It is perfectly legitimate to criticise Israeli settlement policy, a topic that has consumed a great deal of newspaper column inches in recent weeks. What is not legitimate, however, is to make arguments based on false claims and hyperbole, lacking in context while resorting to intemperate language.
Writing in The Guardian, Marxist psychoanalyst Professor Slavoj Zizek makes a number of charges against Israel that do not stand up to scrutiny. Below are some of those charges along with rebuttal:
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Zizek begins by highlighting the recent eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in eastern Jerusalem.
However, like much of the UK media Zizek fails to add appropriate context. As outlined by Just Journalism’s Rafael Broch, “the two Arab families…were evicted for failing to pay rent in violation of the terms of their tenancy agreements. The Arab families who have kept to the terms of their tenancy agreement have not been evicted.”
The dream underlying Israel’s plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?
Zizek appears to be applying a peculiar form of his psychoanalysis, using a mural on a wall to make the serious and false accusation of ethnic cleansing. Is painted scenery the best that Zizkek can manage to make such an absurd claim?
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Referring to rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, Zizek asks “But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?“
Perhaps Zizek should be asking why Palestinians have fired thousands of rockets from Gaza after Israel disengaged from the territory in 2005. Is Zizek really suggesting that Qassams from Hamas controlled Gaza are directly correlated to the situation on the Fatah dominated West Bank?
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Zizek claims:
What goes on is the slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.
The reality is quite different however. As restrictions on movement and checkpoints have been removed, the West Bank economy has started to improve. As Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times, the International Monetary Fund states that the West Bank economy should grow by 7% this year. As Michael Oren writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Among the improvements of the last year cited by the IMF and other financial observers are an 18% increase in the local stock exchange, a 94% growth of tourism to Bethlehem – generating 6,000 new jobs – and an 82% rise in trade with Israel.”
Zizek simplistically claims that new settlements are being built. This, despite an unofficial freeze on building new settlements for the past few years and actions to evacuate illegal settlements that have been built without government approval.
While there have been some disgraceful incidences of criminal behaviour on the part of Israeli settlers towards Palestinians, they are recognised as such by the Israeli state, which has endeavoured to uphold the rule of law. The charges of religious desecration and targeted killings of Palestinian farmers, however, have no basis and one can only wonder how Zizek is able to make such outlandish accusations.
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Zizek continues:
one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.
Robin Shepherd, arguing that that the Nazification of Israel as a technique of denigration has begun to invade the mainstream, asks in response:
what possessed Zizek to use, and the Guardian to allow, the term “Palestinian-frei”? It is obviously an inversion of the Nazi term Judenfrei, literally meaning free of Jews. (Linguists suggest that it is not as strong as the term Judenrein (cleansed of Jews) but its purpose and etymology is clear.)
In addition, is Zizek really suggesting that Israel is planning to eventually remove all Palestinians from the West Bank in an act of ethnic cleansing? The notion is, of course, without foundation and completely false.
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But perhaps Zizek’s real views are exposed in the following sentence where he continues to criticise Israeli settlements and settlers:
The same story has been repeated since 1949: Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by the international community, counting on the fact that the peace plan will not work.
Referring to the year 1949, does Zizek not recognise that Israeli settlement in the West Bank only began after Israel gained control over the territory following the 1967 Six Day War? Or is he implying that all of Israel has been illegally settled post-1948?
Viewing Israel as an illegitimate and illegal colonial implant would be in keeping with Slovaj Zizek’s Marxist background. Is it any surprise that The Guardian would publish such an op-ed?
Send your considered comments to The Guardian – [email protected]
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