This is my first post since moving to this platform last year; if you are a subscriber, hopefully your subscription survived the transition. Note: The “we” here refers to non-Palestinians in the solidarity movement. -JRS
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Perhaps timing is everything. For a while now, I’ve wanted to write about two issues in the Palestinian solidarity movement in the West, themes that result from my own observations and study as well as conversations with other writers and activists. In December, one of those writer-friends forwarded a review of two Palestine-related books published in Canada last year; as it turns out, I’d just finished reading those books, and the review exhibits the very problems that had been preoccupying me, namely racism and philosemitism.
The review in question, “How brave can I be?” was written by critic and editor Steven Beattie and published on his website, That Shakespearean Rag (paywalled). The two books: Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada, an anthology from Baraka Books; and You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, a memoir by Palestinian-Canadian writer Saeed Teebi.
To his credit, Beattie gets a lot right, acknowledging the genocide in Gaza (ongoing), the violent foundation of the state of Israel, and how “Western governments, media, and corporations have gone to great lengths to stifle protest or criticism”. All well and good, so far.
The first problem comes up in reference to an article in Razing Palestine by Arfa Rana, a Palestinian journalist who resigned from Canada’s public broadcaster (CBC) due to the institution’s complicity with Israel (ongoing). Beattie quotes Rana: “The weekend of October 7, 2023, we watched as Palestinian resistance fighters tore through the 30-year-old apartheid wall surrounding Gaza and broke free into Israeli settlements – land that had been theirs, even homes that they recognized from childhood.”
Note, this is not an interpretation, but a statement of fact: Late into what had been, as of October 6, one of the deadliest years for Palestinians in decades, following a years-long siege (the blockade) and periodic slaughter (2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021), inhabitants of a concentration camp executed a military operation aimed at their liberation. Of course, we in the West who, by lottery of birth, occupy positions of safety and privilege, may not condone or feel comfortable with that – but that is what happened. Which is why people often reference similar events as a way of explaining Al-Aqsa Flood: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, for example, or the Nat Turner slave rebellion.
Beattie responds to Rana as follows: “Calling Hamas terrorists ‘resistance fighters’ when they were responsible for murdering more than 1,200 civilians attending an outdoor music festival and taking 250 others hostage is equally disingenuous”. Note that he not only calls Rana a liar (I’ll come back to this later), but recycles the tired Western trope of “terrorist” to describe Hamas. Beattie also repeats Zionist propaganda regarding the death toll – wrongly, I must add, as not all deaths took place at Nova – when in fact many of the casualties were military, and an unknown number of non-combatants may have been killed by friendly fire, something that Israeli media has at least acknowledged, though Western media has not.
Worse, perhaps, the review describes the “horrific Hamas attack” as the cause (“precipitating event”) of Israel’s “military operations”, which, again, is Zionist propaganda. As Muhannad Ayyash notes in Lordship or Liberation in Palestine-Israel, October 7 was a pretext for the Israeli genocide, not the cause; that is, it offered a way to solve the Gaza question – not to mention, consolidate control over Jerusalem and the West Bank (ongoing), take over Southern Lebanon (ongoing), occupy Syria (ongoing), and attack seven or eight other countries in the region.
As evidence of this, you need only look at a recent picture of Rafah, or consider any of the ghastly metrics (volume of ordinance, casualty estimates, etc.) – Israel’s “military operations” have nothing to do with the hostages, or Hamas for that matter; their intention, as stated from the start, was to level Gaza, kill and maim as many as possible, drive the rest out, and settle the enclave.
Or, precisely what they’ve been doing in Palestine since 1948.
Beattie ends this section with some both-sidesing: “terror is terror and civilian slaughter is the same no matter which side of the wall you come from”. We should remember, however, that on one side of Beattie’s wall lies the concentration camp; on the other, a supremacist, apartheid state with one of the most powerful armies in the region and the full support of Western allies.
My point: We in the West should think about why we believe that some “terrorists” woke up one morning and decided to carry out “civilian slaughter”, or why we might have believed, as many did, the stories of forty beheaded babies or campaigns of sexual violence. Why, although we recognize that what is happening in Gaza is wrong – there’s still a nagging part of us that believes they kind of brought it on themselves.
The answer to those questions is racism.
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The second problem relevant to Palestinian solidarity in the West is, as mentioned, philosemitism. This manifests most often as a tendency to center Jewish voices over Palestinian ones. Many in the movement do this – I have done this – i.e. what Mohammed El-Kurd describes as “an obsessive curation of ‘reliable narrators’ whose testimonies are unthreatening, authoritative, or impartial” and that favors “Jewish and Israeli sources” based on “the farcical, though deep-seated notion that [they] are somehow more credible.”1
In this regard, Beattie’s review states the following: “This is why it is so important that Leila Marshy, the editor of Razing Palestine, has included Jewish antiwar voices in her collection. The Israeli government and its Western allies would like people to believe that the Jewish community is monolithic in its support of Israel’s war: nothing could be further from the truth.” Beattie then surveys briefly some of the Jewish voices in the anthology, i.e. a faculty group in Quebec, another in Canada, as well as children’s book author Elise Gravel.
First, an uncomfortable aside: While Jews in Canada might not be monolithic in their support for Israel, they do support it overwhelmingly; as Jake Landau notes based on recent survey data: “The Canadian Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel’s violence against Palestinians, and opposes efforts to restrict that violence in any material fashion.” This is explained, of course, not by nature of them being Jewish, but rather Zionist – something they share with many non-Jewish Canadians.
Asides aside, the problem is that centering Jewish voices on Palestine cannot be extracted from the wider context of anti-Palestinian racism, which aims to deny, silence and, ultimately, erase Palestinians – in fact, it is effectively engaging in such. This explains why, for example, in Beattie’s commentary, the words of a Jewish children’s book author pass unquestioned, while those of a Palestinian journalist are “disengenous”.
The point here: We should interrogate why we need white, Jewish people in North America to explain what Israel and its allies are doing in West Asia – especially when there are plenty of Palestinians documenting and reporting their experience, at home and in exile. Passing the mic in this context is not only just; it also directly fights anti-Palestinian racism – and anti-Arab racism, more generally.
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To be clear, this essay is not about Beattie or the failings of any individual; no person or political action is perfect. Rather, I’m addressing what you could call a default setting among Western liberals and the liberal-left. This position puts limits on Palestinian liberation (don’t engage in violence, don’t discuss Jewish Supremacy) and fails – or refuses – to see the forest for the trees in our own countries, i.e. what it actually means when, going back to Beattie, “Western governments, media, and corporations have gone to great lengths to stifle protest or criticism”. In Canada, of course, this comes with added layers of significance, given that the question of Palestine is an indigenous one.
At the start of his review, Beattie associates silence with complicity, a common sentiment. But I’m not sure I agree with that anymore. In my view, complicity is complicity, e.g. taking awards or grants from implicated institutions, writing op-eds and articles for compromised media platforms, supporting politicians and parties that enable mass death. I might actually prefer silence to that.
No, silence is, first and foremost, cowardice. And yes, the silent could be braver and do better – but so can we.
Eating an Island 
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