On Monday, the ultra-Zionist smear sheet the Jewish Chronicle returned to its old tricks of denouncing perfectly decent people as ‘anti-Semites’ because they dare to criticise Israel. Their latest victim is the Labour MP for mid-Sussex, Gemma Bolton, because she had issued a series of tweets describing Israel as an apartheid state, calling for the deselection of MPs who had been disloyal to Corbyn and supporting the BDS campaign against Israel. Aaagh! What a monster! Except, as Zelo Street has shown, there’s absolutely no anti-Semitism there. These are all criticisms of Israel, not Jews or Judaism.
They’re also entirely justified. Israel is an apartheid state. 95 per cent of property in Israel is owned by the Jewish National Fund, which will only let it to Jews. Palestinians are subject to choking legislation deliberately designed to strangle their businesses and agriculture. Arabs travelling into Israel to work have to use separate roads from Israelis, in which they are subject to frequent stops at checkpoints. It doesn’t matter how upset the Board, the Chief Rabbi and the inmates of the United Synagogue get about having Israel described as an apartheid state, an apartheid state is precisely what it is. Demanding that it’s critics see it otherwise is just bullying and brainwashing, like the torture scene in Orwell’s 1984 when O’Brien attempts to get Winston Smith to say that the wrong number of lights are shining.
As for the BDS campaign being against Israel, this is a deliberate half-truth. It’s not against Israel. It is against goods produced in the occupied territories. These belong to the Palestinians, but the Likudniks and their ultra-nationalistic allies and supporters believe they should be part of Israel. The BDS campaign is thus against Israeli expansionism and apartheid, not against Israel and certainly not against Jews. Indeed, the BDS campaign has the staunch support of many Jews outraged at what the country is doing to the Palestinians in their name.
But then, you can’t expect common sense and sweet reasonableness from the Chronicle, nor any of the other institutional defenders of the Likudniks and the current ultra-Zionist regime. Even the mildest criticism of their country sends them off into what Molesworth would sa was a ‘fearful bate’. And any mention of the Palestinians has them climbing the walls and chewing the furniture. This was shown in a very telling story from Jack Straw, which Lobster head honcho Robin Ramsay has included in a piece about the UAE-Israel rapprochement in his ‘View from the Bridge’ column, ‘Forget the Palestinians’. Straw’s a Christian of Jewish heritage. In his memoirs he describes how various Israeli officials flew off the handle at him simply because he had referred to the Palestinians in an article.
‘One Israeli Cabinet minister described this was as an “obscenity” and “pornographic”. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon expressed “anger, outrage and disappointment”. Israeli president Moshe Katzav cancelled a meeting with me. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres cancelled a formal banquet.’
These people are fanatics and racial supremacists, not statesmen or respectable politicians. And the Board, the Chief Rabbianate and right-wing rags like the Jewish Chronicle share that irrational fanaticism.
It is they, rather than Israel’s decent, reasonable critics, like Gemma Bolton, who should be held in contempt.
Keir Starmer has shown himself determined to purge the party of any and all critics of Israel on the utterly specious grounds that they are automatically anti-Semites. They must be, despite the fact that very many of them are self-respecting Jews and equally self-respecting non-Jewish anti-racists. This is because the Israel lobby and the British establishment and media have declared that anybody who supports Jeremy Corbyn and/ or shares his conviction that Palestinians should be allowed to live in peace in their traditional homeland has to be a horrible Jew-hater and a Nazi. Even if, like Corbyn, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Mike, Martin Odoni and any number of others, they are determined anti-racists. So let’s remind people just what the Palestinians are facing, and why criticising Israel is entirely legitimate and is based on what the Israeli state and its armed forces do, not because they’re Jewish.
I found this ‘Letter from Israel’ in Private Eye’s edition for 30th November – 13th December 2001. This was a time when the Eye didn’t flinch at criticising Israel, even when outraged Zionists complained that it was being anti-Semitic by doing so. The Eye has said that the ‘Letter From…’ pieces are written by journalists from countries described, so that this piece, although anonymous and possibly reworked by someone else in the Eye to cover up the author’s identity, comes from an Israeli journo. And it’s a long list of Israel’s attacks, not just on the Palestinians and their leaders, but also the Americans and Lebanon. It runs
Terrorism is the topic of the year, and whatever the current focus, history shows that we in Israel have a certain historical experience.
Take the bombing of American targets. Our chaps bombed the US cultural centres in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1954, planning to let Abdul Nasser’s new Egyptian government take the blame. Unfortunately the scam went wrong and our defence minister Pinhas Lavon had to resign, though the director-general of his ministry, Shimon Peres, managed to hang on. Today he is Ariel Sharon’s foreign minister.
Or take political assassinations. If you ever wondered why Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants are hard to understand, the answer it simple: we shot most of his organisation’s top foreign language speakers. In fact in one glorious year, 1972, our Mossad secret service managed to kill both the PLO’s political representative in Rome, Wael Zouetar, and his counterpart in Paris, Mahmoud Hamdan.
Admittedly we make the odd mistake. There was the embarrassing 1974 incident in Lilienhammer, when a Mossad hit squad shot dead Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in front of his heavily pregnant Norwegian wife, having mistaken him for a PLO man.
Still, we maintain a sense of proportion and have never believed in simply takinig an eye for an eye. In 1982 when an assassin from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon wounded (but not killed) our London rep, Shlomo Argov, we invaded Lebanon and more than 20,000 people there died, mostly civilians.
Then there is the bombing of local public buildings, one of our specialities. In recent months we have shelled not just West Bank police stations, but hotels, an orphanage and the Bethlehem maternity hospital. (Not that many Palestinian women reach the hospital. Our boys at the checkpoints surrounding their townships are particularly mistrustful of women claiming to be in labour and so refuse to let them through).
None of this would have happened, of course, if the Palestinians would agree to live happily while surrounded by our soldiers and settlers. But they won’t and we must protect ourselves. Not for us any lily-livered effort to apprehend the actual perpetrators. We prefer hostage taking. This is certainly what we did when some Palestinians recently shot that nice man, ex-general Rehavam Zeevi, the founder of a party whose sole platform is the expulsion of all Arabs. Such a view had resulted in his being invited into Mr Sharon’s government as a tourism minister.
Anyway, whenever that sort of thing happens we just hold the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at gunpoint and station tanks in their streets. Then we smash the place up (just look at Manger Square after we finished with it!) and kill a few dozen locals of mixed age and sex.
And, oh yes, we also use helicopter gunships to blow to smithereens any Palestinian we suspect of planning any attacks on us, though not usually the actual perpetrators. Those we expect Yasser Arafat to hand over, in exchange for the goodwill we have shown in our peace talks with him, which have been dragging on for a mere eight years. Why are those Palestinians in such a rush?
That we have spent those years building thousands of new settler homes in the West Bank is a mere accident, not a lack of sincerity. True, this may have involved confiscating Palestinian land, arresting its owners and shooting demonstrators, which slows down agreement; but it makes sense: we just like holding peace talks so much we never want them to end.
Of course, we cannot negotiate with just anyone, and so we are currently helping improve Arafat’s administration by picking off any unsuitable figures. And we don’t just mean military men: one of those killed by us was Dr. Tahbed Thabed, the director-general of the Palestinian health authority.
In the 19 years since then, we’ve had the blockade of Gaza and now Netanyahu has declared his intention of seizing 1/3 of Palestinian land on the West Bank. But organisations like the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Leadership Council, the entirely wrongly named Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jews or members of the Labour Party, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, founded to bolster British support for Israel after the bombardment of Gaza, will denounce anything more than the mildest, token criticism of Israel’s actions.
The Israeli state has been engaged on a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, and many of its own citizens have protested against it. Israel is a country. It is not, and never have been, synonymous with the Jewish people, no matter what law Netanyahu passes to claim that it is. Criticising Israel and its leaders is not anti-Semitic, no matter how much the Board and the Chief Rabbis howl that it is.
And Starmer has no business kicking genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism out of Labour, simply for supporting the Palestinians. And especially not when he is tolerating real, anti-Black racists and islamophobes.
The documentary then moves on to January, 2009 and the invasion of Gaza, and allegations of Human Rights abuses by Israeli forces were still circulating months later. But Oborne points out that you wouldn’t know it from the contents of the News of the World and the Mirror. Both these rags ran stories instead about the threat to Israel from the surrounding Arab nations. The hacks behind these pieces had been given free trips to Israel by BICOM, one of the wealthiest lobby groups in Britain. Oborne then goes on to interview David Newman in his office in Jerusalem. Newman worked alongside BICOM in disseminating Israeli propaganda in British universities. Newman states that there is indeed a debate within Israel about the status of the settlements in Palestinian territory. Groups like BICOM close down this debate abroad, and instead demand absolute for Israel.
Plocha Zabludowicz, the head of BICOM, is the 18th richest person in Britain. And he is very definitely not part of traditional British Anglo-Jewish society, but came up through the Jewish Leadership Council, who are described as the lords of the big Jewish donors. Oborne then interviews the head of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Rabbi Emeritus David Goldberg, and asks if he knows him. Goldberg states that his name doesn’t ring a bell. Zabludowicz is actually of Polish ancestry. He is a Finnish citizen with a house in north London. His father made a fortune peddling Israeli arms, as did Zabludowicz himself before moving into property and casinos. His company is registered in Lichtenstein. He is, in short, ‘a rank outsider’. He was also one of the guests at Madonna’s birthday party in Italy.
Zabludowicz generously bankrolls BICOM, to whom he gave £800,000, who wrote a clause into their accounts recognising his generosity. He had given them £1.3 million in the previous three years, and has business interests in the Middle East. These cast doubt on the possibility of reaching a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Oborne then goes on to discuss the case of one of the illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine, whose supermarket is owned by Zabludowicz. Newman states this indicates the direction in which BICOM is moving. Rabbi Goldberg states that it shows that Zabludowicz calculates that the settlement won’t be returning to the Palestinians, even under the most generous peace deal. As for Zabludowicz himself, he declined to meet the Dispatches team, but instead released a statement claiming that he was a major supporter of the creation of a separate Palestinian state, and that he understood that concessions would need to be made. Oborne was, however, successful in talking to Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. She claimed that BICOM was very open, that their donors do not influence policy. When asked about Zabludowicz, she claimed he was different from anyone else and she didn’t know about his business connections. All the organisation was doing was to make journos and people aware of the different strands of the debate on Israel.
Oborne moves on to the other groups involved in the Israel lobby – the Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation, and states that some members of these groups are very aggressive towards the TV and press. He then interviews Alan Rusbridger about his experiences of dealing with them. Rusbridger states that some TV editors warned him to stay away from them and the whole subject of Israel and the Palestinians. The Guardian was attacked for criticising Israel in a way that no other country does. There was a special meeting at the Israeli embassy between the ambassador, Zabludowicz, Grunewald of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the property magnate Gerald Reuben. They were unhappy about a Groaniad article comparing the Israeli’s occupation of Palestine with apartheid South Africa. So Grunewald and his mate, Roman Leidel, decided to pay Rusbridger a visit. Grunewald is a lawyer, claimed that the article was fomenting anti-Semitism, and would encourage people to attack Jews on the street, a risible accusation which Rusbridger denied. This was followed by complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about the article by the pro-Israel American group, CAMERA, or Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which specialising in attacking journos critical of Israel. The Press Complaints Commission duly investigated the article, and found that only one fact was wrong. When asked about this, Rabbi Goldberg states that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. There are two road systems, one for use by Israelis and one for the Palestinians. There are two legal systems in operation. The Israelis are governed by Israeli law, while the Palestinians are governed by military law. When asked what will happen to him when his comments are broadcast, the good rabbi simply laughs and says that he’ll be attacked once against as being an ant-Semitic, self-hating Jew.
Many other Jews are also critical of Israel. Oborne goes on to talk to Tony Lerman, formerly of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, and now a Groaniad journo. Lerman states that the Israel lobby don’t take into account the diversity of Jewish views on Israel. This is confirmed by Avi Shlaim, who says that there is a split in the Jewish community over Israel. The community’s leaders are largely pro-Israel with a narrow rightwing agenda that is not typical of Jewish Brits. And libelling Israel’s critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ is now common policy.
One example of this use of libel is a New York blogger, ‘Hawkeye’, who hunts through the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ column, claiming it is full of anti-Semitic bias. Rusbridger states that this is dangerous and disreputable. ‘Hawkeye’ attacked Lerman in particular as a nasty anti-Semite. Lerman states that this tactic has been adopted because it’s a useful defence of Israel. Rabbi Goldberg concedes that some people might be seriously anti-Semitic, others are just voicing genuine opinions, which should be respected. Michael Ancram, even, was accused of being anti-Semitic, which he said he takes with a pinch of salt.
But this leads into the whole question of whether the BBC has been corrupted by the influence of the Israel lobby. On record, BBC journos and spokespeople claim that the Corporation’s reporting of Israel is unbiased. Off-record, the stories different. News staff state that there is always pressure from top management for a pro-Israel slant. Oborne then interview Charlie Brebitt, an accountant at the LSE, who was formerly of Channel 4, who confirms that there is a very strong and active Israel lobby, and a sizable body of sympathy with Israel. The BBC has no choice but to respond. Honest Reporting, another pro-Israel media attack dog, and the other parts of the Israel lobby take advantage of this, alleging that there is an institutional bias at the Corporation against Israel.
In 2003 during the Iraq invasion the Beeb broadcast a hard-hitting documentary investigating Israel’s secret nuclear weapon’s programme, entitled ‘Israel’s Secret Weapon’ on the 16th March. The Israeli Press Office issued a statement comparing this to the worst of Nazi propaganda, and imposed restrictions on BBC staff in Israel. When Ariel Sharon, the Israeli leader, visited Downing Street, the only journos banned from covering the meeting were the Beeb. Honest Reporting UK complained that the programme was part of a campaign to vilify Israel. One member of the group, Nathan Sharansky, complained that the late Orla Guerin, here shown with two eyes, was anti-Semitic, and that she shared the goals of Palestinian terror groups.
Tony Greenstein, a Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist, as well as opponent of all other forms of racism, has put up a very interesting piece on his blog commenting on Richard Spencer’s declaration that he is ‘a White Zionist’. Spencer is the leader and founder of the ‘Alt-Right’ movement, which takes its name from the website he founded. He is a racist and White supremacist, and one of the organisers of the Nazi march in Charlottesville last weekend, which saw the stormtroopers surround the hall in which a multicultural, multi-racial meeting against the racists was being held. The Nazis also surrounded a synagogue, chanting ‘Sieg heil!’ The rabbi and one of the officials smuggled the Torah Scroll out of the building because they were afraid these thugs would desecrate it.
The whole march was like something from the Third Reich, with the Nazis carrying torches, bearing shields with Nazi insignia, and chanting ‘Blood and Soil’, one of the Nazi slogans, and ‘the Jews shall not replace us’. There have been documentaries on the Beeb over here about how, amongst their other atrocities against the Jews, the Nazis also invaded synagogues and brutalized the rabbis and congregation during Krystalnacht. That was the evening when the Nazis smashed the glass front windows of Jewish businesses.
Greenstein notes that apart from Spencer, Trump’s administration has included other anti-Semites and racists. Such as Steve Bannon, the former head of the racist and White supremacist Breitbart News, Steven Miller, who formulated Trump’s immigration policy and was mentored by Bannon, and the infamous Sebastian Gorka.
Gorka’s one of the founders of the New Democratic Coalition in Hungary, which includes Jobbik, an openly racist, anti-Semitic party. He has also given his support to the Hungarian Guard, Jobbik’s anti-Semitic militia, and has the Vitezi Rend, a medal for a chivalric order created by the Hungarian dictator, Admiral Horthy, who presided over the deportation of his country’s Jews to the death camps.
But Spencer also claims to respect Israel and has talked about having an alliance with the Jews. When Rabbi Matt Rosenberg of Texas A&M Hillel challenged Spencer to learn the Torah with him, which was God’s revelation of radical inclusion and love, Spencer threw it back at him. Would he be so supportive of such radical inclusion if the entire Middle East could move to Israel? He then went on to state that he respects the Jewish people because they didn’t assimilate to the nations around them, and that is what he wants for America, his country.
Greenstein has also included two articles about Spencer and his views on Israel, one of the Israeli paper Haaretz and the other from Y-Net. The Y Net article states that Israel isn’t shocked by the presence of anti-Semites in the White House, as an upsurge in anti-Semitism is good for Israel.
The article states
As the Jews in Israel long for immigrants with a certain affiliation to their people, and as Zionism—like any other ideology—needs constant justification, we have a secret hope in our hearts that a moderate anti-Semitic wave, along with a deterioration in the economic situation in their countries of residence, will make Diaspora Jews realize that they belong with us. Is proof even necessary? No one will protest the assertion that the rise in anti-Semitism in France gave us some satisfaction, in the sense of “we warned you, didn’t we?” Late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not hesitate to make such a declaration, angering the French government and many Jews who see themselves as unconditional French citizens. Thousands of Jews from France who see Israel as a lifeboat, as an insurance policy, purchased apartments here and raised real estate prices in the coastal cities. That’s good. It proves Zionism was right. Furthermore, no one can deny that the economic crisis in the Soviet empire, coupled with the nesting anti-Semitism there, were the cause of the immigration to Israel of about 1 million Jews and their non-Jewish relatives, most of whom have no affiliation to Jewish culture. Neither can anyone contradict the embarrassing fact that Israel worked to lock the gates to the US, the opening of which may have directed many of these Jews and their relatives there, and perhaps even most of them.
The article also states that the comfortable existence of American Jews raises the question of whether the foundation of Israel was worth it. Israel’s existence has not made Israel a normal state, and has not combated anti-Semitism but has partly served to increase it through the state’s maltreatment of the Palestinians. The article concludes
In order to remove these malignant doubts, it would be good to have some anti-Semitism in America. Not serious anti-Semitism, not pogroms, not persecutions that will empty America from its Jews, as we need them there, but just a taste of this pungent stuff, so that we can restore our faith in Zionism.
This is very much the same view as Greenstein’s own: that Zionists are perfectly happy allying and stirring up anti-Semitism, as they believe it will ultimately benefit Israel by causing Jews to migrate there.
It was statements like this, which got Livingstone suspended from the Labour party, when he told the historical truth that Hitler had forged a brief alliance with the Zionists to send Jews to Israel from Germany.
And it is because of this, entirely correct assessment of the Zionists’ attitude towards anti-Semitism, and their utilitarian view of the brutalization and persecution of diaspora Jews, that Mr. Greenstein himself has repeatedly been vilified as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘self-hating’.
I’ve blogged several times in my pieces attacking Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud party and the Israel lobby, and the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour centre-left, that there are many very courageous Jews and Israelis, who are also strongly opposed to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. This is another video I found on YouTube. It’s for an organisation, Young, Left and Jewish, and has the organisation’s website address at the end. In it, anti-Zionist Jewish young people describe their beliefs and activities to oppose and make people aware of the persecution of the Arabs.
One Jewish young woman describes how the trips to Israel provided by the Jewish organisations are designed to inculcate support for Israel, even going so far, if they can, to encourage Jews to immigrate there. Another young woman begins her story by telling a bit of her own family history. She is descended from two Holocaust survivors and a Nazi officer, and so is connected to both sides of the Holocaust. She shows a family photograph album, with photos of her parents and grandparents, including the tattoo of the number the Nazis’ had placed on the arms of their victims. She then describes how, on a trip to Israel, she and her friends encountered a group of Arab Israelis. She and they sat down to talk, and they discovered that they had much in common through their experiences of persecution, the Jews from the Nazis and the Arabs from the Israelis. She states that this is causing immense pain and outrage, and that this will continue for decades to come. Intercut with this bit is historical footage of Jews being herded into the cattle trucks to the death camps. Another young woman describes how she and her friends put on a play by Jews, for Jews, to explore and explain about the persecution of the Palestinians by the Israeli state. Yet another young woman tells how she heckled Ariel Sharon in order to tell ‘truth to power’.
In my posts about this issue, I’ve described the fierce hostility those Jews, who do campaign on the behalf of the Palestinians face from the Zionist establishment. Just as anti-Zionist gentiles are smeared as anti-Semites, Jews are accused of being self-hating, or ‘not proper Jews’. Or worse. Another young woman in this video talks about going to a Zionist meeting to hand round pamphlets and flyers about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She describes how she and others like her are accused of being ‘self-hating’, or because they oppose Israel, they must somehow be in favour of terrorism or Yasser Arafat. She describes how she was cursed and spat at, with women she describes as looking like typical Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) grandmothers raising their middle finger to her. One woman even turned away and covered her child’s eyes.
One Rabbi, R. Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, states that he has received death threat for his opinions.
The video is accompanied by a couple of pieces of traditional Jewish song.
I was particularly struck by the young woman, who found a common thread of experience through her family’s suffering under the Holocaust, and the Arab Israelis’ persecution by the Israeli state. The Palestinians refer to the destruction of their country as the Nakba, which means the ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. Amos Oz in his book, The Israelis, describes how just as the Israelis attempt to recover the history of the numerous Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, so the Palestinians similarly attempt to document and trace their communities, which have been exterminated by the Israelis.
He also includes in his book accounts and statements by Israeli soldiers of their mixed feelings, including guilt and sorrow, at seeing Arabs forced off their lands and from their property. Several of them felt that it could easily have been them made to depart from their homes by an overwhelming power. It struck me that these feelings, like those of the young woman in this video, came from the collective Jewish experience of being repeatedly under attack, and forced to move on through violence, including armed force. The Holocaust is the best known, and most extreme and horrific of this, but just one example in the long persecution of the Jewish people. And some soldiers – unfortunately, not all – were bound to have profound misgivings when they found themselves ordered to do precisely the same thing to others.
Opposition to Israel and its systematic persecution of its indigenous population isn’t a simple case of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. it is a response by principled women and men to the persecution of yet another people by a colonial settler state. Very many of those who support the Palestinians against the likes of Netanyahu are sincere anti-racists, including Jews, who feel that this persecution runs counter to the teachings of their own religion. I put up a video a few days ago of a mass meeting of Orthodox Jews in New York to protest against the state of Israel and the conscription of Yeshiva students into the armed forces. One of the rabbis speaking declared that Israel was sinning by turning the Jews, a peaceful people, into a militaristic nation. He called this ‘the hands of Esau’. Oz in the Israelis also claims that the Jewish and Israeli peoples are not militaristic, giving a Yiddish word for militarism. This, translated into English, literally means, ‘the silly games of gentiles’.
Unfortunately, Israel is a highly militarised society, which has had the ethnic cleansing of the original people of Palestine as its goal from the start. If there is to be a just peace, and genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East, it will be done by principled people like those in this video.
I found this very interesting and pertinent quote from Uri Avnery’s paper, ‘Manufacturing Anti-Semites’ in Tom Easton’s article, ‘Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent’, in Lobster 47, Summer 2004: 3-8. The article’s an analysis of the role of the Neo-Cons in Britain and America, and the Israel lobby, in the invasion of Iraq and the new imperialism in the Middle East. The article’s based on four books, Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism, ed. Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap, The Politics of Anti-Semitism, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century by Scott Lucas, and George Galloway’s I’m Not The Only One. He writes
Uri Avnery’s ‘Manufacturing Anti-Semites’ is a very powerful attack on the present government of Israel by one of its own citizens.
‘The Sharon government is a giant laboratory for growing the Anti-Semitism virus. It exports it to the whole world. Sharon’s propaganda agents are pouring oil on the flames. Accusing all critics of his policy of being anti-Semites, they brand large communities with this mark. Many good people, who feel no hatred at all towards the Jews but who detest the persecution of the Palestinians, are now called anti-Semites. thus the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something approaching respectability.’
In America, he says, ‘the Jewish establishment is practically straining to prove that it controls the country’. Avnery describes how in 2002 a young black congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, ‘dared to criticise the Sharon government, support Palestinians and (worst of all) Israeli and Jewish peace groups. The Jewish establishment found a counter-candidate, practically unknown black woman, injected huge sums into the campaign and defeated Cynthia. All this happened in the open, with fanfares, to make a public example – so that every senator and congressperson would know that criticising Sharon is tantamount to political suicide.’
Easton in his paragraph quotes the absolute dominance of the Israel lobby over congress, and the disastrous effect this has had on relations between America and the rest of the world.
This theme is taken up by George Sutherland, the pen name of a ‘senior congressional staffer’, in describing what he calls ‘Our Vichy Congress’. He writes: ‘For expressions of sheer grovelling subservience to a foreign power, the pronouncements of Laval and Petain pale in comparison with the rhetorical devotion with which certain congressmen have bathed the Israel of Ariel Sharon.
After detailing several examples of the way the Israeli lobby operates, including preventing an investigation of the Israeli ‘arts students’ saga, he concludes:
‘Israel’s strategy of using its influence on the American political system to turn the US national security apparatus into its own personal attack dog – or Golem – has alienated the United States from much of the Third World, has worsened US ties to Europe among rancorous insinuations of anti-Semitism, and makes the United States a hated bully.’
Sutherland quotes the words of EU commissioner Chris Patten in The Washington Post: ‘A senior Democratic senator told a visiting European the other day: “All of us here are members of Likud now.”(p.5).
Avnery, and Israeli critics of their country’s foreign policy and maltreatment of the Palestinians, are, not surprisingly, subject to intense hostility in their homeland. In one poll, a majority of Israelis declared that those of their countrymen who defended the Palestinians should be stripped of their citizenship. Avnery also has a point about the way the cavalier use of accusations of anti-Semitism have cause the word to lose much of its sting. The Cynthia McKinney affair was reported and remarked on in the Libertarian blog, Vox Day, which is highly critical of Israel and does have a very pronounced tone of anti-Semitism.
The accusations directed at Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone and now Jeremy Corbyn are in line Sharon’s strategy of trying to silence his critics with the same accusation. And the more it’s used, the more likely it will have the opposite effect.
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