We will not be silent

We will not be silent

The Żydowska Ogólnopolska Organizacja Młodzieżowa decision to withdraw from the November 11th coalition reveals much about the organisation’s position on racism and the status of Palestinians.

The political message is clear – racism can be tolerated against Palestinians in the name of Israeli ‚sovereignty.’ There is no blanket opposition to racism and fascism, clearly some forms of racism are acceptable. The establishment of an ethnically pure state on the basis of expulsion of the indigenous population is a dynamic we have seen repeated throughout history, and one that anti-fascist movements have resisted consistently, but when the doctrine of racial superiority is practised, today, before our eyes, ie the status of Jews in an exclusively Jewish state, ie Israel – we are told we must remain silent. We must look the other way. Palestinian suffering, because Palestinians do not bear any Jewish lineage or identity – for if they did, they would ‚fit in’ to the Israeli state, is negated, denied and deemed irrelevant. How can this be justified?

The campaign of solidarity with Palestinians (Kampania Palestyna) is not anti-Israel or anti-semitic, just as the movement against apartheid South Africa was not anti-white or anti-South Africa. Our demands and our aims were and are, the same – human rights and equality. Our treatment by theŻydowska Ogólnopolska Organizacja Młodzieżowa mirrors the narrative used by racists to justify negation of the other and attain superiority over another. We are ‚othered’, a foreign body, we are labeled as irrational, as haters, naïve, ignorant, dangerous, and must be suppressed.

This is not the politics of an anti-fascist and anti-racist movement. Anti-fascism resists racism and fascism in all its forms, without exception. No human being or ethnic group is better than any other. To claim exceptionalism for a particular ethnic group or identity is to claim superiority. To claim justification of oppression based on ones own experience of suffering, is to claim superiority in suffering and to generate a hierarchy of suffering. There is no heirarchy in suffering. Racism is racism, whether it is practised by politicians in suits or thugs on the street, whether it is embedded in institutional structures and bureaucracies or state policies and ideologies.

We stand up to all of it. The Żydowska Ogólnopolska Organizacja Młodzieżowa has taken the decision to draw the line at standing up for another people – the Palestinian people – because it has bought the doctrine of Israeli exceptionalism, that Israel has the right to be an ethnically pure, expansionist state, and has the right to practise apartheid, all in the name of an identity politics which excludes all those who are not Jewish. How is this just, democratic and an anti-dote to racism? TheŻydowska Ogólnopolska Organizacja Młodzieżowa supports this ideology and normalises this to such an extreme that it will suppress its own political agency in an open organisation dedicated to resisting racism including the ongoing reality of anti-semitism in Poland. ‚This coalition can only be a home for those opposing particular forms of racism and we get to chose what they are’ is the message being communicated here.

This shows us where the priorities are of this group and the narrow self-interest that it is serving. The November 11th coalition is meant to represent a participatory democratic politics based on universal equality. The global is the local. Poland is not an isolated capsule, government policies influence conflicts and movement of people from all over the world. The argument that ‚This issue does not belong in the coalition because it is marginal or foreign’ echoes the politics that allow for exclusion and denial to develop and betrays a lack of understanding of globalisation.This also undermines the ethos of solidarity with the excluded, the marginalised and the invisible. We want to see a solidarity that will de-other ‚the other’ and de-other ourselves from one another. Identity politics are a reality but when they become exclusive, supremacist, reified in states, border regimes, nationalisms, then we lose each other, we lose our commonality and we lose the commons – an uncommodified human rights and access to land, water, warmth, atmosphere and ecology, that we as a campaign believe in. Racist and fascist politics cannot be divorced from the material economic and political frameworks they evolve through and the interests they serve.

The issue of Israeli apartheid over Palestine cannot be ignored. Poland has an intimate historical and present day link with Israel. Israeli corporations and institutions complicit in the colonisation of Palestine run our buses, build our housing estates and co-produce weapons which are used against civilians on the streets of Palestine and Afghanistan. The occupation of Palestine is not only being reproduced through our government’s material and political support, but also by organisations which enforce a silence on the issue, thereby normalising it, denying there is a problem, denying there is responsibility here in Poland and denying activism around it. We will not be silent. Not over anti-antisemitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, anti-gypsy and traveller racism, border regimes locking up migrants, and not over Palestine.

Polish Palestine Solidarity Campaign