‘War on Want’ and the Jewish People 28
Sam Westrop asks why John Hilary of War on Want suggests Shlomo Sand’s ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ is suitable for ‘learning more about Palestine’. This piece was originally published at The Propagandist:
The debate regarding anti-Zionism’s anti-Semitic overtones is as ever applicable and is as ever strenuously contested. On a British University campus, I regularly experience screaming denials of bigotry from not just British Islamists and their morally anaemic far-Left supporters, but also from persons considered – or at least self-perceived – to be moderates.
For a while now, I have taken what I consider to be a reasonable and positive perspective: if one ignores the unquestionable suffering and the consequent emotional and rational incentives of the Jewish people to provide themselves with the optimism, prosperity and success of the self-reliance and security of a homeland, then one can reject Zionism – or Jewish nationalism – but only on the absolute condition that one also rejects Palestinian nationalism. To choose one over the other is a consummate hypocrisy that assumes absolutely no rational premise or a desire for peaceful resolution.
One particular NGO, which any rational yet uninformed observer would expect to take an enlightened and progressive position, would be ‘War on Want’ – a registered British charity which received just under half a million pounds from the European Commission and about £160,000 from the British Government in 2009.
The stated aims of War on Want include the promise ‘to relieve global poverty however caused through working in partnership with people throughout the world’. Such wording presupposes a forward-thinking organisation that acts in the interest of progress and prosperity; regrettably, the very opposite is true.
