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PALESTINE AND HISTORY: MACKLEMORE V. HILLARY CLINTON  
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Juan Cole
May 11, 2024
Informed Consent
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_ I have never understood the trope that Israel made generous offers
to the Palestinians (it never did) but that the Palestinians rejected
them, and therefore the Palestinians should be deprived of all their
basic rights forever. _

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered herself of some
ahistorical and distorted remarks about Palestine on _Morning
Joe,_ maintaining that the young people protesting the Gaza
atrocities do not know history.

Ms. Clinton’s self-serving description of the 2000 Camp David
process has been debunked
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historians
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In fact, her husband Bill Clinton promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993
that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank by 1997. He
then allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage that process and allowed
the Israelis to double the number of squatters they sent in to the
Palestinian West Bank to steal property and terrorize people. When
Netanyahu went out and Ehud Barak came in, Clinton sponsored
negotiations, but Barak was maddeningly vague about what he would
offer and never produced a text that Yasser Arafat could sign. It is
not clear why Arafat needed to sign anything more; he already signed
the Oslo treaty, which should have resulted in an Israeli withdrawal
that never came. Soon thereafter Barak lost to Ariel Sharon, who was
as determined to sabotage any land for peace deal as Netanyahu had
been, and he wrecked the whole process.

Her placing of all the blame on the Palestinians is typical of
inside-the-Beltway Goy Zionism, and is profoundly ahistorical. The
young people can’t be fooled by these glib words. They see what they
see.

I have also never understood the trope that Israel made generous
offers to the Palestinians (it never did) but that the Palestinians
rejected them, and therefore the Palestinians should be deprived of
all their basic rights forever. What is this, an Original Sin
doctrine? If the negotiations of 2000 fell through, why couldn’t
they have been picked back up in 2001? It is because
the _Israelis_ wouldn’t pick them back up, and went on to steal
vast swathes of private Palestinian property and to brutalize the
occupied population.

That is, in understanding these events, values as well as historical
understanding are important, and I fear the Clintons have never had
much of either.

In contrast, Irish American rapper Macklemore (Benjamin Hammond
Haggerty, b. 1983) dropped his single, “Hind’s Hall,” on May 10.
He is donating the proceeds to UN relief work in Gaza.

It may be the most powerful anti-war statement in music since Bob
Dylan’s 
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songs in the early 1960s against the nuclear arms race between the US
and the Soviet Union. And the song displays a firm knowledge of what
exactly has been done in history to the Palestinians.

The reference is to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which
students occupied briefly and renamed “Hind’s Hall.”

Hind Rajab
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a Palestinian little girl who got into her uncle’s car in northern
Gaza on January 29, along with her aunt and four cousins, to head
south, which the Israeli military said was a “safe zone” (that was
a lie). Under the shockingly inhumane Israeli rules of engagement,
unlike anything in any civilized democracy, the car was fair game just
because it was in motion out in the open. Israeli pilots and tank and
artillery commanders appear to make no effort at all to avoid killing
civilians, explaining why they have murdered over 40,000 people from
the air (over 34,000 confirmed and thousands more under the rubble).
The car was hit and everyone was killed but the five-year-old Hind.
Her cousin had tried calling the Red Crescent rescuers but then she
died of her wounds. Hind called them back herself, in an incredible
feat for a wounded child surrounded by the corpses of her loved ones.
She was asked by the operator, what about your relatives. “They’re
dead,” Hind replied.

The call went like this:

HIND RAJAB: [translated] Come take me. You will come and take me?

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Do you want me to come and take
you?

HIND RAJAB: [translated] I’m so scared. Please come. Please call
someone to come and take me.

The Red Crescent Society, the Middle Eastern branch of the Red Cross,
got permission from the Israeli military to send two rescuers. They
appear, however, to have been hit by an Israeli tank shell not far
from Hind’s position. She spent the last four hours of her life
bleeding out.

There are no Hamas operatives in this story. It is a tale not just of
reckless disregard for civilian life but of the deliberate targeting
by the Israeli army of civilians. The Red Crescent ambulance was
clearly marked and the society had gotten Israeli permission to rescue
Hind, but they were murdered anyway. This is not an error. It is
systematic sadism.

So the student protesters at Columbia University named Hamilton Hall
after Hind (rhymes with “wind”), who did not live to celebrate her
sixth birthday. She joined some 15,000 dead Palestinian children
casually wiped off the face of the earth by Israeli war criminals. The
student protesters were themselves assaulted by police and arrested.

Macklemore’s lyrics 
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and determination of the campus demonstrators:

* The people, they won’t leave
What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?
The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting
It goes against what our country is funding
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free

The first stanza implicitly contrasts the threats issued by campus
administrators and municipal authorities with the peaceful demands of
the students. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the US government,
which proclaims itself a supporter of liberty, in keeping Palestinians
stateless and unfree.

The second stanza slams the role of the police in protecting property
rather than persons, on behalf of a system of white supremacy.
Macklemore here implicitly draws a parallel between the Black Lives
Matter movement and these protests for Palestinian rights:

* Actors in badges protecting property
And a system that was designed by white supremacy (Brrt)
But the people are in the streets

He goes on to slam Meta (Facebook and Instagram) for having been
“paid off” to suppress news
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Palestine. (I actually don’t think Meta was paid off to do this, it
is just something management wanted to do.) He then criticizes the
politicians who take money from the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), which serves Israeli interests in shaping the US
government.

The so-called “land of the free,” he complains, is beset by
fear-peddling. The new generation, however, is not taking it. Nothing,
not banning TikTok and not using algorithms to hide the atrocities,
can now make the youths unsee what they saw.

* But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness
Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children

He insists on the frame of white supremacy for the denial to
Palestinians of the right to resist being occupied and subjected to
ethnic cleansing. That right is granted only depending on
“dollars” and “the color of your pigment,” he says.

He blasts the claim that it is antisemitic to be anti-Zionist, saying

* I’ve seen Jewish brothers and sisters out there and ridin’ in
Solidarity and screamin’ “Free Palestine” with them
Organizin’, unlearnin’ and finally cuttin’ ties with
A state that’s gotta rely on an apartheid system
To uphold an occupyin’ violent

He agrees with many Palestinians that the Israeli project of ethnic
cleansing — that began with the Nakbah or catastrophic expulsion of
over half of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 — has never
really ended.

* History been repeating for the last seventy-five
The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied (Woo)

He wonders if it is really more of a challenge to law and order for
students to set up tents on a campus lawn than for Israel to commit
genocide, a set of war crimes in which the president of the United
States is deeply entangled:

* Where does genocide land in your definition, huh? (Hey; hey)
Destroyin’ every college in Gaza and every mosque
Pushin’ everyone into Rafah and droppin’ bombs
The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all
And fuck no, I’m not votin’ for you in the fall (Woo)
Undecided

He also calls out his colleagues in the music industry:

* Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of
silence (Hey, woo)

He acknowledges that if he was on a label he might well be dropped,
but he says he would be fine with that.

* What you willin’ to risk? What you willin’ to give?
What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretendin’ that you didn’t exist
You’d want the world to stand up and the students finally did,
let’s get it (Woo)

Macklemore’s historical understanding runs rings around that of Ms.
Clinton.

MACKLEMORE – HIND’S HALL
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_Juan Cole [[link removed]] is the founder
and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell
Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of,
among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of
Empires
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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
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Follow him on Twitter at @jricole
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the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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* Gaza
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* Oslo Accords
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* Hilary Clinton
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* Student protests
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* Columbia University
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* Palestinians
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