How Israel Is Being Framed

Why Palestine is no Ferguson

By Yoav Fromer

Middle East
HOW ISRAEL IS BEING FRAMED

Why Palestine is no Ferguson

By Yoav Fromer
December 3, 2015
The rising toll of knife-wielding and car-slamming Palestinians who have been
tragically shot and killed on an almost-daily basis over the past two months in
Israel has helped fuel a popular narrative among many of the countrys critics:
The expansion of settlements in the West Bank by Benjamin Netanyahus
increasingly racist right-wing government and the spike in Jewish terrorism have
empowered young Palestinians to throw off the yoke of oppression and take up
arms against the occupation. This romanticized version of events, which
purposely downplays the immediate cause of recent Palestinian deathsthe fact

that they were killed because they tried, and often succeeded, in killing Jews
conveys the impression that innocent Palestinian youths are being senselessly
and ruthlessly shot down, randomly, by trigger-happy Israeli cops and soldiers.
It is no coincidence that this plot sounds familiar to American ears. Its meant
to. Framing the escalating violence in Israel in such a way consciously seeks to
create an analogy between the recurring shooting and killing of unarmed black
men in the United States and the deaths of Palestinians in order to promote
solidarity and link the two struggles in the American public imagination. A recent
media campaign featuring iconic African-American activists like Lauryn Hill and
Angela Davis along Palestinian activists aims to solidify the notion of a shared
destiny by employing the catchy slogan: When I see them I see us.
Yet something is very wrong with the vision that links Palestine to Ferguson. It
is one thing to convey sympathy for oppressed peopleand yes, in many ways
Palestinians are oppressed. But comparing Gaza to Baltimore or Jerusalem to
Ferguson isnt just inaccurate or unfairits insulting. African-American
teenagers arent being shot in American cities by policemen because they are
randomly attacking innocent civilians in the streets with knives, or shooting
parents in front of their children. The entire point of the Black Lives Matter
movement is that the victims are innocent.
And despite the ongoing occupation and subsequent injustices that Israel
propagates, Palestinians do share in the responsibility for their own travails and
suffering. Trying to obfuscate this inconvenient truth by incorporating their
cause into the heroic struggle against racism in America threatens to invest
Palestinian terror with a moral legitimacy that does violence to the facts, and
will only inflame rather than help end the conflict.
***
During a public gathering to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the
Million Man March that was held on Capitol Hill in October, the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright, the outspoken and controversial pastor whose church President Obama
once attended, declared that The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine
have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected. He went
on to blame racism, militarism and capitalism for their historical agonies and
implied that Israel was reproducing the European colonial scheme: Apartheid is
going on in Palestine. As we sit here, there is an apartheid wall being built
twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of illegally
occupied territories, where the Europeans have claimed that land as their own.
Such rhetoric, which has become widespread among Israels critics (especially on
the academic left), aims to reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a formulaic
anti-colonial David vs. Goliath standoff. In doing so, it threatens to transform

the conflict from a historically complicated political, geographic and religious

struggle to the one thing it has never actually been about: racially motivated
imperialism.
The increasingly ubiquitous habit of tying together the Palestinian and African
American causes with the thread of colonialism seems to forget, ironically, just
what the European colonial project was all about. Rooted in a realpolitik
competition for global domination between great powers, a rapacious need for
raw materials and new markets to satisfy growing industrial economies and
consolidating political regimes, and imperious fantasies of national grandeur and
racial supremacy that concocted the so-called White Mans Burden to civilize
the world, Europeans employed their technological and administrative superiority
to forcefully subjugate native peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America, plunder
their lands, and in some places like the Congo, devastate entire populations.
Israel, unfortunately, has done a lot of regrettable and unjust things. But none
of them have ever amounted to this. And whereas western colonialism was
dedicated to conquest and exploitation, the origins of Israeli expansionism are
located in a markedly different motive: sheer physical survival. Although it is
true that many Israeli settlers justify their presence in the West Bank with
biblically rooted claims of a greater Israel, the states influential military
establishment along with the majority of the population, have always been much
more pragmatic and accordingly concerned with the strategic security that such
motivations serve, rather than with fringe messianic fantasies.
The settlers, who are often presented by Israels detractors as the true face
of the nation, represent a small fraction of the general population (and the
extremist and violent sects among them are tellingly despised and condemned by
a vast majority of Israelis on both sides of the political aisle as well as by the
settler establishment). The settlers may be vocal, well organized and
disproportionately influential due to Israels unstable parliamentary systembut
they lack the political legitimacy that is falsely attributed to them. Polling
suggests that their public appeal has been plummeting due to the atrocious
terrorist acts against Palestinians perpetrated by fanatic settler youths, and
that less than a third of Israelis support their cause.
One of the saddest twists of fate in this conflict is that, like in any Greek
Tragedy, Israel continues to do the last thing it actually wants to: control the
lives of millions of Palestinians. Although the occupation is unjust, it must not be
understood as an expression of racial apartheid or Zionist imperialism as much
as a counter-productive national security strategy. After all, Israelis have
voted, repeatedly and overwhelmingly, in 1992, 1999, and 2006 for left-centrist
governments that were dedicated to securing a land for peace agreement with

the Palestinians and withdrawing from the occupied territories. Regardless of

who was to blame for the failures to achieve a final deal in Camp David fifteen
years agoa thorny issue that to this day both sides continue to contest
Israelis have proven time and again their willingness to return the West Bank in
exchange for ensured security. Just this summer, despite the spike in religiously
motivated violence, polls surprisingly indicated that a majority of Israelis still
favored a two-state solution.
The reason for this is clear: Most Israelis, despite what the Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions efforts have tried to suggest, do not want their kids
to serve in the West Bank, they dont want their taxes to fund the settlements,
and they dont see the territories as necessary for realizing the Zionist dream.
On the contrary, the only reason Israelis are unwilling to get out of Judea and
Samaria is the existential fear that like in Lebanon (2000) and Gaza (2005),
history will repeat itself a third time and a unilateral withdrawal will transform
the West Bank into yet another terror state on their bordersone that is much
closer to the coastal population centers and economic heart of the country and
would therefore make life in Israel unbearable and intolerable. In this regards,
the settlements are perceived by many as a means and not an ends: they provide
a strategic buffer zone that absorbs the brunt of the terror attacks and
protect cities like Tel Aviv or Haifa from coming under daily barrages of rocket
fire as had happened in southern Israel after the IDF withdrew from Gaza. Any
peace arrangement that could ameliorate these security concerns would
probably also swiftly bring about the end of the occupation.
Portraying Israel as a colonial and apartheid state purposely belies this security
rationale and falsely substitutes the racial motive for the political one.
Employing power to subjugate, exploit and dominate populations deemed racially
inferior is what justified European colonialism and American Jim Crow. Doing so
in the belief, misguided as it might be, that you are genuinely protecting the
public welfare doesnt make you an imperialist. It makes you a modern state.
***
The gross discrepancy in tactics makes the Palestinian claim to solidarity with
African Americans equally dubious. The most successful method for dismantling
Jim Crow proved to be, after all, the non-violent resistance campaigns
spearheaded by, among others, Martin Luther Kings Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee. Their courageous efforts at defeating southern
racism through non-violent means included integrating lunch counters and bus
lines and holding mass boycotts and public demonstrations. And they succeeded
in changing public opinion and forcing congress and the federal government to

intervene not simply because they won the moral high-ground and exposed the
raw bigotry and hatred undergirding southern racismbut because theirs was a
genuine message of peace, justice and universal brotherhood.
As King famously declared in his speech at the March on Washington in 1963: In
the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful
deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the
cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high
plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to
degenerate into physical violence. Passionately committed to the benevolence
and amity preached in the gospels, King understood that the very nature of the
struggle would shape its eventual outcome. He therefore emphasized: It is
wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.
Israelis would be very glad if Palestinians wished to align themselves with the
African American cause that King, maybe more than anyone else, embodies. So,
it is curious and revealing that they have time and again rejected non-violent
protest as a strategy to end to their own oppression. Despite efforts at
promoting such alternative forms of resistance, many Palestinians have instead
continuously opted for violence: in recent weeks they have celebrated the
slaughter of innocent Israeli civilians and incited for more bloodshed while
echoing the infamous Hamas founding charter that avows to obliterate Israel
and reclaim every inch of Palestine. Its worth remembering that even the
most militant African American organizations such as the Black Panthers
primarily challenged only those perceived to be the instruments of their
oppressionthe police; whereas Palestinians have chosen to indiscriminately
attack unarmed women, children, and the elderly. To ignore both the bloodcurdling eliminationist rhetoric and the repeated rejectionist actions and violent
terror attacks of their interlocutors in favor of the idea that all the
Palestinians want is a peaceful two-state solution might indeed be the essence of
wise, far-sighted state-craft. However, the fact that many Israelis have come
to believe otherwise and mistrust Palestinians is not simply evidence that
Israelis are colonialist racists.
Even though there were competing voices within the Civil Rights movement, it
was Kings inspirational message of peace and coexistence that ultimately
prevailed. While there are similar dissenting voices among Palestiniansit is only
the violent fanatics on their side whose voice is being heard. And we must
seriously contemplate why this is so before comparing Palestine to Selma. When
Palestinian knife-wielding attackers admit that they set out to stab Jews and
are soldiers in a holy war we need to consider the grim fact that their tactics
are so different because their goals may be so far apart: most African

Americans sought emancipation from their enemies; too many Palestinians seek
the destruction of theirs.
The attempt to perpetuate an inherently flawed and purposely misleading
analogy between Palestinians and African Americans is symptomatic of the
increasingly distorted manner in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come
to be viewed in the West. The politicization of knowledge among some of Israels
critics has led to the irresponsible simplification of what is at heart, an
incredibly complex affair in which both sides have legitimate grievances. But
understanding the real origins of the conflicta prerequisite to ever
engendering a viable solution to end itdemands nuance, sophistication and a
moral ambiguity that too many are unwilling to employ. Yes, the occupation is
unjust; but, what are the reasons for perpetuating it? How can a sovereign
nation, entrusted with the common security of its citizens, justify signing peace
treaties with the same people whose founding charter is explicitly committed to
their destruction? These are not excuses, but fundamental questions.
Attempting to conveniently sweep them under the rug of ignorance by hurling
hollow accusations of settler-colonialism and systems of repression towards
Israel that attempt to falsely compartmentalize the conflict into a distorted
historical model to which it doesnt apply, is a betrayal of intellectual life and a
mockery of common sense.
Calls for African American solidarity with the Palestinians could be more
compelling if their experiences were actually similar. But they arent, at least
not yet. Israeli police officers who shoot knife-wielding Palestinians trying to
stab innocent civilians to death are not similar to police officers in the United
States who kill unarmed black men. The former were shot because they tried to
kill someone. The latter were shot because of the color of their skin.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy with no heroes and far too many
victims. Let us therefore remember that Black lives matter. Palestinian lives
matter. Israeli lives also matter.
***
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