Content Warnings: brief discussion of anti-Blackness, brief discussion of Islamophobia, discussion of antisemitism, brief allusion to genocide
Video 1 (https://twitter.com/jacktomhogan/status/1392172740967292929)
Fred Moten: Settler colonial states take it upon themselves to imagine themselves to be the living embodiment of the legitimacy of the nation-state as a political and social form.
For me, there's two reasons to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine. One is because they're human beings and they're being treated with absolute brutality. But the other is that there's a specific resistance to Israel as a nation-state.
And for my money, to be perfectly clear about this, I believe that the nation-state of Israel is itself an artifact of antisemitism.
If we thought about Israel and Zionism not just as a form of racism that directly results in the displacement of Palestinians, but if we also think about them as artifacts of the historic displacement of Jews from Europe, right, in the same way that we might think of, let's say, Sierra Leone or Liberia as artifacts, okay, of racist displacement.
If we think about it that way, okay, and - and the reason I'm saying this is just to make sure that you know that there's a possible argument against the formulation that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, when we know that Donald Trump is a staunch supporter, and people like Pat Robertson in the United States are staunch supporters, that oughta help us to the fact that you can be deeply antisemitic and support the state of Israel. These things go together. They're not antithetical to one another.
[applause]
So that it becomes important for us to be able to suggest that resistance to the state of Israel is also resistance to the idea of the legitimacy of the nation-state. It's not an accident that Israel has taken upon itself— that when Israel takes upon itself... when the defense of Israel manifests itself as a defense of its right to exist, this is important. It's a defense not just of Israel's right to exist, but of the nation-state as a political form's right to exist.
Video 2 (https://twitter.com/jacktomhogan/status/1392174183518515203)
Fred Moten: And nation-states don't have rights. What they're supposed to be are mechanisms to protect the rights of people who live in them, and that has almost never been the case. And to the extent that they do protect the rights of the people who live in them, it's in the expense— it's at the expense of the people who don't.
So, part of what's at stake, one of the reasons why it's important to pay particular attention to this issue, why we oughta resist the ridiculous formulation that singling out Israel at this moment is itself antisemitic, is because it's important to recognize that Israel is the state, right.
For reasons that I think are totally bound up with antisemitism, right, Israel is the state that, insofar as it makes the claim about its right to exist, is also making the claim about the nation-state's right to exist as such.
It's this— it's that same kind of argument that... I remember, d— and I'm sorry I keep going on so long, but I— there's that— there's those formulations that people often make about Black people and/or Indigenous people as if they were the essence of the human, right. So that every time Black people or Indigenous people do something that supposedly we're not supposed to do, it constitutes a violation to the very idea of the human. Right? Because somehow, as a function of the nobility of our suffering, we constitute the very idea of humanity, right.
And there's nothing more brutal, right? Nothing more vicious than having, than being consigned to that position. Similarly, Israel, as a function of antisemitism, has now been placed in the position of protecting the very idea of the nation-state.
So for me, first and foremost, it's important to have solidarity with the Palestinian people. But second of all, it's important to actually have some solidarity with the Jewish people insofar as they can and must be separated from the Israeli state.
Because ultimately, the fate of the Jewish people, if it is tied to this na— to the nation-state of Israel, will be more brutal than anything that has yet been done or that can be imagined. And I mean everything that you think I mean when I say that.
Video 3 (https://twitter.com/jacktomhogan/status/1392176645197414404)
Robin D. G. Kelley: If you look at the policies of Israel with respect to the, kind of, the occupation, and even forms of apartheid that operate within '48 borders, that is the white supremacist state. And then, what they have in common is white supremacy. That ultimately, that is the fundamental thing that—
And that's why the Steve Bannons and the Donald Trumps and the— of the world be, could get a pass in a way that someone like Omar Barghouti is being persecuted, right?
So that said, just a couple things on the question of solidarity. You know, one of the.. Angela Davis made a really important point in her most recent book that looks at, you know, this, these recent struggles around Ferguson and Palestine. And, you know, she points out that 2014 was really a turning point. And where you have the death of Michael Brown and the protests around Mike Brown in Ferguson, simultaneous with the assault on Gaza.
And that the connection between these two created a space and possibility for a solidarity that's not new — it's been, you know, ongoing — but kind of deepening of that solidarity.
And it's been interesting because on the one hand, it creates some opportunities for linking these struggles. Looking at the Israeli security apparatus and this relationship to the US police state on the one hand.
On the other hand, it's also opened up really difficult conversations about anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. That you have examples of Black Islamophobia and, and Palestinian anti-Blackness.
And so that — instead of being a problem, instead of seeing that as a problem for solidarity, it becomes an opportunity to work through questions of our histories, of our relationships.
And also seeing a different kind of future, one in which what appears to be parochial struggles, or local struggles, even national ones, can begin to think beyond their own location.