Am I a neocon apologist for Zionism or an appeaser of Islamofascism?” This is the question that has been haunting the British political commentator Martin Bright with respect to what he should say about Gaza. Bright wants to believe there can be a middle ground on the subject but fears that if he tries to occupy it, he risks being stigmatized as either a diehard defender of Israel or as a supporter of terrorism.
What makes Bright’s dilemma acute is his role as the first-ever Gentile editor of the Jewish Chronicle, a British weekly soaked in Zionist sentiment. Writing in the paper, Bright recorded the profound impression made on him by Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, “Footnotes in Gaza” (2009). As a sop perhaps to Zionist readers, Bright stressed that Sacco is much concerned with myth making and the fallibility of memory and that his is no simple portrait of Israel as a pariah state. Nevertheless, he had plainly been made more than a little uncomfortable by Sacco’s dramatic evocation of the long-standing brutalization of Gazan people at Israel’s hands.
So great was Bright’s unease that he dispatched an SOS to Facebook, raising the question: What would you do if like him you were the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle and obliged to have an opinion about Gaza. The general verdict of his Facebook respondents seems to have been that his pursuit of the middle ground was a lost cause, since not only was the predicament of Gaza patently unspeakable, it was also the unmistakable product of Israeli oppression. The most sympathetic response he received came from a Muslim, who advised him to “write without emotional attachment to any side and relax”. With good reason, Bright felt this was much easier said than done. Mindful of how deeply controversy about Gaza has permeated Britain’s domestic political agenda at a time of intense concern about terrorism, he acknowledged that in 2010 he would hardly be able to duck the issue of where he stands on it. Henceforth, he proposes “humbly” to follow the example of Joe Sacco by “setting aside personal preconceptions and looking at the facts”.
This, though, is to traduce Sacco’s book. Seeking to recruit the graphic artist as a morally conflicted fellow spirit, Bright suggests that Sacco’s portrayal of the Palestine/Israel conflict is much more ambiguous that it actually is. Though “Footsteps in Gaza” does indeed raise questions about the fallibility of memory and historical truth, it leaves no doubt that the people of Gaza are victims of savage Zionist injustice; like its predecessor, Sacco’s internationally acclaimed book, “Palestine” (2001), it is a deliberate attempt to educate otherwise ill-informed Westerners about the appalling adversity that has been the lot of Palestinian men, women and children throughout the course of a hideously unequal conflict.
Bright is wrestling with a phony dilemma. When every allowance has been made about Israel’s right to defend itself, the notion that there could be a middle ground of opinion about the humanitarian catastrophe it has precipitated in Gaza taxes credulity. Jewish opinion would be outraged were anyone to suggest that he or she was struggling to decide what to think and say about any comparable persecution of Jews, or indeed about persecution of Jews of any description.
What grounds are there for agonizing about how to react to Israel’s crippling economic blockade of Gaza and the mass killing of Gazans by its rampaging army last year? Such agonizing seems all the more gratuitous in the light of the authoritative UN Goldstone Report documenting Israeli atrocities in Gaza. To equivocate about the issue is akin to someone having equivocated in the late 1930s about what line to take on Guernica, the obscene aerial destruction of the Basque town of that name by Nazi and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War, which thanks to Picasso’s famous painting, became the defining image of fascist military brutality.
In London this January, under the banner “Gaza: Our Guernica”, supporters of the Palestinian cause have been organizing countless events with the aim of ensuring that Israel’s war crimes in Gaza are not forgotten. At one of them, the veteran political writer and activist, Tariq Ali, observed that Israel’s Gaza offensive has outraged civilized opinion across the world as no Israeli action against the Palestinians ever outraged it before. A chasm has begun to yawn between the reflexively submissive attitude toward Israel of Western governments and the very different attitude towards it of increasing numbers of ordinary people. There is an emergent popular consensus that Israel has branded itself a rogue state whose vicious policies need to be systematically challenged, just as those of apartheid South Africa were challenged. Critics of Israel have cause to feel that they are part of an embryonic mass civil movement that will in the fullness of time render the case for justice for the Palestinians impossible for Western governments to ignore, however much Israel may persist in its efforts to manipulate them.
It is on this burgeoning pan-continental movement that the artistry and moral passion of Joe Sacco is having such a galvanizing impact. All by themselves his unique exposes of the chronic suffering of Palestinian people are terminally discrediting the Zionist narrative of the Middle East conflict. But this is a time when books challenging Zionism are pouring from the presses; a notable new one in relation to Gaza is Ramzy Baroud’s “My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”, a compelling memoir of lifelong resistance to Israeli oppression by the author’s late irrepressible father, Mohammed. That there is no corresponding upsurge of books championing Israel says much about how far, by virtue of its blatantly racist subjugation of the Palestinians, the Jewish state has forfeited the status it once enjoyed in the West as a noble cause. No wonder that as a Gentile writing for a Zionist organ, Martin Bright is experiencing such unease.
