The problem is that there is more to the motion than its title, which is the same for most things, really. The problems with this motion include the insistence on a one state solution (against the expressed wishes of the Palestinian people) and a threat of wholesale proscription of Jewish communities.
I say this as a Green member - this motion overshadows really decent policy passed at this conference including two BDS motions. This is a highly controversial motion within the party and it was only carried over the line by entryists. 4/5 of our MPs opposed it as well as the leader and one of the deputy leaders.
If you want to understand things, you have to read past the headline. It’s the only way.
How do you imagine a two state solution working when one of those states is an ethnosupremacist theocracy? Are you just trying to delay any action being taken until every Palestinian has been cleansed, or do you believe an equal, multicultural Palestinian state is somehow discriminatory against Jews?
It’s simply not up to us as British people to decide whether Palestinians or indeed Israelis, should organise themselves this way or that way. It is clearly within our remit to forcefully denounce violence and discrimination and systems of oppression, but what the affected people choose to do is not for us to tell them.
It is for us to produce the economic and political pressure for Israel to submit to making necessary changes in the interest of peace and equality. The exact nature of those changes is no more our business than it was to preside over this region 80 years ago. If the Palestinian people hold a legitimate referendum and decide to pursue a single state, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. We have no business telling them that that should hold a referendum to produce that result.
We organised them that way! We are the reason it’s such a fucking mess, we can expend our resources removing Israel instead of telling Palestinians it’s their problem now.
People like you are exactly why there’s a genocide going on, because you’re not willing to confront our complicity in the situation.
I explicitly said that it’s our responsibility to apply economic and political pressure to Israel. But without a clear mandate from the Palestinian people, it’s not our place to try to dissolve the Israeli state. The Palestinian people do not agree on the eventual solution to their problems but they do agree that applying economic pressure via BDS, even if it causes Palestinians harm in the short term, is the mechanism for achieving a better situation for their people. We accordingly support them by applying BDS, in line with their wishes.
So what, you transplant a foreign people into another land, move on, and then when the foreign people start eating the natives you just sigh loudly and proclaim ‘we’ve learned from our mistakes and we won’t interfere no longer’ ?
It is for us to produce the economic and political pressure for Israel to submit to making necessary changes in the interest of peace and equality. The exact nature of those changes is no more our business than it was to preside over this region 80 years ago.
Did you read this part? It is our responsibility to apply BDS to allow Palestinians the economic and political power to take on their oppressor. It is not our responsibility to determine for them how they wish to do that.
The problems with this motion include the insistence on a one state solution
Because only the most ignorant or naive think that being a separate nation protects anyone from the aggression of the West’s favorite fascist regime.
If you think being a neighboring country that isn’t aggressive towards Israel keeps you safe, you should have a word with someone from the Golan Heights or the part of Syria they RECENTLY started illegally occupying.
(against the expressed wishes of the Palestinian people)
Gonna need a source on that.
and a threat of wholesale proscription of Jewish communities.
That sounds like classic antisemitic conflating of Zionism and Jewdom, as well as ridiculous hyperbole. Specifics, please.
If you want to understand things, you have to read past the headline. It’s the only way.
I did. None of the things you claimed (other than 4/5 of the MPs being against it) were actually in the article afair from reading it last night.
As someone who hasn’t read the actual motion itself - sure, being a separate state doesn’t protect against Israel, but the issue seems to be that this motion insists on a one state solution.
Why?
Being a single state obviously doesn’t help. So what is the benefit? Why is it insisting on this?
Because a single state that doesn’t discriminate based on religion and ethnicity IS the only solution that could possibly create lasting peace and justice.
As long as there’s a Jewish supremacist apartheid ethnostate on or next to their land, no Palestinian will be safe.
Being a single ethnostate with several ethnicities being oppressed by the dominant oneobviously doesn’t help
Fixed it for you. Like South Africa before it, the solution is to overthrow the tyrannical apartheid system of government, not portioning out a tiny parcel of land next to it that the overlords will always scapegoat and vilify.
So what is the benefit? Why is it insisting on this?
I suggest you spend the next couple of days really pondering about your true self and your deeper motivations if you’re having “mixed feelings” about a political ideology actively targeting and murdering children (with bombs and even snipers) because those children are in the very words of those ideologues, “vermin”.
Chamberlain, at least, had the excuse that his actions happened before the NAZIs actively started trying to exterminate people.
I’m not the OP, but allow me to share my mixed feelings.
I agree with the motion. But it’s a vote loser. Voters are idiots and a not insignificant number will be convinced by the British press that this is anti-semitic, c.f. Jeremy Corbyn.
The Greens could have had all the right policies vis-a-vis arms sales, sanctions, BDS etc. without passing this motion, and for as long as they are a threat to Labour, that would have some weight in the public discourse. But I would be very surprised if passing this motion doesn’t ensure that Polanski loses the by-election, and I fear that’s going to begin a slide back into irrelevance for the Greens.
It has been my experience living in Britain for over a decade and during the Leave Referendum that no matter what left-wingers say or don’t say, the British Press will convince the idiots that they’re bad in some way.
If there’s one thing the whole Corbyn affair showed is that trying to avoid being tainted by the billionaire-owned Press is a mugs game and just reinforces the effectiveness of their manipulation.
If you’re constantly shifting in what you say and avoiding strong statements of principle to avoid the risk that the press paint you as something that sounds bad, you end up making yourself seem shifty, vague and unprincipled, which paradoxically makes it easier for the Press to paint you with anything they feel like as slandering is far more believable against people who don’t stand firm by what they claim to believe.
That recipe of “don’t say or act in ways that the Press might call ‘extremist’” has been tried again and again, most notably with Corbyn, and the result was invariably either failure or the party in question morphing so much it ended up having nothing to do with the original party (Labour’s change from what it was before Blair being a perfect example of the latter).
From what I’ve seen in more than one country putting accommodating to the criticism of people who are your adversaries above your own principles doesn’t work, whilst taking principled stances and not dancing to the tune played by the billionaire Press is something that at least historically worked, even in the UK (which is how the country ended up, at least for a while, with power in the hands of people who created things like the NHS).
This, by the way, is also my experience in other countries in Europe I lived in - once I returned to my own native Portugal were I also became involved in Politics (I was a member of the Green Party in the UK for a while when I lived there), I saw the exact same thing happen in the small leftwing party I became a member of (which had surged from an historical 5 or 6% to about 14% of votes by the time I became a member) as the leadership was played with very similar tricks (in this case it was mainly about being called “extremist” by the mainstream supposedly left party) and ending up collapsing the vote in the party down to 2%.
“Pragmatism” in genuine left-wing parties that puts even the strongest of moral principles (and being against child mass murder is probably one of the strongest principles there is) aside fearing criticism from others, all driven by the desire to gain votes in order to gain power, just makes a party and its leadership look shifty and unprincipled - “just more liars trying to get our votes” - which is deadly if you’re a left-wing party as left-wing ideologies are about doing what’s best for the many, not the few.
More in general and going back to my original post, if even one’s principle that “mass murder or children is unacceptable” can just be put on the shelf like that out of mere fear of what’s essentially “what will other people say” mixed with “what if we don’t get more votes”, then one doesn’t actually have principles and what drives them as a person is something else altogether than principles.
Personally, I don’t think you can be genuinely somebody who wants “the greatest good for the greatest number” (the core left-wing principle) if you can’t even openly put forward the best suggestions to stop children being mass murdered because you fear what the billionaire owner press might say.
Nowhere did I suggest that the principle of being against child murder should be abandoned. Sanctions against Israel and critical support for the BDS movement are policies that are not contingent on the passing of a “Zionism is racism” motion, and can be justified on their own terms.
The media will always line up against a left-wing party (or anyone to the left of Thatcher), and part of the job of being a left-wing party is dealing with that, and not giving them easy wins. As much as I liked Corbyn and his policies, he was bad at his job because he could not engage well with bad faith actors. And you just have to be able to do that to win elections. Polanski is actually quite good at that, because he’s able to to bring a conversation back round to what he wants to say without looking like he’s avoiding questions.
Passing the Zionism is racism motion now is essentially the green party shooting itself in the foot with a shotgun. Almost every major Jewish organisation in the UK (the board of deputies and the Jewish leadership council for two) is explicitly Zionist - and to be clear, I think that’s bad, actually - and as a result are now going to denounce the green party as anti-semitic. And now Polanski is going to have spend time justifying that rather than getting his actual messages out while trying to fight a by-election.
I think what the Israeli government has done to the Palestinians is despicable but I’ve got mixed feelings about this.
Yeah, God forbid that your concerns should ever go so far as supporting someone doing anything about the problem.
I think they should have gone further and called Zionism anti-Semitic. Nothing has done more damage to the Jewish people post WW2 than Zionism.
Why is that? Israel is by definition an apartheid ethnostate and was always intended as such. It doesn’t get much more racist than that.
The problem is that there is more to the motion than its title, which is the same for most things, really. The problems with this motion include the insistence on a one state solution (against the expressed wishes of the Palestinian people) and a threat of wholesale proscription of Jewish communities.
I say this as a Green member - this motion overshadows really decent policy passed at this conference including two BDS motions. This is a highly controversial motion within the party and it was only carried over the line by entryists. 4/5 of our MPs opposed it as well as the leader and one of the deputy leaders.
If you want to understand things, you have to read past the headline. It’s the only way.
How do you imagine a two state solution working when one of those states is an ethnosupremacist theocracy? Are you just trying to delay any action being taken until every Palestinian has been cleansed, or do you believe an equal, multicultural Palestinian state is somehow discriminatory against Jews?
It’s simply not up to us as British people to decide whether Palestinians or indeed Israelis, should organise themselves this way or that way. It is clearly within our remit to forcefully denounce violence and discrimination and systems of oppression, but what the affected people choose to do is not for us to tell them.
It is for us to produce the economic and political pressure for Israel to submit to making necessary changes in the interest of peace and equality. The exact nature of those changes is no more our business than it was to preside over this region 80 years ago. If the Palestinian people hold a legitimate referendum and decide to pursue a single state, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. We have no business telling them that that should hold a referendum to produce that result.
We organised them that way! We are the reason it’s such a fucking mess, we can expend our resources removing Israel instead of telling Palestinians it’s their problem now.
People like you are exactly why there’s a genocide going on, because you’re not willing to confront our complicity in the situation.
I explicitly said that it’s our responsibility to apply economic and political pressure to Israel. But without a clear mandate from the Palestinian people, it’s not our place to try to dissolve the Israeli state. The Palestinian people do not agree on the eventual solution to their problems but they do agree that applying economic pressure via BDS, even if it causes Palestinians harm in the short term, is the mechanism for achieving a better situation for their people. We accordingly support them by applying BDS, in line with their wishes.
I don’t know, you guys seemed pretty gung-ho about the idea while creating the state of Israel from Palestine.
It’s almost as if some of us are trying to learn from the past rather than endlessly repeating the same mistakes.
So what, you transplant a foreign people into another land, move on, and then when the foreign people start eating the natives you just sigh loudly and proclaim ‘we’ve learned from our mistakes and we won’t interfere no longer’ ?
Did you read this part? It is our responsibility to apply BDS to allow Palestinians the economic and political power to take on their oppressor. It is not our responsibility to determine for them how they wish to do that.
Because only the most ignorant or naive think that being a separate nation protects anyone from the aggression of the West’s favorite fascist regime.
If you think being a neighboring country that isn’t aggressive towards Israel keeps you safe, you should have a word with someone from the Golan Heights or the part of Syria they RECENTLY started illegally occupying.
Gonna need a source on that.
That sounds like classic antisemitic conflating of Zionism and Jewdom, as well as ridiculous hyperbole. Specifics, please.
I did. None of the things you claimed (other than 4/5 of the MPs being against it) were actually in the article afair from reading it last night.
As someone who hasn’t read the actual motion itself - sure, being a separate state doesn’t protect against Israel, but the issue seems to be that this motion insists on a one state solution.
Why?
Being a single state obviously doesn’t help. So what is the benefit? Why is it insisting on this?
Because a single state that doesn’t discriminate based on religion and ethnicity IS the only solution that could possibly create lasting peace and justice.
As long as there’s a Jewish supremacist apartheid ethnostate on or next to their land, no Palestinian will be safe.
Fixed it for you. Like South Africa before it, the solution is to overthrow the tyrannical apartheid system of government, not portioning out a tiny parcel of land next to it that the overlords will always scapegoat and vilify.
See above.
what the Israeli government has done to the Palestinians is
despicableG E N O C I D EIt’s not
wrongmeanterribleregrettablebadthe word to use is G E N O C I D E.Just an FYI in case you want your butisms to be taken in good faith.
“Genocide” isn’t an adjective. Calling genocide despicable isn’t invalid.
I suggest you spend the next couple of days really pondering about your true self and your deeper motivations if you’re having “mixed feelings” about a political ideology actively targeting and murdering children (with bombs and even snipers) because those children are in the very words of those ideologues, “vermin”.
Chamberlain, at least, had the excuse that his actions happened before the NAZIs actively started trying to exterminate people.
I’m not the OP, but allow me to share my mixed feelings.
I agree with the motion. But it’s a vote loser. Voters are idiots and a not insignificant number will be convinced by the British press that this is anti-semitic, c.f. Jeremy Corbyn.
The Greens could have had all the right policies vis-a-vis arms sales, sanctions, BDS etc. without passing this motion, and for as long as they are a threat to Labour, that would have some weight in the public discourse. But I would be very surprised if passing this motion doesn’t ensure that Polanski loses the by-election, and I fear that’s going to begin a slide back into irrelevance for the Greens.
It has been my experience living in Britain for over a decade and during the Leave Referendum that no matter what left-wingers say or don’t say, the British Press will convince the idiots that they’re bad in some way.
If there’s one thing the whole Corbyn affair showed is that trying to avoid being tainted by the billionaire-owned Press is a mugs game and just reinforces the effectiveness of their manipulation.
If you’re constantly shifting in what you say and avoiding strong statements of principle to avoid the risk that the press paint you as something that sounds bad, you end up making yourself seem shifty, vague and unprincipled, which paradoxically makes it easier for the Press to paint you with anything they feel like as slandering is far more believable against people who don’t stand firm by what they claim to believe.
That recipe of “don’t say or act in ways that the Press might call ‘extremist’” has been tried again and again, most notably with Corbyn, and the result was invariably either failure or the party in question morphing so much it ended up having nothing to do with the original party (Labour’s change from what it was before Blair being a perfect example of the latter).
From what I’ve seen in more than one country putting accommodating to the criticism of people who are your adversaries above your own principles doesn’t work, whilst taking principled stances and not dancing to the tune played by the billionaire Press is something that at least historically worked, even in the UK (which is how the country ended up, at least for a while, with power in the hands of people who created things like the NHS).
This, by the way, is also my experience in other countries in Europe I lived in - once I returned to my own native Portugal were I also became involved in Politics (I was a member of the Green Party in the UK for a while when I lived there), I saw the exact same thing happen in the small leftwing party I became a member of (which had surged from an historical 5 or 6% to about 14% of votes by the time I became a member) as the leadership was played with very similar tricks (in this case it was mainly about being called “extremist” by the mainstream supposedly left party) and ending up collapsing the vote in the party down to 2%.
“Pragmatism” in genuine left-wing parties that puts even the strongest of moral principles (and being against child mass murder is probably one of the strongest principles there is) aside fearing criticism from others, all driven by the desire to gain votes in order to gain power, just makes a party and its leadership look shifty and unprincipled - “just more liars trying to get our votes” - which is deadly if you’re a left-wing party as left-wing ideologies are about doing what’s best for the many, not the few.
More in general and going back to my original post, if even one’s principle that “mass murder or children is unacceptable” can just be put on the shelf like that out of mere fear of what’s essentially “what will other people say” mixed with “what if we don’t get more votes”, then one doesn’t actually have principles and what drives them as a person is something else altogether than principles.
Personally, I don’t think you can be genuinely somebody who wants “the greatest good for the greatest number” (the core left-wing principle) if you can’t even openly put forward the best suggestions to stop children being mass murdered because you fear what the billionaire owner press might say.
Nowhere did I suggest that the principle of being against child murder should be abandoned. Sanctions against Israel and critical support for the BDS movement are policies that are not contingent on the passing of a “Zionism is racism” motion, and can be justified on their own terms.
The media will always line up against a left-wing party (or anyone to the left of Thatcher), and part of the job of being a left-wing party is dealing with that, and not giving them easy wins. As much as I liked Corbyn and his policies, he was bad at his job because he could not engage well with bad faith actors. And you just have to be able to do that to win elections. Polanski is actually quite good at that, because he’s able to to bring a conversation back round to what he wants to say without looking like he’s avoiding questions.
Passing the Zionism is racism motion now is essentially the green party shooting itself in the foot with a shotgun. Almost every major Jewish organisation in the UK (the board of deputies and the Jewish leadership council for two) is explicitly Zionist - and to be clear, I think that’s bad, actually - and as a result are now going to denounce the green party as anti-semitic. And now Polanski is going to have spend time justifying that rather than getting his actual messages out while trying to fight a by-election.
The inner racist coming up?