The debate about Israel and Palestine has gained new momentum after the recent weeks of violence in Israel and Gaza.
Right now, something that can be compared to a battle of sympathy is raging on social media, but the political parties remain on the side they usually stand on – which may be an explanation for the over-trampling and exaggerations.
Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for future has been the sender of a highly controversial Instagram post with sweeping and conspiratorial claims about the Western media’s agenda and funding, which is now spreading around the world. The post raised questions about the movement’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, to Hamas and its acts of terror, and to far-right conspiracy theories.
Nevertheless, it took almost a day from the posting of the post for FFF Sweden to post its own and partially divergent position on the matter.
That a climate network that brings together young people becomes a platform for anti-Israeli propaganda is perhaps not so surprising in the violent climate that prevails after Hamas’s bestial attack in Israel and Israel’s subsequent military actions in Gaza.
A breeding ground for criticism of Israel
But there is a breeding ground for criticism of Israel within the environmental movement and also in the Green Party, which is rooted in a strong support behind the Palestinian cause. That criticism has gotten out of hand at irregular intervals, most recently last week when the party was forced to distance itself from a statement by a local politician who asserted that the people who survived the Holocaust are now carrying out another holocaust. The distancing came after the Swedish Committee against Anti-Semitism criticized the whole thing.
If you ask environmental party politicians why the party always sides with Palestine, the answer is about human rights and being in opposition to the government. A slightly more cynical politician on the left points out that climate activists and young people can draw parallels between the Palestinians’ disadvantage against a stronger Israel and the climate issue’s disadvantage against a difficult-to-change world.
But the fact is that the Israel-Palestine issue is almost an inherited conflict issue in Swedish politics, “the progenitor of all foreign policy”, as one left-winger said.
The Green Party is pro-Palestinian
All parties have clear positions that new generations of politicians are schooled in. Some parties have changed their views during Israel’s long existence, but the Environmental Party has been pro-Palestinian since its foundation, and the party’s first spokesperson, Per Gahrton, has left a deep impression with his strongly anti-Israel rhetoric.
All parties are locked in their positions and it is easy to overstep when eager debaters look for strong images and metaphors. The debates themselves are not always comprehensible either to the audience or to the debaters themselves.
Tomorrow Friday there is a debate in the Riksdag on the situation in Israel and Palestine. An excellent start for those who want to familiarize themselves with the locked positions in what is usually called domestic foreign policy.