How nice to see Hamp again at the center of a tangled political controversy: whether to travel to Israel, and buy Israeli goods and services, or not to.
And Northampton did the right thing.
When local activists challenged Police Chief Jody Kasper about traveling to Israel to get training by the Israeli security forces, our town took a step closer to one of the more important, if vilified, political movements in the world: The Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The BDS aims to pressure Israel to recognize not only the intrinsic human rights of the Palestinian people, but also to ensure equal rights and justice for all those living in Israel — Muslim, Jew, Christian.
It was serendipitous that the decision was made shortly after the United Nations International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
To be clear: This was not about the anti-terrorism training our top cop might have gotten, nor the need for it after the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. The question is whether or not Israel is, or should be, a political pariah state for its treatment of Arab and Muslim citizens in Israel and those it rules over in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza.
But of course, like the rest of our politics today, you cannot really discuss the question of Israel and Palestine. Minds are closed, battened, nailed and booby-trapped on this intractable, poisoned topic. And as you cannot convince a Trumper their man is ruining the nation, nor a Resister that Trump might do some good, so you cannot convince a Zionist of the inalienable rights of Palestinians, and you cannot convince a Palestinian supporter of the paramount needs of Israel to defend itself.
For decades, the talk was of peace between these two peoples, but no longer. To paraphrase the reggae star Peter Tosh, we don’t want no peace, we want equal rights and justice. And those are the terms now: Peace is impossible.
Recent events in Israel prove this beyond a doubt. It might look like Israel is just going with the flow of right-wing authoritarianism in places like Turkey, the Philippines and here in the U.S. But really, it has taken the lead.
In July, the Israeli parliament passed a nation-state law that finally defined what the world has known about Israel for a long time: It is an exclusively Jewish state that has sacrificed equal rights and justice for a narrow, tribal identity.
As reported at the time, the law:
■Restricts uniquely “to the Jewish people … the right to exercise national self-determination.”
■Makes Hebrew Israel’s official language; downgrading Arabic to a “special status” that used to be called the back of the bus.
■Enshrines “Jewish settlement as a national value” and commands that the government “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”
The most hated symbol of all, the settlers in the West Bank, are now a protected “value.”
It is neither extremist nor anti-Semitic to say: Can you imagine if our Congress passed such a law? Swap “native-born Americans” for the Jewish people, English for Hebrew, and progressives would run riot through the streets, although at last bout 40 percent of Americans would applaud it. And that is one of the cursed curiosities that keeps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict burning so hot: There are few quarrels that find progressives and conservatives on the same side as we find there.
But the nation-state law has at least stripped away any facade that Israel is now more than an exclusive nation reserved for one people who would keep it only by force of arms. Or, lamentably, that Israel had begun as a laudable experiment, a refuge for the oppressed and despised, but it has matured into a militarized, racialized, right-wing island unto itself.
You can lament that reality, as I do, or yell, “I told you so!” But the Israeli Knesset on behalf of the Israeli Jewish people has closed the door on peace. The struggle for the equal rights and justice for all those living in historical Palestine is the only politics left.
And yes, Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, helped nail the door shut by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And yes, this debate continues amid a horrific rise in anti-Semitism, here in America and in Europe.
What Israel shows is what many nations have already learned: You cannot colonize the land of another people without sowing the seeds of hatred and war for decades. Or for centuries, as the British found out when they settled Scotch-Irish Protestants in Catholic Northern Ireland.
As in our nation and much of the world, the time for talking is over, and the time for action has begun. We either must take a stand or do nothing and let the rot of doing nothing continue to poison our global body politic.
Northampton made the right call — and they, we, did it in the right way.
Joe Gannon, author and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.