But the speaker was subverting the meaning of the phrase, by insisting that both groups must find homes there. I still think he deserves credit for this, rather than paranoia.
Rewarding paranoia is dangerous. What I can do to create a parallel which is salient for me is think about the controversy around the use of the word "queer". It was rehabilitated quite forcibly in the 90s, when I was a young gayling, and I have been permanently affected by this, and am therefore receptive to similar attempts now. Others aren't. Within the LGBT+ community, there is a whole maelstrom of views, which tends to simplify when this is seen from outside.
On the other hand, I'm also a linguist, and aware of reader response as a factor. It determines how utterances are treated. Of course the speaker can be aware of traditions of reception, and the circumstances in which their utterance will be received, and may attempt to manipulate this, but ultimately, interpretation is always done by the parties who receive an utterance.
I just don't get the mindset that says "those murderous bastards did something awful over there so I'll harass this chap with a skullcap / woman with a headscarf over here".
It's the age-old problem of unexamined generalizations people are prone to. The problem is getting people to realize that these are generalizations. If they're rooted in emotional convictions, they'll be particularly hard to shift.
... ultimately, interpretation is always done by the parties who receive an utterance.
And you can't legitimately tell people how to feel.
But I think I'm lacking context for what you're talking about -- I didn't see a specific speaker referenced. Who was it using this phrase?
Ah OK, I think this is a reference to this MP, who, in my view, has been totally unfairly suspended by the Labour party. To quote him: "“I said: ‘We will not rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty.’"
I think there is a real question to be asked about the role of media outlets in using the same tactics on the British Jewish community as they do white gentile Britons - trying to make people scared, fearing the (predominantly brown, predominantly Muslim) "other" coming to get them. Only, because of the visceral cultural memory of the Shoah (as alluded to earlier in the thread), the effect is magnified and instead gammonesque ranting it stokes genuine terror. Some Jewish leaders are also guilty of stoking this, of playing up fears, like when some claimed Jeremy Corbyn was an "existential threat to British Jews" or similar language. This was obviously preposterous but it seems that some British Jews found it convincing. Is there a way to criticise Israeli oppression and support a free Palestine without (a) genuinely scaring some people and (b) having your words deliberately misinterpreted by bad actors supporting Israel to scare others?
Ah, thanks. Well, I don't know how it sounds in the UK. But it sounds like a real fuck-up to me. If he really wanted to be inclusive of both Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine, using a phrase associated with militant groups aligned with just one side was not the way to go about it.
I have a theory in my head that anger is like a fundamental drive in a person that says "something needs to be changed and now." And I can imagine someone watching some godforsaken nightmare far away and thinking "that really hurts to watch, someone should do something about that?" And so anger occurs.
But it's far away, so there's not much you can do about it.
And I think you have to couple this with an idea that "those people are the problem." People who support Israel are the problem, people who support Palestine are the problem (there have been violent incidents involving both.) And then you look a thing to do and, oh! There's a supporter for that godforsaken regime right there! And anger takes over and you decide you've "done something" about it.
I dunno, there's some part of me that feels a moral obligation to reverse engineer the way violent monsters think, so at least I can understand them. Maybe it's some sense of the commitment to love. Love requires a measure of empathy and a willingness to put yourself in someone else'e shoes, even when they're stomping someone else's head into a curb. So I try to understand. And with effort, I think I can.
I've had a pet theory, think I picked it up in an article somewhere, that a certain kind of privilege makes people vulnerable to this. You want to be a good guy. You want to be someone who fights for what's right and "makes a difference." And, via empathy, you're deeply outraged by *gestures vaguely at a bunch of places.* But without being the victim, you can't say how to address the rage or how to help the situation. So you end up piling up all of this anger without having the personal context. And I think it can warp a person over time if they're not careful.
I think @Ruth 's Terence quote works pretty well. I guess that's my attempt.
I had a similar conversation with a close Jewish friend. A Labour Party member and no fan of Israels current government. She told how hearing "from the river to the sea" awakened an almost group memory of the holocaust and earlier pogroms, which as a British Jew she has no family connections with.
She spoke of the fear in the local synagogues and Jewish secondary school.
I know multiple folks in that situation, and my empathy for them is really complicated.
@Ruth as has been noted earlier in the thread, Likud, Netanyahu's party, also uses the phrase "from the river to the sea". The context matters, the words used with it matter. When Likud use it they're saying all of Eretz Israel should be under control of the Jewish state (and, arguably, that sufficient Palestinians should be killed, expelled or disenfranchised to maintain a Jewish majority). Andy MacDonald was taking the usage from both Israelis and Palestinians and saying that there can only be peace when all the people in the region are free.
Here is a direct response to that piece. Munnayer in the first piece says, "The claim that the phrase 'from the river to the sea' carries a genocidal intent relies not on the historical record, but rather on racism and Islamophobia." Tanny responds, "I do not think Hill [cited by Munnayer] is explicitly promoting genocide. But he is capitalizing on the phrase’s ambiguity because it simultaneously gives anti-Zionists a mandate for violence while offering plausible deniability of this intent. Deliberate ambiguity allows them to have it both ways. Munayyer and Hill are likely among those whose preferred outcome is a peaceful polity between the river of the sea, where ethnicity and religion play no role in bestowing rights and citizenship. But even so, it is open to doubt whether such an envisioned free Palestine would signify genuine equality for its Jewish inhabitants."
When Likud use it they're saying all of Eretz Israel should be under control of the Jewish state (and, arguably, that sufficient Palestinians should be killed, expelled or disenfranchised to maintain a Jewish majority). Andy MacDonald was taking the usage from both Israelis and Palestinians and saying that there can only be peace when all the people in the region are free.
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it. And right now this MP decides this heavily freighted language is a good idea? If you google "from the river to the sea" you can find plenty of people using it in a way MacDonald seems to have intended -- here's a 2021 example in the Guardian from an Indian-born British guy. But right now it's not a phrase I'd use when addressing the public.
Thank you for sharing the response. I'm not convinced by its attempt to paint any violence in resisting Israeli oppression as automatically terrorism, nor by the claim that the slogan must imply genocide because non-genocidal Palestinians didn't shout loud enough about Hamas using it. It's the same "you're not condemning loudly or quickly enough so you must support" rhetoric that is rightly criticised as anti-semitic when directed at Jews but it seems couldn't possibly be racist or Islamophobic when directed at Palestinians.
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it.
I don't actually think this is the case, the debates about the extent of the land predate the use of the phrase by Fatah in the late 60s.
Furthermore the one sided nature of the policing of this phrase makes the entire argument seem like it is an attempt to rule any form of resistance illegitimate.
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it.
I don't actually think this is the case, the debates about the extent of the land predate the use of the phrase by Fatah in the late 60s.
The debates do, yes, and thanks for pointing me back to your earlier post. I'm wondering now about the phrase itself, the slogan.
Furthermore the one sided nature of the policing of this phrase makes the entire argument seem like it is an attempt to rule any form of resistance illegitimate.
There's more going on than policing, though, if people hear the phrase and are terrified.
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it.
I don't actually think this is the case, the debates about the extent of the land predate the use of the phrase by Fatah in the late 60s.
The debates do, yes, and thanks for pointing me back to your earlier post. I'm wondering now about the phrase itself, the slogan.
Furthermore the one sided nature of the policing of this phrase makes the entire argument seem like it is an attempt to rule any form of resistance illegitimate.
There's more going on than policing, though, if people hear the phrase and are terrified.
I don't think it's the phrase as such, it seems to be any support for Palestinian liberation that challenges the ethnic-sectarian-nationalist character of the current State of Israel. Israel has spent huge amounts of time, money and energy welding itself to Jewish identity precisely so that any challenge to it will be felt as threatening by the Jewish diaspora.
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it.
I don't actually think this is the case, the debates about the extent of the land predate the use of the phrase by Fatah in the late 60s.
The debates do, yes, and thanks for pointing me back to your earlier post. I'm wondering now about the phrase itself, the slogan.
The first uses of it were in a much more maximalist sense, Betar's response to the Peel Commission was "For the holy city Jerusalem and Eretz Israel from Dan to Beersheba and from the Gilead to the Sea" (most of the two territories of the British mandate). This was back when the slogan in Revisionist circles was "Two banks the Jordan has, this is ours and that one as well"
Furthermore the one sided nature of the policing of this phrase makes the entire argument seem like it is an attempt to rule any form of resistance illegitimate.
There's more going on than policing, though, if people hear the phrase and are terrified.
There are all sorts of reasons why people may be terrified, and even granting that that in itself should be enough to rule out use of a particular phrase, I don't see the same principle being applied equally. When was the last time that Netanyahu was pulled up on Likud's founding statement, or his use - just last month - of the map of Israel which annexed the occupied areas? Or the kinds of things members of his ruling coalition like Smotrich have come out with? What impact do you think they have in the Palestinian audience hearing/watching them ?
Also -- how I hear this phrase is affected by how it's used where I live. There was a small protest out front of Long Beach city hall yesterday to pressure our congressman to support a Congressional resolution supporting a ceasefire. Click the link and scroll down to see a banner, with the Palestinian flag, reading "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free." They chanted, "Israel bombs, USA pays, how many kids have you killed today?" It was led by a local group I'm very familiar with as they hold community events at the church I used to work for; I've met and worked with these folks; if someone tells me "Long Beach Forward is doing XYZ" I'm normally totally on board. But when their statement says, "We come from queer and trans, people of color, Muslim, immigrant, and refugee families and communities,” I wonder if they've talked to the folks at Temple Israel.
The local interfaith council normally holds their annual "unity dinner" in early November. They've postponed it indefinitely.
Hosting
I'm turning on my tags because this is now the fourth time of asking on this thread @Arethosemyfeet
It's good that you posted the Jewish Currents piece but that's multiple cases of posts making assertions about Jewish identity, forms of antisemitism and whether they should be taken seriously or not and now how something will be 'felt as threatening by the Jewish diaspora' which to the best of my knowledge you don't belong to.
These posts seriously lack own voice references/ links/citations to what Jews in Britain or the diaspora in other places are thinking or feeling about antisemitism right now.
If you'd rather post about what Palestinians think about the current conflict from Palestinian sources then that's fine, but I'm asking you now to stop commenting on antisemitism on this thread without substantial own voice commentary from Jews for whom this is not a theoretical subject or, as others have done, engaging with Jewish people around you and hearing and reflecting how they are experiencing things.
If you can't do that then please stick to other topics related to this conflict.
I'm wondering now about the phrase itself, the slogan.
The first uses of it were in a much more maximalist sense, Betar's response to the Peel Commission was "For the holy city Jerusalem and Eretz Israel from Dan to Beersheba and from the Gilead to the Sea" (most of the two territories of the British mandate). This was back when the slogan in Revisionist circles was "Two banks the Jordan has, this is ours and that one as well"
Thanks for this. I may have to spend more time going down this particular rabbit hole.
When was the last time that Netanyahu was pulled up on Likud's founding statement, or his use - just last month - of the map of Israel which annexed the occupied areas? Or the kinds of things members of his ruling coalition like Smotrich have come out with? What impact do you think they have in the Palestinian audience hearing/watching them ?
Fear and anger, and I don't blame them.
Aljazeera says Smotrich "triggered international outrage" with what he said in March, including sharp condemnation from the US state department. The Jerusalem Post called Netanyahu's stunt at the UN a map fiasco and quoted the Jewish CEO of Americans for Peace Now as saying, “Netanyahu is returning to his government of fascists, felons, and fundamentalists, which in both action and words contradicts his bogus rhetoric of peace.”
I don't know what's happening in the UK. I don't know if that MP should be in big trouble or not. Are you saying no one challenges Netanyahu there? Progressive Jews in the US certainly do. Here's a J Street guy condemning Netanyahu's map.
This opinion piece (I think both authors are Jewish but if I've got that wrong I apologise) is a few years old but it highlights a number of demographic and cultural differences between British and American Jews and attributes to these a difference in levels of support for Israel: https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2016/07/why-british-jewry-isnt-drifting-away-from-israel/
I think the political analysis of the UK is flawed but the description of the differences between Jewish culture in the two countries seems entirely consistent with what I've seen.
When was the last time that Netanyahu was pulled up on Likud's founding statement, or his use - just last month - of the map of Israel which annexed the occupied areas? Or the kinds of things members of his ruling coalition like Smotrich have come out with? What impact do you think they have in the Palestinian audience hearing/watching them ?
Fear and anger, and I don't blame them.
Aljazeera says Smotrich "triggered international outrage" with what he said in March, including sharp condemnation from the US state department. The Jerusalem Post called Netanyahu's stunt at the UN a map fiasco and quoted the Jewish CEO of Americans for Peace Now as saying, “Netanyahu is returning to his government of fascists, felons, and fundamentalists, which in both action and words contradicts his bogus rhetoric of peace.”
Okay, so what actual material consequence has he faced ? Why doesn't the 'will you denounce' logic work the same way in every interview involving Netanyahu ? (I'm not necessarily saying that's a useful question, but it's instructive to see when it's rolled out and when it isn't).
As I said, the current Israeli Ambassdor to London has used to same language of 'from the river to the sea' in support of Israel's exclusive claim to that territory, but this has apparently passed without much comment - leading politicians have been quite happy to share platforms with her, including the leader of the opposition - a Gentile married to a Jew (intermarriage being another issue Hotovely is opposed to).
I don't know what's happening in the UK. I don't know if that MP should be in big trouble or not. Are you saying no one challenges Netanyahu there? Progressive Jews in the US certainly do. Here's a J Street guy condemning Netanyahu's map.
For various historical reasons the Jewish community in the UK tends to be much more conservative leaning than is the case in the US, the equivalent of JVP would be something like Na'amod - which is tiny by comparison. When Miliband - himself Jewish - was leader of the Labour Party Jewish support for Labour actually fell (from already fairly low levels) with polling indicating this was primarily down to his support for recognising a Palestinian state:
Okay, so what actual material consequence has he faced ? Why doesn't the 'will you denounce' logic work the same way in every interview involving Netanyahu ?
This is going way past the original question. I'm not defending Netanyahu, and I'm not defending some kind of both sides bullshit when the power differential in Israel/Palestine is so grossly skewed and when, as I've noted, my own government is bankrolling Israel and its military. All I'm saying is I can see why a Jewish person would be scared at hearing the "from the river to the sea" phrase. And you've shown me why a Palestinian person would be just as scared hearing it from the other side.
This opinion piece (I think both authors are Jewish but if I've got that wrong I apologise) is a few years old but it highlights a number of demographic and cultural differences between British and American Jews and attributes to these a difference in levels of support for Israel: https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2016/07/why-british-jewry-isnt-drifting-away-from-israel/
I think the political analysis of the UK is flawed but the description of the differences between Jewish culture in the two countries seems entirely consistent with what I've seen.
The US parts ring true to me, except for this: "It’s not too much to say that Jews in America have developed a sense of immunity to anti-Semitism, generally believing it to exist only at the margins of society." Maybe true in 2016, when the piece was written -- not true now. The Trump presidency and the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue put paid to that. And the hostage situation at the synagogue in Texas last year. Antisemitic hate crimes went up in 2017 and stayed up, then went up again in both 2021 and 2022.
And of course Trump stoked Islamophobia as well. The Council of American-Islamic Relations says hate crimes against Muslims finally went down in 2022 to a point comparable to that prior to Trump's inauguration. They attribute this to a reduction in the volatility of US politics and the devotion of federal resources to going after white supremacist groups following the Jan 6 attack on the capital; this had the added positive effect of keeping the feds too busy to harass so many Muslims. (I'd give a link, but it automatically downloaded a pdf to my computer.) But the rate of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US is going right back up again right this minute.
Okay, so what actual material consequence has he faced ? Why doesn't the 'will you denounce' logic work the same way in every interview involving Netanyahu ?
This is going way past the original question. I'm not defending Netanyahu, and I'm not defending some kind of both sides bullshit when the power differential in Israel/Palestine is so grossly skewed and when, as I've noted, my own government is bankrolling Israel and its military. All I'm saying is I can see why a Jewish person would be scared at hearing the "from the river to the sea" phrase. And you've shown me why a Palestinian person would be just as scared hearing it from the other side.
I wasn't implying that you were either defending Netanyahu or some kind of both-sidesim. My point is that similar phrases have been used by both sides, yet one side actually has a history of trying to appropriate it to have a more secular/less nationalistic meaning [*], and at that point I question the focus being placed on its use by that side.
Because the result won't be that in future Netanyahu/Hotovely/Smotrich et al will have to moderate their language and illustrations, the net effect will be to further police Palestinian speech (literally in some cases).
There are senior politicians in the Israeli Knesset who are using much more inflammatory language and engaging in much more inflammatory actions right now who receive less scrutiny, and I'm reminded of this piece by the Jewish scholar Alana Lentin:
In The Times the Chief Rabbi is quoted as saying (in an article in the paper) '...so many seem to have lost sight of the moral distance between Hamas and Israel '.
What is 'moral distance '? Doesn't it sound a bit like Whataboutism?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/04/us-jews-rift-gaza-israel-crisis
This article is largely a connected series of quotes from Jewish Americans, and is probably a decent summary of the range of views (barring, I think, the portion of ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe Israel is illegitimate, but perhaps they are too small to be of relevance in the US).
Because the result won't be that in future Netanyahu/Hotovely/Smotrich et al will have to moderate their language and illustrations, the net effect will be to further police Palestinian speech (literally in some cases).
I would like to expand somewhat on this post by looking at one of the incidents I mentioned. That of Netanyahu illustrating a speech to the UN with a map of Israel that erased the occupied territories:
The specific complaints were that there was one artwork containing a picture of the Al Aqsa Mosque with a Palestinian flag next to it, and that there was a captain that read:
"Fishing with nets is one of the oldest industries in Palestine. The shoreline stretches for 224 km from Rafah in the south to Ra’as al Naqoura in the North."
The former location is South of Gaza and the latter is in Lebanon, and the argument was that description was an erasure of Israel. UKLFI further went on to argue that the schoolchildren had been "indoctrinated by Hamas ideology" and that the very presence of both these things made Jewish patients feel "vulnerable, harassed and victimised".
A statement of solidarity with Palestine (put up by Forensic Architecture the director of is British-Israeli) was pulled that read:
"Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine. We believe this liberation struggle is inseparable from other global struggles against racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and settler colonial violence and we acknowledge its particularly close entanglement with the Black liberation struggle around the world."
There are a number of other incidents that I could mention; but ISTM illustrative of a general policing of Palestinian Speech. This is the frame through which I view that Jewish Journal piece. There's no exploration of the history of the phrase's use by Israel, nor why it's suddenly offensive now that it has been appropriated - in part - by Palestinians.
Netanyahu was sworn in at the end of last year, this was published before then, but I don't see a rash of condemnatory pieces from that time:
"The government will act in accordance with the following guidelines:
The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria."
As the journalist Daniel Finn says it amounts to a strange form of standpoint theory that runs in one direction.
Your post compares apples to oranges -- what Netanyahu, who leads a government whose closest ally is the most powerful country in the world, gets away with vs. what children or even director of Forensic Architective are allowed to say?
But I'm not disputing what you're saying. This conflict is asymmetrical in numerous ways. Yet Jewish people are still afraid. A shipmate said Jewish people should have taken what MacDonald said another way, but fear doesn't work that way. You and I have been arguing at cross purposes, so I'm going to stop.
Anti-Semitic incidents have undoubtedly increased, but the source quoted in that article is the ADL whose CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who has stated that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism (and that Zionism is endemic to Jewish identity)
You want to argue against the FBI and the DHS as well?
I don't know what standards they use but the UK records racist incidents on the basis of the perception of the person reporting, which is the only way to avoid it being affected by racist policing but has the downside of being susceptible to expansive definitions as @chrisstiles has noted.
Okay, who will you believe? What statistics will you cite yourselves? Synagogues in the US had armed guards before the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, before 9/11. Perhaps the UK is blissfully free of real anti-semitism, but it is alive and well in the US. You do recall we have
active neo-Nazis, I hope. (Link goes to Wikipedia article on the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and pictures flags carried there: the Nazi swastika and the Confederate flag.)
Go find the FBI statistics on your own if you don't believe me -- they track hate crimes. The majority of religion-based hate crimes in the US are directed at Jews, despite their being less than 3% of the population.
Looking at crime numbers of violence in the city of Chicago, and hearing people yelling at us because our city is supposedly a hellhole of violence...I learned something about the way I understand statistics in terms of "people getting killed."
One is too many.
After that...it's just more numbers of things that shouldn't happen. 100, 1000. I fear that once you start getting into orders of magnitude, the individuals don't matter except when they're linked to a faction.
[SARK]
"Oh, that's the bloody corpse of a star-bellied sneetch! Don't you know those sneetches are endangered! Pay no mind to the ordinary sneetches. They're more replaceable. They're more privileged. Their humanity is inconvenient to my personal narrative."
[/SARK]
With apologies to Dr Seuss, memory eternal.
If I describe Israel's action as a war crime, I'm suddenly accused to spreading antisemitism because some shit-for-brains somewhere will beat up a Jewish kid in retaliation. Or I can't condemn Hamas's act of terrorism, because that would justify Israel's war crimes. Damned whatever you say, so just shut up. It's a rather extreme eggshell-walking situation where if you don't balance your grief just so, you're a monster. And maybe we are anyway.
It feels like a passive aggressive game of weaponized grief. "Don't grieve for them, you'll make more people hate us because of our vague association with the perpetrators!"
If one is too many, what do you do about 1000? 10,000? Is that why we resort to putting people into clumps like nation states and ethnicities? To save us the grief?
I don't know if this counts as 'own voice' but BBC Radio 4's religious news and comment programme this morning contained interviews with Jewish university chaplains and other Rabbis which cited an increase in abusive hate-crime incidents against Jewish students etc of around 800%.
It also carried the powerful and shocking testimony of the mother of one of the hostages seized by Hamas at the music festival. Video footage of his abduction obtained by CNN showed that he'd lost the lower part of his left arm - he is left handed - to a Hamas grenade.
So not only do they know he's been seized - and nothing about his subsequent fate and whereabouts - they also know he's sustained a life-changing injury.
In all the 'what about this', 'what about that' I'm sure we'd all agree that we are seeing unimaginable horror and tragedy that is almost paralysing in its intensity. What can we do? What can any of us do?
I was thinking about this quote from Solzhenitsyn - “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"
It feels like many countries are tearing themselves apart because of the simplicity of trying to separate "them/evil" and "us/good".
I was thinking about this quote from Solzhenitsyn - “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"
This. I can fully understand the desire to somehow remove Hamas like a tumour from the body of Palestine, but it won't and can't work. Hamas is a product of oppression, and its members are fathers, brothers, sons (I'm assuming most are male) of ordinary Palestinians, and killing them will simply produce another wave of angrier recruits. The only solution is to end the oppression that formed it (and the fear that drives that oppression). I half wonder whether a political solution to this is going to involve peacekeepers from elsewhere, but who the fuck do you get who isn't instantly distrusted by one or both sides? Nepal? Punjabi Sikhs?
I don't know if this counts as 'own voice' but BBC Radio 4's religious news and comment programme this morning contained interviews with Jewish university chaplains and other Rabbis which cited an increase in abusive hate-crime incidents against Jewish students etc of around 800%.
It also carried the powerful and shocking testimony of the mother of one of the hostages seized by Hamas at the music festival. Video footage of his abduction obtained by CNN showed that he'd lost the lower part of his left arm - he is left handed - to a Hamas grenade.
So not only do they know he's been seized - and nothing about his subsequent fate and whereabouts - they also know he's sustained a life-changing injury.
In all the 'what about this', 'what about that' I'm sure we'd all agree that we are seeing unimaginable horror and tragedy that is almost paralysing in its intensity. What can we do? What can any of us do?
My commentary: of course dropping a nuke on Gaza would also destroy much of Israel, the distances are very small.
Whilst also feeling utterly wretched that a government minister in a government which has nuke could even *think that*, I was also wondering whether a "nuke Gaza" placard would be acceptable in a British protest march.
The rhetoric is being ratcheted up to extreme.
--
Another thing I was thinking about was how various commentators are reaching for extreme language for what could happen next, the desirability of the destruction of "the other", how their side is at risk of extermination and so on. And how these things (ie extreme language from the other side) feeds off each other (the ratcheting up of fears that they want to destroy me and mine).
And how the focus of the media on this is obscuring the reality that these things happen in other places (Mynmar, South Sudan). Which I don't think is to engage in whataboutery so much as to realise that this planet is so entirely screwed that the things we all fear in one part of the world are already happening in another place where there are no TV cameras.
He appeared to have been mostly un-suspended a few hours later - it's also not the first time he said genocidal things, so perhaps the real offense was mentioning that Israel had nuclear weapons.
And how the focus of the media on this is obscuring the reality that these things happen in other places (Mynmar, South Sudan). Which I don't think is to engage in whataboutery so much as to realise that this planet is so entirely screwed that the things we all fear in one part of the world are already happening in another place where there are no TV cameras.
My attention was drawn recently to the ongoing situation in Kurdish Syria, where (I'm told, sources are limited) Turkey has bombed power and water facilities serving 4 million Kurds, leaving them in a pretty desperate situation. I was recommended to follow: https://twitter.com/iAmHaks
It was certainly eye-opening. Apart from anything else the abuse from what I assume are Turkish nationals directed at Kurds is atrocious, like the worst of 19th and early 20th century anti-Irish racism. The plight of the Kurds, a people with a land and an identity but irrationally split between three states, is one that I've been aware of for a long time but rarely gets to the front of the news. Between Turkey being a NATO member and the global Ummah being rather less bothered about Muslim on Muslim brutality there is no-one with a geopolitical interest in giving Kurds a voice. There's also this weird thing where if you condemn a thing no-one is publicly backing your voice doesn't even echo, it just gets sucked into the void. So criticism of Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen is met with silence, same with China's treatment of Uighurs or Tibetans, or any number of other atrocities western governments quietly accept. The Israel-Palestine conflict generates attention and heat because Israel has large numbers of vocal apologists both within and outwith western governments, so the condemnations become louder and more vociferous.
Israel's lobby is powerful, obviously. But the Israel-Palestine conflict gets attention because of Israel's "apologists" ... seriously? It's not because this has been an intractable conflict for ages? It's not because if it spills over there could be even more widespread horror? And draw Iran and Russia more tightly together? And create a situation where the US is supporting allies in two full-blown wars simultaneously? Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't get wall-to-wall media coverage because of Ukraine's "apologists."
Also, your post elides the difference between media coverage, which @KoF brought up, and what state departments and foreign ministries are doing. The US recognizes China's treatment of the Uighurs as genocide, but it's not headline news.
In fairness, I don't think the US + allies are sending $lots in arms to the conflicts in South Sudan, Western Sahara (remember that one?) etc.
There's little appetite to start a conflict with China for obvious reasons (for a start they'd likely win) and unfortunately the other places barely register.
In contrast, we've been actively encouraging conflict in the ME by repeatedly giving money to Egypt and Israel for "security" - because strategically we all recognise the importance of the region.
We do, however, sell lots of arms to Saudi Arabia even though we know they use them to torture and oppress their own people and commit war crimes in Yemen.
And how the focus of the media on this is obscuring the reality that these things happen in other places (Mynmar, South Sudan). Which I don't think is to engage in whataboutery so much as to realise that this planet is so entirely screwed that the things we all fear in one part of the world are already happening in another place where there are no TV cameras.
I think the focus is a function of a number of things; the way in which the conflict serves as a signifier for other things (such as the hypocrisy of the 'rules based international order', the clash between the West and the Majority World or between Islam/Christianity, Islam/Judaism) and thus the number of times it has served as a general flashpoint, the amount of material support given by the US to Israel, and finally the fact that the conflict has been going on for long enough that the oppressed side has been able to develop a professional class that can explain the conflict in a register consumable by western media (which is also why Palestinian intellectuals, reporters, civil society organizations etc have been targeted by the Israeli state and some of their outriders).
Israel Palestine has only been an intractable conflict since 1947. That's only a few years before my father was born. He's not a young man anymore, but it wasn't "ages and ages ago."
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
It does strike me as rather unfair that Europeans basically shoved their own guilt into the middle east and now we insist that this is some kind of mystical "clash of civilizations" instead of a simple turf war where one group took a whole bunch of land from another. You can't displace that many people and expect peace.
It frustrates me that because organized religions are ancient, we assume that any conflict that happens to fall along religious lines must similarly be ancient. Honestly, I think it's less about Judaism per se and more about the fact that Israel has become America's fortress in the middle east. Imperialism is what everyone resents, not piety. Though hiding imperialism under a facade of piety is, of course, a Christian tradition that's as old as the nation state (which itself isn't 1000 years old, I think.)
You don't need to study 1000 years of history to understand the modern middle east. A mere hundred years will do.
[yeah...50 is understating it, I forget my own age here]
Interesting point, no, hang on, a very very obvious point, that Israel's attack on Gaza will radicalize many Palestinians. Presumably, the Israelis calculate that if a certain number are radicalized, more will be killed. Or maybe I've missed out something. Well, killing 10 000 will dissuade others. Success!
Comments
Rewarding paranoia is dangerous. What I can do to create a parallel which is salient for me is think about the controversy around the use of the word "queer". It was rehabilitated quite forcibly in the 90s, when I was a young gayling, and I have been permanently affected by this, and am therefore receptive to similar attempts now. Others aren't. Within the LGBT+ community, there is a whole maelstrom of views, which tends to simplify when this is seen from outside.
On the other hand, I'm also a linguist, and aware of reader response as a factor. It determines how utterances are treated. Of course the speaker can be aware of traditions of reception, and the circumstances in which their utterance will be received, and may attempt to manipulate this, but ultimately, interpretation is always done by the parties who receive an utterance.
But I think I'm lacking context for what you're talking about -- I didn't see a specific speaker referenced. Who was it using this phrase?
It's the age-old problem of unexamined generalizations people are prone to. The problem is getting people to realize that these are generalizations. If they're rooted in emotional convictions, they'll be particularly hard to shift.
Ah OK, I think this is a reference to this MP, who, in my view, has been totally unfairly suspended by the Labour party. To quote him: "“I said: ‘We will not rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty.’"
The whole Guardian article is here
I think it is a reference to this mp.
The full quote was:
But it's far away, so there's not much you can do about it.
And I think you have to couple this with an idea that "those people are the problem." People who support Israel are the problem, people who support Palestine are the problem (there have been violent incidents involving both.) And then you look a thing to do and, oh! There's a supporter for that godforsaken regime right there! And anger takes over and you decide you've "done something" about it.
I dunno, there's some part of me that feels a moral obligation to reverse engineer the way violent monsters think, so at least I can understand them. Maybe it's some sense of the commitment to love. Love requires a measure of empathy and a willingness to put yourself in someone else'e shoes, even when they're stomping someone else's head into a curb. So I try to understand. And with effort, I think I can.
I've had a pet theory, think I picked it up in an article somewhere, that a certain kind of privilege makes people vulnerable to this. You want to be a good guy. You want to be someone who fights for what's right and "makes a difference." And, via empathy, you're deeply outraged by *gestures vaguely at a bunch of places.* But without being the victim, you can't say how to address the rage or how to help the situation. So you end up piling up all of this anger without having the personal context. And I think it can warp a person over time if they're not careful.
I think @Ruth 's Terence quote works pretty well. I guess that's my attempt.
I know multiple folks in that situation, and my empathy for them is really complicated.
https://jewishcurrents.org/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-really-mean
It predates the current escalation but I think it's probably better for that.
@Ruth as has been noted earlier in the thread, Likud, Netanyahu's party, also uses the phrase "from the river to the sea". The context matters, the words used with it matter. When Likud use it they're saying all of Eretz Israel should be under control of the Jewish state (and, arguably, that sufficient Palestinians should be killed, expelled or disenfranchised to maintain a Jewish majority). Andy MacDonald was taking the usage from both Israelis and Palestinians and saying that there can only be peace when all the people in the region are free.
Here is a direct response to that piece. Munnayer in the first piece says, "The claim that the phrase 'from the river to the sea' carries a genocidal intent relies not on the historical record, but rather on racism and Islamophobia." Tanny responds, "I do not think Hill [cited by Munnayer] is explicitly promoting genocide. But he is capitalizing on the phrase’s ambiguity because it simultaneously gives anti-Zionists a mandate for violence while offering plausible deniability of this intent. Deliberate ambiguity allows them to have it both ways. Munayyer and Hill are likely among those whose preferred outcome is a peaceful polity between the river of the sea, where ethnicity and religion play no role in bestowing rights and citizenship. But even so, it is open to doubt whether such an envisioned free Palestine would signify genuine equality for its Jewish inhabitants."
So first it's a Palestinian slogan. Then Likud takes it and reverses it. And right now this MP decides this heavily freighted language is a good idea? If you google "from the river to the sea" you can find plenty of people using it in a way MacDonald seems to have intended -- here's a 2021 example in the Guardian from an Indian-born British guy. But right now it's not a phrase I'd use when addressing the public.
I don't actually think this is the case, the debates about the extent of the land predate the use of the phrase by Fatah in the late 60s.
Furthermore the one sided nature of the policing of this phrase makes the entire argument seem like it is an attempt to rule any form of resistance illegitimate.
There's more going on than policing, though, if people hear the phrase and are terrified.
I don't think it's the phrase as such, it seems to be any support for Palestinian liberation that challenges the ethnic-sectarian-nationalist character of the current State of Israel. Israel has spent huge amounts of time, money and energy welding itself to Jewish identity precisely so that any challenge to it will be felt as threatening by the Jewish diaspora.
The first uses of it were in a much more maximalist sense, Betar's response to the Peel Commission was "For the holy city Jerusalem and Eretz Israel from Dan to Beersheba and from the Gilead to the Sea" (most of the two territories of the British mandate). This was back when the slogan in Revisionist circles was "Two banks the Jordan has, this is ours and that one as well"
There are all sorts of reasons why people may be terrified, and even granting that that in itself should be enough to rule out use of a particular phrase, I don't see the same principle being applied equally. When was the last time that Netanyahu was pulled up on Likud's founding statement, or his use - just last month - of the map of Israel which annexed the occupied areas? Or the kinds of things members of his ruling coalition like Smotrich have come out with? What impact do you think they have in the Palestinian audience hearing/watching them ?
The local interfaith council normally holds their annual "unity dinner" in early November. They've postponed it indefinitely.
I'm turning on my tags because this is now the fourth time of asking on this thread @Arethosemyfeet
It's good that you posted the Jewish Currents piece but that's multiple cases of posts making assertions about Jewish identity, forms of antisemitism and whether they should be taken seriously or not and now how something will be 'felt as threatening by the Jewish diaspora' which to the best of my knowledge you don't belong to.
These posts seriously lack own voice references/ links/citations to what Jews in Britain or the diaspora in other places are thinking or feeling about antisemitism right now.
If you'd rather post about what Palestinians think about the current conflict from Palestinian sources then that's fine, but I'm asking you now to stop commenting on antisemitism on this thread without substantial own voice commentary from Jews for whom this is not a theoretical subject or, as others have done, engaging with Jewish people around you and hearing and reflecting how they are experiencing things.
If you can't do that then please stick to other topics related to this conflict.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
Hosting off
Thanks for this. I may have to spend more time going down this particular rabbit hole.
Fear and anger, and I don't blame them.
Aljazeera says Smotrich "triggered international outrage" with what he said in March, including sharp condemnation from the US state department. The Jerusalem Post called Netanyahu's stunt at the UN a map fiasco and quoted the Jewish CEO of Americans for Peace Now as saying, “Netanyahu is returning to his government of fascists, felons, and fundamentalists, which in both action and words contradicts his bogus rhetoric of peace.”
I don't know what's happening in the UK. I don't know if that MP should be in big trouble or not. Are you saying no one challenges Netanyahu there? Progressive Jews in the US certainly do. Here's a J Street guy condemning Netanyahu's map.
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2016/07/why-british-jewry-isnt-drifting-away-from-israel/
I think the political analysis of the UK is flawed but the description of the differences between Jewish culture in the two countries seems entirely consistent with what I've seen.
Okay, so what actual material consequence has he faced ? Why doesn't the 'will you denounce' logic work the same way in every interview involving Netanyahu ? (I'm not necessarily saying that's a useful question, but it's instructive to see when it's rolled out and when it isn't).
As I said, the current Israeli Ambassdor to London has used to same language of 'from the river to the sea' in support of Israel's exclusive claim to that territory, but this has apparently passed without much comment - leading politicians have been quite happy to share platforms with her, including the leader of the opposition - a Gentile married to a Jew (intermarriage being another issue Hotovely is opposed to).
For various historical reasons the Jewish community in the UK tends to be much more conservative leaning than is the case in the US, the equivalent of JVP would be something like Na'amod - which is tiny by comparison. When Miliband - himself Jewish - was leader of the Labour Party Jewish support for Labour actually fell (from already fairly low levels) with polling indicating this was primarily down to his support for recognising a Palestinian state:
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/huge-majority-of-british-jews-will-vote-tory-jc-poll-reveals-1.66001
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-funding-crisis-jewish-donors-drop-toxic-ed-miliband-9849299.html
The US parts ring true to me, except for this: "It’s not too much to say that Jews in America have developed a sense of immunity to anti-Semitism, generally believing it to exist only at the margins of society." Maybe true in 2016, when the piece was written -- not true now. The Trump presidency and the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue put paid to that. And the hostage situation at the synagogue in Texas last year. Antisemitic hate crimes went up in 2017 and stayed up, then went up again in both 2021 and 2022.
And of course Trump stoked Islamophobia as well. The Council of American-Islamic Relations says hate crimes against Muslims finally went down in 2022 to a point comparable to that prior to Trump's inauguration. They attribute this to a reduction in the volatility of US politics and the devotion of federal resources to going after white supremacist groups following the Jan 6 attack on the capital; this had the added positive effect of keeping the feds too busy to harass so many Muslims. (I'd give a link, but it automatically downloaded a pdf to my computer.) But the rate of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US is going right back up again right this minute.
I wasn't implying that you were either defending Netanyahu or some kind of both-sidesim. My point is that similar phrases have been used by both sides, yet one side actually has a history of trying to appropriate it to have a more secular/less nationalistic meaning [*], and at that point I question the focus being placed on its use by that side.
Because the result won't be that in future Netanyahu/Hotovely/Smotrich et al will have to moderate their language and illustrations, the net effect will be to further police Palestinian speech (literally in some cases).
There are senior politicians in the Israeli Knesset who are using much more inflammatory language and engaging in much more inflammatory actions right now who receive less scrutiny, and I'm reminded of this piece by the Jewish scholar Alana Lentin:
https://www.alanalentin.net/2015/04/14/the-opposition-to-anti-zionism-as-antisemitic-philosemitism/
[*] And there are plenty of parallels of oppressed groups appropriating the language of oppression as part of their struggle.
What is 'moral distance '? Doesn't it sound a bit like Whataboutism?
This article is largely a connected series of quotes from Jewish Americans, and is probably a decent summary of the range of views (barring, I think, the portion of ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe Israel is illegitimate, but perhaps they are too small to be of relevance in the US).
I would like to expand somewhat on this post by looking at one of the incidents I mentioned. That of Netanyahu illustrating a speech to the UN with a map of Israel that erased the occupied territories:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-brandishes-map-of-israel-that-includes-west-bank-and-gaza-at-un-speech/
Ruth mentions various organisations that censured Netanyahu, but I'd argue that there were little or no material consequences to this action.
Let's compare and contrast with this incident here; where an exhibition of artwork by children from Gaza was removed from the hospital in London:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/27/artwork-gaza-schoolchildren-removed-chelsea-and-westminster-hospital
The specific complaints were that there was one artwork containing a picture of the Al Aqsa Mosque with a Palestinian flag next to it, and that there was a captain that read:
"Fishing with nets is one of the oldest industries in Palestine. The shoreline stretches for 224 km from Rafah in the south to Ra’as al Naqoura in the North."
The former location is South of Gaza and the latter is in Lebanon, and the argument was that description was an erasure of Israel. UKLFI further went on to argue that the schoolchildren had been "indoctrinated by Hamas ideology" and that the very presence of both these things made Jewish patients feel "vulnerable, harassed and victimised".
Let's take another incident involving UKLFI:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/aug/16/artists-pull-work-from-whitworth-gallery-after-palestine-statement-removal
A statement of solidarity with Palestine (put up by Forensic Architecture the director of is British-Israeli) was pulled that read:
"Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine. We believe this liberation struggle is inseparable from other global struggles against racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and settler colonial violence and we acknowledge its particularly close entanglement with the Black liberation struggle around the world."
There are a number of other incidents that I could mention; but ISTM illustrative of a general policing of Palestinian Speech. This is the frame through which I view that Jewish Journal piece. There's no exploration of the history of the phrase's use by Israel, nor why it's suddenly offensive now that it has been appropriated - in part - by Palestinians.
Netanyahu was sworn in at the end of last year, this was published before then, but I don't see a rash of condemnatory pieces from that time:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/judicial-reform-boosting-jewish-identity-the-new-coalitions-policy-guidelines/
"The government will act in accordance with the following guidelines:
The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria."
As the journalist Daniel Finn says it amounts to a strange form of standpoint theory that runs in one direction.
But I'm not disputing what you're saying. This conflict is asymmetrical in numerous ways. Yet Jewish people are still afraid. A shipmate said Jewish people should have taken what MacDonald said another way, but fear doesn't work that way. You and I have been arguing at cross purposes, so I'm going to stop.
The Jewish and Muslim communities here in the US both have good reason to be frightened; the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Anti-Defamation League report skyrocketing rates of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents.
Anti-Semitic incidents have undoubtedly increased, but the source quoted in that article is the ADL whose CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who has stated that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism (and that Zionism is endemic to Jewish identity)
https://archive.ph/RgO0m
There has been been criticism from Jewish groups/academics that the ADL's Audit frequently conflates the two:
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-adls-antisemitism-findings-explained
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/the-anti-defamation-league-is-fueling-war/
As well as more general criticisms of the ADL itself https://archive.ph/qQBfF
From my post:
Apologies, I should have been more precise 'the sources for the figures quoted in the article'.
I don't know what standards they use but the UK records racist incidents on the basis of the perception of the person reporting, which is the only way to avoid it being affected by racist policing but has the downside of being susceptible to expansive definitions as @chrisstiles has noted.
Go find the FBI statistics on your own if you don't believe me -- they track hate crimes. The majority of religion-based hate crimes in the US are directed at Jews, despite their being less than 3% of the population.
One is too many.
After that...it's just more numbers of things that shouldn't happen. 100, 1000. I fear that once you start getting into orders of magnitude, the individuals don't matter except when they're linked to a faction.
[SARK]
"Oh, that's the bloody corpse of a star-bellied sneetch! Don't you know those sneetches are endangered! Pay no mind to the ordinary sneetches. They're more replaceable. They're more privileged. Their humanity is inconvenient to my personal narrative."
[/SARK]
With apologies to Dr Seuss, memory eternal.
If I describe Israel's action as a war crime, I'm suddenly accused to spreading antisemitism because some shit-for-brains somewhere will beat up a Jewish kid in retaliation. Or I can't condemn Hamas's act of terrorism, because that would justify Israel's war crimes. Damned whatever you say, so just shut up. It's a rather extreme eggshell-walking situation where if you don't balance your grief just so, you're a monster. And maybe we are anyway.
It feels like a passive aggressive game of weaponized grief. "Don't grieve for them, you'll make more people hate us because of our vague association with the perpetrators!"
If one is too many, what do you do about 1000? 10,000? Is that why we resort to putting people into clumps like nation states and ethnicities? To save us the grief?
It also carried the powerful and shocking testimony of the mother of one of the hostages seized by Hamas at the music festival. Video footage of his abduction obtained by CNN showed that he'd lost the lower part of his left arm - he is left handed - to a Hamas grenade.
So not only do they know he's been seized - and nothing about his subsequent fate and whereabouts - they also know he's sustained a life-changing injury.
In all the 'what about this', 'what about that' I'm sure we'd all agree that we are seeing unimaginable horror and tragedy that is almost paralysing in its intensity. What can we do? What can any of us do?
I was thinking about this quote from Solzhenitsyn - “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"
It feels like many countries are tearing themselves apart because of the simplicity of trying to separate "them/evil" and "us/good".
This. I can fully understand the desire to somehow remove Hamas like a tumour from the body of Palestine, but it won't and can't work. Hamas is a product of oppression, and its members are fathers, brothers, sons (I'm assuming most are male) of ordinary Palestinians, and killing them will simply produce another wave of angrier recruits. The only solution is to end the oppression that formed it (and the fear that drives that oppression). I half wonder whether a political solution to this is going to involve peacekeepers from elsewhere, but who the fuck do you get who isn't instantly distrusted by one or both sides? Nepal? Punjabi Sikhs?
Here's one piece that includes victims on both sides. I think one thing to do is to try to keep hope and try not to give into hate. Mind, it's not fun living in a world where that seems to actually take effort. I don't usually find it hard and it's been pushing on me.
An Israeli government minister talked about dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-05/ty-article/netanyahu-criticizes-minister-who-suggested-option-of-dropping-nuclear-bomb-on-gaza/0000018b-9e7b-db71-a7df-ffffe4510000
I believe he was slapped down by Netanyahu.
My commentary: of course dropping a nuke on Gaza would also destroy much of Israel, the distances are very small.
Whilst also feeling utterly wretched that a government minister in a government which has nuke could even *think that*, I was also wondering whether a "nuke Gaza" placard would be acceptable in a British protest march.
The rhetoric is being ratcheted up to extreme.
--
Another thing I was thinking about was how various commentators are reaching for extreme language for what could happen next, the desirability of the destruction of "the other", how their side is at risk of extermination and so on. And how these things (ie extreme language from the other side) feeds off each other (the ratcheting up of fears that they want to destroy me and mine).
And how the focus of the media on this is obscuring the reality that these things happen in other places (Mynmar, South Sudan). Which I don't think is to engage in whataboutery so much as to realise that this planet is so entirely screwed that the things we all fear in one part of the world are already happening in another place where there are no TV cameras.
He appeared to have been mostly un-suspended a few hours later - it's also not the first time he said genocidal things, so perhaps the real offense was mentioning that Israel had nuclear weapons.
My attention was drawn recently to the ongoing situation in Kurdish Syria, where (I'm told, sources are limited) Turkey has bombed power and water facilities serving 4 million Kurds, leaving them in a pretty desperate situation. I was recommended to follow: https://twitter.com/iAmHaks
It was certainly eye-opening. Apart from anything else the abuse from what I assume are Turkish nationals directed at Kurds is atrocious, like the worst of 19th and early 20th century anti-Irish racism. The plight of the Kurds, a people with a land and an identity but irrationally split between three states, is one that I've been aware of for a long time but rarely gets to the front of the news. Between Turkey being a NATO member and the global Ummah being rather less bothered about Muslim on Muslim brutality there is no-one with a geopolitical interest in giving Kurds a voice. There's also this weird thing where if you condemn a thing no-one is publicly backing your voice doesn't even echo, it just gets sucked into the void. So criticism of Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen is met with silence, same with China's treatment of Uighurs or Tibetans, or any number of other atrocities western governments quietly accept. The Israel-Palestine conflict generates attention and heat because Israel has large numbers of vocal apologists both within and outwith western governments, so the condemnations become louder and more vociferous.
"Apologists" is a very loaded word.
I would argue that the loading in this case is accurate, but I take your point.
Also, your post elides the difference between media coverage, which @KoF brought up, and what state departments and foreign ministries are doing. The US recognizes China's treatment of the Uighurs as genocide, but it's not headline news.
There's little appetite to start a conflict with China for obvious reasons (for a start they'd likely win) and unfortunately the other places barely register.
In contrast, we've been actively encouraging conflict in the ME by repeatedly giving money to Egypt and Israel for "security" - because strategically we all recognise the importance of the region.
Doublethink, Temp Epiphanies Hosting
I think the focus is a function of a number of things; the way in which the conflict serves as a signifier for other things (such as the hypocrisy of the 'rules based international order', the clash between the West and the Majority World or between Islam/Christianity, Islam/Judaism) and thus the number of times it has served as a general flashpoint, the amount of material support given by the US to Israel, and finally the fact that the conflict has been going on for long enough that the oppressed side has been able to develop a professional class that can explain the conflict in a register consumable by western media (which is also why Palestinian intellectuals, reporters, civil society organizations etc have been targeted by the Israeli state and some of their outriders).
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
It does strike me as rather unfair that Europeans basically shoved their own guilt into the middle east and now we insist that this is some kind of mystical "clash of civilizations" instead of a simple turf war where one group took a whole bunch of land from another. You can't displace that many people and expect peace.
It frustrates me that because organized religions are ancient, we assume that any conflict that happens to fall along religious lines must similarly be ancient. Honestly, I think it's less about Judaism per se and more about the fact that Israel has become America's fortress in the middle east. Imperialism is what everyone resents, not piety. Though hiding imperialism under a facade of piety is, of course, a Christian tradition that's as old as the nation state (which itself isn't 1000 years old, I think.)
You don't need to study 1000 years of history to understand the modern middle east. A mere hundred years will do.
[yeah...50 is understating it, I forget my own age here]