False Dichotomies

Greens Engage pick up the baton.

The Kallash are a 3,000-strong animist tribe that live in a remote valley in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the northwest of Pakistan. According to myth (but not the DNA), they are descendants of Alexander the Great. They are connected to the nearest town by the nine kilometre long Lowari tunnel. This makes it easier to get supplies in during the harsh winters, and has allowed them to strengthen their education system (they have only recently put their language into written form for the first time), but it has also exposed them to those who want them to convert to Islam, a threat that has increased since the rise of the Taliban.

In a comment on my piece, ‘The World is What it Is’, Joseph writes: “When I see people breaking across borders and implementing their freedom of movement, my heart lifts, be it in Spain, Mexico, Britain or Israel. I recognise that borders exist, just that I recognise that neo-liberalism exists. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and change things.” For Joseph, the border is an obstacle to the spread of progressive politics, and is used to maintain artificially constructed divisions between peoples. For this reason, any attempt to break down borders is to be encouraged. Read more

In just over a month’s time I hope to be in Kashmir. Specifically, I’ll be in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. There’s also the Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan and the Azad Kashmir provinces, and the Chinese-administered regions of Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract. The Indian and Pakistani areas are divided by the Line of Control, which was the staging post for insurgents during the bitter conflict that flared up during the 1990s. If I try and cross the Line of Control, I am likely to be shot by Pakistani soldiers. If I bring a Kashmiri from south of the Line of Control, in order to help him go and see his ancestral home of Muzaffarabad, I am still likely to be shot by Pakistani soldiers. If I bring hundreds of people with me, my chances of being shot by Pakistani soldiers will increase exponentially. And if I were to do that, who do you think my mother would blame? A clue: it wouldn’t be the Pakistani soldiers. Read more

One of the many lies told by supporters of the BDS movement is that their solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is absolutely uncontroversial, and that they are merely in favour of guaranteeing that international norms are observed. In a recent article, Omar Barghouti picks up on this theme, suggesting that those who point out that BDS threatens the “existence” of Israel are attempting “to muddy the waters and to push beyond the pale of legitimate debate the mere statement of facts about and analysis of Israel’s occupation, denial of refugee rights, and institutionalized system of racial discrimination, which basically fits the UN definition of apartheid.” Read more

Chas Newkey-Burden, aka Oy Va Goy, has written a very kind post about the return of falsedichotomies. You can read it here. Thanks to Chas!

This is the sequel to “My Zionist Narrative”

The Nakba was one of the greatest injustices in modern history. While everyone else was achieving their national self-determination, we were instead ethnically cleansed from our land, and all because we dared to oppose those who wished that we had never been here in the first place. Yes, we used violence, but theirs was far greater. Try to empathise for a moment. What would you have done? What choice did we have? To accept Zionism would have been to deny our existence as a people. Read more

The establishment of the State of Israel was one of the most inspiring events in modern history. Against all the odds, and in the immediate aftermath of the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters, a landless, stateless, and largely friendless people achieved national self-determination in the land they had dreamed of continuously for the previous two thousand years. They did this in the face of unstinting opposition from the land’s population and the neighbouring countries, opposition that was violent and zero-sum. They did this because they had no choice: to compromise on national liberation would have been suicidal. Read more

Favourite 30 non-hip-hop albums coming soon…

30. Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury:  For being sparse and scary throughout.

“Yo, what up? What up? This ya man Grinding, from downtown Norfolk/Just want y’all to know it’s about time/For us to come up and make a change man/They keep tryin’ to keep us down, but that ain’t the way to be man/It’s about time for us to get it together man/Everybody else got their shit together/Why the n**** can’t get they shit together and get they money together?/Hustlers come together with hustlers/Know what I’m sayin? This ain’t just for the playas in VA/This for playas all over the world, this Grinding” Read more

I really hope that this is a sick joke, or that it’s April 1st and I haven’t been paying attention, because this story is utterly ridiculous. According to today’s Yediot Ahranot, Israel is on the verge of issuing its citizens with ‘smart’ ID cards, which will now contain biometric information, and apparently the numbering will start from…6,000,000. Yes, indeed, the estimated number of Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Dimi Reider lays out some of the arguments against this symbolic gesture here. They are largely sound, but I’m more disturbed by the naffness of the gesture, as if there’s something cute about taking millions of dead people into account when planning a twenty-first century ID card. It’s all the more frustrating because the news was announced two days after Yom HaShoah, when the country fell silent to remember the murdered.  

I really hope that I’ve fallen for a hoax.

I don’t know what the latest Palestinian unity deal means in the long-term. What’s interesting is that it seems to have been forced on both parties by geopolitical circumstances: Fatah by the loss of Mubarak and Hamas by the weakening of Assad. While the tectonic plates shift, it’s sensible to huddle together and try to survive. The timing, though, seems rather unfortunate, given the imminence of September and surely what will be one of the most important diplomatic breakthroughs the Palestinians have achieved in generations. Read more