A decade of anti-Israel clichés

Just in time for Christmas, The Financial Times came out with a seasonally-themed editorial on "The need for peace in the Holy Land." You wouldn't quite know it from this editorial, but the 21st century's first decade began with far-reaching Israeli proposals for peace that were rejected by the Palestinians at Camp David and Taba in 2000/01, and now that the decade is about to end, it turns out that last year, Israel's prime minister proposed a Palestinian state on the equivalent of all the pre-1967 territories of Gaza and the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital - but again, the proposal was apparently not good enough.

While these Israeli efforts are not even mentioned, the Financial Times worries about a lack of outside interest and involvement:

It is, at best, disingenuous to pretend that two parties with such massively disproportionate power, resources and diplomatic and financial support could ever reach a deal on their own. The Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and the land on which they hope eventually to build their state is daily being eaten away. Any possibility of dividing the Holy Land into two states - with 78 per cent of historic Palestine for Israelis and 22 per cent (the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem) for the Palestinians - will soon evaporate, if it has not already."

This short paragraph could be a promising entry for any competition that seeks the most concise summary of the past decade's most popular distortions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 'Israeli Apartheid' gospel

Advertised 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.

Is Obama anti-Israel?

A recent Jerusalem Post-sponsored poll showed that only 6 percent of Jewish Israelis consider the Obama administration as "pro-Israel," while 50 percent believe that Obama's policies reflect a "pro-Palestinian" stance and 36 percent see the policies as "neutral."

There is of course a noisy chorus of merry voices that cheer Obama's "tough love" for Israel and the shouts for "more" and "tougher, much tougher" are all over the media - and no doubt there is a dimension to it that has very little to do with sober political analysis. Indeed, it's hard to avoid the impression that at a time when there is no shortage of serious foreign policy challenges for the Obama administration, their determined fight against even one more brick in any Israeli building anywhere beyond the line that separated Israel and the Jordanian-occupied West Bank before 1967 attracts a rather disproportionate amount of media coverage.

'Israel is the key'

Who won the elections in Iran? Well, whoever won, Ahmadinejad was officially declared the winner, and once Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described this result as a "divine assessment," it didn't take long for somewhat more mundane assessments to appear:

The most obvious winner is Israel's right-wing Likud government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. There was never the slightest indication that a Mousavi victory would lead Iran to dial back its program for enriching uranium and, potentially, building nuclear weapons. And Israelis see that program as a threat to their existence, no matter who is president of Iran. But Mousavi's touchy-feely image as a moderate reformist would have clouded the issue, obscuring the potential dangers as the Israelis see them, and making it harder, politically, for Netanyahu to keep open the option of a military attack to set back the nuclear program."

The Muslim world's anti-imperialists

President Obama's speech in Cairo has been debated already long before it was given, and there was a veritable tsunami of commentary afterwards. Some of the critical commentaries were in my view off the mark because they ignored the fact that this was a speech given by an American president who decided to go to an Arab capital to address the Muslim world in a quest for improved mutual understanding. Of course one can disagree with the notion that it is indeed America that should plead for better mutual understanding. As former secretary of state Madeleine Albright emphasized:

To most Americans, the idea that our country is attacking Islam or that we view the Islamic faith as an enemy is absurd. The first Gulf War was a response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of a neighboring Arab country. On 9/11, America was the victim, not the aggressor. In Iraq, President Bush's rationale for regime change, though misguided, was hardly anti-Islamic. US leaders can't be held accountable for what some writers say in order to scare people and sell books. What is more, in the 1990s, America twice led NATO into conflicts on behalf of Muslim populations - first in Bosnia, then Kosovo."

The "facts-don't-matter" camp

Over 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.

Saeb Erekat's secret

There was little enthusiasm when the Annapolis talks were launched in late 2007. Their goal - to produce at least the outline of an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians by the time president Bush left office - was widely regarded as completely unrealistic, and quite a few commentators dismissed the initiative as just more "peace processing." But when Israel's new foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman recently declared quite undiplomatically that the Annapolis process was over and done with, commentators united in a chorus of indignation - apparently, they didn't like to hear that Lieberman thought they were right all along.

War crimes propaganda

Human Rights Watch has conducted a thorough investigation of civilian deaths … On the basis of this investigation, Human Rights Watch has found that there were ninety separate incidents involving civilian deaths ... Some 500 ... civilians are known to have died in these incidents. ... nine incidents were a result of attacks on non-military targets that Human Rights Watch believes were illegitimate. ... Thirty-three incidents occurred as a result of attacks on targets in densely populated urban areas ... the use of cluster bombs was a decisive factor in civilian deaths in at least three incidents. ... In its investigation Human Rights Watch has found no evidence of war crimes."  (Source: http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200.htm#P37_987)

When some 500 civilians die, when non-military targets are attacked and cluster bombs are used and yet, the conclusion is that there is "no evidence of war crimes", you can be sure of one thing: Israel wasn't involved. Indeed, the quote here is from a report on NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia ten years ago.

It is important to remember that the NATO campaign back then was officially justified as a humanitarian intervention designed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian aggression. Yet, in the course of NATO's campaign, civilian infrastructure was deliberately targeted and destroyed; cluster bombs were used, causing the death of an estimated 90-150 civilians; and, according to the report cited above, "inventory shortages and cost considerations" led to the replacement of precision-guided weapons with "dumb" bombs.

UNRWA in the spotlight

It's not just because of the recent fighting in Gaza that UNRWA has recently been the subject of several articles: the UN agency that was founded to support the Palestinian refugees created during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 will mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment at the end of this year. It is arguably a very special anniversary of a very special agency: at a time when millions of destitute refugees all over the world struggled to cope with their fate, UNRWA was set up in December 1949 to just care for one group of refugees - and six decades later, UNRWA is the biggest UN agency with a staff of over 29.000, most of them (99 percent) Palestinians, and it is still devoted to supporting millions of Palestinians that remain classified as "refugees", even though they may live in the same place where they, and indeed their parents, were born, and even though they may have citizenship where they live.

The elections and Israel's image

In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz offers a grim assessment of the challenges facing Israel as the country prepares for elections this week. Horovitz focuses in particular on the "relentless process of delegitimization" that Israel has been exposed to for quite some time now and he suggests that this process will likely intensify if the Likud wins the elections, because Israel's critics would interpret this as a sign that Israel has "turned its back on peacemaking."

However, Horovitz also makes clear that what Israel does or doesn't do matters very little to those who are eager to delegitimize the Jewish state. Indeed, recent events have shown once more that there is a chorus of indignation whenever Israel moves to defend its citizens - such unfathomable chutzpah will naturally result in comments like: "Israel's international reputation slumped to its lowest point for two decades yesterday, amid condemnation in Britain and Europe of the Israeli army's behaviour ... There were calls for a United Nations-led inquiry into allegations that the Israeli army carried out a massacre and that its soldiers were guilty of war crimes." This may sound like a very recent condemnation of the fighting in Gaza, but it's actually from April 2002: that's how the Guardian - and indeed many other news media around the world - reported about the Jenin "massacre" that never happened.