Gideon Falter: chief executive of the
In response to a recent post [1] in which I stuck up for the right to cross the road - be one a proverbial chicken or an openly Jewish individual - I had a charming email from someone telling me I'm a Zionist stooge at best and an apologist for genocide at worst.
Surely you realise that Gideon Falter is an activist and provocateur and that the whole thing with him being stopped by the police was staged for the cameras?
Well, yes, okay - but that's not really the issue, is it?
Even Rosa Parks [2] had pre-planned with others in the NAACP her courageous act of civil disobedience on that fateful day in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama. And she was perfectly happy to be photographed being fingerprinted when arrested for a second time, in 1956, one month into the Montgomery bus boycott that her initial arrest had sparked.
The fact that Parks might also be described as an activist and provocateur who understood the power of symbolic protest and how to use the media to get her point across, doesn't detract from the rightness of her actions in exposing the shameful reality of segregation.
Similarly, the fact that Falter exposed that on a spring day in central London, in April 2024, a man can be stopped from going about his peaceful and perfectly lawful business and walking where he wishes to walk on the grounds that his openly Jewish appearance - he was wearing a yarmulke - would antagonise a pro-Palestinian crowd to such an extent that his safety couldn't be guaranteed by the Met police, is what matters here.
At least that's what matters to those of us who value the freedom of the individual above that of a vitriolic and potentially violent mob seeking to intimidate; in other words, I don't care that it was a manufactured incident.
Notes
[1] See: 'Openly Jewish' (22 April 2024): click here.
[2] Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott.
I fear talking of Rosa Parkes and the likes of Gideon Falter, (and their aims and sufferings) in the same breath tips TTA into a realm of clouds and cuckoos where birds fly backwards and G-d is a hovering dog. But let's press on as best we can.
ReplyDeleteLet's be clear, as it seems to need constant repeating, that the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a peculiarly British stupidity. We can all also agree that the police officer’s phrase 'openly Jewish' was clumsy to say the least. Anti-Semitism is abhorrent, even though it's pretty clear that Islamophobia (in which context the well-known Islamophobe, Israeli apologist, and apparently unarrestable former PM Boris Johnson incredibly and shamefully called British Muslim women 'pillar boxes') is a far bigger problem in the UK. A minority of decent people stand against both.
However . . .
Perhaps the writer may care to consider if his phrase 'a vitriolic and potentially violent mob' might be better applied to the Israeli war machine than used to lambast Palestinian demonstrators (actually, to borrow his phrase, going about their 'peaceful and lawful business' by exercising what some of us tend to feel is a not unreasonable protest against the extermination of their people). Though perhaps it might be tinily tweaked to 'brutal and genocidal state terrorist machine pursuing its own criminal war agenda' in this instance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iupfxe38Wj0
I wanted to provide a link to the full-length video of this embarrassing episode, which readers can (and I suggest should) view it from start to finish, and perhaps peruse some of the comments while there, to help shape a more informed view of this incident. As one person comments, for those who lack context, it presents 'Gideon Falter, CEO of hardline pro Israel lobby group CAA and director of JNF which raises money to acquire land for colonial settlements in Palestine - [who] just happened to have “stumbled” across a pro-Palestinian protest in London - with his body guards and film crew in tow.' As another person remarks, he's essentially 'a professional victim' (as distinct from Parkes, who was a real and brutalised victim), who, another adds, 'went looking for confrontation' (as 'counter-protesters' tend to do).
To coin a phrase, with an attitude like his, what could possibly go wrong? If anything, the police officer's 13-minute indulgence of this entitled, disingenuous, colonialist prick (notwithstanding his dumb choice of phrase on a clearly massively pressurised day) should have got him a pay rise and Falter a fine for wasting police time! Or perhaps the local authority could just bulldoze his house to make him feel at home.
It's Rosa Parks; not Parkes. This might just be an instance of carelessness on your part, but some might see it as disrespectful. But let's press on as best we can ...
DeleteWhilst criticism of the Israeli government is legitimate, the term anti-Zionism is problematic, as it not only implies a denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, but helps to perpetuate a subtle form of antisemitism (often by invoking historic antisemitic tropes).
I think we can probably move quickly beyond my misinsertion of a rogue 'e' into RP's name, can we not, in the context of what was a much wider and more extensive response on my part? Picking up on such minutiae reads to me, tbh, as nit-pickingly resentful and mainly an attempt to distract from the substance of my comment.
DeleteThanks for reassuring me that it's OK to critique the genocidal Israeli war/state terrorist machine, as I wouldn't want to say anything 'illegitimate'.
While I didn't realise you were a cheerleader for the entire Jewish people from the time of the Bible, perhaps it's worth mentioning that not all Jews are Zionists. Indeed, you may have heard that many are actually standing with Palestinian protestors around the world and indeed demonstrating against the Netanyahu government (albeit not necessarily for pro-Palestinian reasons) in Jerusalem as his administration degenerates into that of a rogue state held in contempt by most of the world (increasingly and unprecedently now including even parts of the US government), except for North Korea, the Chino-Russian axis of evil, and Rishi Sunak.
Your invocation of the Jewish people's 'right' to land that is, moreover, somehow 'ancestrally' ringfenced (underwritten, by implication, by what is a Biblical myth), is frankly unfathomable. Next you'll be telling us you recite the Torah at home in front of a statue of King David and dream of the divine transcendence of earthly time!
In fact, since 1947/8, following the politically engineered creation of the fake state of Israel and the start of its land grabs, through a combination of property sales, mass Arab migration and lethal force, Arabs have been removed, or removed themselves, from land to which they, fyi, also make long-standing and demosntrably justified historic claim. As far as I'm aware, and I work for a high-ranking Palestinian scholar at the University of Jerusalem, it isn't Arabs who are forcing Jews out of their own properties at gunpoint via bulldozer. As I write, Jews are already eyeing up homes in Gaza, buttressed by sick 'rehousing' companies.
The only thing that's 'problematic' about the term 'anti-Zionism' in our time is that it is so scandalously unsupported. Netanyahu has proposed the 'total victory' of his thugs in the Gaza Strip, whose bombing and missile campaign cannot remove Hamas nor does it intend to. In short, if it really needs saying, it is geared to the obliteration of a people and the destruction of it schools, universities and hospitals. This is now not remotely controversial.
Those individuals and countries who fail to speak out against this genocide, deprive Israel of arms, or if necessary take up arms against its army, are essentially complicitous with totalitarianism by definition. In a tragic historic reversal for all humane Jewish people, the Zionist horrorshow has turned into a latterday holocaust machine.
Actually, I think the careless misspelling of Rosa Parks is very informative. As is your desire to move "quickly beyond" this matter whilst remaining indifferent to the fact that misnaming the above might be perceived as offensive.
DeleteI thought poets were meant to be attentive to language and that philosophers prided themselves on their refusal to be in a hurry.
And if you're going to offer a political analysis that you wish to be taken seriously then factual accuracy is crucial; particularly when it comes to the small details. Otherwise, how is the reader able to trust the reliability of your larger claims?
You might also want to consider being a little less sarcastic and abusive; refusing to see anti-Zionism and anti-semitism as entirely separate issues does not make stupid. Nor does refusing to drape oneself in the Palestinian flag, or cosplay in a keffiyeh, make one a "cheerleader for the entire Jewish people since the time of the Bible".
Your final paragraph calling for Israel to be deprived of weapons (and thus made defenceless) and for other nations to "take up arms against its army" is frankly sinister.
I have no issues whatsoever at the speed, sarcasm, im/patience or accuracy of my thought on any of the above - sorry if this disappoints you (or other readers)! Meanwhile, if you continue to prefer to fixate on a minor misspelling in lieu of facing responses to your original post, be my guest if it makes you feel better!
DeleteRe the question of 'abusiveness', however, I would invite you to review in this context your own deeply distasteful (and frankly paranoiac) attempt to besmirch peaceful Palestinian protesters as a 'vitriolic and potentially violent mob' in your original post. It's frankly sub-Johnsonesque! Even the Daily Mail would choke on it!
Derrida (himself a Sephardic Jew, lest we forget, albeit one who also curdled that identity with reference to an 'Arab blackness') and others have already made abundantly clear the idiocy of refusing to distinguish ani-Semitism and anti-Zionism, even if the tide is beginning to turn and the shekel beginning to drop. I feel little need to re-rehearse any of this well-worn discussion, therefore. However, as a starting point, I would refer intelligent critical readers of TTA to the contributions of Eva Borgwardt, proponent of a 'queer' Talmudic Studies and Director of IfNotNow, a US-based Jewish group opposing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that had the commendable courage to issue a statement following the Hamas incursion of October 7 that 'We cannot and will not say today’s actions by Palestinian militants are unprovoked'. Borgwardt's personal summation that 'I’ve never known any kind of actual hope for a Zionism that does not demand occupation, apartheid and the oppression of Palestinians to fulfill the identity of the Jewish state' luminously encapsulates, I suggest, the brave aims of a progressive Jewish anti-Zionism for our own time.
Finally, I'll leave it to other readers to decide which is the more 'sinister': other countries/groups intervening in the terroristic/genocidal machinery of a politically engineered rogue state like Israel to paralyse her murderous purposes or facilitating her unilateral obliteration of the Palestinian people by standing by and doing nothing.*
* Fun fact: Israel has killed more Palestinians in 2023 than in any year since 1948 and the Nabka (22,141, inc. 6,450 women and 9.000 women).**
** Currently comfortably on course to double this figure in 2024.
You really should consider getting a job with the PLO Press Office, or perhaps working for the Gaza Health Ministry; maybe that "high ranking Palestinian scholar at the University of Jerusalem" whom you mention can assist with this ...
DeleteI usually prefer (as a matter of courtesy) to let any reader who chooses to comment have the last word. But I'll make an exception in this case.
It's interesting that you have "no isssues whatsoever" with your own thought, when you subject the thinking of others to close critical examination. For someone who values self-reflection, that strikes me as odd.
Similarly, for someone who champions perspectivism, it seems strange that you should view this topic from a single standpoint and do so with such conviction and apparent sincerity.
One wonders why it is (like many on the far left) you have this singular obsession with Israel and Palestine. The Geneva Academy is currently monitoring more than 110 armed conflicts around the world and yet you never mention these; it's only when the Israelis are involved that you seem to get agitated - why is that?
Re: my language with relation to the Palestinian protesters; is chanting 'from the river to the sea' and calling for 'intifada' not vitriolic in your view? Do you think such phrases and such terms are designed to calm the situation? And if some members of the crowd were not potentially violent, then why did the police prevent Gideon Falter from crossing the road for his own safety?
Why must we be reminded that Derrida was Jewish? You don't instruct us to remember the ancestory of other writers you mention. You've effectively pinned a yellow star on him.
What do you think about the events of October 7? Again, not untypically, you've been noticeably silent on this (although you now express admiration for the "commendable courage" of those who refuse to condemn the actions of Hamas).
Let me close with one of those "fun facts" you seem to like: the Palestinian population was less than 1.5 million in 1948, but is now over 5 million. This growth in the 75 years since the Nakba might suggest that the "unilateral obliteration of the Palestinian people" by the "genocidal machinery" of Israel isn't going to plan ...
I am content to leave the readers of TTA to make up their own minds on this dialogue now. However, by way of brief footnote(s) on my side:
Delete1. My comments on your issues with my 'abusiveness' and 'sarcasm' etc. were/are entered in that specific context. To repeat, I don't have a problem here with the tone or tenor of my response for the reasons I've given, so I'm sorry that you appear to.
2. All of my comment was and is a compensatory gesture in relation to the original post and its palpable malice, which I'm sure The Daily Mail (or worse) would be delighted to publish. To accuse me as respondent of wilful identification with a single view is rich to say the least, and your troubling tendency to engage in flagrant projection of this kind is noted. A philosophical interest in the claims of perspectivism does not preclude a passionate focus on a particular political/humanitarian cause, incidentally.
3. There are a number of conflicts around the world, that's perfectly true. However, you chose to write provocatively (and I suggest irresponsibly) about one of them that has especial prominence now in world affairs for multiple reasons. It's not too hard to understand, therefore, why the focus should fall where it does in this case.
4. I alluded to October 7 in my previous comment in regard to the anti-Zionist Jewish organisation I highlighted, but a key reference point would be Baudrillard's exemplary essay 'The Spirit of Terrorism', which spirit is of course conditioned by the occupational violence of the Islamophobic Western body politic and proceeds in perfect step with it. Osama Bin Laden is the classic personification of the 'double agent' here - trained by the CIA before turning against Western power. The trick is to spotlight those right-wing thugs who want to prolong this dance of death as long as possible while laying claim to totalitarian fantasies of 'total victory' and other Dalek-like idiocies.
5. Were you at the London demonstration and did you make detailed notes of the contributions of all protesters? I note your shapeshifting (and I suggest self-serving) ambivalence toward the police officer on the day, whom your original post sought to take down for his supposedly outrageous attack on a single Jewish provocateur's right of passage but whom you now seem to want to characterise as a professionally responsible barometer of public safety. As has been pointed out, both in the street and university campuses, Jews have also stood with Palestinians, the curdling of which dichotomy is unfortunate for your own provocations and apparent condoning of Zionist violence.
6. Finally, I assume you're taking your decontextualised population figures from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. What would be needed would be a detailed breakdown of such, measured against 20C political events and the current genocidal incursions in the Gaza Strip and other attacks on the West Bank.
As a closing suggestion, why not be brave and adventurous and one day travel to Israel/Gaza yourself (as I plan to) and see what military intimidation means on the ground for those Arabs who are living and suffering with it all over the region? You could report back on your findings for TTA readers everywhere.
Yes, like you, I very much want to bring this dialogue to a close (I'm sure readers will be as tired and as bored by it as I am).
DeleteHowever, let me respond - in brief - to your six points and final suggestion ...
1. I didn't imagine for a moment that you would wish to modify the tone and tenor of your response. But just as Deleuze advises Michel Cressole, so I would suggest you might also try to be a bit kinder in your correspondence.
2. Seems odd for a self-confessed Satanist to feel the need to compensate for "palpable malice".
3. Actually, I didn't write about the war in Gaza. In the post dated 22 April 2024, I commented on the fact that a man was prevented from crossing a London street (and threatened with arrest) due to the fact that he was (openly) Jewish. I'm really very little interested in what happens in the Middle East; my concern is far more with events in the UK.
4. Alluding to the October 7th attack is not the same as condemning Hamas for the atrocities committed on this day.
And so, just as you take note of all my personality traits and (doubtless many) character failings, I have noted that when given the opportunity to make your position clear re: the murder of 766 civilians (71 of whom were non-Israelis) on 7 October, you still avoid doing so.
5. No, I wasn't at the London demonstration - were you?
Again, if you look at the original post, I hardly mention the police officer who spoke with Gideon Falter (and certainly didn't seek to "take him down").
Funny you should think I change my position re: the police; back in your BLM phase, you were insisting they're all violent racists, now you want them to be given a pay rise!
(Oh, and btw, the term 'shapeshifting' is mostly used now by those on the lunatic fringe who subscribe à la David Icke to antisemitic conspiracy theories.)
6. All quotes (including figures) are taken out of context. Are you suggesting that the data from the ICBS is unreliable? Do you have any evidence for this? Are you disputing that there are more people in Gaza now (2.1 million) than when Israel withdrew in 2005 (1.3 million)? FYI, at present growth rate there's projected to be 3.1 million people in Gaza by 2050.
Finally, why on earth would I want to go to either Israel or Gaza? When are you going (before or after those long-planned trips to the Amazon and the Arctic)?
Quite why you prejudge the responses of TTAs readers (as if they can't think for themselves and in any event be given the space to) as likely 'bored', I've no idea, other than as a rather crude attempt to project your own stated mental state onto them and lasso a dubious idea of community. As for your own alleged boredom, I might suggest in a Beckettian vein you cultivate the state further, as it seems very generative of 'exceptional' writing for you in this context in your responding to me over and over. The irony is, of course - to which you seem weirdly oblivious - that 'Middle Eastern' political events are, as your own original post self-evidently implies, completely inseparable from 'British' events. On what basis you draw geopolitical parameters here leaves me mystified for how it seems blind to the reality of the global/multi-cultural world order, the international arms trade, as well as the sociological reality of political 'contagion'. Given your background in cultural studies, it's especially peculiar, but perhaps your fixation on some kind of sealed illusion of 'Britishness' is more a matter of your identification with far-right thinking?
ReplyDelete1. It seems odd to make 'kindness' a requirement for writing, and I don't really know what you mean by 'kinder' here anyway. Even if I did, why would this necessarily be a 'value' for me? I speak for myself, or try to, in all manner of ways in order to express both passion and complexity, not in order to curry favour with my fellow humans. Personally, as I prefer Jim Morrison's starting point that 'people are strange', if anything, the cultivation of a certain strangeness (or 'un-kindness') strikes me as a far more interesting starting point for writers - certainly in the poetic domain. Finally, how your borrowed 'advice' from Deleuze jives with your actual treatment of me in your latest fusillade of clearly rattled if not embittered remarks is baffling.
ReplyDelete2. I'm not sure where I've 'confessed' in any public forum to being (in the sense of warranting some kind of fixed label) a 'Satanist', even if, as is sometimes said of the devil himself (and as Whitman famously echoed), I contain multitudes. Not really sure what your point is here, therefore, nor your odd demand for some kind of fixed personal identity, which you consistently rail against in your own person.
3. Reading between the lines, your reference and attitude to the Palestinian content/backdrop to your post will be, for most readers, I think clear, and even clearer when one reads the actual lines in your supplementary comment to describe the demonstrators ('vitrolic', 'violent' etc., rather than e.g. 'damaged' and 'traumatised'). So much for 'kindness' here! I also think it betrays a disingenuousness at best and a lack of sophistication at worst to try to pretend that writing is only/literally what is visibly articulated in a particular frame. As in theatre, the 'hors-text', or what is outside its frame but acts upon it, is, quite literally, the 'bigger picture' here (as well as the beginning of irony, of course).
4. No, I don't feel the need to 'clarify' my 'position' on Hamas - I'm not a spokesman 'for' or 'against' their cause - to satisfy your (unclear) requirements. To repeat, I concur, however, with Eva Borgwardt's statement that the October 7 incursion can hardly be said to be 'unprovoked'. While attacks on people's lives and livelihoods are always to be regretted at some level (Ken Livingstone, responding to the death of Osama Bin Laden, once said that he felt unable to rejoice in it as he felt sad when anyone died, and I find that a very noble (and Nietzschean) position), it is for the Palestinian people to decide if they wish to be 'represented' by Hamas (though, clearly, they aren't defined by them, any more than I'm defined by the Royal Family), and for the Israeli people to decide if they wish to be represented a racist and murderous government. If they, and other nations, continue to support the Netanyahu government, however, Israel will have to face the consequences, and rightly so in my view.
ReplyDelete5. Where does your hatred/anxiety about the moon as a source of lunacy and your continued need to attach this to views you disdain, one wonders?
6.I have no idea about the correctness of the figures you cite, but anything under an Israeli banner I'd trust about as far as I could throw it. (That isn't to say I necessarily trust Palestinian figures either.) I'm far more interested in the reported 31,000 casualties and 70,000 injured, in addition to the bombed homes, hospitals, schools and universities in the Gaza Strip. Quite why you are citing demographic content in 2005 when Israel 'withdrew' in the current climate strikes me as frankly perverse - and that's before we get onto the terrible conditions many Gazans live under in their cramped territory, which is another context (it's called population density) you seem to be overlooking.
As you say you like to leave your readers with the 'final word' in these matters, I'll be happy to do that, but I'm unperturbed either way if you get triggered once again. 'Dialogue' in this context seems for you to mostly engage your usual tactic of table-turning when you are confronted with questions that make you uncomfortable and/or you wish to evade, so it goes as far as it goes.
PS I already gave you one or two good reasons to visit Israel, but if you can't bear to respond to these, that tells its own story.