Judy Haiven knows we can't wait for the powerful to change, we have to organize against them

Judy Haiven is the co-founder of Equity Watch and part of the national steering committee for Independent Jewish Voices Canada. She worked for nearly 20 years as a professor of industrial relations at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Now, her main focus is left wing activism and political writing. As a Jewish person who supports Palestinian human rights, her voice is a powerful source of moral courage at a time when the ongoing genocide in Gaza is still cloaked in claims that opposing Zionism is tantamount to anti-semitism. We talk about that conflation in this interview, and why it's become a means of explaining and excusing the inexcusable: a reign of terror and a commitment to killing children, erasing families and committing genocide in Gaza. Haiven bluntly explains that the way anti-semitism has evolved is that it is now profoundly attached to criticism of Israel. What do we do in that situation? How do we find clarity? What will it take to gain enough political traction for the liberation of Palestine from Western imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism to become possible?I recommend reading her blog, which is called Another Ruined Dinner Party. It's autobiographical, searingly critical and wonderfully funny. I want to say, before we get to the interview, that I'm at a point where I can't help but feel that continuing to talk and write about Palestine is falling short. Harsha Walia mentioned on social media recently that she is humbled by the many calls for her to weigh in, to publicly speak to this unrelenting nightmare. What she said was that she is "ambivalent about writing" because it is so "jarring to have spent years connecting & organizing against violences in multiple places, registers, and geographies, and for it to be exploding all around us." I continue to give a platform to anticolonial communicators because the common sense assumption still seems to be that Palestinians are not our equals, their lives do not matter to the same extent that the lives of other human beings matter. But the overwhelming destruction, the Zionist wrath, that has been inflicted upon Palestine is impossible to ignore now. We are living in the aftermath of a foreseeable slaughter, which no one seems capable of stopping. How do we reckon with this reality?

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