“Jews will not replace us.”
You may remember this chant from the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. It relies on a racist conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement, which accuses Jewish people in positions of power of using non-white immigration to bring about a genocide of white people. That’s antisemitism, and it’s repugnant.
Now consider the case of Mohammed El-Kurd, one of the two writers at the centre of the storm over Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Kurd’s family live in a house in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Some years ago the family decided to build an extension to their house. Permits to extend or renovate homes Palestinians live in are rarely if ever granted. They proceeded.
After Jerusalem’s Israeli municipality confiscated the keys to the extension, they somehow ended up in the hands of a group of Jewish settlers, who moved in. This happened when Mohammed El-Kurd was a child. You can watch a video he made in 2011, when he was 12, of what this was like. He is now a grown man, and settlers are still “sharing” his home, their residency underpinned by the guns of a state of which the settlers are citizens and the Kurd family are not.
After living under a multi-generational military occupation, it’s not surprising he is lashing out on Twitter.
On the wall outside the Kurds’ house are spray-painted Arabic words. They say “we won’t leave”. But if they said – in Arabic or English – “Jews will not replace us”, they would not be referring to the racist nonsense that circulates on alt-right chat sites. They would be describing a campaign actually being carried out in the city’s occupied east to “Judaise” it, one house at a time, aided by the Israeli authorities and Jewish organisations gathering millions of dollars in donations. One such organisation, the City of David Foundation, counts Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich as a backer.
This campaign is also being carried out across the occupied West Bank and within Israel, with renewed vigour since the swearing-in of a government in which two racists with a long history of incitement to violence – Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – now have unprecedented powers. Ben-Gvir’s powers are over the police. Smotrich’s are over the administration of the occupied territories, powers that until now were always exercised by Israel’s military.
You might think the controversy over Adelaide Writers’ Week is about one word or another. Or about what sort of Palestinians should be invited to speak. Or how many of them. And whether they should be matched by Jewish or Israeli counterparts while speaking. But it’s actually about creating a smokescreen around Israel’s conduct. As the flames grow higher in the West Bank, fanned by politicians who talk without shame about ethnic cleansing, we would be arguing about the wording of the fire alert.
It has been argued in this country that use of the word apartheid to describe what Israel is doing is antisemitic. Or that use of the word occupied is pejorative. Or that you shouldn’t urge people to divest from the Israeli state because to do so is antisemitic. That you can’t “single out” Israel for criticism because … you guessed it.
I have always believed that using the word Nazi in political debates, but especially those involving Israel, is misguided and counter-productive, and I’ve told people so. It treats the Middle East and its history as a sideshow of Europe’s, with all its hatreds and crimes.
But the West’s history means that in the cacophony of competing voices, those who make the comparison believe it will cut through and eliminate grey areas. They are wrong, but they shouldn’t be disqualified from speaking on that basis. As the Israeli writer Jacobo Timerman said during the invasion of Lebanon 40 years ago, “if criticism of and accusation against Israel … are going to be dismissed as expressions of antisemitism because they contain verbal images which correspond with Nazi crimes against the Jews, we will become alienated from the world in which we live”.
Until something is done at the international level about the reality Palestinians are experiencing, the argument about comparisons and terminology is one that will continue chiefly among people who aren’t actually interested in working to change that reality.
To better understand what is going on in Palestine, I suggest you buy a ticket and get yourselves over to the Adelaide Writers’ Week for the perspective of Mohammed El-Kurd and other Palestinians. Sure, you might find some of what you hear discomfiting and even painful. But you’re not the one who is fighting for your freedom.
Maher Mughrabi is The Age’s features editor.