Bob Lord

Voltaire famously said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

When confronted with atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza, the response of Israelis and the  blind support for Israel crowd in the U.S. (a crowd which is becoming increasingly less Jewish) is to light their hair on fire and scream “What about Hamas? What about Hamas?” 

As thin as the logic of that response is in reference to Gaza, it’s non-existent in reference to the atrocities committed by Israelis in the West Bank, which occur on nearly a daily basis.

But, as Dan Cohen of Mondoweiss reports in ‘There is no Jewish terror’: Conspiracy theory that Palestinians committed Duma firebombing spreads among Israelis, Israelis have developed a new justification for those atrocities: The Palestinians themselves are committing them. Cohen explains:

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It’s no surprise that Black Americans and Palestinians would find common cause. Nonetheless, the solidarity is impressive.

David Palumbo-Yiu of Salon reports in Black activists send clear message to Palestinians: “Now is the time for Palestinian liberation, just as now is the time for our own in the United States”. First, the statement of Palestinians from last summer, upon Michael Brown’s death, in the middle of the Gaza massacre:

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For months now, I’ve dedicated a huge chunk of my reading time to race in America. Obviously, the injustice of black Americans killed by police is a motivating force for that. But there’s more to it. At lunch after the Sanders / O’Malley Town Hall during Netroots Nation, a friend made the point that we can’t hope to achieve lasting social justice unless we achieve economic justice.

I don’t disagree with him, but I think the obverse is equally true: We won’t achieve lasting economic justice unless we achieve social justice. In other words, the two are inextricably connected. I bungled this a bit in my op-ed last year, Dr. King’s Nightmare, in which I made the observation that the Forbes 400 list members controlled more wealth in America than the entire 40 million plus African-American population. There, I put the relationship between black/white wealth inequality and racism thusly:

By the time African-Americans broke mostly (but not entirely) free from racist constraints on their economic mobility, they were whacked with a new obstacle: the almost equally suffocating injustice of extreme inequality. They’re not the only ones suffering. But because they were locked out of the egalitarian economic progress that took place during Dr. King’s lifetime, they’re disproportionately represented in the group now stuck on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The use of the word “mostly” in the first sentence was a terrible choice on my part. Compare my logic to Paul Krugman’s from a few month’s ago in Slavery’s Long Shadow:

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