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A letter from Oi Polloi published in Reason to Believe #10. Dear RTB, Congratulations on another excellent issue. We were especially glad to see the piece on the International Solidarity Movement and their work in occupied Palestine and also the interview with Israeli band Nikmat Olalim. With the wealth of misinformation and totally inaccurate myths which so often abound in the mainstream media when this issue is raised it was a breath of fresh air to read pieces that told it how it is and were written by people who actually know what they are talking about in regards to this subject. We can't help wondering however what the reaction to this will be amongst some of your German readers. At a time when we are seeing increased Israeli repression against the indigenous population (be they the Bedouin of the Negev desert or the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza), the expansion of the illegal settlements in direct defiance of international law and all peace proposals, the seizing of yet more Palestinian land with the construction of the apartheid wall and the enacting of sickeningly racist legislation by the Knesset like the restrictions on Israeli citizens and Palestinians from the occupied territories from marrying, it may come as a surprise to some readers from other countries that a significant proportion of the politically active German punks, far from supporting the rights of the indigenous people against a brutal and racist military occupation or working with the Israeli peace activists and courageous soldiers and pilots who refuse to take part in the immoral and criminal actions of the Israeli Occupation Force, actually call for "Solidarity with Israel" and go to great pains to defend the policies of the Sharon government and the Israeli military out of some twisted, misguided idea that they are part of some romantic struggle against fascism. Obviously no one can forget the horror of what took place during the Third Reich as the Nazis' sick racist ideology saw the wholesale mass murder of more than six million Jews in the Shoa or Holocaust, the attempted wiping out of the Romany traveller population of Europe and the slaughter and deliberate starving and working to death of tens of millions of Russian and other Slavic "untermenschen" that the nazis also saw as "racially inferior". This must never, ever be allowed to happen again and it is very encouraging to see that so many of the German youth are so determined to stop the far right in their country from spreading their poison and building their neo-nazi organisations. Plenty of these fascists of course are only too happy to play on the actions of the Israeli Occupation Force in Palestine as a way of stirring up anti-Jewish feeling in a totally cynical way as they obviously don't give a fuck about the Palestinians themselves who they would probably class as "dirty arabs". It is quite right that these scumbags (like many of the German rightwing politicians in parliament) are opposed every step of the way but it doesn't mean that anyone who criticises the Israeli occupation is a crazed anti-semite as so many of the German left seem to believe. Indeed they go one step further and claim that the Palestinians are all in fact fascists motivated only by mindless hate for the Jews. One Berlin "anarchist" mag "Interim" that we saw, for example, used the phrase "Palestinian fascists" every single time the word "Palestinian" was mentioned as if the two automatically go together - totally ridiculous -especially when one thinks of Palestinian groups like George Habash's far left PFLP with their policy of "All power to the Workers and Peasants". Sadly a lot of the German left though don't let little things like facts get in the way and condemn any criticism of Israel as bordering on Nazism. This is the same kind of twisted logic that sees some of these characters now actually supporting the USA of George Bush with the reasoning that since the US supports Israel it means that if you are against the US you must be some kind of anti-semitic neo-nazi - one German antifa website even went so far as to discourage folk from going on anti-war demos against the US militaristic policies on the grounds that those who would go on these demos would be old nazis who "could not forgive the US for being responsible for destroying the Third Reich"!! That is one of the stupidest arguments we have heard in along time and it is maybe hardly surprising that their understanding of current affairs is so upside down when this nonsense clearly shows they have no grasp of history either - we think you'll find that it wasn't the US who were responsible for the end of the nazis but the Soviet Union and its sacrifice of 30 million dead in WWll that bled the nazis white and led to the ultimate defeat of their sick ideology. We were brought face to face with this warped reasoning on a trip to Germany last year and it is this experience that we would now like to share with your readers in response to some of the criticism that has been levelled at us in Germany and on the web as a result. We were on tour in the south of Germany and were to play at an autonomous youth centre in Freiburg called KTS. On arriving we decided to have a wander around the building and came across a bundle of big card placards for some demo or march that were full of slogans like "Solidarity with Israel" and "Death to the fascho-islamic Palestinians" etc. At first we thought it was some kind of sick joke as we could hardly believe our eyes especially with one placard that said simply "Fuck the Palestinians". It soon became obvious that it was no joke however as we noticed stickers around the centre with slogans like "Antifa means Solidarity with Israel" and the sickening "Cool kids don't wear the keffiyeh" - we wonder what genius came up with that wonderful "antifascist" slogan - just imagine that in another form as "cool kids don't wear turbans" let alone "cool kids don't wear skullcaps" - fuckin sick racist shit. We were shocked and horrified and as a result decided to speak out on stage about this when we played. When we went on then we spoke out at length about Sharon and the occupation, Israeli treatment of politicial prisoners like Mordechai Vanunu who blew the whistle on Israel's programme of nuclear weaponry and about our belief that legitimate criticism of Israel was in no way some kind of anti-semitism and that claiming that was was was just a technique used to silence those who wanted real justice in the middle east. To symbolise this we also burnt one of the "Solidarity with Israel" placards. A lot of people agreed with us but at the end of the gig we were surrounded by a crowd of outraged young men seemingly convinced that we were all crazed Jew-baiters. They ignored the fact that we had played numerous songs urging physical confrontation of fascists and that as well as explaining this on stage in German we had also made mention of the courageous Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and praised this as an example to us all. No, they said, we should have dedicated "They Shoot Children, Don't They?" not to Sharon and the IOF but to the parents of the Palestinian children who were killed as it was them who were responsible as they "happily sent their children out to die as martyrs" - you can read this nonsense on the net if you don't believe people could be so moronic but then it was interesting too that not one of these folk had children themselves or had known what it is like to carry a child for nine months and spend years bringing them up - if they had they maybe wouldn't have been so fast to claim that their parents send them out to die. Indeed many of these kids don't even have any parents to keep them off the street as the heroic IOF has already killed or deported them. The twisted logic got better though - why, they asked, if we were even handed, had we not burnt a Saudi flag - when we replied that we didn't see the point ( everyone there we credit with enough intelligence to see that the Saudi regime is full of shit although we'd have nothing against torching one of their flags if we could get one) we were told that this meant we must support Islamic Sharia law - we kid you not. This again is on the net under some article these fuckwits wrote entitled something like "A nice evening of punk rock mixed with hatred for the Jews" which, amongst other things, likened the atmosphere at our gig to a "pogrom" and accused us of spewing "anti-semitic filth" as well as wanting the "destruction of the Jewish race". Thankfully most people who know us know that we have a long record of putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to anti-fascist action and opposing nazism and racism in all its forms and would treat this with the contempt it deserves - and if these arseholes in KTS had bothered to read any of our lyrics( like those to "Bash The Fash" available on the net) they would be left in no doubt about our attitude to anti-semitism. If they had also bothered to do some research they might have found out that we were involved in fundraising for Israeli autonomous centres and have toured and recorded on numerous occasions with different Jewish musicians - but this might all spoil their little fantasy of standing up to the "evil anti-semites". Get a grip folks - take off your rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to looking at Israel, work with those on both sides of the conflict who are striving for peace and justice, if you want to fight anti-semitism there are plenty of real targets in Germany like your neo-nazi parties instead of fucking around with silly nonsense like this against people who are actually out fighting the real fascists themselves - and think yourselves fucking lucky that we don't believe in the legal system or we'd have sued your fuckin arses off for the libellious shite you've spread worldwide on the web. Next, make the effort to actually do some research about what it is you are talking about as there seems to be a disturbing amount of ignorance on this subject in Germany. Some of it is deliberately fostered like the aforementioned "Interim"'s list for the readers of the middle east wars which conveniently missed out Israel's invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and Egypt during the Suez war. A little bit of knowledge of the real facts might also go some way to seeing an end to offensive nonsense like the Antifa website that described Israeli torture, house demolitions of innocent people, collective punishment and extra-judicial murder as "justified security measures" and defended a bloodthirsty corrupt murderer like Sharon. Interestingly enough the folk in Freiburg also had a go at us for calling Sharon a war criminal, saying that we must have read that in some German tabloid newspaper. Actually we took that from the Israeli report that found him responsible for the deaths of the Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon and led to him having to resign his post. His bloody history goes back longer than that though. In 1953 Sharon personally led a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that left 69 people dead ( more than 40 of whom were women and children), in February 1955 after an Israeli cyclist was killed he led another raid on the Egyptian positions in Gaza that killed 39 people ( the disproportionate nature of this response played a large part in fuelling Nasser's distrust of the Israelis and led in part to the path to war in the future), then in 1982 after the wounding of an Israeli diplomat in London, Sharon launched the invasion of Lebanon in retaliation - thousands died and many thousands more were maimed and injured as the Israelis laid siege to Beirut using naplam and other chemical weapons like phosphorous bombs in their attack. Incredibly though, many of these folk we met in Germany tried to tell us that Israel only wanted peace and talked to us of how "the arabs invaded Israel three times"(!!) - er, no, not quite - try that the other way around - in1956 Israel invaded Egypt backed by Britain and France, in 1967 Israel invaded Egypt, Syria and the West Bank and Gaza (leading to the 1973 war too as Egypt tried to get back the territory it lost) and in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. All this is to say nothing of the 1954 terrorist bombing campaign by Israeli agents in Egypt when they set off a whole series of bomb attacks against British and US targets like libraries and cinemas etc in an attempt to drive a wedge between Egypt and the west. No wonder so many Arabs are suspicious of Israel. This isn't mindless anti-semitism - it is the product of bitter experience. Yet these folk try to claim to us that the trouble in the region is all the product of irrational Arab hatred of the Jews. There were certainly incidents of Arab violence against the Jews like the bloodshed stirred up by the British in Iraq as their typical "divide and rule" policy was played out but on the whole Jews and Arabs had coexisted side by side for centuries in the region until mass Jewish immigration began and it became obvious that the zionist aim was to take over Palestine and force out the indigenous population. Even recently we saw the Iraqi neighbours of the Jewish community in Baghdad protecting the Jewish community's buildings from looters and the initial failure of Sharon's plan to relocate the Iraqi Jews to Israel as many of them simply didn't want to go. This brings to mind the Israeli bombing campaign against Jewish targets in Iraq in the 1950s in an attempt to increase immigration to Israel - yes, you read that right -check this stuff out. None of the people we spoke to in Germany seemed to know anything about that though and we were shocked by the staggering ignorance of almost all of those who held some of the most opinionated views on this subject. No one seemed to know about Israeli use of biological warfare against Arab villages as far back as the 1940s, about the Israeli gas attacks on Khan Younis refugee camp, about the Israeli attempts to develop a biological weapon that would only affect Arabs ( brought to light in 1998 and described by Israeli Knesset member Dedi Zucker as "monstrous"), about Israeli destruction with chemical defoliants of the harvest of the indigenous Bedouin of the Negev desert as the Sharon government attempts to "transfer" them out of the area, about the massacre of Palestinians by right-wing settler Baruch Goldstein, about the Amsterdam El Al plane crash that resulted in the fatal release of chemicals being used in Israel's chemical weapons program, about the bomb attacks on Palestinian schools by Israeli settlers etc etc - all this information is documented and out there. If you are going to open your mouth about something like this do some fuckin research first. But then again there are none as blind as those who will not see and this wouldn't quite fit in with their romantic anti-fascist fantasy. How many of these folk actually know any Palestinians or Israelis anyway or have actually been there to see for themselves? ( And yes, some of our band have been to Israel). It is very fuckin easy for some kid in south west Germany to spout off about how evil the Palestinians are and how the Israelis only want peace etc and how the Palestinians shouldn't have the right to return to their homes that they lost in the Naqba (the Catastrophe) of 1948 but it would be a bit fuckin different if it was YOU who had to live in the stinking refugee camp with open sewers, starvation rations, no prospect of a job or a future or the possibility to move away and facing daily humiliation from foreign soldiers who had killed and maimed members of your family - how would you fuckin like it? What would you do? You know what, no one would answer that question apart from a couple of folk who tried to say that the problems of the Palestinians were all due to Islam! Yeah, right! You know something else, if any of you folk who come out with stuff like that actually bothered to get in touch with some Israeli punks you would find that they don't share your ideas. Yeah, the people who actually live there know better than you - and you want to know what they think? Check the website of Israeli band Dir Yassin for example in particular this bit http://www.angelfire.com/il/deiryassin/ethnic_clensing.html They are by no means alone in their views and it is also interesting that while our friends KANSALAISTOTTELEMATTOMUUS from Finland took shit while on tour in Germany for the 7" which had a song about the Israeli occupation and featured a cover showing a photo of a young Arab boy who has pissed his trousers with fear being dragged away by Israeli soldiers, they got really positive feedback from folk in Israel itself as loads of folk liked it and were glad that someone was finally speaking out about what was going on in their name. Something else we should maybe mention here is folk giving us grief for calling for a boycott of Israel which they say means we want the destruction of the country. What we want is an END to the destruction ( we would not go along with the band who have that song "Burn Israel Burn" for instance - we think we have all seen quite enough burning in the middle east) and we see a boycott as a way of pressuring Israel and making the illegal settlement of Palestinian land more difficult. As long as these illegal settlements are able to get much needed financial income from goods that they export with the connivance of the Israeli government stamped "Produce of Israel" the boycott must continue. That is our response to the occupation - we do not of course support bomb attacks on restaurants or the like which are not only horrific but also play right into the hands of Sharon by giving him an excuse to continue his clampdown on the Palestinians and the wholesale destruction of their society in his attempts to drive them out and create a "Greater Israel". Our call is for solidarity with the Israeli peace activists, political prisoners like Mordechai Vanunu and the refuseniks. What we did say, however, was that something was seriously wrong in the state of Israel when the Israeli daily "Ha'aretz" quoted an Israeli army officer as saying that the Israeli army could and should learn from and adopt the tactics employed by the nazis in taking over the Warsaw ghetto when taking over densely populated palestinian areas like the Nablus casbah or Jenin refugee camp. Our critics in Freiburg didn't seem to have a problem with the Israeli adoption of nazi tactics or indeed with Ha'aretz reporting of this - they just got outraged at us mentioning it. It is always the same; mention Israeli torture and the torture isn't the problem - it's you for being "anti-semitic", mention their collective punishment of civilians and that isn't the problem - it's you for being "anti-semitic" - a very convenient way to silence legitimate criticism. It becomes a bit more difficult though when the critics themselves are some of the millions of Jewish people worldwide who are opposed to Israeli policy and who are seeing the undeniable drift to the right in Israeli politics. As one Jewish commentator recently put it "My parents were murdered by jackbooted Germans and now they are commemorated by jackbooted Israelis". The DIR YASSIN website does go as far as to compare some Israeli actions to those of nazis but we think that is a word one has to be careful about throwing around. Ok, the Israeli "democracy" is walling the Palestinians up in their own cramped ghettos and slowly starving them, giving them different ID papers, rounding them up for detention without trial and writing numbers on their skin but they aren't actually gassing them to death. Personally we would make the parallel with Apartheid South Africa, long time ally of Israel - different laws for different races, bantustan "homelands", "at least a halfway democratic multi-party system in the midst of a war against evil terrorists" etc. etc. Basically we could go on about the Israeli bombing of residential flats from the air to target one suspect guy and leaving over 100 maimed and injured not to mention more than a dozen dead, the uprooting of hundred year old olive groves, the court-martialling of the Israeli intelligence officer who refused to target civilians, the murder of journalists, ambulance personnel and even UN workers, the deliberate killings of peace activists, the bulldozing of homes and shops, the constant humiliation of the occupation, the forcing of arrested Palestinians to chose their own torture etc etc - you might be happy to call for solidarity with that - we, on the other hand, find it as repugnant as a Hamas bomb attack on innocent Israeli civilians. Yes, Germans have a special responsibility because of what happened under the Nazis but that responsibility is not to legitimise anything Israel does no matter how brutal or indefensible - it is the responsibility to never again turn a blind eye while racist rightwing militaristic ideologies are oppressing weaker groups. Yes, solidarity with Jewish people against anti-semitism but solidarity with the Israel of Sharon and his government of ethnic-cleansers?? Please don't turn a blind eye to what they are doing because the one thing that characterised everything our German critics said was a complete disregard for the rights and situation of the indigenous Palestinian people - indeed many folk even tried to claim that the Palestinians don't even exist - a bit like Turkey's denial of the existence of the Kurds who are seen only as "mountain Turks". There is so much more we would have liked to say on this topic but if we keep going it's gonna fill your whole zine! Just bascially this thing is not as black and white as a lot of the German left see it (remember for instance that the Zionists in Palestine in 1941 approached the Nazis and offered an alliance to fight against the British to help Hitler achieve victory - and that during the Spanish civil war when a disproportionatly large number of the anti-fascist volunteers from America were Jewish, the zionists condemned them and tried to put obstacles in their way) and most importantly "Israel" does not equate with "Jewish". Just as "Boycott Israel" does NOT mean "Boycott the Jews" neither do millions of Jews all around the world agree with the policies of ( or even some, like the group Neturei Karta, the existence of) Israel. If you are going to open your mouth on this subject then the least you can do is to learn about it properly in the first place. For any readers who would like to know more and for an idea of what many Jewish and Israeli opponents of Sharon and co have to say about all this Check: www.gush-shalom.org and www.couragetorefuse.org and in particular www.nimn.org as well as www.icahd.org (Isreali Coalition Against House Demolitions) www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org and www.wrmea.com/jews_for_justice - there are loads of others too if you bother to look which just goes to show that the policies of the Israeli rulers represent all Jewish people just about as much as George Bush is representative of all Americans ( so equally voicing opposition to those policies is NOT hatred for the Jewish people as a whole) - and for those of you who are open-minded enough to view the Palestinians' side of things try www.electronicintifada.net and www.palestinechronicle.com . In closing we would like to urge all political bands touring in Germany to raise these issues on stage and with the folk they are talking to after gigs. We would also especially ask folk passing through Freiburg KTS to call the folk there on their shit and get them to take a long hard look at themselves and the people using their centre. There can be no justification for racist shit like "Fuck the Palestinians" and "Cool Kids Don't Wear the Keffiyeh" - especially not under the banner of some kind of misguided and totally twisted "antifascism". Wise up. Thanks for the space RTB. Fight fascism. Smash all racism - no exceptions. Oi Polloi c/o Edinburgh Anti-Fascist Action, PO Box 421 , Edinburgh EH11 1JD |