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‘We Are All Palestinians’

A free preview of Anthony Barnett’s new monthly column exclusive to the Byline Times print edition

From the November edition of the Byline Times

We Are All Palestinians

My entire political lifetime has been accompanied by a deep political myth. That the sheer inhumanity of the Holocaust that annihilated six million Jews means that, at a fundamental level, they represent humanity itself. For their history symbolises our existential vulnerability and victimhood. It is something that every one of us can identify with.

This profound identification was then spliced onto the existence of Israel so that its expansion was excused, a process Pankaj Mishra forensically illuminates in his London Review of Books lecture on the Shoah after Gaza. As he sets out, it is excused no longer and we are living through a “rupture in the moral history of the world”.

I felt this bodily before I’d reflected on it, after my younger daughter returned from the first demonstration against the war unleashed on Gaza. She said that the crowd chanted “we are all Palestinians”. My hair stood on end. 

The pitiless ruthlessness which was to reduce Gaza to 40 million tons of rubble, the genocide to which Palestinians were being subjugated as they cried out for help before our eyes, has reversed the terms. Israel has defined itself as an expansionist state seeking its own equivalent of Lebensraum, justified by Biblical claims that are as farcical as they are murderous. And the Palestinians have become the new Jews. 

It is striking that two articles both published this September by Jewish authors, as removed from each other politically as is possible, within the realm of secular reason, observe that Israel is losing its “legitimacy”. 

Etienne Balibar – describing himself as an intellectual, a socialist, and the grandson of a victim of the gas chambers – states it outright, in an eloquent memorandum in Philosophy World Democracy. Thomas Friedman, The New York Times foreign affairs opinion columnist since 1995, is naturally more oblique. He merely sees it coming, writing that legitimacy as “crucial” in an essay that argues “Netanyahu’s strategy is a disaster”.

The Bible also speaks of Gaza. It says that it was there that the Israelite Samson, blinded but with God-given strength, destroyed the Philistines as he brought down their temple. But he also brought it down upon himself. 

REGULAR WRITERS EXCLUSIVE TO the PRINT edition


  • Peter Oborne: Diary
  • Sonia Purnell: Perspectives
  • Simon Nixon: Political Economy
  • Rosie Holt: Election Diary!
  • Chris Grey: Shades of Grey
  • Alexandra Hall Hall: Global Flashpoints
  • Mic Wright: Bad Press Awards
  • Anthony Barnett: Notes on Politics
  • Otto English: Myth of the Month
  • John Mitchinson: Zeitgeisters
  • CJ Werleman: Worldview
  • Penny Pepper: Who Are the Disabled?
  • Jonathan Lis: Political Culture
  • Tim Walker: Mandrake


Another Lens on Gaza

The outrageous impunity with which the Israeli Government is escalating its war of expansion is in part permitted by the one-sided coverage provided by our dominant media

If you are looking for modern, vigorous, and professional reporting on the Middle East, a great place to start is by signing up to Zeteo, founded by our own Swindon-born Mehdi Hassan after he was purged from MSNBC earlier this year. It has just been awarded an integrity prize in Washington by democracy and human rights organisation DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now) and Mehdi’s speech sets out what it is trying to achieve. 

With 250,000 followers – 30,000 of them paying like myself – it is off to a good start. Middle East Eye plays a similar role in Britain but brings a more traditional print-media model to the web, while Zeteo has the visual edge with its origins in television debate, reporting, and interrogation.


Citizen David

Perhaps the leading political intellectual in Britain, certainly on the left, of the last 50 years, David Marquand died in April. He was 89. I attended a recent memorial event for him at Mansfield College, Oxford. We all shared the way the official view of him, as someone who was serially disloyal, missed the fundamental consistency of his allegiance to an open, democratic politics. 

He famously switched parties, from being a Labour MP, to becoming a founder of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a Liberal Democrat, then rejoining Labour, then denouncing Blair, seeking a Lib-Lab pact in 2010, and finally, in despair, leaving England for his native Wales and joining Plaid Cymru

But I quoted from his note to the ceremonial officer when he turned down the offer of a CBE in 2019, writing: “The fact is that I strongly disapprove of the honours system in this country and would be betraying convictions that I have held for decades were I to let my name go forward.”

How should we describe his decades-long convictions? 

He was not a collectivist. He adjured any association with communism in any of its forms – he was never ‘Comrade David’. But nor, even though he was the son of a Labour minister, was he a Labourist – he wasn’t ‘Brother David’ either. Nor did he embrace that peculiarly British form of collectivism, the tribalism of ‘clubland’. He may well have been a member of a London club out of convenience, but he wasn’t a ‘chap’ who could be defined by his loyalty to any such attachment.  

What, then, was he? The answer in two words is ‘Citizen David’.

He was exceptionally far-sighted. Writing in Prospect in 1999, he saw the danger of an emerging populism, with its core belief in a ‘one true people’ drowning the pluralism he regarded as essential to recognising our multiple identities.

“The case against the populist mentality is moral, not practical,” he concluded. “It has to do with the nature of democracy. The populist argument for democracy is that the people should be sovereign. Accept that, and populism prevails. But it is not the only argument, or the best. The pluralist vision of democracy implies a deliberative, reflective politics of power-sharing, and mutual education. Absolute popular sovereignty is as alien to it as absolute parliamentary sovereignty.” An insight that strikes at the commanding principle of our monarchical system.    

Anthony Barnett is a writer and campaigner. He was a co-founder of openDemocracy, and is the author of ‘Taking Control!: Humanity and America after Trump and the Pandemic’ and ‘The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump’

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