John E., you asked John R. what his suggestion to the Palestinians is. I’ll answer for myself: I don’t have one, and I’m wary of anyone on the American left who does. People living under siege will choose their forms of resistance, whether we approve of them or not. Your comparison of the NLF and FLN holds up to that point. It holds further than you might want, too. Socialists who supported the FLN still argued openly about Philippeville in 1955, and having that argument didn’t turn them into colonialists.
Where I can’t follow you is the casualty paragraph. About 1,200 people were killed that day, most of them civilians. Around 250 were taken hostage. The UN Special Representative found reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence took place at several sites. Some of the early claims were false, and the IDF did kill some of its people under the Hannibal directive. That still leaves the core account standing, and calling it hasbara hands John R. is the easy half of the argument. I also don’t think the breach of the fence and the killing of people at a music festival can be commemorated as a single event. RKOB’s point about Democratic voting is a fair hit, and it’s also a dodge, since it doesn’t touch the question John R. raised. But I’d push it somewhere RKOB probably didn’t intend. A left that votes Democratic in November and marches for Palestine the rest of the year has two politics and no party. That isn’t one comrade’s inconsistency. It describes nearly all of us. Marv’s post is the one I keep coming back to. He’s right that sympathetic bystanders read the flags and chants through a frame the Zionists built for them and right that the movement should be corrected without being denounced. What his post doesn’t say is who would do the correcting. The solidarity movement is a coalition of campus groups, NGOs, mosques, unions, and small sects. Nobody in it can decide what gets said on October 7, and nobody can be held to it afterward. So each grouping speaks to its own base, and the most committed voices set the tone because there’s nobody where a different line could win a vote. John R. calls the result stupidity. I’d say the stupidity follows from the arrangement, and denouncing it changes nothing about that arrangement. I don’t have a program for the movement to adopt. My point is narrower. “Educate the movement” needs an educator, an organization with members who argue out a line and then answer for it. The left has gone a long time without building one. While that stays true, we’ll have this exchange every October, and none of it will bind anyone, including me. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43669): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43669 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121651941/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
