Randa Abdel Fattah: Is the crime having no empathy or being antisemitic?
The dilemmas of free speech
With Randa Abdel Fattah being banned from the Adelaide Writers' Festival, and its virtual collapse, I think it is worth returning to what offended people some time ago. The language used was probably on the minds of Adelaide Writers Festival decision-makers, despite their denials that the decision was about her politics. I also assume they were being heavily lobbied.
I am reposting parts of what I wrote a long time back, and some other points. Please read her entire essay On Zionist Feelings , a seminal, raging and confronting essay on Palestinian consciousness and rhetoric. She says, amongst many other things:
“Since when do the victims of genocide have the responsibility to defer to and protect the feelings of those who enact, support, and enable their genocide?
“Palestinians and their supporters who, amid the scourging of their homeland, the genocide of their people, the starvation and displacement of survivors, are expected to defer to the fragility of Zionists. We are seeing this play out across multiple sites and contexts — from protests to expressions of liberatory Palestinian nationalism, to political chants, to language and dress.”
“In all these instances, expressions of Zionist fragility expose a calculated, purposeful strategy of insisting on the status of victim when confronted with the material fact of Palestinian existence and the solidarity of others
“Palestinians bear no responsibility to coddle the feelings of Zionist racists. We collectively refuse to provide Zionists with reassurances to placate and soothe their political anxieties.
“. … I reject essentializing language, stereotypes, or theories that claim that there are particular traits or characteristics unique to “Jewish people” as a homogenous collective, or “being a Jew.” I defend the right of Jewish people to openly practice Judaism and freely express their religious and cultural identity. I defend the right of Jewish people to practice their faith even though I unequivocally reject and condemn Zionism as a political ideology. I do not accept that such a right can be enjoyed at the expense of Palestinian life, freedom, and self-determination.
In the same article, she referred to the “Hamas’ breakout and attack”. As far as I know, she has never condemned war crimes committed by Hamas. She also posted a photo on October 7,2023 of what is assumed to be Hamas paraglider on social media. And, while rightly criticizing the reports published by the New York Times concerning rape allegations by Hamas or others, in “Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza” (in The New Arab) she has not commented, as far as I know on the support for such allegations or rape, torture and and other illegal acts from the UNHRC or Amnesty International.
In all these act, it appears that she is concerned first and foremost with defending, Palestinians, their resistance and their truths and traumas from erasure and solidarity is expressed, whatever the situation. Thus the murder, rape, or torture of Israelis should be bracketed from the much larger crime against Palestinians and the world’s complicity in this (and Zionist colonialism). “When the feelings and fragility of Zionists are used as a rhetorical shield to deflect from engaging with the moral and material reality of genocide, Palestinians are left to ask: how many of us must be killed, maimed and injured, forced from our traditional land and beloved homes, be tortured and have our schools, universities, and livelihoods destroyed, for those in power – those who have the power to stop this genocide”
In July, 2024, in an Twitter post (I have the screen shot) she said “I don’t believe in Nazi analogies, as Israel and Zionism will stand on their own in the historical record as a unique and globally recognized signifier of crimes against humanity—not only against the Palestinian people, but against the conscience of the world.” Thus, the Gaza genocide is placed as unique, above all other crimes against humanity. This is falling into the same way of thinking about the Holocaust as taking priority over all other events in history. The fact is, all are horrifying testament to a pattern in human history.
More recently, in response to the Bondi killings, she posted on Instagram (only part of this is quoted):
“And as I stroke my daughter’s hair trying to get her to sleep, I scroll through the texts my teenage children sent me in the early aftermath of the shooting: ‘Pray it’s not an Arab or Muslim. Hijabis are gonna cop it tomorrow. Watch them pin it on us all now.’ And then I reflect on the statement by the Antisemitism Envoy, Jillian Segal, in which she unconscionably blames this cold-blooded blooded mass shooting by two antisemitic gunmen of Jewish people celebrating their faith on Bondi Beach not on, say, the neo-Nazi protest in front of NSW Parliament House last month, or the state-sanctioned emboldening and rise of the fascist, far-right, but instead on the peaceful March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a march of over 300,000 protesting genocide and mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
It's our children who force us to confront the state of the world we live in today.
Their fears, observations and questions cut through the hot takes and exploitative and dangerous political agendas. In a time of mass slaughter, their instinct is moral clarity. They teach us that as we bear witness to genocide in Gaza and terrorism in Bondi, we must remain committed to fighting for a world where life is sacred.
They remind us that blood flows in settler colonies that refuse to confront the unfinished business of racism. That 'Free Palestine' is not identity politics. It is a moral orientation that demands we fight for a world where every single human being is afforded the right to life, justice, freedom and dignity.
I have highlighted that sentence because it is chilling in light of Bondi and the fact that she regards both Israel and Australia as settler colonies. It is not just "Jewish people” who were killed as she said in the first paragraph. Actually, they are settlers in Australia and are to be associated with those in colonized Israel. Does that mean the fight can be extended to here, albeit by others (two people of Indian origin), against Jews, assumed to be Zionists, and therefore guilty as those in Israel (I am bracketing here the politics of Chabad and making the assumption that not everyone killed or wounded at Bondi was a raging racist). Certainly not the child who was shot dead). Does it in fact matter if those shot were Jews or Zionists? Does it also means that she is rationalizing the murder of other non-Jewish Australians who were killed or shot? Is her statement in fact rationalizing what happened into the big picture, that this was really the problem of settler colonialism, and not of some form of abominable antisemitism or antizionism? Are angry thoughts too much for public consumption? Are they an incitement to violence?
What is going on here? Is she actually antisemitic or overcompensation in seeing no humanity on the other side? I think it is the latter. She has no empathy for colonists wherever they are. It is clear that he has nothing against Jews as a religious or cultural community. The key problem however, is that her virulent (and understandable) objection to Zionism and the Israeli state puts everyone in the same basket (and likewise, in line with current thinking all non-Indigenous Australians) Palestinians are not concerned about nuances, yet they should be, if they are concerned about the “religious and cutural rights of Jews” as she has said.. But say that fragile Zionists have “a calculated, purposeful strategy of insisting on the status of victim “ is as much an essentializing conspiratorial statement that applies to many in the Jewish community .And sadly , apparently, the fragility that I have at this time after Bondi, even as a post -Zionist concerned scout the future of Israeli Jews is to be discounted
Haggai Mattar, a leading Israeli leftst and an editor of the non-Zionist 972 Mag put it like this:
[It] is important to remember that Zionism means vastly different things to different people, and plenty of those who subscribe to that label would say they are committed to justice and liberation for Palestinians; we can argue with them about what that actually looks like, but they clearly don’t deserve to die. And given that most Israelis and a great many Jews around the world see themselves as Zionists, hearing statements against their right to live evokes dark connotations.
The proliferation of this kind of rhetoric appears symbolic of developments in anti-colonial discourse, centering on a misinterpretation of the writings of Frantz Fanon not as a warning of the dangers of colonialism and armed struggle against it — dangers that, in the long run, mainly harm the colonized population, long after liberation — but as an uncritical call for revolutionary violence.
I think that is the trap she has fallen into via her anger, a purist fantasy which ultimately, cannot find peace because it cannot accept Jews, particularly Israeli Jews as they are. The “problem” of Palestine is not just about Palestinians. It is also a problem consuming Jews of all stripes because if the disastrous course of Israeli history. But there is no empathy. Contrary to what she claims, her claims are all about identity politics.
Intellectually, she can bracket out Jew/Zionists, but the real world, can’t Some form of Jew/Zionist will remain in the Holy Land and that it what has to be dealt with. It can’t be militarily defeated nor will BDS end it. The solution has to be political. Ideally, of course, it would see the end of the apartheid ethnostate of Israel and either one state with very separate hateful communities (worst solution), or some sort of political deal for bi-nationalism or a federation. I don’t know and no-one knows. I can only point to what Rashid Khalid, the great Palestinian intellectual and advocate has said in his Hundred Years War. I find this far more productive than Randa Abdel Fattah’s identitarian rage.
While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other. Overcoming the resistance of those who benefit from the status quo, in order to ensure equal rights for all in this small country between the Jordan River and the sea—this is a test of the political ingenuity of all concerned. Reducing the extensive sustained external support for the discriminatory and deeply unequal status quo would certainly smooth the path ahead.
What is do be done? I don’t think banning or deplatforming her is the right thing.
Her ideas are challenging and disturbing. Soldarity politics which offers no nuance, no empathy to the other’s dilemmas and circumstances is cruel. Saying things like “expressions of Zionist fragility expose a calculated, purposeful strategy of insisting on the status of victim” is generalizing, conspiratorial and cruel, even to me, a post-Zionist who has been engaged against Zionist extremism in decades.
Ruth Riegler in a recent critique of Max Blumenthal and others (MB part of Mondoweiss where her essay appeared), argued that some people on the left start to echo the “same Islamophobic rhetoric used by the far right” and are “like Tucker Carlson to mock evidence, relativise cruelty, and treat victims and their testimony as worthless”. It’s also in the same vein as some Zionist rhetoric. I think the same is going on here.
And of course, she appears to have no political solution, other than rage or support for ‘one state’. For all that she deserves to be on a platform with an intellectual critic (not me, I’m not fast enough on my feet). I don’t think a fawning audience is the right way to go (a fault of many of these festivals I think- not all writers are geniuses). She is the kind of writer to whom hard questions should be addressed.