| Fear of the Other Conference papers |  |
| Fear of the Other Conference papers | |
Take these two statements:
“We know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims, here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism as much as we do.”
and
“We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage –Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews –as well they should be… So can Italians not champion Italianness? Or the British their Yorkshire Pudding|?”
The first was by the British Prime Minister, speaking in the wake of the London bombings in July.
The second was by novelist-of- the moment, Lionel Shriver, writing in the Guardian Week-end magazine ( I read her book, We need to talk about Kevin, over the summer).
These two statements are of course very different from each other –their authors certainly are – but they share one common feature. The ‘we’ they invoke, implicitly or explicitly excludes groups who, though living in Britain or holding British citizenship, are somehow ‘other’
{ As a vegetarian, by the way, I am far more likely to be seen munching on a Yorkshire Pudding than supping chicken soup}.
I don’t know who the organisers of this conference had in mind exactly when they titled it ‘Fear of the other?’ But they have left me wondering:
Is ‘the other’ in the conference title meant to refer to Jews and Israelis if you are a Muslim and Palestinians and Muslims if you are a Jew - or is ‘the other’all of us?
All of us here who have a story to tell, about ourselves or our parents and grandparents, which we carry with us all our lives, about the insecurity bred from being perceived as ‘other’ than the majority, of being ‘other’ than the ones who do not know what it is to have their presence or existenceor quaint cultural habits questioned, neither now nor in the past.
‘The other,’ I would suggest, is all of us who know what it is to be held accountable for the actions or beliefs of a tiny minority who act in our name. Who know what it is to be presumed to hold views we do not necessarily, always or even sometimes share, but are able to understand. Who know what it is to be mistrusted, accused of having an international or foreign agenda, or even feared and despised
Although there are many differences between us, that is something all of us here who are Muslim, Jew, Israeli, Palestinian (or for that matter Asian, Black or other minority) have in common, or can claim some connection with, now or in the past. This common experience of ‘otherness’, in other words, is one which can bind us not divide us, if only we would let it.
But that is here. Over there, in Israel and Palestine, many of these ties that bind, or could bind, do not apply.
Over there, there is a brutal and sometimes deadly occupation of one people –Palestinian, largely Muslim – by another people, Israeli-Jews.
Over there Muslims and Christians who live in the Jewish state are routinely discriminated against and demeaned.
Over there Jews live in fear of the bombs and resistance the occupation and discrimination inspire.
Over there, ‘the other’ clearly is ‘Jews’ if you are Muslim and ‘Muslims’ if you are a Jew - with Israelis, of course, primarily in a relationship of conquest and power over Palestinians.
The problem is of course when over there spills into here with no account made for the substantial differences. That this happens is no surprise when so many Jews, Muslims and Palestinians here so passionately identify with their respective ‘sides’ over there. That is another experience in common (although not one I share) –living here, being a part of here, but also looking over there for identity, pride and self-respect
But that this spill-over is understandable does not make the results any less dangerous. Over here there are age-old festering wounds which are easily stoked and rekindled.
When Jewish organisations or official spokespeople here engage with debates about Israel/Palestine that – as a minimum -refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause [from the inception of the state of Israel onwards] they indulge the fantasy, spoken or otherwise, that there is some ‘natural’ affiliation between Islam and terrorism -an affiliation that, bizarrely, leads Muslims to value life less and commit suicide more than others - when the bitter truth is that it is centuries of colonisation, occupation, humiliation and inequality that has fuelled this sense of alienation and dispossession by many Muslims around the world.
When Muslim organisations or official spokespeople talk about the ‘BBC –not just one programme- having a ‘pro-Israeli’ or Zionist agenda (not what the BBC is best known for by the way) they rekindle the historic slur of Jewish control of the media, and much else, that used to lead Jewish organisations in this country to publish how few Jews were editors or bankers or whatever to disprove the thesis; as if individual Jewish people of diverse views working in one profession is anyway evidence of ‘control.’
(This particular claim about the BBC was most recently made in the context of a disgracefully biased, in my view, edition of Panorama on the MCB. Panorama incidentally produced another programme a while back about a Zionist organisation in America which I am not alone in thinking came close to reproducing the age-old conspiracy theory of Jewish world domination).
It was of course repeated and sustained libels about Jewish control of both capitalism and communism simultaneously (we’re a canny lot) that legitimised the pogroms, massacres, hate campaigns, ghettoisation and ultimately the attempted (and partially successful) genocide of Jews in Europe that led many Jewish people to conclude they had no place in this continent in the first place and to look elsewhere (with or without the underpinnings of Zionist ideology) for a safe haven.
Finally, by allowing the conflict over there to infest relations between Jews and Muslims or other ‘others’ over here, we not only fuel racist ideology and stereotypes -and reinforce the insecurity that bolsters Zionism or confirms Muslim rage and alienation -but we manage to miss entirely the root cause of this intractable dispute and many others around the world.
Those Jews who emigrated to Palestine left, in the main, because life was made impossible for them in Europe. No matter what Zionist ideologues will say about messiahs and promised lands, that is the simple truth. It was made impossible by genocidal racists across Europe, and it was made v. uncomfortable by many Liberals, Tories and Socialists here in England. Lord Balfour of the Jewish homeland fame was in fact one of the prime movers of the 1905 Aliens Act, the first immigration law in this country which was specifically designed to keep out Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Offering chunks of Palestine for these ‘undesirables Jewish aliens’ instead was part of the deal, which in turn reflected the imperialist power and colonialist mentality of early 20th century Britain.
[Less well known, by the way, is the lively debate amongst Enlightenment scholars and their Socialist successors –from Voltaire to Marx- about whether Jewish ethnic or religious identity had any validity at all or was a ‘problem’ which would be eradicated through emancipation or revolution or both. This went on in explicit terms at least until the Holocaust largely burnt it out.]
And if there is alienation and rage among Muslim youth then Palestine is only a part of the equation –although a very important one of course. It was Britain who conquered and controlled so much of the world that the sun never set on it, who created countries like Iraq to famously divide and rule over an oil rich territory by creating one entity for three different peoples and then encouraging one of these groups to govern.
Every time we focus our ire and disdain on each other here in the UK , in other words, we obscure these roots to current conflicts and also to racism and anti-Semitism.
As the acclaimed black columnist Gary Younge wrote in the Guardian this week: “No matter how many young drunken white men beat each other up over the weekend, there is no such thing as white-on-white crime. No matter how bitter their ethnic divides, white people never engage in tribal conflict.” He might have added “no matter that in its time Europe invaded most of the rest of the world, killing and dispossessing hundreds of thousands, terrorists are Muslims and the hidden controllers of the world are Jews.”