'If I only had a brain'

In case you were wondering what on earth could motivate the campaign to subject Israel to boycott, sanctions, and disinvestment (BDS), the answer has finally arrived. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) has just released a pamphlet by their associate director of the Department on Anti-Semitism and Extremism, Ben Cohen, that promises to reveal ‘The Ideological Foundations of the Boycott Campaign Against Israel’.

‘What needs to be interrogated,’ Cohen asserts, ‘therefore, is the set of ideas that underlie the boycott movement as well as their appeal, both actual and potential…’

…In opposing the existence of a Jewish state, the boycott movement remains faithful to the long-held opposition of many left-wing ideologues toward Jews asserting themselves as an identifiable, autonomous collective.

Who are these left wing ideologues? Plenty of socialists find identity politics – political activity that places identity as a member of a group defined by ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and so forth – a distraction from the class struggle that can eradicate the economic conditions that foster oppression. We don’t oppose Jews asserting themselves as an identifiable, autonomous collective any more than we oppose anyone clinging to any other self defeating illusions.

I was also surprised to read that the BDS movement opposes the existence of a Jewish state. Plenty of antiZionists are involved in the movement, but from what I’ve read, the vast bulk of the movement explicitly supports the existence of a Jewish state bounded to the east by the Green Line. It’s not until the very last paragraph of the pamphlet, where he reemphasises ‘the fundamental aim of the boycott movement: not the withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 lines, but its dissolution as a sovereign state’, that Cohen finally reveals, ‘…this is not to suggest that every person who advocates a boycott of Israel necessarily supports this goal’.

Unbeknownst to actual participants in the movement, who overwhelmingly derive their inspiration from the movement against South African apartheid,

In advocating the economic, cultural, and political isolation of Israel, the boycott movement borrows from multiple historical legacies, notably the state policy of anti-Semitism, formally presented as anti-Zionism, practiced in the Soviet Union…

The apartheid parallel is not lost on Ben Cohen,

Finally, in demonizing Israel by comparing it with the former apartheid regime in South Africa—a grave deceit that is a core concern of this paper—the boycott movement seeks to force Israel to abandon, internally, its Jewish character and, externally, its sovereignty.

The last time I checked, the movement that culminated in the 1994 end of South Africa’s coveted white character had not in fact compromised its sovereignty, nor was that ever one of its objectives.

The campaign for BDS has enjoyed some encouraging successes in raising the issues in Britain in the last few months. Union debate on the issues is particularly welcome. BDS on their own, however, will not reverse the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza any more than 35 years of sanctions ended apartheid. Much less end the racist scourge of Zionism.

It is cynical ahistoricism to draw an analogy between South Africa and Israel.

when applied to Israel, the analogy is, at best, a careless and hasty attempt to graft the structure of one state onto another, simply because tensions and divisions over citizenship, land use, and access to services are a fact of life in Israel (as they are in other multiethnic societies). At worst, it represents the transformation of the word “apartheid” into a sheer pejorative term, removed from its southern African context and stripped of its close historical linkage with Afrikaner nationalism.

Just like the Holocaust was absolutely unique and to call anything removed from its northern European context and stripped of its close historical linkages with German nationalism transforms ‘genocide’ into a sheer pejorative term. Just like the American Revolution was unique and it’s a distortion and a travesty to call any other historical event ‘revolution’. Little could be more obvious than that if it’s not in southern Africa and linked to Afrikaner nationalism, it can’t even resemble apartheid.

To underscore the fundamental differences, Cohen writes,

Devised in the 1940s, the concept of ‘transfer’, removal of the indigenous Palestinians, was intrinsic to the racist culture of the Zionist regime and its prescription of separate (and unequal) development for different ethnic groups. By the 1970s the poverty-stricken territories were home to nearly four million Palestinians, many of whom were forcibly deported and deprived of citizenship in the new state, or any nationality at all. Starved of resources and entirely dependent on the Israeli regime (which controlled everything entering or leaving the West bank and Gaza, including foreign aid), a ‘Palestinian state’ was nonetheless touted as a permanent solution for Israel’s ‘demographic time bomb’. By transferring the Palestinian population in its entirety to the Palestinian state, the architects of the settlements intended to make sure that pressure for majority rule never reached critical mass.

Just kidding. This is what he really wrote:

Devised in the 1940s, the concept of the bantustans, separate “homelands” for blacks, was intrinsic to the racist culture of the apartheid regime and its prescription of separate (and unequal) development for different racial groups. By the 1970s the poverty-stricken bantustans were home to nearly four million blacks, many of whom were forcibly deported and deprived of their South African citizenship. Starved of resources and entirely dependent on the apartheid regime (since the absence of international recognition meant that international aid was not available), the bantustans were nonetheless touted as a permanent solution for South Africa’s black population. By transferring the black population in its entirety to the bantustans, the architects of apartheid intended to make sure that pressure for majority rule never reached critical mass.

There are real differences between the South African and Israeli versions of settler colonialism, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. In a nutshell, where the South African economy relied crucially on the labour of the enormous Black majority, Zionism has for much of its history aspired to replace indigenous Palestinian labour with ‘Hebrew labour’. The original Bantustans were a fiction erected specifically to deprive the colonised of political rights within ‘South Africa proper’. In this respect, at any rate, the creation of a ‘sovereign’ Palestinian state would actually enhance the resemblance with the South African paradigm. It seems obvious that even an optimal Palestinian state that incorporates the whole of Gaza and the West Bank, including annexed East Jerusalem, even in the unlikely scenario that the corridor between the two enclaves could be secured from Israeli interference, would have a tenuous claim to economic or political viability. But as the settlement grid expands and consolidates, as the wall inexorably corrals the West Bank Palestinians into four or more isolated ghettoes, as the leader of the free world gives his imprimatur to Israel’s eventual annexation of the ‘already existing major Israeli populations centers’, the shape of the future Palestine becomes clearer and clearer.

Cohen finds it ‘supremely ironic’ that

…those who insist that Zionism represents a surrender to anti-Semitism, who go on to claim that anti-Semitism is simply a rhetorical trick to muzzle criticism of the State of Israel, who grudgingly concede that Jewish identity may have, after all, a valid religious component, but stringently reject anything beyond that—present their approach as the key to making Jewish communities secure. From a Jewish perspective, such a position is transparently dishonest.

It just so happens that I am among ‘those who insist that Zionism represents a surrender to anti-Semitism’, so I might have something to say about these other accusations he’s leveling at me. Clearly, what he intended to write must have been that we claim specifically accusations of anti-Semitism are the rhetorical trick, not anti-Semitism per se. In many cases, those making the accusations may really believe that criticism of Israelii policy is anti-Semitic, but the vast majority are simply slurs, and often enough, as in Cohen’s case, part of a deliberate policy of trying to undermine criticism by tarring it with the ‘anti-Semite’ brush. But that is a very far cry from a claim that they are ‘simply a rhetorical trick to muzzle criticism of the State of Israel’. Anti-Semitism has a long history and there really are anti-Semitic incidents, including in Israel itself.

To say that Jewish identity has ‘a valid religious component’ is not the same thing as to say that some Jews derive our ethnic identity from participation in the community that engages in Jewish religious practices. The latter is transparently the case. But no, my Jewish identity has no religious component. Like any other form of identity politics, Jewish identity is a response to racism. Even when the oppressed embrace their own ethnic or ‘racial’ identity, it’s the racists who define the race by biologising whatever ad hoc racial markers they prefer to apply - appearance, cultural practice, surname… What makes me a Jew is that anti-Semites consider me a Jew. The Nazis’ racist 1935 Nuremburg Laws, prescribe that ‘A Jew is an individual who is descended from at least three grandparents who were, racially, full Jews...’ and ‘Full-blooded Jewish grandparents are those who belonged to the Jewish religious community.’ I also meet the definition in the racist 1970 amendment to the Law of return: ‘For the purposes of this Law, "Jew" means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.’ Above all, though, I’m a Jew because people like Ben Cohen, and the AJC, and the State of Israel purport to represent my interests and speak for me, as evidenced when he presumes to enunciate the ‘Jewish perspective’. So, no, I don’t ‘stringently reject anything beyond’ religious observance as a marker of Jewish identity.

Cohen reveals a great deal about his agenda when he claims that people like me ‘present their approach as the key to making Jewish communities secure’. It’s true that I have made the point from time to time that Israel is in reality the most dangerous place on the planet to be a Jew. The chance of falling victim to a misguided act of Palestinian resistance is obviously highest in Israel. Incidents of Nazi violence against Jews are probably as frequent in Israel as in France. A third of Jewish children in Israel, the charities all tell me, go to bed hungry. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors live in poverty. And I agree that the existence of the Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine conspires with the insistence of the State of Israel and the Zionist ideologues that Israel’s actions represent the interests of all Jews to provide the most significant pretext for modern anti-Semitic sentiments and violence. But while the end of the Zionist project would almost certainly have the effect of making Jewish communities more secure, that is not the principal concern, which is to reject racism and to achieve justice for the Palestinians, without which there can be no meaningful peace. But Cohen can’t even imagine an agenda other than his own obsession with securing Jewish communities. In fact, he excoriates Rosa Luxemburg for writing,

“Why do you come to me with your special Jewish sorrows? I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims in Putumayo, the Negroes in Africa.... I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Clearly, from his perspective, the ‘Jewish perspective’, to neglect to privilege Jewish security over all others is anti-Semitic. It’s simply bizarre that Zionists can accuse their mildest critics of singling out Israel when they are the ones who vehemently insist that Israel and Jews never be held to the same standards as anyone else. It’s a stunning propaganda triumph for the Hasbara establishment to get away with it.

If the AJC can pass off stuff like,

[Israel’s dissolution as a sovereign state] is the goal of those who have created the boycott movement and who set its agenda and priorities. It is a goal that is consistent with the broad trajectory described here, which sees in the persistence of Jews and Jewish identity an abnormality and which seeks to eradicate the foundations— territorial, cultural, political—for a conscious, self-defining Jewish existence in Israel and the Diaspora.

and the rest of Cohen’s legion of straw men, the Hasbarists will have further cause to celebrate.

Good for the gander

…a clear and present danger to international peace and security. Its ambitions to become the dominant power in the region, its heavy-handed interference in the domestic affairs of its neighbors, its lavish support for terrorist groups, and its massive arms build-up all underscore the nature of the threat.

…in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and UN Security Council resolutions.

…economic sanctions have been presented as a possible means to influence the regime and persuade it that there will be a painful price for flouting the will of the international community. With the implementation of sanctions and the threat of further ones…sanctions may have more direct impact than skeptics believed.

Despite…destabilizing influence in the international arena, investors from around the world continue to supply vast sums of money that not only prop up the regime, but also serve to embolden it…

No, of course it’s not Israel that the AJC was writing of in its new pamphlet, The Ca$e for Targeted Sanctions. Needless to say, the cuddly peacelovers at the American Jewish Committee aver, ‘No nation should relish the idea of military confrontation…The object, it should be stressed, is not to target the Iranian people, but its government’s policies.’

That would be the same American Jewish Committee that wasted no time yesterday in issuing a statement that ‘condemns the decision of UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, to advocate for a total boycott of Israel’.

"With the UNISON action, the union representing more than one million workers in public services in the United Kingdom has now joined with the journalists and academics unions in a shameful hate campaign against the Jewish state."

The UNISON resolution makes no mention of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, yet calls for the removal of Israel's security fence, pejoratively referred to as the "Apartheid wall".

…"UNISON has aligned itself with these murderous, anti-democratic and viciously anti-Semitic forces."

Later this week the UNISON conference may consider a further resolution calling for divestment from pension funds "which may have investments in Israel or in key companies trading with Israel."

Both motions are anti-Semitic, attempting to put Israel beyond the pale, just as prior anti-Semitic movements targeted individual Jews and Jewish communities.

Just in case anyone has missed some of the action, ‘Iran’s nuclear weapons program is particularly worrisome’. Israel’s nuclear arsenal threatens nobody. ‘Experts believe that the regime is developing ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear weapons…and could wield its nuclear deterrent as political blackmail throughout the Middle East’. Some ‘experts’ believe that, some Israeli experts for example, but not the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, for example. And it goes without saying that Israel’s actual nuclear arsenal blackmails nobody. ‘In light of these scenarios, the international community has turned to economic penalties to demonstrate to Iran’s policymakers that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable.’ But a nuclear armed Israel is not only acceptable, but desirable.

And economic penalties for ‘a clear and present danger’, ‘ambitions to become the dominant power in the region’, ‘heavy-handed interference’, ‘lavish support for terrorist groups’, ‘massive arms build-up’, ‘violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and UN Security Council resolutions’? Well they’re ok if the target is Iran, whose deadliest, most implacable enemies make those claims about it. But not if the target is Israel, which has demonstrated that it meets every one of the criteria the AJC cites to justify economic sanctions against it’s regional rival. Except one. Israel has not violated the NPT. That’s because Israel isn’t even party to the NPT, for obvious reasons.

Once again, we have an example of Israel’s shrillest defenders, ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ In their haste to accuse others of anti-Semitism, they display their own anti-Semitism, in the terms of the very ‘Working definition’ they helped draft. Apparently this proclivity for foot shooting has a long pedigree. On Tuesday, the AJC took umbrage when the UN Human Rights Council designated Israel ‘a permanent and separate agenda item’.

“No words can adequately describe how disappointing has been the performance of the UN Human Rights Council since its inception more than a year ago,” said AJC Executive Director David A. Harris…adding that this development is particularly painful for AJC, whose leaders were directly involved in helping to draft the human rights provisions in the UN Charter more than 60 years ago.

I suppose they should have taken more care to frame human rights provisions explicitly to exclude violations by Israel.

Paths to peace

As reported on Jew sans frontières, lenin’s tomb, Ha’aretz, and everywhere, Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) voted by a large margin yesterday to submit ‘the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches for information and discussion'. That would be the call for the academic boycott of Israeli universities by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

While this is of course a very welcome step towards the isolation of Israel, as I wrote in December, although I have reservations about sanctions, and an academic boycott in particular, as a tactic, the call by Palestinian unions and academics for it trumps my reservations.

One of the strongest arguments I’ve encountered in support of the boycott is the self serving hypocrisy of those who bleat about infringing academic freedom for Israelis while issuing not so much as a peep against the almost total eradication of academic activity of any kind in Palestine, both for Palestinian academics and students and for anyone wanting to do research in the Occupied Territories.

In this connection, Dr Rima Merriman of Arab American University in Jenin writes of a student who had applied for

a Paths to Peace scholarship to attend NYU for a year. There were six scholarships offered, three for Israeli students and three for Gaza and WB students. Over fifty applications were submitted and our student was shortlisted and invited to an interview....in Jerusalem…But how to get to Jerusalem? [Palestinians require permits to enter Israel, not readily obtainable] He called the coordinator of the scholarship, a Professor Zweig, and said he needed a letter to submit to the Israeli military post at Salem here in Jenin in order to get a permit. He submitted his request and was told he would get a permit, but when the Israeli official called him in for an interview, he was bluntly told that the price of the permit was to "cooperate" - i.e., inform on the people around him in his village or on campus, etc. He ended up not getting a permit…Not only that, any hope of his ever getting to the US is probably non-existent now, because the visa computers of the US consulate are apparently on the same network as Israeli so-called "intelligence" networks - no questions asked. In fact, one of the rationales used by Professor Zweig for NOT conducting the interviews in Ramallah is that a. Israeli students wouldn't have been able to get to them, and b. if our student couldn't get to Jerusalem, he wouldn't be able to get a visa to the US and that would be that. Apologetically, he explained that this brick road to peace he is coordinating has nothing to do with politics!...

I hasten to recall that a much more extensive and broadly supported boycott of apartheid South Africa was first called in 1959. Even though the Black population comprised an 80% majority in South Africa, while the populations of Palestinians and Jews within historic Palestine is currently about even; even though the South African economy depended crucially on Black labour while the Israeli economy was founded on ‘Hebrew labour’ and has been conscientiously reducing Palestinian labour in Israel and the settlements since 1999; even though Black South Africans had a strong union movement and an armed insurgency and didn’t have to contend with anything resembling Holocaust guilt, it still took 35 years before those sanctions achieved the end of apartheid. So don’t hold your breath.

[Thanks to Tony Greenstein for the Paths to Peace story.]

Already reeling

A recipient wrote yesterday pointing out that I had failed to indicate when writing of ‘the Times’ whether I meant the NY, LA, London, or Canberra Times. I promised to try to be more careful in future. But if I should ever slip, I probably mean the NY Times and you can work out which it is by hovering your mouse over the hypertext link.

Thank goodness there’s a ceasefire at last. Today’s NY Times carries an article by Dina Kraft, datelined Sderot. To put the event in context, she reports,

at least 1,100 rockets have been fired into Israel itself. With the escalation of the fighting in June, about 400 Palestinians have been killed, a number of them militants, along with three Israeli soldiers. Four Israelis have been killed by rocket fire in the past 14 months

Ms Kraft has decided not to trouble her audience with a count of the projectiles fired into the Gaza strip, including, perhaps the 11 155mm shells used in the Beit Hanoun massacre less than a fortnight ago, an incident already consigned to the memory hole. She wants readers to believe the ‘escalation’ was somehow mutual rather than an invasion by the world’s fourth most powerful military.

Mr. Olmert said the re-entry was to win the release of the captured soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, but many Israelis said they viewed the move as a chance to quash the rocket fire.

Ms Kraft reports this as if either of those pretexts made any sense in political or military terms, as if five months of experience haven’t decisively proven that ‘re-entry’, so much more pleasant for those enjoying entry than military invasion, was entirely ineffective in retrieving the hostage and quite predictably provoked further rocket firing in retaliation.

Parents in both southern Israel and Gaza reported anxious and fearful children, many showing signs of trauma and regression like bed-wetting and nightmares after the long months of back and forth fighting, rockets, shelling and airstrikes.

This kind of conflict is so evenhanded in how it traumatizes children. The two evenly matched antagonists clearly launch airstrikes against each other. And there is no mention of the sonic boom attacks Israeli warplanes have been carrying out many times nightly for months. Indeed, it is not clear whether these, which impact most on children and may in fact be intended specifically to target children, come within the terms of the ceasefire.

In any case, four paragraphs sympathetically tell the tale of Daniel Gigi, who is leaving Sderot with his family of six after a Qassam rocket hit their house. Another quotes an 11 year old Sderot boy treated for shock last week. There are no sympathetic stories of Palestinian parents fleeing the ‘conflict’, because of course departure is not an option for them. There are no quotes from shocked Palestinian children, either.

A unity government could end the economic and political embargo imposed by Western countries after Hamas was elected in January.

Ms Kraft clearly wants the reader to join her in thinking a few things here. One of them is that the Palestine Authority is a government. In reality, as everyone knows, it was set up as part of the Oslo ‘peace process’ with the principal objective of transferring responsibility for policing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from the Israeli military to a more acceptable looking indigenous surrogate. Another is that there is nothing unusual about imposing an airtight ‘economic and political embargo’ in retaliation for an undesireable election result. It might be worth mentioning, if you believe in such things, as the NY Times often makes a show of doing, that such a blockade would be a clear violation of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,’ except, conveniently, Palestine is not a state, undermining the initial assertion about a ‘unity government’. It might be worth mentioning how quickly the blockade was imposed after the purported provocation or how comprehensive its provisions. Some might think that it was somewhat cynical to place a paragraph of this kind into a report without fleshing it out with a few words describing the devastating impact the embargo has had on the ordinary Palestinians who comprise its principal target.

On the whole, this report, like others every day or nearly every day, in the NY Times and many other western media outlets, as I often point out in this blog, would appear to provide evidence of a pro Israeli stance. But if that is the impression you get, I fear you, like me, are mistaken.

Isi Leibler, identified as chair of ‘the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’, writing in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, warns, in the wake of the imminent launch of al-Jazeera’s English service,

There is no disputing that at every level we are losing the global war of ideas. Despite clear evidence that fanatical Islamic fundamentalism threatens the basic fabric of Western civilization, Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, are now generally perceived as pariahs.

The English version of Al Jazeera thus has the potential of evolving into one of the most effective weapons against the Jewish people, already reeling from the onslaught of massive waves of anti-Semitism. It may further marginalize Israel and create more animus against Diaspora Jews.

I’ll leave it to the reader to pick apart all the propaganda tricks Mr Leibler deploys in his article – ‘already reeling from the onslaught of massive waves of anti-Semitism’, indeed! But I do want to draw attention to how comfortable this champion of diaspora Jewry is drawing the diaspora into the crimes of the Zionist state, seamlessly weaving the first person plural personal pronoun through his narrative. Zionists correctly deplore this as anti-Semitic when their perceived enemies do it, but it is a fundamental part of their own rhetorical arsenal. As a Jew resident in ‘the Muslim world’, it is still Zionism that makes me most uneasy and I find more anti-Semitism on the Jerusalem Post’s website than on al-Jazeera’s. So go figure.

Does he deserve to die?

Well, probably. But we may never know for sure because he was not accorded the scrupulous safeguards that the Iraqis are entitled to in their justice system. And of course, it is not theirs, anyway. That’s just the fiction the occupation has put on the whole quisling structure they’ve established in Iraq. As if they would take anyone in but a handful of international relations academics!

In an uncharacteristically sensible opinion, considering the auspices under which it was carried out, Leandro Despouy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers ‘voiced “strong objections” regarding the conduct of the trial’, as reported on the UN website.

Despouy cogently observes,

The tribunal has been established during an occupation considered by many as illegal, is composed of judges who have been selected during this occupation, including non Iraqi citizens, and has been mainly financed by the United States.

…lack of observance of a legal framework that conforms to international human rights principles and standards, in particular the right to be tried by an independent and impartial tribunal which upholds the right to a defence… risks being seen as the expression of the verdict of the winners over the losers…Since its beginning one of the judges, five candidate judges, three defence lawyers and an employee of the tribunal have been killed.

Furthermore, the body had no mandate to address “the war crimes committed by foreign troops during the first Gulf war (1990), nor the war crimes committed after 1 May 2003, date of the beginning of the occupation.”

He also discouraged Saddam’s execution which would be an open contradiction to the growing international tendency to abolish capital punishment.

Perhaps more importantly, it lets Saddam’s main backers entirely off the hook, as Robert Fisk chronicled in yesterday’s CounterPunch, citing US and British supply of a range of biological and chemical agents that they were perfectly well aware were being used against the Iranian conscripts in the first Gulf War in the 1980s, as well as the Halabja massacre, which the US cynically tried to blame on Iran when Saddam was their buddy. Norman Solomon provides a list of compelling accusations specifically against US Secretary of ‘Defense’ Donald Rumsfeld.

Indeed, a really thorough investigation would have to go right back to the late Fifties and examine how the Ba’ath came to overthrow the Qassem government in the first place, and how Saddam rose to preeminence in that august institution. And it might even determine who needs to stand trial for the crimes against humanity of the UN sanctions regime, characterized by its administrators, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, as ‘genocide’.

If Saddam doesn’t live to testify in all those trials and help bring his backers to justice, it will be, if possible, even more obvious that the principal function of this kangaroo court has been to protect the guilty.