Emma Watson – who has played roles from Hermione Granger in Harry Potter movies to Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Meg March in Little Women, has come out as pro-Palestinian. She was, of course, immediately smeared as being antisemitic.
Israeli diplomats and propagandists have long maintained that the Palestinian people’s opposition to their dispossession from their own land was not motivated by any sense of injustice, but merely by anti-Jewish racism. This is deemed, in the standard European-imperialist Orientalist framework, to be mysteriously endemic in Muslim and Arab societies.
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It is precisely because Israel’s injustices have become more and more clear for more and more people that the Zionist movement and the Israel lobby have come to increasingly rely on fabrications of anti-Semitism.
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[But] Weaponised anti-Semitism – a tool in the Israeli arsenal almost as powerful, in its own way, as the undeclared nuclear weapons it has – is beginning to lose its potency.
30 acts have withdrawn from a major cultural festival in Sydney, Australia to protest Israeli sponsorship and to make a point of denying Israel any cultural stamp of approval. BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) is not intended to hurt Israel in any classic economic fashion, there’s no intention to starve Israelis, but is aimed at depriving Israel of international support, much as South Africa found itself isolated in the 1980s.
“Israeli settlers push Palestinians out of West Bank playground” 8 November 2021
The Palestinian encampment of Susiya is, according to Israeli law, illegal. It makes for rather interesting photos to see Israeli settlers and Palestinians battling over a playground of swing sets and see-saws.
Israel makes use of what it calls “administrative detention,” a procedure that allows them to hold Palestinians for months without charges. This procedure is an opening to abuse as no evidence of criminal activity needs to be publicly presented. Hisham Abu Hawash was recently released from such detention after he had conducted a hunger strike for nearly five monhs.
In Israel, the reaction of a society that keeps moving to the right as it continually elects extremist leaders was of anger at the agreement to release Abu Hawash. However, their anger should have been directed at their government and the legal system which allows detention without charge. They would not accept this practice for their own family or friends.
Palestinians in Gaza have to go to Israel every now and then for emergency medical care. They’re not permitted to carry any supplies with them such as tubes of toothpaste, lipstick, sunblock and of course, no food or water. Our author relays how getting an operation in Israel (that her doctors recommended be done “immediately”) took five months!
