Friends like these

 

You might have thought that if it was anybody's job to look after Israel's occupation forces, it would have to be the Israeli taxpayer.  But it transpires that 

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) has assumed the responsibility of providing these soldiers with love and support in an effort to ease the burden they carry on behalf of the Jewish community worldwide...with the mission of providing and supporting social, educational, cultural, and recreational programs and facilities for the young men and women soldiers of Israel who defend the Jewish homeland...Providing financial aid to soldiers in need, granting academic scholarships to former combat soldiers, helping bereaved families, and sponsoring fun days for combat battalions are just some of our endeavors...reinforce the significant bond between the Jewish community in the United States, the soldiers of the IDF, and the State of Israel.

FIDF builds sports and cultural centres for the IOF all over Israel and, if I read the map correctly, in the West Bank, as well as providing mobile recreational facilities for those too busy humiliating Palestinians at remote checkpoints or bashing down doors in the middle of the night to get to one of the more permanent centres.

If IOF soldiers carry the burden of occupation and oppression 'on behalf of the Jewish community worldwide'  doesn't that constitute 'Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel', one of the ways 'in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel', according to the EU Monitoring Commission's 'Working definition'? 

Anyone who wants to contribute to this blatantly antisemitic project is in luck.  Next Tuesday, 9 March, FIDF is holding its National NY Gala in the Grand Ballroom of Manhattan's historic Waldorf-Astoria, where

More than 1,300 people will gather together to support Israel’s soldiers and the State of Israel. At the dinner, you will have the unique opportunity to hear from Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi Chief of the IDF General Staff and meet combat soldiers who fight on the frontlines to ensure the safety of the state of Israel.

For just US$180,000, you can book a table for ten, although only $179,678 of that will be tax deductible.  Or if you're too tightfisted to fork over a week's pay to defend Western Civilisation from the barbarian hordes at the gate, you can buy a seat for $1000.  I just can’t help wondering how much of contributions to Friends of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades or Friends of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, or even Friends of the Canadian Land Force Command would be tax deductible?

Alternatively, you can join the protest march, assembling at 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue at 5PM on the day - next Tuesday, 9 March.

[H/t to Lou Proyect]

A Jewish fingernail

To the clamour of sensational headlines, Britain’s Community Security Trust (CST) has released its latest report, Antisemitic incidents, January – June 2009.

In case they are unfamiliar, according to the CST website,

Every year CST helps secure over 170 synagogues, 80 Jewish schools, 64 Jewish communal organisations and approximately 1000 communal events. CST also represents the Jewish community on a wide range of Police, governmental and policy-making bodies dealing with security and antisemitism. Indeed, the Police and government praise CST as a model of how a minority community should protect itself.

It seems that one of the threats from which they secure communal events is Jewish women distributing flyers.

Their other claim to fame is compiling data about antisemitic incidents. ‘Anti-Semitic attacks in Britain at record high’, wrote the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on 24 July. Similarly, Ha’aretz reported, ‘Watchdog: British anti-Semitism doubled after Gaza war’, and BBC News, ‘'Record rise' in UK anti-Semitism’.

The BBC’s Dominic Casciani opens his article, ‘Anti-Semitic attacks in the UK doubled in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2008, according to new figures.’ In reality, the CST reported a total of 609 incidents in the first half of 2009, compared to 276 over the first half of 2008. The 77 assaults recorded in the last six months are not nearly double the 45 they claimed for January to June 2008. Of course an attack need not be a literal assault, but Casciani couldn’t possibly be in any doubt about how his audience would interpret that first sentence, as he tacitly acknowledges a few lines down, ‘Most incidents were abusive behaviour, but there were also 77 violent acts.’

The CST’s media release itself notes that the perceived explosion of antisemitism was a direct response to Israel’s slaughter of the besieged population of the Gaza Strip.

The main reason for this record number of incidents was the unprecedented number of antisemitic incidents recorded in January and February, during and after the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza

There’s absolutely no reason anyone should give them the benefit of the doubt, but let’s assume they are not disingenuous when they claim, ‘Anti-Israel activity, which does not use antisemitic language or imagery and is directed at pro-Israel campaigners rather than Jewish people or institutions per se, is also not classified by CST as antisemitic.’ When the State of Israel claims to be the state of all Jews and to act on behalf of all Jews, when all the principal Jewish organisations in Britain applauded the massacre, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, ‘The voice of British Jewry since 1760’, organises a rally to celebrate it, it is understandable, if wrong and unforgivable, how some might form the impression that Jews were complicit.

As Casciani mentioned, only 77 of the 609 ‘attacks’ (less than 13%) actually involved any violence. Another 63 (10%) involved ‘Damage or desecration’, defined as

Any physical attack directed against Jewish property, which is not lifethreatening. This would include the daubing of antisemitic slogans or symbols (such as swastikas) on Jewish property, or damage caused to Jewish property, where it appears that the property has been specifically targeted because of its Jewish connection.

Most (64%) of the ‘incidents’ comprised ‘Abusive Behaviour’, which ‘includes a wide range of types of incident, including antisemitic graffiti on non-Jewish property, hate mail and verbal racist abuse.’ To be honest, I’m not convinced that the Jewish community is likely to flee in panic to the sanctuary of the West Bank at the sight of a sticker like this one allegedly distributed in Bournemouth:

But taking the CST at their word again, let’s assume that there were 77 actual physical assaults on Jews motivated by antisemitism over that six month period. The CST’s 2008 report claims 44 assaults in the last six months of 2008, giving a total of 121 for financial year 2008–09.

According to Wikipedia, the total number of Jews in the UK is 350,000. That means that the rate of antisemitic assaults for FY 2008–09 was 34.6 per 100,000 Jews. In comparison, the Home Office site gives a figure of 960,187 cases of ‘Violence against the person’ in England and Wales during FY 2007-08, the most recent data available. The total population of England and Wales is 54,096,600. So the rate of assault in the population in general is 1774.95 per 100,000. Bearing in mind that the figures are not strictly comparable because the Home office figures cover the previous year and are more geographically restricted, they may still provide a rough indication of the scale of difference, and that means that any Briton, Jewish or not, is roughly 40 times as likely to be the victim of assault as a British Jew is to be the victim of an antisemitic assault. Looked at another way, 0.01% of all assaults are motivated by antisemitism.

But that scenario doesn’t really account for the alarming increase witnessed in 2009. So let’s assume that the level of violence for 2009 is exactly double the rate over the first six months, even though we know that the rate of ‘incidents’ plummeted in the six weeks after Israel withdrew its troops in January and has now plateaued at around 50 per month, as the graph shows.

On that assumption, the antisemitic assault rate is 44 assaults per 100,000, as compared to 1775 total assaults per 100,000.

Indeed, even ‘Damage or desecration’, like this swastika daubed outside a synagogue in Manchester, is not a great threat to Jewish life or community.

Still, compared to the ‘Criminal damage’ rate for England and Wales in 2007–08 of 1915 per 100,000, the antisemitic ‘Damage or desecration’ rate for 2008–09 is 30 per 100,000. Antisemitic “damage or desecration’ turns out to be equivalent to about 0.010% of the 1,036,123 cases of Criminal damage. In the implausible scenario where the observed increase persists through 2009, the Damage or desecration rate would be 36 per 100,000, or 0.012% of Criminal damage.

One is doubtless tempted to compare the frequency of antisemitic incidents with analogous racist incidents targeting some other oppressed minority in Britain, say Muslims. According to a May 2002 BBC article,

Muslim groups have agreed with a report by the EU race watchdog that anti-Islamic feeling has "detonated" in the UK since 11 September.

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) said there had been a big rise in attacks - including physical assaults - on Muslims in Britain since the US terror attacks.

That would be the same EUMC that promulgated the execrable ‘Working definition’ of antisemitism that has been such a big hit with the US State Department, among others. They have a new name – the Fundamental Rights Agency and the link from the BBC site to the EUMC report is broken, nor can I find either that report, or indeed the ‘Working definition’, on the FRA site. (For reference, you can still find the ‘Working definition’ on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism site.)

There is an EUMC report, apparently from 2003, National Analytical Study on Racist Violence and Crime, but I’m sceptical that it is the one described in the article. It devotes a whole page to ‘New antisemitism’, including a table lifted from an earlier CST report, but only one paragraph to Islamophobia. Two graphs at the back chart the risk (Chart 2) and rate (Chart 3) of victimisation by ‘racially motivated incidents’ (RMIs) for four groups – White, Black, Indian, and Pakistani/Bangladeshi – in 1993, 1995, and 1999. They are not terribly informative, disaggregate neither Jews nor Muslims, and cover a period irrelevant to the topic of post 9/11 anti Muslim RMIs, much less to the explosion of antisemitism in the first half of 2009. For what it’s worth, however, they seem to show a pattern of RMIs targeting Pakistanis and Bangladeshis at a much higher rate than Blacks or Indians.

On visiting the sites of the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Society of Britain, linked to from the article, there doesn’t appear to be a compilation of data. While the Islamic Human Rights Commission apparently collects incident reports, I haven’t managed to find evidence on their site that they publish the data, either.

In any case, to compare antisemitic incidents with anything else would of course itself be antisemitic. After all, we know how many Arabs a Jewish fingernail is worth.

No Turkish coffee

Australia’s Retailers’ Association has enthusiastically embraced a call from Brisbane radio 4BC shock jock, ex cop Michael Smith, to ban covered women from shops, banks and post offices.

According to Robyn Ironside in the Courier-Mail,

Smith called for Muslim women who wear an Islamic hijab in public to be fined for offensive behaviour.

He made the remarks on-air and on the 4BC website, saying: "Any reasonable person would find this offensive."

Of course, this has nothing to do with targeting Muslim women.

"Retailers should not have to fear any form of retribution or backlash for requiring the removal of any obscuring headwear, including hijabs, as a condition of entry," [Association executive director, Scott] Driscoll said.

"This is about ensuring a more safe and secure retail environment for all and being able to readily identify any and all perpetrators of armed hold-ups or shop theft."

All he’s doing is saying that if you are a women who thinks her religion requires women to cover their heads in public, you should not be able to deposit money in a bank or buy a postage stamp, but if you’re a man who thinks his religion requires women to cover their heads in public, you should.

Meanwhile, over the Tasman, Mustafa Tekinkaya, the Turkish born proprietor of the Mevlana café in Invercargill has come under fire for expelling two Israeli women, reports Will Hine in New Zealand’s Southland Times.

‘Everyone is going on about racism. This has nothing to do with racism. This is all about the killing of innocent children,’ Tekinkaya is quoted as saying. ‘He said he would not serve anyone from Israel until it stopped killing innocent babies and women in the Gaza Strip.’ His wife and business partner, Joanne, added, ‘Those dead women and children don't have a voice. No one's sticking up for them. Innocent women and children are being punished, so how can we be quiet and stand by and support that...?’

Laudable sentiments, no doubt. And yet, what have Natalie Bennie, who apparently lives near Invercargill, and her sister Tamara Shefa, visiting from Israel, have to do with the slaughter in Gaza? In my view, nobody gets to decide who their parents are or where they are born, and we are therefore not culpable for the crimes of our ancestors or the state that claims our allegiance. Bennie and Shefa may be among the most rabid supporters of the massacre, or they may not. They may even have made the error of discussing their views while in the Mevlana. But I for one would take great exception if some petty bourgeois interrogated my nationality or my political views before agreeing to sell me a cup of coffee, or ejected me because they disagreed with me.

The Israeli ambassador Yuval Rotem, based in Canberra, Ambassador Rotem said the New Zealand ‘government needed to make a declaration or statement giving the "red light" to such actions’.

Far be it from me to agree with an Israeli diplomat, but he’s right about that.

When he describes Tekinkaya’s views as ‘anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment’, however, he crosses the line. Tekinkaya has said nothing remotely anti-Semitic. By inferring from his objection to the Gaza massacre that Tekinkaya displays ‘anti-Jewish sentiment’, he buys into the anti-Semitic trope so popular among Israeli spokepersons, that to criticise Israel is to be an anti-Semite, which tars all Jews with the Zionist brush.

Echoing His Excellency, Natalie Bennie, who lodged a complaint with the NZ Human Rights Commission, claimed ‘It was very anti-semitic behaviour…He might as well have put a sign outside his shop saying `No Jews Allowed'.’

The Anti Defamation League, the EU Monitoring Commission, and the US State Department will doubtless be howling before long about the unprecedented increase in anti-Semitic incidents in New Zealand.

Dershowitz farts

So successful was the campaign against his nemesis, Norman G Finkelstein, that it snared yet another junior member of DePaul’s academic staff. Mehrene E. Larudee, an assistant professor of international studies, ‘praised as "outstanding" by the dean of her college and recommended unanimously by distinguished faculty peers during the tenure process’, was just about to be named director of DePaul's program in international studies.

And now, flushed with triumph, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz has launched a new crusade. Incensed at the injustice of the British University and College Union (UCU) resolving to consider a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, he has sent out a call for academics around the world to declare their solidarity with Israeli academics.

We all agree that singling out Israelis for an academic boycott is wrong. To show our solidarity with our Israeli academics in this matter, we, the undersigned, hereby declare ourselves to be Israeli academics for purposes of any academic boycott. We will regard ourselves as Israeli academics and decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded.

It was certainly no surprise when Dershowitz made his ‘Gam ani yisra’eli’ declaration in the immediate aftermath of the UCU conference resolution. But since the petition was launched on 4 June, it has attracted 4568 signatories, sixteen just in the few minutes since I first loaded the page. Among them are at least four university presidents and no fewer than fourteen Nobel Prize winners.

This is the man one of whose claims to fame is that in his 2002 book, Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age, he proposed that judges be empowered to issue a "torture warrant".

An application for a torture warrant would have to be based on the absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives coupled with probable cause that the suspect had such information and is unwilling to reveal it.

By expressly limiting the use of torture only to the ticking bomb case and by requiring a highly visible judge to approve, limit and monitor the torture, it will be far more difficult to justify its extension to other institutions.

So either he doesn’t know or doesn’t care that information extracted by torture is notoriously unreliable and unlikely to save any lives from a ‘ticking bomb’. Furthermore, he acknowledges

Every democracy, including our own, has employed torture outside of the law.

Throughout the years, police officers have tortured murder and rape suspects into confessing -- sometimes truthfully, sometimes not truthfully.

The "third degree" is all too common, not only on TV shows such as "NYPD Blue," but in the back rooms of real police station houses.

So it can only be wilful naivete or downright stupidity that makes him think that legalising torture under specific circumstances will have any effect whatsoever on the torture that’s been going on all along anyway, apart from providing subtle reassurance that it’s a good idea. In any case,

Until quite recently, Israel recognized the power of its security agencies to employ what it euphemistically called "moderate physical pressure" to elicit information from terrorists about continuing threats.

And if Israeli did it, it must be ok.

Writing in The Times yesterday in collaboration with Anthony Julius, another lawyer, he enunciates this strange opinion.

the boycotters have aligned themselves with Hamas, a frankly anti-Semitic party, Hezbollah, another frankly anti-Semitic party, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a frankly anti-Semitic politician. All are unreconciled to Israel’s existence, wish it harm and are committed to an account of its power and standing that is utterly dependent on classical anti-Semitic tropes and texts.

I can’t imagine who they hope to hoodwink with allegations of this kind. Among those advocating a boycott, most are concerned exclusively with Israel’s acquisition of territory by force in June 1967. They want Israel to declare its border formally at or near the Green Line. For four decades Israel has been busy establishing ‘facts on the ground’ in the form of permanent settlements, demonstrating to all but the most studiously oblivious that they have no intention of leaving. This, and not wishing Israel harm or ‘classical anti-Semitic tropes’ is the principal motivation for the boycott movement.

Furthermore, the boycotters have most assuredly not aligned themselves with Hamas, Hizb’allah, or the Iranian president. Some might be more sympathetic to Hamas than to Fateh. Some might have supported Lebanon in the war Israel waged against it last July and August. Few if any would support Ahmedinejad’s ranting, even among those who realise that he never said anything about ‘wiping Israel off the map’.

In reality, the “one-state solution” is not ‘favoured by most boycotters’. The vast majority support Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’ alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

After blathering on about ‘the two academic principles’, Universality of science and learning and Freedom of expression, Dershowitz and Julius conclude that an academic boycott would only be justified when, in their view, ‘the person or institution to be boycotted does not meet the criterion of being a scholar or place of learning’ or

When the person or institution to be boycotted violates either or both of the two principles: For example, where freedom of research is denied to the employees of the institution. Another application of this exception is the counter-boycott. It meets the boycotter with a reciprocal gesture of rejection. A counter-boycott is justified in the face of a boycott. It is not open to the same objections as the boycott itself. [my emphasis]

They argue that ‘the boycotters rarely offer a rational account of why it is right to shun Israel or its academic institutions’. They reject the rationales that ‘Israel's universities are complicit in its misdeeds’ and that ‘Israel’s misdeeds justify the boycott regardless of the universities' own complicity in them’. Then they dismiss as irrelevant ‘Israel’s misdeeds’, ‘the “ethnic cleansing” during the 1948 War, the “military occupation and colonisation” following the 1967 War, and the “entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel.”’, further claiming that they are fabrications.

The razor sharp legal minds have the audacity to criticise

…the utter irrationality of the boycotters’ position, its disconnectedness from the ordinary canons of argument – the marshalling of evidence, the advancing of coherent theses, the acknowledging of objections, and so on…

They never even trouble to mention the principal justification for an academic boycott in particular – that it in fact meets their second criterion. It is effectively a counter-boycott of precisely the kind they just endorsed. Palestinian universities are routinely closed by the Israeli authorities. Palestinian academics and students are actively prevented from attending classes and performing other academic activities by curfews, closures, roadblocks, checkpoints, and so forth, even if they escape ‘targetted assassination’ or ‘arrest’. Palestinian academics are not free to travel to meet with academics outside Palestine, or even in Israel. If they manage to do so, their return is often problematical. Students from Gaza are absolutely prohibited from studying in the West Bank notwithstanding the absence of suitable facilities within Gaza. And that’s without even considering the additional obstacles erected by the comprehensive boycott of the PA that has robbed vast numbers of Palestinian families of their sole source of livelihood.

This kind of unscrupulous ‘argumentation’ cloaked in self righteous indignation and presumptuous slurs on his adversary’s reasoning is absolutely characteristic of Dershowitz, the Likudniks’ toothless Rottweiler.

They conclude their diatribe by constructing what passes for a rigorous argument among Harvard Law Professors that the boycott is not just unjustified and counterproductive, but anti-Semitic, to boot.

‘There are two reasons for regarding the boycotters’ position as an anti-Semitic one’, they aver. ‘First, the academic boycott resonates with earlier boycotts of Jews. The history of anti-Semitism is in part the history of boycotts of Jews.’ Talk about red herrings! But they have the unmitigated chutzpah to raise the 1945 Arab boycott of Jewish Palestinian businesses, as if the Zionists had never boycotted Arab businesses, right down to market stalls and even victimised Jews with the temerity to employ Arab workers.

‘Second’, they reckon, ‘it is predicated on the defamation of Jews’ and proceed to recite a litany of caricatures of the positions they don’t possess the vertebrae, knowledge, or nous to refute.

The Jewish State, in pursuance of its racist ideology, is perceived as pure aggressor, and the Palestinians are perceived as pure victims. The PACBI boycotters and their UCU fellow travellers would deny to Jews the rights that they upholds [sic] for other, comparable peoples. They adhere to the principle of national self-determination, except in the Jews’ case. They affirm international law, except in Israel’s case. They are outraged by the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, but are untroubled (say) by the Islamic nature of Iran or of Saudi Arabia…They are indifferent to Jewish suffering… in supporting a boycott they have put themselves in anti-Semitism’s camp.

They go on to presume to ‘rewrite’ the definition of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism consists, first, of beliefs about Jews or the Jewish State that are both false and hostile, and second, of injurious things said to or about Jews or the Jewish State, or done to them, in consequence of those beliefs. Anti-Semites wrong Jews and the Jewish State, and they are wrong about Jews and the Jewish State. Many anti-Semites also want to hurt Jews and the Jewish State or deny to them freedoms or rights enjoyed by non-Jews or the generality of States.

The fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism.

By bracketing Jews and the Jewish State, by treating them as inseparable, by claiming above all that a slight on the Jewish State is a slight on Jews, Julius and Dershowitz reveal themselves as the true anti-Semites.

Since I started writing this, the signatory count has risen to 4591. Some actually are Israeli academics, so their gesture is irrelevant, and others don’t provide an academic affiliation, so probably don’t have one and can’t actually implement any meaningful acts of solidarity. But they are only a few.

What’s worrisome is that this swollen overpaid buffoon talks out the wrong orifice and Nobel Laureates queue up to have a sniff. It’s embarrassing.

EU slams Gandhi

Mark Elf, over at Jews sans Frontières, drew my attention to Arthur Neslen’s post on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ site. Entitled ‘When an anti-semite is not an anti-semite’, the article discusses the EU Monitoring Commission’s ‘Working definition’ of anti-Semitism, which has come up on this blog before.

His main point is that under the EU definition, such luminaries as Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein would be tarred with the antisemite brush, while Lee Barnes of the Nazi British National Party might very well not. According to Neslen, it turns out that the framer of the EU definition was one Kenneth S. Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s specialist on antisemitism. What prompted Neslen’s article is that Britain’s National Union of Students has adopted it as official policy. It’s frightening that other bodies are now jumping on the bandwagon. Neslent claims ‘the British government has pledged to re-examine its own definition of anti-semitism’ and ‘the US state department's special envoy for combating anti-semitism’ has endorsed the EU Working definition. In fact, according to the State Department site that he links to is quite explicit that ‘The recitation of the EUMC "working definition" of anti-Semitism should not be construed as an acceptance of that definition, or the statements and examples thereunder, as United States policy’. Still, it’s a worry that they’ve given it pride of place there and I’m not aware of any other definition on the State site.

Anyway, I was impelled to post this as a comment there.

Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann argues, somewhat tongue in cheek, that when the definition of antisemitism is perverted to incorporate principled opposition to Zionism and to Israeli policies in this way, it transforms antisemitism from a racist atrocity into a virtue. And that really is one of the dangers of a widespread acceptance of a definition along the lines of the ‘Working definition’.

The approach I want to take here is to analyse the relevant passage of the ‘Working definition’ and see where it leads.

To begin with, I think it’s important that we know exactly what the EUMC definition actually says in this regard:

Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

· Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor).

· Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

· Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

· Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

· Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.

1. The right to self determination

It is all very well to demand the right of self determination for Jews in Palestine, but it is not exclusive of other internationally recognised human rights. To use the right of self determination to establish an ethnically exclusive state that deprives the indigenous population of their rights, including, significantly, the right to self determination itself, is an exercise in the crudest cynicism. This is in fact one of the reasons that the existence of a State of Israel as a specifically Jewish state is a racist endeavour.

2. Double standards

Contrary to the opinion of people who don't accept the conventional rules of argument, in a discussion of Israeli policies, Saudi and Jordanian policies aren't actually relevant. The fact is, most critics of Israel are also critical of other countries. And uncritical supporters of Israel demand quite unreasonably that every time anyone criticises Israel, they firsts criticise Egypt, or Pakistan, or Canada, whether it’s relevant or not. It is also relevant to point out that whatever crimes the Jordanian government may commit against its own citizens and its neighbours, it never claims to be doing it on my behalf, as Israel does. In making this claim, Israel gives me special rights to criticise its policies and its existence and indeed, in my view, imposes a special obligation on me to do so.

3. Symbols

It probably really is antisemitic to accuse Israel of ‘christ killing’ and the like, although those who are serious about the right to freedom of expression would want such forms of atrocious speech protected.

4. Nazi comparisons

This is another red herring. Nobody claims that the state of Israel is rounding up Palestinians and literally transporting them to death camps. But former Israeli Justice Minister, Yosef Lapid, himself a Holocaust survivor and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, was recently reported comparing the behaviour of Hebron settlers with the antisemites who tormented him in his childhood in Yugoslavia. On 1 December 2004, however, Akiva Eldar reported in Ha’aretz that Machsom Watch had filmed 28 year old West Bank music student Wissam Tayam being forced to play his violin for the entertainment of the soldiers at the Beit Iba checkpoint near Nablus. Trivial examples, perhaps, but the point is that if Israelis are so sensitive about comparisons with the Nazis, it would behove them to eschew behaviour that invites such comparisons.

5. Collective responsibility

Ultimately, the EU ‘Working Definition’ undermines itself. If it is anti-Semitic to deny that a Jewish state has a right to exist, or to compare Israeli policies to Nazi policies, the inescapable implication is that it is anti-Semitic because to do so impugns all Jews, and not just Israelis or the Jewish state itself. If it reflects upon Jews in general to criticise Israel in these ways, then that must mean that those defining anti-Semitism believe that all Jews actually are responsible for the State of Israel and its policies. So Stern and whoever else framed the ‘Working definition’ are themselves ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel’. In this way, by defining antiZionism as anti-Semitic, the EU and those who seek to apply the ‘Working Definition’ betray that, under their own definition, they are anti-Semitic themselves.

A certain irrationality

When the NY Times brought in TimesSelect a while ago, I was really grateful that I didn’t have to read Thomas Friedman anymore. But last July, they gave free access to the whole site for a week or so and I came across this lame article on academic freedom by one Stanley Fish, a bigshot academic in Florida. Which prompted me to write this devastating critique on my old blog.

Apparently they’ve given him a weekly column where he can display his ignorance and prejudice, because he wrote in his column, Is it good for the Jews? on Monday,

I can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future when American Jews might feel precarious once again. There is a certain irrationality to this imagining, given that at this moment, I am sitting in a very nice house in Delray Beach, Fla., and taking advantage of the opportunity afforded me by The New York Times to have my say on anything I like every Monday. And in a few months I will repair to an equally nice house in the upstate New York town of Andes, where I will be engaging in the same pleasurable activity. Sounds like a good life, and it is.

Half his luck! And of course it’s not unusual for the Times to take on some real…well, commentators, Friedman himself not least among them. I remember being scandalised when they gave William Safire a weekly column ‘On language’ where he proceeded to enunciate opinions as backward and uninformed as his political views.

Anyway, Fish reckons that there are grounds for him to fear anti-Semitism, as if he were trying to lend credibility to Atzmon’s ‘pretraumatic stress disorder’ theory.

After summarising Mearscheimer and Walt’s famous dog wagging hypothesis, he writes,

The war was a huge mistake and is causing us no end of trouble at home and in the world at large. The lobby that led us into it is a de facto agent for a foreign government — Israel. Members of that lobby are largely, though not exclusively, Jewish. And that’s where the anti-Semitism comes in. Or does it? One reason the lobby is immune from criticism, Mearsheimer and Walt explain, is that criticism, when it appears, is always re-described as anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is something no one wants to be accused of. Their point, and it has been made by many, is that there is no reason to assume that those who criticize Israel and argue that America’s uncritical support for a flawed state is strategically unwise and morally wrong are anti-Semitic.

Well, it turns out, he claims, that there is empirical evidence that this is wrong.

Charles Small and his Yale colleague Edward Kaplan have recently published an article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the title of which also tells its own story: ‘Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe’. What Small and Kaplan find is that ‘Those with extreme anti-Israel sentiment are roughly six times more likely to harbor anti-Semitic views than those who do not fault Israel on the measures studied, and among those respondents deeply critical of Israel, the fraction that harbors anti-Semitic views exceeds 50 percent’.

Christian was kind enough to secure me a copy of Kaplan and Small’s paper (subscription required). It does indeed find a correlation between what the authors are pleased to describe as ‘extreme anti-Israel sentiment’ and a cluster of indicators of anti-Semitic sentiment. The quote from Kaplan and Small, incidentally, is accurate, although it actually expresses the same thing twice.

Now one thing about statistics is it doesn’t matter how clever or sophisticated your methods if the basic data are bogus or if you ask the wrong questions of the data. Kaplan and Small are quite up front about the questions asked in the Anti Defamation League (ADL) survey that they are reanalysing for their paper and about their analytical methods. As they should be.

This first thing you notice in their paper is that they start from certain assumptions. For example, in their very first paragraph they quote London Mayor Ken Livingston’s assertion, ‘Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict’. Then they go on to assert, ‘Many Israeli and Jewish individuals and organizations have characterized statements such as these as anti-Semitic in effect if not intent, given that Israel is singled out in the face of silence over human rights violations committed elsewhere.’ [my emphasis]

According to the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, between 29 September 2000 and 31 January 2007, Israeli security forces and civilians killed 4057 Palestinians, while Palestinians killed 1020 Israeli troops and civilians over the same period. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFE) claims 1130 Israeli victims of ‘Palestinian violence and terrorism’ since September 2000. The most recent of these, however, which is outside the period the B’tselem statistics cover, was the 25 February case ‘of Erez Levanon, 42, of Bat Ayin in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, killed by multiple stab wounds... Security officials believe that the murder was terror-related.’ [my emphasis] Without actually checking each and every casualty description I can’t be sure, but I suspect that the discrepancy of 109 over the relevant period may well arise from inconclusive cases like Erez Levanon. I haven’t found an estimate of Palestinian deaths on the MFE website. But if we accept the B’Tselem count for Palestinian dead, even if the MFE count of Israeli dead is accurate, there are still more than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis killed. Almost seven times as many Palestinian minors (815) as Israeli minors (115) were killed. So it’s not as if Livingston was saying anything contentious, just reporting a fact, and understating it somewhat, to boot, as it would seem that nearly four times as many Palestinians as Israelis have perished in the violence since 2000.

But of course that’s not the point. The point is that Kaplan and Small have joined the chorus alleging that critics single out Israeli human rights abuses. Now it is a fact that not everyone who ever condemns Israeli atrocities always also condemns some other government’s atrocities in the very same sentence. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t do so in other contexts. Many, probably most, of those who condemn Israeli violence against Palestinians also condemn Saudi human rights violations against women, Indian atrocities in the Valley of Kashmir, Australian violations of Indigenous rights, the US occupation of Iraq, and any other anti human abomination we find out about. To say that Israel’s critics single it out simply isn’t true.

But there’s another factor at work. As I’ve mentioned before, the Egyptian government does not purport to lock up its political opponents on my behalf. The Israeli government does claim to act for me and in doing so imposes a special responsibility on me to speak out against it to proclaim, ‘Not in my name!’, as a non Jew can’t. By refusing to make this explicit in the context of their ‘singled out’ assertion, Kaplan and Small betray the prejudices they bring to bear on their research.

Now the syntax of that sentence leaves it ambiguous whether it’s ‘Many Israeli and Jewish individuals and organizations’ or Kaplan and Small themselves who take the assertion as ‘given’. But even granting them the benefit of the doubt, if they were truly dispassionate, they would clarify that they did not wish to take a position on the allegation, or something of that sort.

The second thing you notice is the presumption they mention, that

Presumably, those with anti-Semitic leanings would be more likely to espouse anti-Israel viewpoints than those who are not anti-Semitic (given that Israel presents itself as a Jewish state)…

It’s easy to see how anyone would make this association and presume as they do – Israel says it’s ‘a Jewish state’, so if you don’t like Jews, you won’t like Israel. But if you think about it, a Jewish state is the answer to the anti-Semites’ dreams. It endorses their view that Jews and non Jews just can’t get along and creates a space where all the Jews can go and get out of their face. And if you read Herzl and other Zionist thinkers, they make this quite explicit. For example, ‘Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.’ (Herzl, Der Judenstadt, ch. 2) So it turns out that Kaplan and Small are proceeding from some poorly thought out and unjustified assumptions. To compound this, a few pages further on, they write,

As discussed earlier, presumably those with anti-Semitic views are more likely to oppose a Jewish state than others…

The ‘earlier’ discussion they refer to is the very passage I just quoted. There, they wrote of ‘anti-Israel viewpoints’. This could be ambiguous, but as we’ll see in a moment, they define ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ quite rigorously. But now the ‘anti-Israel viewpoints’ have magically transformed into ‘oppose a Jewish state’. As we’ll see in a moment, none of the indicators deployed to detect anti-Israel sentiment interrogates views on anything like the legitimacy of a Jewish state. It’s just that the authors can’t help betraying that they are among those who consider criticism of Israeli policy equivalent to advocating abolition of the Jewish state.

The third thing is the indicators on the basis of which they derive their concept of ‘extreme anti-Israel sentiment’. This is detected on the basis of agreement with these four propositions (antiIsrael response in parentheses):

• The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is similar to South Africa’s treatment of blacks during apartheid. (agree a lot)
• Who do you think is more responsible for the past three years of violence in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israelis, or the Palestinians? (Israel)
• In your opinion, during military activities inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip, do the Israeli Defense Forces intentionally target Palestinian civilians, or are civilian casualties an accidental outcome of Israel’s military response? (IDF intentionally target civilians)

· In your opinion, is there any justification for Palestinian suicide bombers that target Israeli civilians? (yes)

Now the third question doesn’t really belong here at all, because it’s not a matter of opinion whether dropping a 500lb bomb on a block of flats to kill one ‘suspected militant’, or shelling a beach where families are picnicking, or lobbing 155mm rounds at a residential building at 4:00 in the morning deliberately target civilians. I suppose some might entertain some doubt as to whether the victims of extrajudicial executions, or ‘targeted assassinations’ as they are denominated in mainstream media speak, are civilians, but since they don’t get to defend themselves in court, we can’t know that, can we? On reflection though, maybe it’s just as useful as the other three questions in detecting extreme pro Israeli bias. If you can truly believe those civilian casualties are ‘just collateral damage’, there’s no doubt where your sympathies lie.

In my view, apart from the third, these are not bad questions to determine attitudes to Israeli policy in the occupied territories. They don’t tell us anything about attitudes to Israel’s existence, to Israeli policy towards Palestinian Israeli citizens, or towards the Palestinian refugees. Or about Israeli policy towards neighbouring countries, or towards the US, or Turkey, or Iran. Or the Israeli arms industry, or its nuclear arsenal. They shed no light on attitudes to the idea of a racist ethnocracy, building a state on the basis of terrorism and ethnic cleansing, or to the establishment of a colonial settler state as a bastion of European and American imperialism on Palestinian land.

By selecting the indicators they have to detect ‘extreme anti-Israel sentiment’, the authors reveal not only their bias, but also an unsuitably cavalier attitude to definition. Furthermore, by misinterpreting the meaning of the selected indicators, the authors undermine their claim to have found a correlation specifically between ‘extreme anti-Israel sentiment’ and ‘anti-Semitic attitudes’.

What they correlate this with is an ‘anti-Semitism index’ (ASI) based on the number of statements the respondents agreed (in the case of the eleventh, disagreed) with:

• Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind.
• Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.
• Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country.
• Jews have too much power in the business world.
• Jews have lots of irritating faults.
• Jews stick together more than other (CITIZENS OF RESPONDENT’S COUNTRY OF RESIDENCE).
• Jews always like to be at the head of things.
• Jews have too much power in international financial markets.
• Jews have too much power in our country today.
• Jewish business people are so shrewd that others do not have a fair chance to compete.

· Jews are just as honest as other business people.

Again, these seem like plausible indicators of antisemtism, although I can think of better ones, for example:

• I would hire a Jew if they were the most suitable candidate for a job.
• I would rent a residential property to a Jew.
• Jews should not be restricted to certain residential neighbourhoods.
• Jews should not be restricted to certain occupations.

· I would be happy for my child to marry a Jew.

But we can only go by what the ADL survey actually asked. And if a respondent agreed with more than five of those statements they count as anti-Semitic.

The fourth interesting fact we notice is that of the 5004 respondents across ten European countries, only 14% did so. That is, 702 respondents agreed with six or more of those statements. In the publication itself, however, I would have liked to see an ordinary table correlating each anti-Semitism indicator with each ‘anti-Israel’ indicator. In any event, among these 14%, the finding is that there is a direct correlation between ‘anti-Israel’ index (AII) and anti-Semitism. Specifically,

Only 9 percent of those with anti-Israel index scores of 0 report harboring anti-Semitic views, but the fraction of respondents harboring anti-Semitic views grows to 12, 22, 35, and 56 percent for anti-Israel index values of 1 through 4, respectively.

And even though there are correlations with factors like age, sex, income, religion, etc., these do not perturb this basic correlation – the more ‘anti-Israel’ views expressed, the greater the proportion with an anti-Semitism index greater than 5.

A spreadsheet with the full dataset is available on the Sage site without a subscsription. So I did a little analysis of my own. While it is quite true that just over 56% of those with an AII of 4 recorded an ASI greater than 5, Kaplan and Small don’t mention that the total number with an AII of 4 is 57, or just 1.14% of the sample of 5004. When the numbers get that small, questions of accuracy start to arise.

Returning to the issue I raised before about the validity of the question about whether Israeli troops intentionally target civilians, it turns out that no matter how anti-Semitic a person is by their measures, of those who only chose to agree with one ‘antiIsrael’ statement almost 55% chose that one in particular.

One of the things that’s missing from the analysis is the correlation between the two indices – Kaplan and Small, following ADL practice, have divided the twelve point anti-Semitism index scale into just two categories, anti-Semitic (6-11) and non anti-Semitic (0-5). They report that they did this analysis, but don’t provide the details.

…as a check on the sensitivity of our results to the specific cutoff employed in operationalizing anti-Semitism (anti-Semitic index values in excess of 5), we also explored ordered logistic models that estimate the probability a respondent reports any particular level of the anti-Semitic index (rather than only index values in excess of 5 or not). These more complex models did not lead to any important differences from the results described earlier…

The reason this is taking so long to post is that I had to download some statistical analysis software and start learning to use it. Anyway, here is the cross tabulation of ASI by AII.

Another thing that’s missing is the reverse of what they report. We know that 9% of those with an AII of 0 are anti-Semitic, 12% of those with an AII of 1, and so forth. But we don’t know what proportion of those with such and such an ASI are ‘anti-Israel’, or even what proportion of each of the two ASI categories are ‘anti-Israel’. I think this is rather a significant omission. It’s all very well to say that the level of ‘anti-Israel’ sentiment accurately predicts anti-Semitic sentiment among the 14% who have it. But we also need to know whether anti-Semitism can predict ‘anti-Israel’ sentiment.

Using the data in the table, it turns out that 30% of those with an ASI over 5 also have an AII of 0 and another 29% have an AII of 1. The correlation still holds, because the corresponding proportions for those with an ASI under 6 are 49% and 33%, but it’s not as impressive from this angle.

Looking at the 186 persons (3.7% of the sample) with the very highest anti-Semitic indices, those who agreed with 9, 10, or all 11 of the eleven indicator statements, the plurality, just over 25% (47) still had an antiIsrael index of 0, and only 16 (8.6%) had an AII of 4.

Partly because they did not report this kind of analysis, the authors conclude,

It is noteworthy that fewer than one-quarter of those with anti-Israel index scores of only 1 or 2 harbor anti-Semitic views (as defined by anti-Semitic index scores exceeding 5), which supports the contention that one certainly can be critical of Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic. However, among those with the most extreme anti-Israel sentiments in our survey (anti-Israel index scores of 4), 56 percent report anti-Semitic leanings. Based on this analysis, when an individual’s criticism of Israel becomes sufficiently severe, it does become reasonable to ask whether such criticism is a mask for underlying anti-Semitism.

First of all, while the ‘fewer than one quarter’ statement is strictly true, they could have expressed it more clearly. It is most accurate of the population with an AII of 2, 22.4% of whom meet their definition of anti-Semitic. Only 12.4% of those with an AII of 1 and 15.5% of the total with AII or 1 or 2 come up anti-Semitic.

More importantly, in reality, it is not at all reasonable to ask whether criticism of Israel mask anti-Semitism. It is much more reasonable to interrogate to what extent real political objections to Israeli actions express themselves in the form of anti-Semitic stereotypes. It is probably significant that those reporting their religion as Islam were nearly eight times more likely to register as ‘anti-Semitic’ than those reporting Christianity or no religion. (Interestingly, among the 25 persons identifying their religion as Judaism, twelve had an antiIsrael index of 1 or 2 and 80% (20) had an anti-Semitic index greater than 0.) This is almost certainly because the Israeli government explicitly carries out all its activities in the name of Jews, because it establishes settlements and roads in the West Bank for Jews only, because the bulk of the land in Israel is held in trust for Jews only, and because the Arabic media emphasise these facts. Obviously, they are not justified in coming to the racist conclusions the survey results indicate. But it is worth understanding how they come to do so.

It might be worth pointing out that Israeli Jews, too, have been known to attach racist stereotypes to others, and not just 14% of them either. In a 2004 survey of Israeli students, roughly contemporaneous with the ADL survey,

75 percent of Jewish students believe that Arabs are uneducated people, are uncivilized and are unclean…69 percent of the Jewish students think that Arabs are not smart…75 percent of Jewish students feel Arabs are violent…75 percent of Arab students showed willingness to meet with Jewish students as opposed to less than 50 percent willingness amongst Jewish students.

Another survey of Israeli Jews found,

68 percent of respondents said they do not wish to live next to an Arab neighbor, compared with 26 percent who said they would agree….46 percent said they would not be willing to have Arab friends who would visit them at their home. Some 63 percent of the Jewish public sees Arab civilians as a security and demographic threat, and 34 percent of the Jewish public sees Arab culture as inferior compared to Israeli culture. Half of the population, according to the poll, is anxious and uncomfortable when hearing Arabic on the street. … 18 percent of respondents said they feel intense hatred for Arab citizens of the country.

…and 40 percent believe that the State should encourage Arabs to emigrate from the country.

As for American Jews, the American Jewish Committee’s ‘2006 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion’ conducted September 25 – October 16, 2006 revealed that 81% agreed with the statement ‘The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel’ and 55% approve ‘of the way the Israeli government has handled the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon’. This is hardly direct evidence of anti Arab attitudes, but in context, it could be suggestive of such attitudes.

Getting back to Fish, as he reads it,

Small and Kaplan are careful to disclaim any causal implications that might be drawn from their analysis: they are not saying that anti-Semitism produces opposition to Israel or that opposition to Israel produces anti-Semitism, only that the two attitudes will more often than not be found in the same individual: scratch an opponent of Israel and you are likely — 56 percent of the time — to find an anti-Semite. This does suggest that if opposition to Israel increases, there will be an increase in anti-Semitism because the population of the 56 percenters will be larger. Is this something Jews, even Jews living in the United States, should be apprehensive about?

Of course it suggests nothing of the kind. It’s not out of the question, but bear in mind that we’re generalising on the basis of 32 people here. Israel does insist that its land grabbing and extrajudicial executions and so forth are prosecuted on behalf of all Jews and a great many Jews, perhaps Professor Fish himself among them, accept that, embrace that, even take pride in it. It is well within the realm of the possible that an increase in opposition to Israeli policies or to Israel per se could be associated with a rise in anti-Semitism. But it is far from a sure thing. Apart from anything else, it’s not ‘an opponent of Israel’ you have to scratch, but specifically one who holds all four of the tested views, including, significantly, support for suicide bombing of civilians, to get the 56% chance of their harbouring six or more anti-Semitic stereotypes. That means that, from the data provided, even among those 426 who support suicide bombing civilians, only 30.5% (130) are anti-Semitic, as defined.

Meanwhile, a small but increasing proportion of Jews is speaking out against the worst of the atrocities in the occupied territories, as evidenced in the British Independent Jewish Voices and Independent Australian Jewish Voices initiatives and organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace in the US. And they are particularly careful not to express anti-Semitic sentiments. As are Gentile critics like Jimmy Carter. As these voices become louder, they may exert a downward pressure on the association between Israeli war crimes and ordinary Jewish people that could ease or break the linkage with anti-Semitic attitudes.

Should American Jews be apprehensive? Well Kaplan and Small analysed 2004 data from ten European countries. There is no way of knowing whether analysis of similar data for the US, if it exists, would find the same correlation. And make no mistake, they did find a real correlation, even if their approach was biased and they accordingly failed to do some crucial analysis.

What we do know, is that a Gallup poll conducted just last month revealed 58% of Americans, when asked, ‘In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinian Arabs?’, answer the Israelis. This is the highest proportion recorded in the survey’s 20 year history, except for last year, immediately after the election of Hamas, and 1991, during the Gulf War when Iraq fired some scud missiles at Israeli targets.

At the same time, ‘sympathies’ for the Palestinians are higher than ever at 20%. Related data show 63% of Americans reported ‘favorable views’ of Israel, down from 68% last year, and 30% had ‘unfavorable views’, up from 23% in 2006. At the same time, ‘favorable’ views of the PA rose from 11% to 16% since February 2006, while ‘unfavorable’ views fell from 78% to 75%.

A BBC poll just released shows that, when asked about twelve countries (actually, half were asked about 6, and half about the other six), ‘Please tell me if you think each of the following are having a mainly positive or mainly negative influence in the world’, among 28,389 respondents in 27 countries, with 56% attributing a negative influence, Israel edged out Iran, with 54%, for first place. The US was close behind with 51%. Canada came in last, with just 14%. Looked at the other way, Israel and Iran took last and second last in positive influence, with 17% and 18%, respectively. The US came a distant fifth, with 30%. Canada and Japan tied for first place, with 54%.

When broken down by country of respondent, Israel got a positive rating of 41% in the US, 16% in Australia, and a surprisingly low 2% in Turkey – the single lowest positive rating for any country from any country. Its negative ratings were 33% in the US, 68% in Australia, and a very unsurprising 85% in Lebanon. In Europe, positive ratings ranged from 6% in Hungary to 19% in Russia, while negative ranged from 40% in Russia to 77% in Germany. There is no way of correlating these results directly with the ADL results. But in comparison with the US, there seems to be a tendency in the European countries the BBC surveyed to assign a more negative and less positive influence to Israel, which may be indicative of the kind of ‘anti-Israel’ sentiments Kaplan and Small analysed. If so, then Professor Fish has little cause for apprehension in the US in the here and now.

‘A certain irrationality’? I’ll say.

Antisemites in sheep's clothing

On Sunday, YNet reported Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni telling the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem, ‘Anti-Semitism is still very much alive. As the home of the Jewish people, this is a fight that should be led by Israel’

"Just 60 years after the Holocaust, we continue to witness racist and anti-Semitic phenomena around the world, that threatens the State of Israel … Something must be done immediately," said Livni.

Livni made it clear that the forum was not meant for talk, but to create a new perception of action against the threats.

"The war on anti-Semitism should be our top priority. We are witnessing new kinds of cooperation between the radical left, the extreme right and the Islamic jihad across the world.”

According to a recent ‘report’ (actually a PowerPoint presentation, apparently) mentioned by YNet on 28 January, anti-Semitic ‘incidents’ have increased alarmingly over the last year.

According to the figures, there was a 66 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Austria, while Germany saw a 60 percent rise. In France, there was a 20 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents, with the same level of increased incidents reported in Russia. In the UK, reports of anti-Semitic attacks dropped by three percent.

The presentation itself alleges a 60% increase in ‘incidents’ specifically in Berlin schools, not in Germany as a whole, and doesn’t provide counts for 2005 and 2006 as it does throughout the rest of the relevant table.

Among the incidents is the murder of Ilan Halimi in France. While there is no doubt that he was murdered, it is not clear that the motive was actually anti-Semitism. Those who claim it as a hate crime allege that ‘pro Palestinian literature’ was found during the arrest and that calls to the family included quotations from the Qur’an that were not recorded by the police, who were monitoring the family’s phone line. The only persuasive evidence of anti-Semitism is that Halimi’s family was not in a position to pay a significant ransom, the other most probable motive for his kidnapping.

But not all the ‘incidents’ counted were murders. In fact the ‘report’ is ambiguous about what they actually count, but it certainly appears to include graffiti. The presentation mentions incidents not reflected in the table. For example, it reports that on 6 August, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said,

"We feel that Israel's aggression against Lebanon and the Palestinians is directed also against us.... Israel reminds us of the fascistic nature of Hitler. Israel is a part of American imperialism."

In other words, to sympathise with Israel’s victims is anti-Semitic. It is anti-Semitic for Israel’s actions to remind you of fascism, a point I’ll return to. And oddly, to regard Israel as part of American imperialism is also anti-Semitic. What’s odd about this is that it was not that long ago that Walt and Mearscheimer were branded as antisemites for making exactly the opposite claim - effectively that the US was a tool of Israeli imperialism!

The presentation also cites

The Iranian President repeatedly calls for the annihilation of the Jewish State. He also demands the European countries to take back the Jews who left them for Israel.

As I’ve mentioned before, Ahmedinejad has not, in fact repeatedly called for the annihilation of the Jewish state. He made one remark that was subject to an unfortunate mistranslation and reported repeatedly. The report doesn’t make it clear how many anti-Semitic incidents that remark counts as.

But of course that’s not the point. The point is that all it takes to make an anti-Semitic incident is possession of pro Palestinian literature, quoting Muslim scripture, and speaking ‘severely’ against Israel. Even identifying with Iran can be construed as anti-Semitic. Presumably, before long speaking in support of the Venezuelan literacy campaign will be anti-Semitic.

Indeed,

The radical left promotes, at times an idea of deligitimization of the existence of the Israel. This is done by holding demonstrations, publishing articles in the media and activity on campuses.

The calls to boycott Israel both financially and academically continued this year. These calls came from leftist elements, especially in Britain, Sweden, South Africa and Canada.

By lumping together real racist violence with racist vandalism, graffiti, harsh words, and criticism of Israel, the Global Forum undermines its credibility and trivialises real anti-Semitism. Whether it is on the increase, remaining about the same, or decreasing, the objective must be to eradicate racist atrocities, whether targeting Jews or anyone else.

The new American Jewish Committee pamphlet, ‘"Progressive" Jewish thought and the new anti-Semitism’ by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, asserts that

Anti-Zionism, in fact, is the form that much of today’s anti-Semitism takes…

In some quarters, the challenge is not to Israel’s policies, but to its legitimacy and right to an ongoing future. Thus, the argument leveled by Israel’s fiercest critics is often no longer about 1967 and the country’s territorial expansion following its military victory during the Six-Day War, but about 1948 and the alleged “crime,” or “original sin,” of its very establishment. The debate, in other words, is less about the country’s borders and more about its origins and essence.

According to the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism’s ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’,

Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

* Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

* Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

* Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

* Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

* Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

Now I find it a little scary that under this apparently widely accepted definition, I am branded an anti-Semite because I don’t agree that colonists are entitled to exercise the right to self determination over territory from which they have ethnically cleansed the indigenous population. Or because the routine, arbitrary humiliation and brutality meted out to Palestinians forced by Israeli policy to go through checkpoints and the like in the course of their ordinary quotidian existence reminds me of the Warsaw Ghetto. Well, at least I’m in good company on that point. Holocaust survivor and Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial chairman Yosef Lapid thinks so too. As he said last month,

"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said.

"I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?"

The interesting point is the last. If it is anti-Semitic to deny that a Jewish state has a right to exist, or to compare Israeli policies to Nazi policies, or to hold Israel to its claim to be a ‘light unto the nations, a paragon of righteousness among states, that implies that to do so impugns Jews, and not just Israelis or the Jewish state itself. If it reflects upon Jews to criticise Israel in these ways, then that must mean that those defining anti-Semitism believe that Jews are responsible for the State of Israel and its policies. So by defining antiZionism as anti-Semitic, the CFCA, the AJC, and FM Livni, with her claim that Israel is ‘the home of the Jewish people’, betray that, under their own definition, they are anti-Semitic themselves.