To a packed audience in Sheffield Ilan Pappe managed to draw some optimism from the current situation. The full talk is posted below.
There were many many excellent points but here are some key take aways – make your own judgement by watching the whole thing.
Israeli society is fragile. Our task in ‘Global Palestine’ is to exacerbate its fragility: our local victories are victories for Palestine as challenging global Israel increases its fragility. Palestine is a marker for many – and we see this in Italy – revealing the mendacity and hypocrisy of neo-liberal leadership across the world. How can we tolerate a leadership that not only allows but is complicit in this genocide.
Pappe quoted Gramsci: there can be no revolution without imagination. That is: imagine about what it is like after. So for Palestinians they need space to consider and set out what it looks like without the occupation, without apartheid and how the right of return can be actualised. The more this is discussed the more mature the ideas when the time actually comes, as it will.
Especially relevant for Sheffield, Ilan talked about the weapons industry and its role in aiding Israeli power in general and the carrying out the genocide in particular. Sheffield industry is being militarised by this government so this was highly pertinent: workers had to be given some choices in order to link up with anti arms industry protests. As we intensify our work on bringing pressure on Forge Solutions, so this point can influence how we communicate with the firm’s employees.
