Press Release: Governor Brown Should Not Use the Holocaust to Hide Racism

[Image of Jerry Brown speaking in October 2010. Image by Neon Tommy/Flickr] [Image of Jerry Brown speaking in October 2010. Image by Neon Tommy/Flickr]

Press Release: Governor Brown Should Not Use the Holocaust to Hide Racism

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was released by The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) on 21 July, 2013.]

Governor Brown Should Not Use the Holocaust to Hide Racism: Jews Decry Brown’s visit to Dachau While at Home He Condones Racism.

As California prisoners’ massive hunger strike against long-term solitary confinement, group punishment, and other policies of the CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) enters its second week, Governor Jerry Brown is on a two week vacation to Germany and Ireland. It is shocking that the Governor has chosen this time to go on vacation while the CDCR refuses to meet the hunger strikers’ five just demands, demands that would end the torture of prisoners in the state he is supposed to be responsible for governing. 

Included in his schedule is a stop at the Dachau concentration camp. We cannot view this as a random choice. We view it as a reprehensible and deliberate attempt to focus the public’s attention on past crimes in order to deflect it from current ones. This we do not accept. The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network strongly condemns Brown’s exploitation of the Nazi genocide to distract from his complicity in the repression and racism against prisoners – disproportionately people of color and low income people, women, and transgender people – which ultimately serves to make money for the lucrative prison industry in California, and subjects vulnerable populations to constant state repression and terror. 

The racism which smoothes Brown’s silence about a massive hunger strike is exactly the same racism which allows for the massive and disproportionate incarceration of black and brown people in California and nationwide. As Michelle Alexander points out, “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its Black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” To bring these statistics closer to home, “In Washington, D.C. ... it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.” 

Indeed, precisely this racism allows for the extrajudicial killing of black people with impunity. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin is simply the latest victim. Last week his killer literally got away with murder as a jury found Zimmerman “not guilty” based on a Florida law that gives (white) people the right to use deadly force to defend themselves, their homes and their vehicles. As documented in a report by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, every twenty eight hours in 2012 someone employed or protected by the US government killed a black man, woman, or child. That year, a total of 313 black people were killed by police, security guards and vigilantes. 

Meanwhile, the struggle against racism and colonialism in Palestine is increasingly becoming a reference point for struggles against racist and colonial policies elsewhere. Over the past two years, hunger strikers in California and Palestine have shared a struggle against inhumane treatment. Today, Palestinian prisoners strike against isolation and the use of “administrative detention” - the indefinite and arbitrary detention of Palestinian people, including children, by Israeli occupying forces without charge, evidence, or trial. Significantly, Sheikh Khader Adnan, a former Palestinian political prisoner, whose sixty-six day hunger strike in protest at being detained without charge attracted worldwide attention, wrote in support of the California hunger strike: 

The policy of isolation is a cheap weapon in the hands of those who hold power. The policy of isolation is used against American citizens who are victims of the political, economic and social order/system that thrives on greed, discrimination and the deprived, including the African-Americans and Palestinian resistors such as Sameeh Hamoudeh and Sami Al-Aryan…Hunger strikes are a courageous step and a real tool for all those who are deprived of their rights to lift the existing oppression, and I hope that these prisoners will gain their rights and their demands. Today, the hunger strikes of the Palestinian prisoners inspire those who are detained to engage in hunger strikes to guarantee that they are treated humanely and with respect and dignity. 

It is therefore grotesque, but also somehow perfect, that Israel is offering the United States ethical tips on how its doctors can force-feed the hunger-striking Guantanamo prisoners. The two countries use similar policies because ultimately they are both faced with the task of governing, yet also repressing, “surplus populations.” To do so they both resort to harsh prison systems, policing, and military control of the people they deem undesirable. In the course of these imprisonments, they then encounter human beings who refuse to accept the unjust, harsh, and brutal treatment they encounter. And so in turn they face hunger strikers whom they struggle to silence. 

For Governor Brown to commemorate the horrors of Dachau while allowing the horrors of solitary confinement for years and decades is hypocrisy, and it is hypocrisy which hides brutality. A death camp is different from a prison. But the underlying logic of the racism and repression of the Nazi genocide resounds: that certain groups of people can be isolated, tortured and killed because of who they are and what they believe in. 

As Jews in solidarity with prisoners organizing from Pelican Bay to Palestine to Guantanamo, we say Never Again for Anyone. and demand that Governor Brown insist that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation meet the dignified demands of the brave and brilliantly organized hunger strikers for humane treatment. 

Please take a moment to sign the "Pledge of Resistance" to stand with California prisoners on hunger strike!

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412