Sofiah MacLeod addresses the defaming of Palestinian supporters as antisemitic, and the complicity of Israel’s supporters in a project deep-set with anti-Palestinian racism.

The 21st of March is observed as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre when South African police opened fire on anti-pass law protestors. Police killed sixty-nine protestors, sparking international condemnation and strengthening the newly formed Anti-Apartheid Movement which aimed to internationalise the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Day in 1979 as the first day in a week of solidarity with peoples struggling against racism and racial discrimination. This year, the 21st of March will be the first day of Israeli Apartheid Week culminating in Land Day, on the 30th of March, a landmark date in the history of the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism that is commemorated in demonstrations of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance against Israel’s apartheid regime. The day commemorates the 1976 general strike and mass demonstrations inside Israel to protest the expropriation of their land for Jewish settlements. Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and refugee camps in Lebanon went on strike in solidarity. In response, Israeli police killed six Palestinian unarmed demonstrators, three of them women, injured one hundred and detained three hundred.

Without resistance there can be no solidarity; Palestinians have resisted a century of violent Zionist movement dispossession from their lands with steadfastness and resilience. The international boycott and solidarity movement is one pillar of their struggle, and in 2005 a call came from Palestine to mobilise international civil society for a campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel modelled on the South African experience.

In response to the success of the BDS campaign, the Israeli government and their supporters worked to smear the movement as antisemitic. The left has yet to find a clear and principled strategy for dealing with such accusations.

One part of that strategy must be to recognise the racism experienced by Palestinians and their supporters. In 2022, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) published the first formal framing of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) as ‘a distinct form of oppression faced by Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinian rights’. Developed after years of consultations with the Palestinian community and their allies in Canada, alongside anti-racism academics and activists, the framework is outlined as follows.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians, or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including:

• denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians;
• ailing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine;
• erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians;
• excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies;
• defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.

It is worth noting that ACLA distinguishes between anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. While there may be overlap, failing to differentiate between the two perpetuates stereotypes of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims; ACLA further warns that:

• it ignores the fact that Palestinians are not all Muslim and erases the identity of Christian Palestinians.
• the conflation reduces a settler-colonial conflict to a matter of mere religious belief.

Reducing the conflict, and the experience of APR, to a religious war between Judaism and Islam perpetuates stereotypes and a falsehood against Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and Jews — namely that these groups are committed to a preordained belief system that programs them to hate one another and therefore makes peace between them impossible.

A Strategy to Sabotage BDS

Most readers will recognise the examples provided and their manifestations in Scotland; pro-Israel and Zionist organisations, the state of Israel and their allies have been working relentlessly around the world to normalise anti-Palestinian racism for many years. Scotland is no exception; in August 2015, pro-Israel groups held a “political training day” with Israeli Embassy staff in Glasgow.  The effort is a response to three main factors — Palestinian resistance and its refusal to surrender their land; worldwide popular antipathy to Israel; and, since 2005, the successes of the BDS campaign.

The Israeli government struggled to counter the BDS movement for some years after the 2005 launch of the BDS Call. Pro-Israel organisations, including the semi-Government think tank Reut Institute, researched, mapped, and developed a strategy to regain the upper hand. Such was the concern that the Reut Institute designated the BDS movement a ‘strategic concern for Israel, with potentially existential implications.’

Acknowledging the grassroots nature of the BDS movement, the strategy adopted by Israel and the Zionist movement focused on mobilising international civil society on the basis that ‘it takes a network to fight a network’, the Reut statement explained. Such work until then had been considered unnecessary because of the support Israel enjoys at state level. To achieve this, it suggested, Israel and their friends had to be seen to embrace those who might be critical of Israel but were not ‘delegitimizers’:

Simply put, the most effective voices against Israel’s delegitimization come from the far liberal and progressive left.

 The intention is that ‘Israel should sabotage network catalysts and drive a wedge between its component parts, primarily between soft critics of Israeli policy and delegitimizers of its existence’. It clas sified ‘Delegitimizers’ as those who support the three demands of the BDS Call, especially the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and who accept the evidence from Palestinians and human rights organisations that Israel is an apartheid state.

In Scotland, the Confederation of Friends of Israel (COFIS), of which Glasgow Friends of Israel (GFI) is the only significant component, was founded in 2015 by a Christian Zionist. Very far from simply being ‘Jewish groups’, these organisations were established with guidance and training from Israeli state officials to implement the strategy to sabotage the BDS movement. They set to work reaching out to civil society groups like churches, meeting local authorities, and organising street stalls. Despite some success in intimidating a few institutions, pressuring them against taking solidarity positions and actions, and smearing pro-Palestine voices as antisemites, they have largely failed to hold back the solidarity and BDS movement in Scotland.

Isolating Apartheid Israel

The glaring blemish on the left is the refusal of STUC-backed Stand Up to Racism to inform COFIS/GFI by means of a public statement that they are unwelcome on the annual anti-racism march on 21st March marking the Sharpeville massacre. This stubborn and, at best, uninformed position undermines the wider anti-racist movement. The Palestinian liberation struggle is inherently anti-racist, opposed to the core racism of the Zionist movement and the ethno-supremacist state it built on the ethnically cleansed ruins of Palestine.

Palestine solidarity work opposes any conflation of Israel and the Zionist movement with Judaism and Jewish communities, while this conflation is promoted and perpetuated by Israel and the Zionist movement. Examples include the attacks on the United Nations, Jeremy Corbyn, the STUC, the Church of Scotland, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and many others solely for their criticisms or hostility to the State of Israel.

It is essential and also elementary to distinguish between organisations such as COFIS/GFI and Jewish community groups. In addition, the antisemitism at the core of Zionist ideology – the axiom of Zionism that Jews cannot live among non-Jewish majorities – needs to be discussed, as does Israel’s relationship with far-right movements internationally.

On writing this article, the ceasefire in Gaza still holds despite Israeli snipers targeting Palestinians trying to access their destroyed homes, and a further escalation of Israel military and settler violence in the Occupied West Bank. The Israeli government, fascist parties in Israel, and the settler movement, with support from the Trump administration, mean to continue their genocidal policies against the Palestinian people.

The BDS Call asks us to identify and challenge complicity within our own institutions and to campaign to pressure those bodies and corporations to end such behaviours. It is our duty to organise to isolate the state of Israel. In anticipation of 21st March, each one of us can:

• Organise an event as part of Israeli Apartheid Week
• Recognise and oppose anti-Palestinian racism as an integral part of our solidarity and anti-racism work
• Refuse to appease organisations such as COFIS/GFI who work to normalise anti-Palestinian racism and to undermine, even criminalise, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Sofiah MacLeod is Convenor of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

References:

Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (2022), ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations’, https://www.canarablaw.org/s/Anti-Palestinian-Racism-Naming-Framing-and-Manifestations.pdf

The Reut Institute (2010), ‘Building a Political Firewall against the Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy’, https://www.reutgroup.org/_files/ugd/1bfcb5_94c7b756f9a34dc0bf0353c7a7812ada.pdf

The Reut Institute (2010), ‘The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall’, https://electronicintifada.net/sites/default/files/2012-10/100331-reut-institute.pdf

The Reut Institute (2010), ‘The BDS Movement Promotes Delegitimization of the State of Israel’, https://www.reutgroup.org/_files/ugd/1bfcb5_d7eb931f316444a2ab32e220f59bc06e.pdf