Painful reading. It says the article was amended on her request to say basically 'not all leftists' etc. Looks like the title was changed too, as the url version, 'Why are some on the left celebrating the killings of israeli jews' is much more inflammatory than the 'side with the child, not the gun' pablum. Either way it's a smear, endorsing yet more false a/s claims - without even citing any examples! - and is calculated to put the pro-palestine left on the back foot and focusing on Hamas' crimes instead of the far greater crimes of the occupier state. Via Max Blumenthal who comments:
'Naomi Klein is one of the biggest sellouts I’ve met in 20+ years in media, and that’s saying a lot. She’s basically a former radical left poseur cashing in as a gatekeeper and informant for snooty trans-Atlantic liberals
Naomi Klein’s plan for Gaza: a Palestinian Green Jobs Corps building Bill Gates sponsored wind farms and solar arrays for a pacified population of caged natives under permanent siege' - https://nitter.net/MaxBlumenthal/status/1712154008440250844#m
In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun Naomi Klein
Some continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians - this only fuels militant Zionism Wed 11 Oct 2023 10.05 EDT
I spent the evening in candlelight and tears with a dear friend who just learned that a close family member was among those massacred in Israel. I won’t name the kibbutz to protect her privacy but yes, it was unequivocally a massacre.
We tried to explain the killing of this family member – a civilian with two kids – to our kids. We tried to do it in a way that would not fill their young hearts with fear and hatred for the people who committed the crime. That was hard enough, but possible. Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them.
In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.
For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.
The Israeli state’s current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days. The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment rests solely with their perpetrators and their financial and military backers abroad. But we all have to figure out how to make it stop.
So how do we confront this violent ideology? For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.
What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.
It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of a left like that.
Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World was published in September
This article was edited at the request of the author to reflect the fact that celebrations of the deaths were rare, and many leading figures on the anti-colonial left, in Palestine and outside of it, clearly denounced the targeting of civilians. Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Wolf
Posted by Ian M on October 12, 2023, 12:50 am, in reply to "Klein in the graun"
...the Doppelganger has a somewhat worse take this time, though it improves after the first section:
Posted by Ken Waldron on October 12, 2023, 1:20 am, in reply to "Klein in the graun"
"some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them."
-Is not the Palestinian death toll greater already? If not it will be soon & as always by a predictably very large margin. "supposed comrades on the left”..." seeming to celebrate this" is merely a reiteration of the right wing "death cult" angle we find regularly used to demonize Palestinians and Muslims generally: a cover for the retributive slaughter.
Re: Klein in the graun
Posted by Dovetail Joint on October 12, 2023, 6:21 am, in reply to "Re: Klein in the graun"
What would happen if the leadership in Israel chose 'peace' and not 'power' for a change, this time around? That would send out a tremndous message to the Palestinians and the wider world. Only they want power and land more than peace, and always have.
Why can't they chose to break the cycle of hate, violence, killing and war? Is vengence and retribution, creating new generations of Palestinian fighters dedicated to attacking Israel and reclaiming their lands, really the way forward? Will Israel and Jews be safer after they destroy Gaza? What about the Palestinian trauma? Smashing Gaza only creates a new Nakba.
But the Zionist extremists in Jerusalem don't want peace, they want surrender, total and complete, from the Palestinians. They only talk about 'peace' as they take piece by piece, more Palestinian territory and deprive them of their most basic human rights.
Does the liberal West really believe that killing thousands more Palestinians in Gaza, a massacre that the liberal West labels a 'war', is going to solve anything?