Support for Palestine at Glastonbury

[Finallyloggedin]

Daman Albarn

https://x.com/damonunofficial/status/1806744107181642172?s=61&t=nilGqPeurpC5xVqZAZdZog

@AhNowTed well said.

I’ll answer your questions

No
No

some people even justify it or minimise it or deny it.

To my mind, the problem with being 'Pro-Palestine' is that the core of the Palestinian Arab political project has always been about expelling or exterminating the Jews. It is not and never has been a project centred on human rights, or about building a functioning state for themselves.

The violent racism of the Palestinian Arabs goes way back, to before the founding of Israel, with pogroms like the 1929 massacre of Hebron's Jewish community (which bore eerily similar features to the pogrom of Oct 7, including the killing of infants and the elderly, and the sexual mutilation of women).

Anti-Jewish hatred among Arabs is not an outgrowth of the military occupation in the West Bank and predates the modern state of Israel by centuries. It is hard for people who don't know much about the history of the Middle East, and the subjugation of non-Arab minorities (Jews, Samaritans, Assyrians, Yazidis, Druze, Copts) after the Arab Conquest, to understand this. To them, the Palestinian Arabs look like the underdogs, while the well-armed Jews look like the bullies. Back when I knew little about the history of the conflict and just consumed left-leaning media, I used to think this too.

But after living in Israel for a year and reading more widely, I realised that it is the other way around: the Palestinians are the primary aggressors in this conflict. You can be the weaker party and still be the aggressor. Their military and economic weakness does not deter them from continuing to start wars, because they believe that ultimately 450 million Arabs will overcome 7 million Jews. That's why the Palestinians have turned down every offer of a state made to them. They don't want a state, they want the Jews gone and Arab Muslim supremacy restored over the one tiny part of the Middle East that has thus far evaded it.

Something like 80 per cent of Palestinians support Hamas. At a conference in 2021, Hamas laid out its vision for a 'free Palestine' and outlined what would happen to Jews in it:

1. Jews who had served in the IDF (which is most Israeli Jews) were to be killed.
2. Jews who had not served in the IDF (basically the Ultra-Orthodox) could be merely ethnically cleansed.
3. Jews who converted to Islam could be 'integrated into the state'.
4. 'Educated Jews' (the scientists, doctors and engineers) were to be enslaved, not allowed to leave the new state of Palestine, but forced to work, for free, for the Arabs.

This is the vision that a supermajority of Palestinians have for a 'free Palestine': one in which Jews are either killed, ethnically cleansed, forcibly converted or enslaved. This, therefore, is what it means to be 'Pro-Palestine'. I don't understand how anybody sane could align themselves with this, but Damon Albarn and most of the British Left disagree, it seems.

There are a not-insignificant number of people who are using it literally, though, as justification and encouragement for the acts of the IDF and extremist 'settlers'.

@Shutupaboutthesun a lot of what you are saying is simply not true.

Palestinans didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors. It’s really not relevant to their struggle for human rights.

Many Jews and Muslims lived happily alongside each other with equal rights before the creation of the state of Israel. Furthermore Christians are being treated horrifically in Jerusalem right now.

Some people are desperate to paint this as a culture war for their own political ends, but funnily enough when you murder peoples families, steal their houses and destroy their livelihoods, they tend not to like it. Wrong is wrong, regardless of anything else.

Well done Kneecap 🇵🇸❤️🇵🇸❤️🇵🇸❤️

@Shutupaboutthesun

I suggest you continue your reading, and start with this.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

Finallyloggedin, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where all citizens have equal rights and the only one whose Christian population isn't shrinking.

I'm not sure if you are deliberately lying or merely uninformed about the history of Arab Muslim imperialism in the Middle East when you claim that Jews and Muslims used to live as 'equals', but I think you need to ask yourself why Assyrians, Yazidis, Samaritans and Copts have been reduced to tiny besieged populations in their indigenous lands in which they were once the majority. If you understand that you'll understand why most Arabs cannot countenance the existence of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East.

Of course Palestinians are deserving of rights, freedom and a national home. The problem is that their political movement is not focused on gaining any of those things. It is and has always been solely about destroying what the Jews have built. This is the heart of the conflict and the reason it has proven so difficult to solve. Israel is not going to agree to dissolve itself, and the Palestinians refuse to accept any settlement that leaves Israel still in existence. If it was about land, or the desire of the Palestinian Arabs for a state, it would have been solved decades ago.

@Shutupaboutthesun How is the expansion of settlements in the WB, encouraged by Likud, the arming of settlers, and the denial of rights to Palestinians in the WB (which is pretty much under Israeli control, if not legally Israel, helping any settlement? You may be right that some in Palestinian politics wish the eradication of Israel, though I am sure it is not all. However, the ongoing expansion of the occupation's reach and control look as if the Israeli government, and many politicians, wish the eradication of a realised Palestine. I think that decades of military force and control has done little to achieve the normal, peaceful state that I would think many Israelis wish for.

Yes lol, this mythical "Palestine" was a place unlike any other in the middle east, where Jews were allowed to live in peace alongside their Muslim neighbours? Pull the other one. You only have to look at what happened to Jews in the surrounding countries to see why Israel needs to continue to exist

To support Palestine is to support an unrecognised state

attached a picture of those countries that recognise Palestine as a country

Who are you calling antisemites?

How dare you.

If I'm an antisemite, so are countless Jewish Israelis, prominent Jewish academics and scholars, Jewish human rights organisations, and a not insignificant portion of Jewish media.

I think supporting Palestine is simply recognising that no people should live under occupation.

This

Are you actually criticising people for showing support and solidarity to Palestinians? Why do you hate them so much that you have to belittle them in that way and slag off people that care about them and their future.

Obviously that’s unacceptable.

I find it strange that people who are not Israeli or Palestinian and have no family members involved are so black and white about their support for one “side” .

Imagine slurring folks as racist, who have the temerity to give a shit about the mass slaughter of 40000 people, the majority of whom are women, children and babies.

This.

@Limesodaagain

Mass-slaughter tends to do that to folks.

I don’t think it’s racist to care about the slaughter of Palestinians.

I do think it’s racist NOT to care about the slaughter of Israelis

Do you feel the same about Russia and Ukraine ?

What - make them anti semitic?

@Limesodaagain

Nobody on this or any other CITME thread has not cared about that.

Yes I do. I think Putin is a terrible man but I understand why Russians feel threatened by the west and NATO - history has taught them how vulnerable they are . ( I’m not a supporter of the Russian action but I do try to understand it)