Anti-Zionist Brihana Joy Gray Says a Lot of True Things, But NOT the Most Important One that We Need to Be Saying In Order to WIN
If you don't know what this most important truth is, read below to learn it
Brihana Joy Gray very eloquently here explains why the pro-Palestine student demonstrators are morally right, that they are opposed to morally wrong violent ethnic cleansing and genocide, and that the conservative critics of these students are using disingenuous arguments to hide this fact. Bravo! for Brihana Joy Gray!
But Houston, we have a problem
While everything Brihana Joy Gray says is true, it is not enough. It is not enough to build the kind of massive movement in the United States that could force the U.S. government to stop supporting Israel, that could make it stop providing the weapons and economic and diplomatic support to Israel that enables the seven-plus decades long Israeli ethnic cleansing project to continue. It is not enough to win over the vast majority of the American public the way the U.S. movement against apartheid in South Africa won the support of the vast majority of the U.S. public and thereby forced the U.S. government to do a 180 and switch from supporting apartheid in South Africa to condemning it.
Recall why the U.S. anti-apartheid-in-South-Africa movement succeeded. It was because there was no argument that Americans ever heard that persuaded them to support apartheid in South Africa. The only obstacle that the anti-apartheid-in-South-Africa movement had to overcome was the initially virtual total public ignorance about the fact that there even was an ugly apartheid system in South Africa. When I was a college freshman in 1965 I happened to attend, out of curiosity, a talk given by a person who described apartheid in South Africa, and my reaction was—I kid you not—that he must be lying! It could not, I believed, possibly be true.
There were no PRO-apatheid demonstrations in the United States. Nobody in the United States argued that apartheid was necessary to make white South Africans safe. As more and more people learned (from the great educational work of the anti-apartheid movement) about the existence of apartheid in South Africa, they became supporters of the anti-apartheid-in-South-Africa movement.
But there IS a persuasive (false, but nonetheless persuasive) argument FOR Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing project
The pro-Palestine protesters CAN succeed like the anti-South-African-apartheid movement succeeded, but only if they (we) explicitly refute the persuasive (false, but persuasive) pro-Zionism argument. Is this not obvious?
The pro-Zionist argument is simple:
“Israeli violence to enforce the ethnic cleansing and current denial of the Right of Return to Palestinian refugees in Gaza and elsewhere, and to enforce the military occupation of the West Bank, and to enforce the apartheid laws inside Israel is for, and ONLY for, the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe, period.”
Here's how Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir expressed it:
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children." [Source is here.]
Golda Meir may have been better than most Zionists in expressing this Zionist view so pithily, but virtually every Zionist thinks about, and defends, Israeli violence this way, viewing it as, however unfortunately, necessary for self-defense of Jews.
All of the many people (see the plot below) who know about and are horrified by the Holocaust and are thus especially sympathetic to Jews are prone to be persuaded by this pro-Israel argument.
Because of this false but persuasive pro-Zionism argument, there are, in contrast to the situation faced by the anti-South-Africa-apartheid movement, lots of people who actively and passionately support Israel (i.e., Zionism) and demonstrate in its support and attack anti-Zionists. This fact is what enables the U.S. government to keep giving unconditional support to Israel!
Let’s be clear about what these pro-Israel people actually believe
Many if not most pro-Israel people (excluding the small number of rich ass holes) are very much opposed to the genocidal Israeli violence in Gaza, which is why they say there should be a ceasefire there. Because of this fact, a person like Robert Reich, as pro-Israel as they get (he supports the “two-state solution” that would make the ethnic cleansing permanent), makes videos like this one and this one expressing great opposition to the killing of so many innocent people in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Of course he also calls for support for Israel—”conditional” support but support nonetheless.
(By the way, Robert Reich has appointed himself a servant of the ruling class with the mission of misleading anti-establishment people. Thus, as I wrote about here, he tried to persuade the Occupy Wall Street people that what they really wanted was capitalism with equal opportunity to become richer than other people, like the billionaire Koch brothers whom he defended. Likewise today, Reich positions himself as somehow on the side of the pro-Palestine protesters but does not support their demand for divestment from Israel because that demand accuses Israel of being immoral for its existence as an exclusively Jewish state based on ethnic cleansing and not just its recent genocide in Gaza. Beware of Robert Reich!)
The conflict between the pro-Palestine protesters and most of the pro-Israel people is not about whether there should be a ceasefire in Gaza
The conflict is about whether universities should divest from Israel—the #1 demand of the pro-Palestine protesters. It is, in other words, about whether the existence of Israel as a Jewish state that does what it must to ensure that its population will always be a large majority Jewish population (i.e., violent ethnic cleansing) is a good and noble thing because it is what makes Jews safe in an antisemitic world, or an evil immoral thing because it oppresses Palestinians. It is about whether or not “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free”—a slogan that obviously says there should not be anywhere in Palestine an exclusively Jewish state based (in order to BE an exclusively Jewish state) on apartheid and ethnic cleansing!—is a good or an evil slogan.
THAT is what the conflict is about.
In order to win over most of the pro-Israel people, the anti-Zionism movement has to persuasively explain why Israel as a Jewish state based on ethnic cleansing is a bad thing not just because it oppresses Palestinians (which pro-Israel people think is an unfortunately necessary thing in order to make Jews safe) but because its actual purpose has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH MAKING JEWS SAFE. The way to make this argument persuasive is to tell the truth, what I call the KEY FACT!
The KEY FACT:
Israeli violence against Palestinians is for the purpose of OPPRESSING ORDINARY ISRAELI JEWS. Zionist violence is designed to make the Palestinians a bogeyman enemy that the billionaire rulers of Israel pretend to protect Israeli Jews from (while funding Hamas and working to keep it in power to make the bogeyman enemy maximally frightening) and thereby control and severely economically oppress and get rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class. This is all proved in my key articles here and here and here and here. Read them if you don’t understand what the real purpose of Zionist violence is!
Passionately pro-Israel people (who are not rich ass-holes) change their mind and become anti-Zionist when they learn the KEY FACT: the true anti-working-class—including anti-Jewish-working-class—purpose of Zionism. I know this from personal experience!
Brihana Joy Gray leaves out of her discourse the KEY FACT. Why? I cannot say for sure. (Hint: YouTube, Brihana Gray’s platform, told me that I would be cancelled on that platform if I expressed the KEY FACT.) But I do know that U.S. (and Western) anti-Zionism organizations (such as BDS, Jewish Voice for Peace, etc.) never—absolutely never!—express the KEY FACT. BDS even agrees with the Zionist lie about Israel being a state that aims to make Jews safe. Jewish Voice for Peace expels any member who expresses the KEY FACT. The reason these anti-Zionism leaders censor the KEY FACT is because their Big $ funders make it a condition for getting that funding. Read the evidence for all of this here and here and here.
(Side note: The mass media has been citing the fact that Big $ (Soros, Rockefellers, etc.) funds the anti-Zionism organizations as supposed evidence that the pro-Palestine student protesters are just puppets somehow manipulated by Big $ to do their protesting and that if it weren’t for this Big $ funding these students wouldn’t be protesting because they have no REAL moral outrage at the genocide in Gaza. As Brihana Joy Gray eloquently proves, this is total BS!)
Think about it.
The anti-Zionism movement is trying to persuade the public to oppose Zionism, but it doesn’t even TRY to refute the #1 Zionist argument that Zionism is all about making Jews safe; it either ignores that argument or in some cases AGREES with it (as I show that BDS does in the previously linked article here.) Is this any way to build the anti-Zionism movement?
Worse, the anti-Zionism leaders have told their followers that instead of aiming to persuade the public to oppose Zionism (which is perfectly possible to do if one expresses the KEY FACT), they should instead ATTACK and annoy and inconvenience the general public in a fit of frustration (caused by their failure to persuade the public to agree with them.) And so organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now block cars on main highways and do similar things to provoke ANGER instead of agreement. This no doubt makes their Big $ funders very happy, but it KILLS the anti-Zionism movement.
By the way…
Somebody earlier criticized what I say above on the grounds that it is just more leftist bickering about what are the correct “magic words” to say to make the working class be class conscious, that it’s just another claim to know the “correct” demand to make, and so forth. BS! I am saying that we need to refute the #1 lie that Zionism relies on to prevail and the way to do that persuasively is to tell the TRUTH. Those who make excuses for not telling this KEY FACT truth are not to be trusted.