TWO DAYS AGO, two brothers, Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank of the River Jordan were murdered by Palestinian gunmen. Hardly news, one might say. Over the past months upwards of 60 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israelis have died in a series of brutal confrontations in the occupied territories.
What elevated this latest incident above the commonplace, however, was the response of the Jewish inhabitants of the settlement from which the murdered brothers came. In the most shocking instance of communal violence since 2000, scores of enraged and armed settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Zaatara and set it ablaze. Thirty houses and dozens of cars were torched, and at least one Palestinian villager was murdered.
Naturally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly deplored the violence and urged both sides to refrain from taking the law into their own hands. Within his coalition government (the most right-wing in Israeli history) however, other voices were raised which were very far from being conciliatory. One far-right MP declared that if Palestinians come to murder Israelis, then their homes should burn – “metaphorically-speaking”. No one on either side believed she was speaking metaphorically.
This latest example of political stimulus and response from the troubled land of Israel/Palestine is merely the most shocking demonstration of a process that is gathering strength all over the planet. Angry minorities, many of them justifiably angry about their treatment at the hands of hostile majorities, move from remonstrance to protest, protest to overt threats and, ultimately, from overt threats to actual violence.
Often, this process of escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for these aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to these minorities’ conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.
One aspect, in particular, of this alleged “encouragement” of minority extremism infuriates the majority: the extraordinary double-standard which excuses or (much worse) celebrates the violence of “freedom-fighters”. The majority’s sense of grievance is only intensified when their administrative and/or military responses to extremism are not only condemned, but also presented as the reason for the minority’s “understandable” resort to extreme tactics. Rightly or wrongly, the impression is conveyed to the majority that their values, their institutions, even their lives, are worth less than those of the minority.
The anger generated by this misrepresentation of the majority’s side of the story is often overlooked by those standing in solidarity with the “oppressed” minority. Being in “the wrong”, the majority’s feelings are dismissed as irrelevant by the minority’s defenders. This is a particularly short-sighted response on the part of those who believe themselves to be engaged in bending the arc of history towards justice. It encourages those dismissed as “deplorables” to discount altogether the moral arguments of their detractors as “fake news”.
A particularly moving analysis of this phenomenon was penned by the Chilean socialist and author Ariel Dorfman. Looking back at the conduct of himself and his comrades in the heady days of Salvador Allende’s radically left-wing Popular Unity Coalition Government (1970-73) this is what he wrote:
“It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … were on our side, who should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.”
Those are sentiments that the Pasifika poet, Tusiata Avia, might want to take to heart. Her poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser Book features a poem entitled “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”. Having celebrated Cook’s murder and cannibalisation, Avia fantasises about doing something similar to those who came after him:
These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna F… YOU UP.
Poetic hyperbole? An entirely justifiable symbolic rendering of the colonial experience from the point of view of the colonised? Maybe. It is equally arguable, however, that sentiments such as these, were they to become widely repeated, could very easily cause millions of New Zealanders to “fear for their safety and their future.”
It is worth remembering that it was the momios, those millions of Chileans who lived in “primal fear” of the Left’s programme, who gave General Pinochet the social licence he needed to overthrow Allende and his Popular Unity Coalition. Momios, too, this time wearing military uniforms, who shot him down in Chile’s Presidential Palace.
It is easy to believe that you are on the side of the angels when everybody who matters to you is cheering you on. No doubt the Palestinian gunmen who opened-up on those two Israeli settlers as they drove by in their car, believed themselves to be fighting for their people’s freedom against Zionist colonisation.
But, that is not how the two brothers’ family, friends and neighbours saw it. That’s why they headed for Zaatara with their guns and their cans of petrol. That’s why the Israeli soldiers stood aside and let them pass.
So they could really F… THEM UP.
Nicely done Chris.
Nietzsche: He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.
Chris Trotter continues, as he has done for the past 50 or 60 years, to be an apologist for Zionism.
The simple fact is that Israel, with its intended perpetual occupation of the West Bank and imprisonment of Gaza, is an apartheid state.
The only realistic future is a unitary state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with equality of rights for all its inhabitants.
https://www.pij.org/articles/1906/one-state-two-nations
Zionism invaders have no right to be anywhere in Palestine. Of course the heroic Palestinian self-defenders had every right to expel them.
What a load of Chris Trotter drivel. Ignoring the racism, apartheid and brutality visited upon Palestinians for 75 years after they were ethnically cleansed from their land by Israeli militias. Trotter has earlier questioned whether any wrongs were done by these militias who mudered and massacred their way across Palestine. (Those who might believe Trotter should start by reading Ilan Pappe’s book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”)
If this pogrom against Palestinians were undertaken against Jews anywhere in the world I hope Trotter would condemn it and stand in solidarity with the victims. So why do Palestinians not deserve the same consideration in Trotter’s eyes?
It seems that standing with indigenous people, whether they be Māori or Palestinian has always been a bridge too far for Trotter.
Maybe he’s a closet Bretheren.
Totally agree with you John.
‘Typical Trotter drivel ‘
Soon after I started reading it, I thought wait for it … there’ll be something about Māori or Pacifica people, threatening insurrection, a race war or something dire.
Sure enough there was.
Trotter needs to get out of his little bubble and talk to ordinary Maori and Pasifica people about the impact of colonization.
Maybe if does, he’ll feel a lot less threatened.
Get with it John.
I didn’t get that Chris made a judgement on Israel Palestine here John, so much as an exploration of homan sentiment in situations of conflict on either side.
I don’t really agree that the Israel Palestine situation is very comparable with internal domestic issues that arise though as one seems international and the other domestic.
D J S
Cherry picking by Chris–the cumulative effect of the Israeli State and Military and Settler’s decades long terror campaign against Palestinians is incredibly one sided in terms of deaths, damage to property/production/infratstructure and unfulfilled lives.
Israeli thug snipers taking out teenagers knee caps with high powered rifles for no reason other than waving a flag or throwing a rock show where the filthy zionists are really at. A people under siege have no option but to fight back.
Stephen, Russian Jews make up 15% of Israel’s population. Are they British imperialists as well?
This is from Joel Maxwell, Stuff journalist article tilted Eches of Ringo
Personally I find it difficult to think about the royals as anything but a fiction-adjacent gang of bejewelled, crown-wearing, ultra-wealthy super-villains who used to chop people’s heads off. Now they snip ribbons and shake hands like recovering Voldemorts – redemption by public service. And if in 2023 they’re still super-villains, then they’re a cartel pushing itself as the drug.
Not dissenting from some of the thoughtful criticisms, but I note that the one political party that has picked this issue up and run with it is ACT, hot off the press 2h ago: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2023/03/poet-tusiata-avia-lashes-act-after-party-calls-book-the-savage-coloniser-racist-and-hate-fuelled.html.
Which by the same token possibly does vindicate Chris’s wider point.
Well spotted Chris+Harris. Trotter’s point is well made, and worth making.
Someone link me Chris’s writings on Palestinian rights? Surely something on the Great March of Return? Or how the Israeli occupation constantly let violent settlers do what they want, because they’re one and the same?
Or did he really just pop into the cesspool of the violent little apartheid investment bubble to equate Palestinian deaths and suffering to the occupiers, then say “Palestinian villages get what they deserve”.
This whole P.O.S. piece sholud be retracted.
An eyewitness account from 1830s. Colonization had nothing on this
There was a slave girl on board, she had a child on her
back which belonged to the chief. By accident, she
dropped the child overboard, the child wasn’t drowned, but
the chief took the slave girl on shore, and hung her up by
the heels, and stabbed her in the back of the neck, and
then sucked her blood till he tired, then the chief’s wife
took a turn of sucking the girl’s blood till she tired, then the
chief again, and so on till the girl was dead. Then they cut
her up, and cooked her in a copper maori; then they had
feast.
The chief’s name was Tairae, he was about five feet eight
inches in height, and very stout. This tribe of his called the
Ngapuhi, fought with a tribe called the Waikato. Some of
the latter tribe were taken prisoner, they sent them out to
get some firewood, and then told them to make a fire, then
the chief would kill one and tell the next of the slaves to
cook him. As I stood it made me tremble to see such
savages. They did not molest the white people, they were
partial to them on account of the white people trading with
them.
They preserve the heads of their enemies, they sell them
to traders. There were plenty of these traders out of Port
Jackson. They trade for flax, pork and native heads. They
have a one pound canister of powder for six or seven
heads, they take the heads to Port Jackson, and sell them
for five pounds each. Then the authorities put a stop to it.
Reality check
The majority are just that. If pushed hard enough and threatened enough they will retaliate. They have the numbers and power to destroy any threats and by that time will no longer be worried by the woke calling them racists.
Sow the wind , reap the whirlwind!
Seems to me Chris that your comment went way over their heads. Sad too because it’s an important comment we should all pay attention to unpartisanly.
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