Everyone has the right to live where they have made their life
This is a very short post, but I have decided to make it a post rather than a note because I’m disturbed by certain directions ‘anti-imperialism’ has taken certain small but vocal sections of the left. I feel it’s important to be very clear about this, even at the risk of being cringe, shrill, or tedious.
Humaira made this lovely, optimistic post on Twitter about South African Jews protesting for the freedom of Palestinians.
And a bunch of people- thousands of people- responded disgracefully in my view, that these Jews living in South Africa are part of the problem because of where they live:
“Can the non-Black South African Jews leave South Africa for a free South Africa too, please?”
“honestly, this is a great example of white people being performative with their activism cause if they truly believed this, they'd get their white asses out of South Africa and give the land back”
“imma be real i don't wanna see white people in africa. like at all. give the continent a good 50 years and then when communism is full swing maybe your descendants can visit to get some inspiration”
A just opposition to colonialism does not entail a demand that anyone leave any place where they have built their lives. Just opposition to colonialism is not a call of a kind of inverted ‘ethnic cleansing from below’. Just opposition to colonialism is a demand that the ethnic cleansing and oppression of the colonized people ends. Under ideal conditions, everyone should have a right to live anywhere, and if you think that’s impractical, everyone should at least have the right to remain where they have lived for years.
This is true equally of every single person, but it should be especially obvious in the case of the Jewish people who have been driven across the face of the whole earth, persecuted terribly, and constantly told they must leave because this or that place because they don’t really belong. In a word, the responses to this tweet are antisemitism.
The leftist point of view is the liberation of all peoples and the freedom of all people to pursue their own ends free from oppression and poverty. It is a deeply humanistic doctrine, and while it backs the oppressed, it does not call for an inversion of the master-slave dialectic, it calls for its end.
Now, to be clear, I do not think there much risk of anyone being forced to leave South Africa. Here are my main concerns:
Saying things like this is morally wrong, in and of itself.
Saying things like this discredits and distorts the left.
I worry about the effects of this sort of rhetoric, not in South Africa, but in Israel, and around the world in the Jewish diaspora. When you say Jews do not belong where they are, you reinforce Zionism.
A) On the ontological level, insomuch as you are presupposing that Jews do not belong in certain places and do belong in others, a foundation of Zionism.
B) On a more concrete level, this rhetoric adds credence to the idea that Jews will never be completely safe without a state of their own.
Certain ideas have developed in leftism that are a useful corrective to an overly abstract liberal universalism, this is good, but humanism is still the core of our doctrine, and has to be, lest we become pathetic mirror images of our enemies, all the spite and none of the power. The good news is, that these ideas do remain at the core of what the vast majority of us believe, we just need to make that clear.
> In a word, the responses to this tweet are antisemitism.
I agree with everything else, but this seems incorrect to me. The responses are claiming that the South African jews are being hypocritical not because they're jews, but because they're white. I would expect to see similar responses to any non-jewish white group of people in South Africa talking about freeing Palastine. So I think you could reasonably call it racism, but not antisemitism.
Just imagine if every religion had to have a nation of it's own to live in.
I grew up in England, with a Scottish mother. When we visited elderly Scottish relatives, we were amused and concerned about the local religious wars which were based on differences between bible statements from one section of the bible and another. Everyone would have to spend most of their time trying to run their own nation. (I bet they would love that, too.)