False Dichotomies

After a while, you start to think that Varanasi is held together by an invisible thread. Only by intuition can you become part of the matrix. I used to walk with trepidation in case I was mowed down by a motorbike or a cycle-rickshaw; now I didn’t need to worry – my movements were locked in to those of the other 3.6 million residents of this stinking city. Without looking, I knew when to stop, when to deviate from my path, and when to plough straight through. One false move would send everyone in my vicinity tumbling down like dominoes, but that doesn’t happen, not once you’re part of the crowd.

I’ve now spent one-sixtieth of my life in northern India, a not insignificant amount of time. I’m both proud and slightly disturbed by this. Proud, because some people are so repulsed by the place that they get on the first plane to Bangkok. Disturbed, because I haven’t learnt the language, acculturated, or managed to understand or accept the way things work here, and I suspect I never will. Read more

Like children without an invite to their classmate’s birthday party, the Israeli far-left has had to jealously watch on as the J14 demonstrations have grown bigger and bigger, culminating in this weekend’s protests, which were the largest in Israel’s history. Outside Israel, pro-Palestinian groups have been unmoved. Ali Abunimah tweeted with a shrug that J14 was “like whites protesting for better incomes in 1985 South Africa, leaving out apartheid because it’s “too divisive””. Inside Israel, though, there has been a split between those who agree with him and those who have decided to try and influence J14 from the inside.

Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal are two anti-Zionists who have chosen to remain in the jealous children camp. In an article entitled “The Exclusive Revolution”, they predictably take the J14 organisers to task for not demanding an end to the occupation as part of their platform. They argue that this is because J14 is resolutely Zionist, and hence excludes the Palestinians and their litany of legitimate grievances against the Jewish State.

Like Abunimah, their argument that a protest against socio-economic conditions is not a protest against the occupation is rather banal, but it is also typical of the myopia and dogma that has increasingly consumed those campaigning on the fringes of the Israeli left. This is unfortunate. It’s true that the occupation is both immoral and increasingly harmful to Israel’s prospects, both in the security and socio-economic sphere. But instead of asking why J14 isn’t dealing with the problem, the far-left should be asking why its activists remain unable to mobilise hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets. Read more