تالا sur X :
▻https://twitter.com/AlfoqahaT/status/1762679465564307952
Hi Professor! Current Harvard Law student here & Palestinian. Hate to take the bait, but I do want to breakdown why this article is inaccurate & intellectually dishonest. Thread:
Feldman’s core argument is that that old European antisemitism has evolved into a “new antisemitism,” one which calls Israel a colonial, imperial, & white supremacist project. His argument relies on misinformation & obfuscation. I’m going to focus on 5 claims he makes -
(1): Feldman writes that “the application [of settler-colonial theory] to Israel is a secondary development.”
This is misinformation. The founder of settler colonial theory, Patrick Wolfe, treated Palestine as a paradigmatic example of settler colonialism. From his 2006 piece “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”:
(2) Feldman writes “whether early Zionist settlers should be conceived as colonialists is a hotly disputed question.” He claims that they didn’t see themselves as part of a colonial project.
If only early Zionists had written about how they saw themselves—oh wait! they did.
Early Zionist leaders Jabotinsky & Herzl wrote openly about Israel being a colonial project (see photos)
The primary group coordinating Jewish settlement of Palestine in the late 1800s & early 1900s called itself the “Jewish Colonization Association”
More importantly: “I know that Zionists have colonized Palestine without the need to cite Herzl. I know this because I live it, because the ruins of countless depopulated villages provide the material evidence of calculated ethnic cleansing.” -
@m7mdkurd
▻https://thenation.com/article/world/palestinians-claim-the-right-to-narrate
It’s true, as Feldman writes, that frameworks like ’colonialism’ are “often used today to make moral judgements.”
And Palestinians use them precisely. It is Zionists who confound, it is Zionists who hide from the moral stigma that now follows the words they once openly embraced
(3) Feldman writes one of the most inaccurate, ahistorical, and intellectually dishonest descriptions of the Nakba that I have ever read:
He inverts the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of over 750K Palestinians
Feldman somehow starts the clock of the Nakba at the “nascent Jewish state” not at the violence that founded this state.
In other words, he defines our ethnic cleansing as our RESPONSE to our ethnic cleansing.
For a brilliant definition of Nakba [as not just a historical event, but as an organizing structure of Palestinian life], read this piece by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah—who Feldman actually supervises. He knows better. ▻https://thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide
(4)Then, Feldman, from his “office in leafy Cambridge Mass,” claims that Israel’s genocide is not a genocide.
Sure, he says, there’s evidence of genocidal statements by Israeli officials and genocidal actions in alignment w those statements...but Israel SAYS it’s not a genocide
This point isn’t even worth disputing. It is a genocide. We know it. He knows it. Israel knows it. Here’s a database of Israeli incitement to genocide, but we don’t need Israeli leaders to tell us what our 30,000 dead already do.
(5)He then argues that even if it was a genocide, we shouldn’t call it that...because then it could make Jewish people look bad
1- Insane for him to center Judaism as the primary victim of a genocide when 30000 Palestinians have already been murdered in cold blood.
2- Wrong of him to use Judaism as the analytical frame for understanding Israel’s violence rather than Zionism & to project responsibility for Israel’s genocide onto all Jewish people.
In conflating judaism & zionism, he’s perpetrating the harm he claims to write against.
3- His argument reminds me of this piece by
@m7mdkurd
, about the absurd expectation that Palestinians suffer silently under the weight of a genocidal ethnostate for fear of committing semantic violence when speaking about the systemic violence they face: ▻https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish
To Feldman, Palestinian suffering is illegible. It is a secondary phenomenon, notable only for the imagined negative consequences that acknowledging this oppression can have on him and his vaunted status as the “archetypal victim”—whatever that means.
He invisibilizes the Palestinian experience. He erases the checkpoints, the seige, the apartheid, the genocide. He cannot see past his own ego. That’s fine. We don’t need him to. Palestinians will continue to narrate our struggle. We will not apologize for doing so precisely.
“There’s no escaping being accused of antisemitism . It’s a losing battle and, more importantly, a glaring red herring. . . There are better things to do: we have coffins to carry. We have kin in Israeli mortuary chambers that we must bury.” -
@m7mdkurd
