United against Britain's 'Israel lobby'
Lavish praise was heaped on some of Britain's media in the English-language Saudi Arab News, where columnist Neil Berry hailed last week's screening of "a groundbreaking Dispatches documentary for Britain's Channel 4 television, trailed by an article in The Guardian newspaper, [that] investigated the covert influence of Britain's 'Israel lobby.'" If you take Berry's word for it, Tony Blair was a Zionist stooge, the British Labor party is run by the "Israel lobby," and if the Conservatives come to power in Britain, things will get even worse - if that's at all possible. But Berry assures his readers that not all is lost: he describes the publication of the Mearsheimer/Walt book on "The Israel Lobby" in the US as "an epoch-making event" that has led over the past few years "to a sea change in the climate of Western intellectual, as well as general public opinion, vis-à-vis the boundaries of debate about the Jewish state." Indeed, relating to another event that caused much debate in Britain last week - namely the publication of the English translation of Shlomo Sand's new book, The Invention of the Jewish People - Berry confidently asserts that this book "is of similarly cardinal significance." So let's try to get this straight: first the Jews (or maybe the Zionists?) invented the Jewish people, then the Jewish people and/or the Zionists proceeded to invent the Jewish Lobby - no, make this the "Israel lobby" - and then all these inventions went on to control much of the world. Obviously, the idea that every Jewish achievement, including nowadays the Jewish state, comes at the expense of non-Jews and is somehow due to one big conspiracy that needs to be uncovered and undone, is hardly new. It unmistakably echoes the idea "Die Juden sind unser Unglück," that is: "the Jews are our misfortune," a concept first made popular by the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke in the 1880s and later adopted by the Nazis. Kristallnacht reflections
When President Obama welcomed the newly re-elected German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Washington last week, he commented on the imminent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. But as Merkel emphasized in an address to both houses of the US Congress, November 9 is also the anniversary of the so-called Kristallnacht in 1938, the "night of the broken glass," when Nazis brutalized Jews and attacked their homes and property in an orgy of unrestrained violence that "later turned into the break with civilization that was the Shoah." In the same speech, Merkel also declared that a "nuclear bomb in the hands of an Iranian president who denies the Holocaust, threatens Israel and denies Israel the right to exist is not acceptable." A few weeks earlier, Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had focused on this specific issue in his address to the UN General Assembly, where he sought to highlight the danger posed by a fanatic Iranian regime that is pursuing its nuclear ambitions at all costs while denying the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist. 'The Arabs will change'
President Shimon Peres hosted his second "Facing Tomorrow" conference in Jerusalem last week. In an interview with Newsweek shortly after the conclusion of the conference, Peres acknowledged the many problems and challenges Israel was facing, but also re-iterated his oft-stated conviction that peace in the Middle East is possible. At one point, he noted: "Some people ask, 'What will happen to Israel in the coming 100 years vis-à-vis the Arab world?' And my answer is, the Arabs will change. Not us. They have to join in a new age." There are of course many Israelis who don't quite share their president's optimism, but some recently published books make the case that the kind of change Peres is expecting is already taking place in the Arab world. One of these is Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows. However, as a sympathetic yet critical review in The New York Times has pointed out, Wright's own research actually gives little reason to think she is right to believe that "a budding culture of change" at the grassroots level is about to bring meaningful and constructive reform to the Middle East. When it comes to the attitudes toward Israel prevalent in the Arab world, it is certainly difficult to detect any positive change. Particularly dismal to contemplate is the fact that even the two Arab states to have signed peace agreements with Israel have shown little interest in any normalization of ties. If we just look at the news from Egypt and Jordan over the past few weeks, the evidence seems clear: instead of any sign of change, it's the same old story of deep-seated hatred toward Israel and Jews. 'Psychoactive' against Israel
What a bizarre title, you may be thinking - and you're right. But it only reflects how bizarre things can get when you venture out to the fringes where it's fashionable to demonize Israel as a uniquely evil force in today's world. It wouldn't be worth writing about it were it not for the fact that when it comes to demonizing Israel, nothing is too absurd to get aired in respectable media outlets or at academic conferences; indeed, there are even prestigious awards to be won. A good example is former Israeli lawyer and political activist Felicia Langer, who was recently awarded Germany's "Federal Merit Cross, First Class." Langer, who has lived in Germany for some 20 years, has made a name for herself as a fierce critic of Israel who wouldn't even shy away from language that suggests comparisons between the Jewish state and Nazi Germany. Reportedly, she left Israel out of protest and has explained that she made "a politically conscious choice for Germany ... because I understood with what brutality and sophistication Israel was exploiting the Germans' guilt." Obviously, the kind of positive reinforcement bestowed on Langer is by and large reserved for Jewish "critics" of Israel, because if a non-Jew suggests that Israel should be suspected of genocidal intentions or be compared to Nazi Germany, most people realize that this kind of "criticism" of Israel is tainted by anti-Semitic attitudes. The phenomenon of Jews eager to level those preposterous charges against Israel has led to a debate about the question if this is a manifestation of "Jewish anti-Semitism." Recently I came across an article that railed against the "tropes of 'Jewish antisemitism'" and dismissed the "concept of the 'self-hating Jew,'" which was described as having been "dignified with a pseudo-psychopathology by those keen to suppress dissent." The writer, Antony Lerman, is a regular contributor to the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog, and this was not the first time that he expressed his passionate rejection of the concept of Jewish "self-hatred." One of the previous occasions was in Lerman's recent review of a book by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, whom Lerman criticized sharply:
Since a note at the end of the review announces that Antony Lerman "is writing a book reflecting on his personal experience of Zionism and Israel," we can expect to hear more from him in defense of even the most outlandish accusations against Israel. While I myself have reservations about the concept of Jewish "self-hatred" - though for very different reasons than Lerman - it seems to me that his thinking on the matter is rather confused. To give just one example, consider his assertion: "Far from being the antithesis of Jewish self-hatred, it is arguable that Zionism was actually a display of it." Really? The blood libel 'Kultur'
Few readers of the Israeli or Jewish media will have missed the reports about a recent article in a Swedish tabloid that accused Israel of abducting and killing Palestinian civilians to harvest their organs. Since the story broke last week, a number of interesting commentaries have been written; among the most worthwhile to check out is Barry Rubin's post, which includes several updates on additional developments and information. I must confess that I was struck by a perhaps rather marginal aspect of the story: the fact that the article was published in the "Kultur" section of the paper. There may be some entirely mundane reasons for this arguably odd placement, but I felt that by publishing the article in the "Kultur" section, the paper's editors had - probably unwittingly - made a very fitting choice. The 'Israeli Apartheid' gospelAdvertised as "The new book by Ben White" on a website dedicated to marketing "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide," everything seems skillfully designed to appeal both to dedicated Israel-bashers and newcomers eager to learn the basics. Those who have never heard of Ben White, a young Cambridge graduate with a BA in English Literature, will certainly be impressed by the long list of prominent people he could get to endorse his first book that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything he studied: Ben White's efforts to spread the idea that Israel should be denounced and opposed as an "apartheid state" are warmly praised by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the historian Ilan Pappe, and a number of well-known academics and writers as well as political and religious personalities. The art of antisemitismThe short theater play "Seven Jewish Children," written as a reaction to the Gaza war by the prominent British playwright Caryl Churchill earlier this year, has stirred up a heated debate about antisemitism. Initially, this debate focused on the question if Churchill's play is antisemitic - a charge that Churchill and her admirers obviously rejected as completely unjustified. But as many critics of the play have pointed out, the question is easy to settle: imagine a comparable play peddling negative stereotypes about "Seven Muslim Children" or "Seven Arab Children," and one thing is for sure: none of the people who praise Churchill's play would want to have anything to do with it. The "facts-don't-matter" campOver the past year, Antony Lerman has published quite a few articles defending anti-Zionist views against the charge that they often serve as a cover-up for antisemitism. If his articles include any biographical information, Lerman is usually presented as (former) director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London; he has also been described as a "leading Jewish thinker." Of course, anyone who writes "as a Jew" and single-mindedly focuses on whatever is wrong with Israel and Zionism can count on having an appreciative audience that can't get enough of this message - particularly if it comes with regular complaints about how unfair it is to suspect people of anti-Semitism simply because they feel that the world would be a better place if Israel didn't exist. No pretense of scholarship
In May 2004, the obscure journal "Race Traitor" featured an article on "Zionism, Antisemitism, and the People of Palestine" authored by Noel Ignatiev. On the website, the piece was prefaced with a note in red print that announced: "This paper is based on a talk I delivered on March 31, 2004. It is intended as a popular summary of the historical and theoretical basis of the current conflict. I make no pretense of scholarship." Once you start to read the hair-raising mix of delusions, distortions, misrepresentations, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, you quickly realize just how much pretense it would have taken to claim that anything like "scholarship" had gone into the writing of this deplorable diatribe. Iran's apologists
The new president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, recently suggested that "we all have to agree that no one dies because of words." He made this remark in response to a journalist's question about the rhetoric favored by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he speaks about Israel. That D'Escoto is not in the least disturbed by the way Ahmadinejad rants against Israel is also clear from the warm embrace he had for the Iranian President after the latter had offered the UN General Assembly his bits of wisdom adapted from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". It was a truly pathetic spectacle to see the representatives of UN members assembled to listen attentively and politely to a speech that regurgitated the classic anti-Semitic themes of Jews dominating and controlling finance and governments and fomenting conflict around the world. But Ahmadinejad knows how little it takes nowadays to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism: all you need to do is to substitute "Zionists" for "Jews" and then you are free to say what anti-Semites everywhere love to hear: |
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