What’s Ukraine got to do with Palestine?
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, Mar 18 2022
Since Russia invaded Ukraine late last month, there has been no shortage of comparisons with the situation in Palestine. For many who support Palestinian rights, there is an instinctive identification with Ukraine as a country under attack, defending itself against a much more powerful force. No one can be indifferent to scenes of civilians experiencing the horror of war and to the lives of millions upended as they become refugees. Campaigners for Palestinian rights have also noted the parallels, and the vastly different and hypocritical responses, to calls for boycotts of Russia and Israel, as well as the selective application of international law. While Russia has been virtually cut off from the world, Israel continues to enjoy impunity as it occupies and colonizes Palestinians’ land and imposes a brutal regime of apartheid on them. Of course, the identification of Ukraine with the plight of the Palestinians is one Ukrainian leaders insistently reject. They see themselves as Israel and their Russian enemies, presumably, as the Palestinians. In December, for example, Zelensky said:
Israel is often an example for Ukraine. Both Ukrainians and Jews value freedom. We know what it’s like not to have one’s own state. We know what it means to defend one’s own state and land with weapons in hand, at the cost of their own lives.
According to the JPost, Zelensky has also urged:
We should be like Israel in defending our homeland.
The Ukrainian leader, notoriously, portrayed Israel as the victim last May when its warplanes were bombarding Gaza, massacring entire Palestinian families in their homes. In February, before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian officials even complained that Israel was treating their country “like Gaza” by not giving them enough support, implying that such perceived mistreatment should be reserved for Palestinians, not Ukrainians. Ukrainian officials have pressed home this identification with Israel ever since the Russian invasion began. Markiyan Lubkivsky, an advisor to Ukraine’s defense minister, told the JPost:
I think that our army is one of the best in the world. Maybe after the Israeli army. The army is very strong because of experience, and morale is very high, motivation is very high, we are like you.
The same newspaper reported:
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, says his models for how to win against all odds are Israel, a country he has visited and admires, and the IDF. Klitschko said: “We have to learn from Israel how to defend our country, with every citizen.”
Wherever one falls on these matters, there are deeper connections with the question of Palestine, according to Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, who told Rania Khalek on her BreakThrough News show Dispatches this week:
Russia and Ukraine both have relations and histories that are very much part of the history of the region which the West came to call the Middle East. Southern Ukraine and the Crimea were former Ottoman regions conquered by Russia’s tsars in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Ukraine’s settler-colonial city of Odessa on the Black Sea, formerly the Ottoman city of Haci Bey, was the place where Greek anti-Muslim nationalism was born at the beginning of the 19th century and where colonial Jewish Zionism was born at the end of the 19th century. In fact, the first Jewish colonists who came to colonize Palestine in the 1880s were Ukrainian Jews from the settler-colony of Odessa. Crimea was even identified during the Soviet period as a potential site for an autonomous Jewish republic, a plan that was abandoned due to strong resistance from the Crimean Tatar population. More recently, both Ukraine and Russia have policies that are entangled with the Middle East. Ukraine, for instance, provided the third largest military contingent to take part in the illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. As far as Russia is concerned, of course Putin has also had excellent relations with Israel, but at the same time he did intervene in Syria against the regime’s jihadi and American and Gulf-supported enemies. However his intervention in Syria continued to allow the Israelis to bomb Syria, but not the jihadis.
Massad also raised the issue of Ukrainian Jews, which Israel is calling upon “to emigrate to Israel so that it can transform them into colonists of the land of the Palestinians.” Massad’s discussion with Khalek provides a great deal of context and insight on the situation in Ukraine and Western responses, including an intense surge of Russophobia that mirrors the previous bouts of xenophobia that regularly accompany American wars and interventions abroad. They also touch on conformity of thought and censorship in Western liberal democracies, and other themes that Massad recently addressed in an article for Middle East Eye. It’s a fascinating discussion that you can watch in the video at the top of this page.
Lowkey smeared by pro-Israel group in elite UK college
Kit Klarenberg, Electronic Intifada, Mar 18 2022
Lowkey. (Photo: Martyn Wheatley/ZUMA)
The rapper and campaigner Lowkey was smeared by a pro-Israel group before a planned visit to one of Britain’s best-known colleges. On Mar 15, Lowkey gave a talk via Zoom arranged by the Palestine Solidarity Society at Cambridge University. The talk, titled “The Israel Lobby’s War Against You,” was supposed to take place on campus a week earlier. The night before it was scheduled, however, Lowkey was contacted by the organizers, who informed him the event had been postponed.
https://twitter.com/cupalsoc/status/1501244089198653440
The postponement followed pressure exerted by the Cambridge University Jewish Society. In an email message to the organizers of the talk featuring Lowkey, the group alleged he “has repeatedly used unfounded conspiracy theories and harmful arguments about ‘the Israel lobby’ to attack the British Jewish community, often in a way that undermines the lived experiences and realities of Jewish students.” The message, seen by The Electronic Intifada, claimed that Lowkey had dismissed “genuine complaints of anti-Semitism from British Jews” and depicted those complaints as “a sinister ploy designed to promote a certain agenda on Israel-Palestine.” The group also accused Lowkey of arguing that the Israel lobby was “behind criticisms of anti-Semitism” in the UK Labour Party, when Jeremy Corbyn was its leader.
The Cambridge University Jewish Society is among around 70 groups that comprise the Union of Jewish Students (UJS). Jack Lubner, a Cambridge student who signed the email message smearing Lowkey, is also active in the UJS at national level. The UJS makes plain its commitment to Israel in its official constitution. One objective of the group is “inspiring Jewish students to making an enduring commitment” to Israel, that document states. In 2017, an investigation by Al Jazeera revealed that the UJS is financed by the Israeli embassy in London. Asked for a comment, Lowkey said:
I’m not surprised they came after me in this way, but it’s certainly disturbing that yet again the Israel lobby is attempting to prevent pro-Palestinian, anti-apartheid perspectives from reaching uni campuses in the UK. UJS can serve as a gateway to the IOF through the Masa Israel Journey program. The two programs it can connect members to are Marva and Tzofim Garin Tzabar, which directly enlist teenagers into the Israeli army.
The email message from the Cambridge University Jewish Society argued that the title of the rapper’s talk “plays into a trope that Lowkey has employed against Jewish students.” Yet it failed to back up the insinuation that Lowkey is hostile toward Jews in any way. That is not surprising. While Lowkey is a trenchant critic of Israel and its state ideology Zionism, there is no evidence that he is bigoted against Jews based on their ethnicity or religion. On the contrary, he has a solid track record of opposing racism generally. Because he has mastered an artform popular among young audiences and sought to educate his fans about Palestine, Lowkey has long been regarded as an enemy by pro-Israel lobbyists. Back in 2011, the right-wing Jewish Chronicle quoted an unnamed “expert studying anti-Israel activity” describing the influence of Lowkey and similar performers as a “potential nightmare.” Far from dismissing genuine complaints of anti-Semitism, Lowkey has condemned how such bigotry is cynically weaponized by the Israel lobby.
During Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of Britain’s Labour Party, pro-Israel groups manufactured an “anti-Semitism crisis.” Numerous allegations of anti-Semitism were made against Labour Party activists. The allegations were usually based on comments criticizing Israel’s policies and activities. Many of the allegations targeted Jewish political activists who have rejected the ideology of Zionism. Lowkey was correct in speaking out against a lobby which has conflated opposition to Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry. Jack Lubner, who signed the email message protesting against Lowkey’s planned visit to Cambridge, was among those who took part in the witch hunt against Israel’s critics. Lubner campaigned for Labour to punish Chris Williamson, then one of its lawmakers, a few years ago. Williamson was suspended from Labour in 2019 after he denounced the witch-hunt against Labour members who supported Palestinian rights.
The Union of Jewish Students, which Lubner represents, is seeking to muzzle Israel’s opponents in British universities. It played a prominent role in efforts to have David Miller fired from his post as a sociology professor with Bristol University. Miller, who has researched the pro-Israel lobby meticulously, was dismissed even though he was cleared of anti-Semitism in investigations launched by the university. The treatment of Lowkey can be contrasted with how Cambridge University hosted Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, last month. Hotovely’s visit went ahead as planned despite how it attracted a protest from Palestine solidarity activists. There are clear double standards involved here. An elite British college is willing to welcome a representative of Israel’s apartheid state. Yet when a critic of that same state is invited, some unfounded smears are sufficient to have the event postponed.
Niqnaq 