We never really allow space for the stories of Palestinians seeking safety and sanctuary to be uplifted. And to me, it is the dehumanization and the silencing of a particular pain and suffering of people, should not be ok and normal. And you can’t be in the practice of humanizing and uplifting the suffering of one, if you’re not willing to do that for everyone.
—Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn, during a 2019 progressive town hall.
Over the last few months, Ilhan Omar, a hijab-wearing black female Muslim House Representative, has kick-started numerous national debates over topics avoided in most households, such as Israel/AIPAC’s lobbying influence over the U.S. government, the 26 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement) state laws that require public contractors and companies to pledge not to boycott Israel on penalty of losing their jobs/contracts and being blacklisted, and the difference between anti-Semitism and criticizing Israel. These debates have touched on numerous issues this country is grappling with: sexism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism. Last month’s House resolution condemning hate led to the calling-out of a wide range of discrimination in the U.S. including the first resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation’s history. But one issue keeps getting left out of these debates and condemnations: anti-Palestinian rhetoric.
If you follow national debates on Israeli policies, you’ll hear certain oft-repeated phrases. These phrases sound like legitimate concerns that no moral person could argue against, such as “Israel has a right to exist.” Who would be so horrible to argue against the very existence of a country with over eight million citizens? Although there are legitimate threats to Israel, this phrase is often evoked, not as a counter to these threats, but as a straw man argument, distorting and blocking urgent and life-threatening questions like “who doesn’t have the right to exist due to Israeli policies?” and “can more than one group of people have the right to exist together, with full human rights and dignity for everyone, in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank?”
Many of these pro-Israel phrases seem race neutral and coming from a place of compassion, but in reality they can hide, often unconsciously, anti-Palestinian beliefs by omitting Palestinian stories and struggles for human rights and dignity from debates on Israeli policies. These omissions often imply that either Palestinian lives don’t matter or that they have less value in a racial hierarchy of who gets to exist in the region.
This type of racism by omission is often promoted through racial dog whistles, or coded racism that politicians and pundits use when they want to demonize, attack, or devalue a specific race of people while appearing race neutral. To better understand national debates on Israeli policies affecting Palestinians, it’s imperative to be able to recognize common anti-Palestinian racial dog whistles.
1. Israel’s “right to exist”
Israel’s right to exist IS possible to support without being anti-Palestinian—but only if the Palestinian right to exist is equally supported. Israel and Palestine’s history and fate are so entwined that to support one’s existence would come at the expense of the other. To say Israel has a right to exist (without mentioning Palestine) is often implying Palestinians don’t have a right to exist and their lives don’t matter.
And this dog whistle also ignores the history of 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948 by Israel, known as the Nakba or “catastrophe.” Israel’s version of this history claims Palestinians left on their own accord as war refugees. Regardless of which version you accept, it’s still illegal under international law to deny refugees the right of return after war. Because of Israel’s continual denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return, one of every three refugees in the world today is a Palestinian.
2. Israel’s “right to defend itself”
This dog whistle is often pushed after Israel has done something horrific against Palestinians, such as shooting over 6000 Palestinian protesters and intentionally killing children, medics, and reporters during Gaza’s Great March of Return. This idea is used to victim-blame the Palestinians by falsely claiming the Palestinian fight for freedom against Israel oppression and occupation is a threat to Israel itself, which justifies and removes responsibility for Israel killing civilians, torturing youth, and denying millions of people basic needs (water, food, medicine, etc.). To believe that only Israel has the “right to defend itself” is to imply that when Palestinians are defending their homes and fighting for their freedom, they’re actually the aggressors who deserve what they get.
3. The “Human Shields” of Hamas
Hamas, the elected government in Gaza, was formed during the First Intifada, a brutally repressed Palestinian popular uprising against Israel occupation. Hamas is no stranger to human rights violations and is arguably doing more harm than good for Palestinians in Gaza. But to criticize Hamas, without criticizing the oppressive occupation and brutality that created Hamas and drives their current policies, is again the same as criticizing Nat Turner’s violence without criticizing slavery. Jesse Williams explained it eloquently during the 2016 BET Awards: “If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression.” To critique Palestinian resistance without acknowledging their need to resist is racism by omission.
The “human shields” dog whistle is one of many victim-blaming tropes that stereotypes Palestinians as violent people who deserve Israeli violence and who need to be controlled by Israeli occupation. It implies that Palestinians are the ones responsible when Israel kills civilians.
4. It’s possible to criticize Israel without invoking anti-Semitism
To be clear its 100 percent possible to separate criticism of Israel from criticism of Jews in general, especially when the criticism is focused on the policies—and not the ethnic makeup—of institutions. But for many Israel supporters, no criticism of Israel will ever be free of anti-Semitism because their goal is not to get to the truth but to create strawman arguments to avoid ever getting there.
Omar summarized this dog whistle at a 2019 progressive townhall: “It’s almost as if every single time we say something, regardless of what it is we say, that it’s supposed to be about foreign policy or engagement, that our advocacy about ending oppression, or the freeing of every human life and wanting dignity, we get to be labeled in something, and that’s the end of the discussion, because we end up defending that, and nobody gets to have the broader debate of ‘what is happening with Palestine?’”
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