Setting it right: What being against Israel's neocolonialist war against the Palestinians is not about

Regarding Israel's war against the Palestinians who want to keep their homes: It is important to grasp clearly what is at stake here, what is in question, and what is not. First, it is important to be clear about what is not. What is not in question is the safety and security of Israeli Jews. What is not in question is the right of Jews to live in peace in their homeland.

I reject "anti-Zionism" because I affirm the right of Jews to live in a Jewish environment in their ancient land consecrated for them by their traditions. I reject only the claims to their exclusive rights to this territory, and the claims that their right justifies the regime of war and policing (they are a unity, policing as war and war as policing) of the Palestinian people, along with the denial to them of any rights or claims to residence in the land that belongs to them by virtue of their own traditions or by actual fact (they are living there now), including their own homes.

I am a tenant activist who believes people should not normally be driven from their homes. And I am an anti-police and prisons activist who is against violent policing and its uses in wars against populations. A protestor has been seen on video saying "I can't breath, you're suffocating me," and the police in Israel act the same way they do in America, especially towards the Blacks. And as Jewish Voice for Peace points out, the Israeli operations and occupations (the West Bank) and enclosure (Gaza) are funded and aided directly by the United States.

If you must calumniate opposition to Israel’s policies, rather than calling it “anti-Zionist,” it might be better to call it anti-American. But the American people generally have no stake in the status quo in that region; only the United States government does, and the economic interests its foreign policy has aggressively backed. Some of us may benefit in the short-term as wars and police and population-control operations like this have economic benefits to corporate powers that trickle down to some extent, but in the long run most of us lose by these policies, especially as neo-colonial policing and militarism tend to wind up being re-imported to the colonial metropole, where they are used on its citizens by their own government. And while the main victims of this have been Blacks and the poor, anyone can be.

It also makes us less free. Slavery does not free masters, but binds them to practices of control of others that are debilitating to the self and come with fear of loss of one’s advantage. Oppression of others requires hardening one’s heart to their suffering, and a hardened heart is also less flexible and mobile, less potentiated and free. “Beneficiaries” of repressive regimes are destined to mourn the loss and damage that occur in that done to the other. There is something that binds us to our neighbors. The way harming harms the agent is not because he may be repaid in a logic of return on invested actions, in vengeance, repayment, or retributive justice, but the damage done to one’s potentialities by becoming calloused and thrown back on the lesser resources of a more restricted subjectivity with fewer productive connections. We cannot live freely if our neighbors are enslaved, or must be feared and defended against, fought, or policed. This can be willed but not consistently desired. A center at war against those around it will enjoy but a tenuous hold. The walls that keep out strangers also limit and bind those within them. Do not sell me a palace in a walled ghetto; I’m not buying it.