Emma Watson’s Advocacy of Palestinian Rights is Justified
by Yanis
Iqbal
Posted on January
08, 2022
On January 3, 2022, Emma Watson, a famous English
actress, posted an
image of a pro-Palestinian rally, with the words "Solidarity is a
verb" written across it. It was accompanied by the following quote about
the meaning of solidarity from the academic Sara Ahmed: "Solidarity does
not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the
same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves
commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have
the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common
ground."
Zionists have responded hysterically to Watson’s post.
Danny Danon, who formerly held the posts of science minister in Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government and Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (UN), accused her
of anti-Semitism on Twitter. Israel’s current ambassador to the UN, Gilad
Erdan, was also critical.
As the Zionist administrative elite spewed venom against Watson, the Israeli
government app Act.IL encouraged users
to troll her. This systematic disinformation campaign is not new; it is driven
by Israel’s opposition to the Palestinian struggle for decolonization which is
exposing the state’s foundational brutality.
In 2021, the Global Firepower Index ranked Israel’s
military strength at 20th worldwide. According to
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel is ranked 10th on
the list of the world’s largest arms exporters in 2015–19. Three of the top 100
arms producers in 2018 were based in
Israel. These figures are extremely high for a country with a population of
eight million people in an area of just 20,000 square kilometers. That is why
the Global Militarization Index lists Israel
as "the most militarized nation in the world." The structural
entrenchment of violence took place in the 1980s and 1990s when Israel shifted
from agriculture and industry to war and high-tech technologies.
Digitalization and advancements in computer and
information technology turned Tel Aviv and Haifa into Middle Eastern extensions
of Silicon Valley. Israel’s militarized accumulation accelerated with the
attacks of September 11, 2001, which allowed the settler-colonial entity to
develop a "homeland security industry." In "The Global Police
State", William I. Robinson writes:
"Israel has been exporting arms around the
world almost since its inception in 1948…The Israeli economy feeds off local,
regional and global violence, conflict, and inequalities. But in the wake of
9/11, it carved out a unique niche as a provider worldwide of weapons
sub-systems, technologies, and training for the global homeland security
industry that have "dual-use" applicability to both military and
civilian markets, doing arms and security business with some 130 countries. The
400 public and private military firms, many of them publicly traded, sold some
$30 billion worldwide in arms from 2000 to 2007…The country has 200
cybersecurity companies and is now the number two worldwide exporter of cyber
products and services."
The distinctiveness of Israel’s arms industry lies in
the use of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) as a laboratory for testing
intelligence systems and structures of repression. Palestinian guinea pigs in
West Bank and Gaza labs have become the perfect tool to sell sophisticated
weapons dedicated to the logic of permanent war. In "War Against the
People: Israel, the Palestinians, and Global Pacification", Jeff Halper
notes that the occupation "provides a testing ground for the development
of weapons, security systems, models of population control and tactics without
which Israel would be unable to compete in the international arms and security
markets… Labels such as "Combat Proven," "Tested in Gaza"
and "Approved by the IDF" on Israeli or foreign products greatly
improves their marketability."
The modern-day grotesqueries of arms sales that
plague Israel reflect the great extent to which Zionism has selectively
manipulated bits of Biblical narratives in an entirely instrumental way for
exploitative purposes. Historically, the term Eretz Yisrael ("Land of
Israel") was a purely religious term, regarded by generations of Jews as
an ecclesiastical territory, but never as a future state. Jews were ordered to
await the coming of the Messiah and the "end of time" before returning to
the land. Moreover, Palestine was never accorded centrality as a major site of
Judaism. All this meant that the Holy Land remained embedded in the religious
imagination of Judaism, never becoming a political, social, economic,
demographic, and cultural reality.
Thus, in "The Bible and Zionism", Nur-eldeen
Masalha remarks: "Political Zionism emerged from the conditions of
late-nineteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe as a radical break from 2,
000 years of rabbinical Judaism and Jewish tradition. The founding fathers of
Zionism were almost all atheists or religiously indifferent. Although in the
interests of gaining international support, political Zionism appealed to the
biblical narrative to legitimize the Zionist enterprise, it was basically a
secular, settler colonialist movement, with non-religious and frequently
anti-religious dispositions."
Considering the large gulf between Judaism and
Zionism, the smearing of Watson as an "anti-Semite" is completely
baseless. Whereas the former is a religious tradition, the latter is a
dehumanizing endeavor fundamentally imbricated in the dark mechanisms of global
capitalism. Those who use the narrative of anti-Semitism as whiplash to
silence Palestinian anti-colonialism are mere representatives of a ruling class
hell-bent on satisfying its rapacity through the brutalization of other
peoples. Instead of being frightened by such deceitful talk, we need to build
counter-hegemonic movements that openly denounce Israel’s genocidal policies
and work to advance Palestinian liberation.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and
freelance writer based in Aligarh, India, and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com.
His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, India, and several countries of Latin America.
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