victimhood that so many
of these Western activists subscribe to. Where some bored Western
youth who feel their everyday lives lack zest go on bungee-jumping
trips in Peru, Western leftists who feel politics at home has been
zapped of urgency go on tank-stopping trips in Palestine.
There is a profound narcissism in the pity-for-Palestinian
movement. When American activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an
Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, it gave rise to a play called
My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The killing of British peace activist
Tom Hurndall in Gaza in 2004 led to a film called The Shooting of
Thomas Hurndall.
This is clearly all about Us - the good and pure Westerners who
went to find themselves in Palestine - rather than about Them, the
actual Palestinians.
There's now also a ship called the MV Rachel Corrie, which was one
of those attacked by the Israel Defence Forces as it sailed to
Gaza last year. Everyone who's anyone in Europe's liberal set is
desperate to sail in her. MPs, thinkers, Nobel Peace Prize
laureates, novelists . . . all have taken the MV Rachel Corrie to
Gaza, super-keen to promote their whiter-than-white decency by
standing, Kate Winslet-style, on the deck of a ship that is
Against Israel. Because being "for Palestine" today is ultimately
a self-serving way of advertising that you are Good, Decent, an
opponent of the modern-day "Nazism" being practised by the Israeli
state.
For these historically ignorant campaigners, Israelis are the New
Nazis and Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto. As the title of a recent
talk in London put it: "A New Hitler for a New Age? The Rise of
Israeli Terror."
Palestinian pitiers have no time to think about the inconvenient
fact that Hamas is an intolerant political entity that has no time
for gay rights or women's equality. Instead, everything gets
reduced to a Narnia-style story of wicked witches v happy fauns,
because this is ultimately about providing vacuous-feeling
Westerners with some much-needed momentum in their lives, not
about untangling a messy political reality.
It's very revealing that Palestine has become less important for
Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals
at exactly the same time. With the Palestinian people somewhat
deflated, the Palestine issue can become perfect political fodder
for the victim-oriented, fancy-dress radicals of the modern West.
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online
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