Escaping israel

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i wanted to write something about this, but as it stands i am really fucking tired and not sure i’m up to it...

nevertheless...

You see, there’s this CBC article which came out last Friday about how since 2000 three thousand “Israelis” have sought refugee status in Canada. The way the article – itself based on a report in the Israeli media – put it is that they were seeking refuge due to “spousal abuse and Palestinian violence”.

Which is not a formulation you see everyday in the bourgeois malestream media.

This strikes me as meaning that these people want to get out of the ultrapatriarchal racist Israeli state because, well, they don’t like what zionism means. Because if to Palestinians zionism means dispossession, exile, even genocide – to Jews zionism means Israel. It means that the state of war and the warfare State are to replace whatever Jewish culture or just plain humanity preceded one’s “aliyah”.

Just as american settlerism took proletarians from europe and turned them into indian killers and slavemasters, or the loyal or terrified wives thereof. Just as the settlerism of new france and new england took poor and criminalized women and men of their “mother countries” and soldered them into the foundations of North American genocide.

And of course for Jewish women, just as for settler women in other colonial societies, even first class citizenship doesn’t protect you from the male violence of the warfare State. The privilege which may come from doing genocide against Palestinians won’t protect you from your father or husband or the perv down the street.

Nuthin new under the sun.

Little surprise that Alan Baker, the zionist state’s ambassador to canada, has denounced these refugee claimants as “harming Israel's image and representing it as a country whose citizens are persecuted.”

(i can just see him... “we don’t persecute citizens, just Palestinians!”... mind boggles at this point...)

More ominously, especially given the current Harper government’s outspoken support for aggressive zionism, is the israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that the department was aware of the number of Israelis seeking asylum in Canada, adding that “we have taken the matter up with the Canadians.”

Reminds me of when Jews were scrambling to get out of the dying Soviet Union, as anti-semitism crawled out from under its rock, and certain zionist canadians pressured the canadian State to refuse them entry, insisting that their “proper place” was in israel. Like it or not.

As thousands of Jews try to leave the israeli prison state, we can be sure that canadian zionists will join this chorus of denunciation. Because colonialism always depends on both the dispossession and violent genocide of the colonized – in this case the people of Palestine – and also on the settler population remaining united and complicit in their blood role.


...realizing of course that this is a slightly incoherent post. i’m tired. you get the idea, though...