Susan Abulhawa’s toleration of anti-Semitism only helps the enemies of Palestine
‘In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.’
When Black people and Palestinians start making excuses for anti-Semitism it has but one effect. It confirms the Zionist argument that Palestinian opposition to Israeli settler colonialism is motivated not by outrage at Israel’s behaviour but by hatred of Jews.
Of course the Zionists have leaped upon this. Zionist opposition to the anti-Semitism of people like Louis Farrahkan is not motivated by genuine outrage at his racism but by their own racism. When the Anti-Defamation League, a group that worked with the South Africa Secret Police BOSS and sends US Police for training Israel denouncesFarrakhan we can smell the racist hypocrisy a mile off. [See Lenni Brenner, When Israel Was Apartheid’s Open Ally].
Anti-Semitism amongst Black people in the US is reflective racism. It is equivalent to the Jewish reaction to non-Jews and anti-Semites in Russia and Poland which was often chauvinist. When the ADL home in on Louis Farrahkan and ignores Trump, Bannon, Orban and all the other genuinely anti-Semitic white supremacists we can be sure that what motivates them is not anti-Semitism but support for Zionism.
Nonetheless the apologetics of Alice Walker are deeply depressing. Walker is a brilliant novelist and anyone who has read her tale of racism, abuse and misogyny cannot help but be moved.
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| Reactions to Alice Walker's comments |
I don’t know what other planets Icke has visite but what is clear is that he is anti-Semitic. Icke isn’t dangerous in the way that the supporters of Tommy Robinson are or the supporters of Zionism are. He is more mad than bad. He believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian creatures control the world. His books, the Robots Rebellion and And the truth shall set you freeendorse the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is incomprehensible that Alice Walker has chosen to endorse Ike.
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| Reactions to Alice Walker's comments |
Isaac Stanley Baker describes the book in the Washington Post thus;
“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” which draws on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” includes this judgment: “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.” The Nazi extermination, he wrote, was “coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”
It is therefore doubly regrettable that Alice Walker, instead of reassessing what she said, dug herself further into a hole. On her own website she defends Icke, as a fellow victim of censorship and denies that he is an anti-Semite even though he holds that Jews in effect organised their own destruction. How would Alice Walker have described someone who said that Africans were responsible for the slave trade? The fact that some Africans collaborated with the slave traders and some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis does not therefore mean that either the Slave Trade or the Holocaust was a consequence of their victims’ actions. Alice Walker wrote:
‘I find Icke’s work to be very important to humanity’s conversation, especially at this time. I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead. Many attempts have been made to censor and silence him. As a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.
Walker compares the ‘attempt to smear’ Icke with the attacks on her and supporters of BDS. It is a confused melange.
But if we can ignore the racist ravings and ramblings of her Zionist critics, whose attacks on Walker are motivated only by their own racism the same cannot be said of her Black Jewish critics. One such is Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me. Nylah writes about the poem It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud.
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| Reactions to Alice Walker's comments |
It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.
Nylah describes how hostility to others can be blinding to oneself yet‘it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “ She describes ‘Our (Frightful) Duty’ as
‘a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.
The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.
The most significant stanza is where Walker writes:
For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,
Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,
Of the creeping Palestination
Of our police, streets, and prisons
In America,
Of war in general,
It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.
It is within this book that,
I believe, we will find answers
To some of the questions
That most perplex us.
Yet she couldn’t be more wrong. The Talmud explains nothing. Attacks on the Jews in Europe often used selective quotes from the Talmud, a book of disputation and interpretation in just the same way as Zionist and Islamaphobes attack Muslim using the Quoran.
According to the sales pitch for Tommy Robinson’s Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam‘Islam is a religion of war and conquest, ... right up until thousands of innocent Americans were wiped out on 9/11.’
Today in Israel racist rabbis such as Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur in Torat Hamelech use the Talmud to justify the right of Jews to murder non-Jews, yeah even their infants and suckling babes. Israel’s bloodthirsty Military Rabbinate likewise use the Talmud and the Torah to justify the slaughter and rape of Palestinians. No doubt a similar exercise could be mounted with respect to the New Testament. It was Christians not Muslims who perpetrated the Holocaust.
But the point to make is that Israel’s murderous barbarities are not caused by the Talmud anymore than the Holocaust was a product of the New Testament or ISIS was the product of the Quoran. Murderers often resort to religious texts to excuse their deeds but the same texts also exhort us to love thy neighbour as thy self.
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| Alice Walker and David Icke |
We can of course expect the Zionists to denounce Alice Walker as an ‘anti-Semite’. Although what Alice has done has provided fuel for the Zionist fire, we can disregard their criticisms of her as the ravings of hypocrites and racists. What is however more painful is the criticism from fellow anti-racists and friends and in this category I put the Israeli educationalist Nurit Peled-Elhanan. In A Letter From Nurit Peled- Elhanan, activist, educator, and friend from Israel and a Poem, she expressed her sorrow at what Alice had written:
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| Nurit Peled-Elhanan |
Dear Alice,
I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.
The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.
The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.
The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.
In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.
But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.
In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.
So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.
One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.
I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.
Much love
Nurit
To which Alice replied:
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan
***
Dear Nurit,
Thank you, Sister Nurit, for not letting go of my hand, while informing me of your views, which I welcome and respect. Though we may have areas still to discuss, and perhaps always will, given the differences in our backgrounds and cultures, my own grip is as strong.
Can you get my website: alicewalkersgarden.com where you are? If so, please read the entire poem. Also read a later poem, below, “Conscious Earthlings.” About the necessity of separating “Jews” from Zionist Nazis. I am including it here.
Also, would you mind if I published your letter to help with the discussion, which seems to be, from what I hear, more about shouting. I am open to continuing our dialogue, if you are.
Love,
Alice
This controversy has not been helped by Palestinian writer and novelist Susan Abulhawa, author of Mornings in Jenin who in the guise of supporting Alice has stumbled in with hobnail boots trampling all in her path. Her In defence of Alice Walker argues that Abulhalwa ‘Alice Walker's real 'offence' is not anti-Semitism; it is her unwavering support for the Palestinian cause.’
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| Alice Walker and Palestinian Women |
Yes that probably is what motivates some, but by no means all, of the criticism of Alice Walker, but whose fault is that? Undoubtedly Alice Walker has been viciously attacked for her support for the Palestinians and that includes the routine cry that she is ‘anti-Semitic’.
Alice Walker is a good example of how false accusations of anti-Semitism actually create anti-Semitism. In what must be rank as one of the most fatuous analogies Abulhalwa compares the reaction to Alice Walker’s comments to that of Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatourwhom the Israelis gaoled for 5 months for writing a poem:
I am reminded of Dareen Tatour, who was imprisoned by Israel for a poem she posted on Facebook, on the fanciful claim it called for violence against Jews; and Gunter Grass, whom Israel bannedand lobbied to have his Nobel Prize in Literature rescinded because he wrote a poem arguing that Germany should stop supplying Israel with nuclear submarines. Even the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest poet, was denounced as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
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| The Board of DYR still lists Lea Tsemel and Ilan Pappe |
Unfortunately Abulhawa has kept company with some pretty dodgy people previously and it was only in 2014 with their attack on BDS that she parted company with the Board of Deir Yassin Remembered. DYR, which was formed about 10 years previously, had been taken over by a right-wing American Professor Daniel MacGowan together with an anti-Semitic Israeli/Swedish fascist Israel Shamir and a British holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Its original purpose was to build a memorial to the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine, where a terrible massacre of up to 254 people had occurred in April 1948, as a means of ‘encouraging’ the Palestinians to flee from their homes.
DYR had originally included people like Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappe and Lea Tsemel, all of them Israeli anti-Zionists. One by one they all resigned from DYR. Yet if you go to the web page today you will still find some of them listed as members. As Halper remarked, “The Deir Yassin Remembered board is like Hotel California, you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave).” See, Jinjirrie, BDS Attacked by the Deir Yassin Remembered
Below is a very moving article by a Black Jewish American, Nylah Burton, about her feelings concerning what Alice Walker has written.
Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me
The Intelligencer, 26.12.18.
When I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I leaned into every word, inhaling Celie’s tragic and triumphant story. In Celie, I felt the presence and pain of my female family members brought up in rural Alabama. In Walker’s unflinching descriptions of misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, and incest, I saw an open accounting of issues buried deep within the larger southern black community — and within my own family.
Above all, I was drawn into The Color Purple because it was haunted by ghosts — the ghosts of Alice Walker’s past. Eloquently and bravely, she was able to confront generational trauma by telling a universal tale that still felt faithful to her own story. And it was Walker’s ability to throw open the shutters and allow her ghosts — our ghosts — into her writing that made it so revelatory. It cemented her standing as an acclaimed novelist, a civil-rights icon, and a formidable thought leader in the field of black feminism.
That changed abruptly two weeks ago, afterthe New York Timesinvited Walker to list her favorite books in its weekly “By the Book” column. She took the opportunity to promote David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which contains some of the most hateful anti-Semitic lies ever to be printed between covers. As excerpted in the Washington Post, Icke’s book alleged that a “small Jewish clique” had created the Russian Revolution and both World Wars, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust to boot. Icke has also accused Jews (among others) of being alien lizard people. After a week of criticism, Walker doubled down in her assessment of Icke’s indefensible work, calling him “brave” and dismissing charges of anti-Semitism as an attack on the pro-Palestinian cause.
It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.
The ghosts in The Color Purple helped me to better understand my own identity and the suppressed history of my ancestors — a journey I’m constantly engaged in as a black Jewish woman. But the ghosts in “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” leave me with more questions than answers. How did Walker’s curiosity curdle into paranoia? How was her commitment to improving the human condition twisted into support for genocide apologists? How could the artist who helped America to better understand black women use her writing to promote the oppression of another group?