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Palestinian and Israeli Women Redefine the Clash of Civilizations

This seemed appropriate after the prior post about Durban. From KABOBfest:

From The Guardian, a short essay by photographer Ryuichi Hirokawa on this photo. It is part of an exhibit for London's Palestine Film Festival:

I took this in 2002, at Al-Ram checkpoint on the West Bank. All the checkpoints had been closed by Israeli troops and these women were demonstrating to have them opened, so that food and medical supplies could come through. An hour before, a group of men had been demonstrating, but the soldiers pulled out their batons so the women - who were both Palestinian and Israeli - moved to the front.

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Durban Review Conference, Racism, And the Clash of Civilizations

If Durban I was a watershed moment for the Palestinian justice movement, bringing together for the first time thousands of activists from around the world (yes, including a handful of anti-Semites), all united in shining a light on Israel's growing litany of human rights violations, it's no wonder the right-wing Israel Lobby reacted with total panic regarding the Durban Review Conference. (One person in Geneva was overhead saying, "We reacted with a fire hose when all we needed was a lawn sprinkler.")
They succeeded in getting the United States and European countries-all part of the colonial project and in the case of the US, the world's only remaining empire- to reject any attempts to shine a light on Israeli institutional racism. Hmm.
As European Jews for a just Peace chair Dror Feiler asks, "Is it really such a scandal to describe Israel as a racist country?"

Because, what else can we call a nation whose policies make crucial differences between people, based on religion and ethnicity? What should we call a state under whose laws everyone is not equal? What should we call the practice of granting exclusive land-purchasing {Editor's correction: it's land-leasing} rights to Jewish citizens (approximately 90 percent of the country's land is not available for purchase {lease} to the country's non-Jewish citizens, solely because they are not Jewish? What should we call laws that allow Jewish citizens to marry foreign nationals and live together in Israel while that same thing is forbidden for Israel's Palestinian citizens, solely based on their ethnicity?

Sid Shniad, co-chair of Canada's Independent Jewish Voices, has a great write-up of the conference. Of particular interest- he gives a rundown of Israeli Michel Warschawski's analysis of what happened in the context of colonial politics. It's absolutely true that the right wing Israel groups in the US have long pushed a Clash of Civilizations framework, which suggests Jews/Christians and Muslims are essential enemies. (And which the vital partnerships of Muslims and Jews in the peace movement shows to be completely absurd.) Of course, the heightened Nazification of Muslims/Arabs, adds on a whole new, disturbing layer. Demonization of a group is a linguistic precursor to annihilation. It makes bombing Iranians, for example, OK.

Michel Warschawski of the Alternate Information Center in Israel provided a particularly powerful analysis of the significance of the original Durban conference and the events that have transpired since. According to Warschawski, the Durban conference marked a major success in the struggle against colonialism – so successful that it became a catalyst for an alliance of Zionist and neoconservative elements determined to mount a global counter-offensive and roll back the progress that the forces opposed to colonialism made there.

Warschawski traced how this counter-offensive focused initially on terrorism, shifting later to Islamic terrorism, and finally ended up indicting Islam itself as the enemy. All this was promoted under the rubric of the Clash of Civilizations, with Judeo-Christianity portrayed as engaged in a battle to the death with Islamic Barbarism in an open-ended war.[2] Those who rejected this framework were accused of being anti-Semitic.
In an aside, Warschawski countered the hysterical Zionist insistence that anti-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds, noting that while it continues to exist, European anti-Semitism is coming from right wing Christian sources rather than those rooted in Islam. He concluded his comments on this subject on a positive note, offering evidence that anti-Semitism is in fact declining over time.
Warschawski argued that Palestine is the frontline in this war and that the Israeli Wall constitutes the dividing line between Judeo-Christian 'Civilization' and Islamic 'Barbarism,' with the underlying issue being the attempt by the Zionists and neoconservatives to re-impose empire, which has been badly shaken by 40 years of successful anti-colonial struggle. He noted that in the context of the Durban Review and the attempts to weaken and undermine it, progressive forces had been put on the defensive and forced backwards, explaining that this is what the boycott campaign and the attempts to disrupt the conference from within had been all about. Warschawski concluded by imploring activists to dedicate themselves to ensuring that they are fully prepared for the upcoming Durban Plus Ten review so that the original, successful struggle can be resumed.

I think it needs to be said that while the Alternative Information Center's Warschawski is likely right about the exaggerated threats of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe, which is antisemitism's historic homeland after all, he does not consider the growing anti-Semitism in the Arab world where, ironically, before the early Zionist settlers began to arrive in historic Palestine, Jews and Muslims often lived side by side quite peacefully.
In his own excellent analysis, Warschawski wrote about a dynamic that I witnessed myself. It's just one of the increasingly long list of things done to destroy Durban.

In the Civil Society Forum their tactic was different, knowing that the one used in the States' Conference wouldn't work. Different but no less efficient. They used part of the African delegation to marginalize the Palestinian issue and neutralize its centrality by mixing it with other crisis throughout the world, in particular the Darfur massacres. Inciting Africans against Arabs by the demagogic arguments: "aren't you fed-up being ignored and marginalized by the Palestinian issue?" and "Is Darfur less painful than Palestine?," the Israeli-US campaign managed to create great tensions in the NGO Forum.