Tony Greenstein | ukwatch.net

Israel's royal welcome

JamieSW — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:43:53 +0000

On April 7, Prince Philip will be hosting a dinner at Windsor Castle organised by the Jewish National Fund. They will be marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state. However this is not a private dinner. Nor is the JNF an ordinary organisation.

The JNF was established in 1901 as the land settlement wing of the World Zionist Organisation. It became one of the primary instruments involved in planning for the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians. Up until 1948 it purchased land for settlement, often from absentee landlords, and then evicted the peasants from that land. Unlike the normal practice under colonial rule, the Palestinians were not re-employed as wage labourers but excluded from the land altogether. This was the concept of Jewish land. But even by 1947 less than 7% of the land of Palestine had been bought up.

The JNF played a crucial role in planning for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In the years leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel, the JNF was a key voice in establishing a consensus in the Zionist leadership for “transfer”. Although not discussed openly, among the Zionist leaders it was accepted that a Jewish state could only come into being if the Arabs were transferred out of the state. Palestine was a land where barely one-third of the inhabitants were Jewish, and even in the area allotted by the United Nations to a Jewish state, barely half of the inhabitants were Jewish. As the head of its Land Settlement Department, Joseff Weitz, wrote in his diary in 1940:

The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off. [Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 62]

Weitz later formed, with the authority of David Ben Gurion, a Transfer Committee. And between 1947 and 1949 an opportunity arose to put these ideas into practice. As Tom Segev recalled in Ha’aretz, a meeting was held in Haifa on March 27, 1948, concerning the fate of the Bedouin of Arab al-Ghawarina in the Haifa area. “They must be removed from there, so that they, too, will not add to our troubles,” Yosef Weitz, of the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund), wrote in his personal diary.

The JNF occupies a unique position in Israel. It is nominally an independent organisation but in reality it is a contracted-out section of the state, controlled by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, carrying out functions that the state itself cannot be seen to do openly. The JNF functions as an ideological outpost of the Greater Israel movement and when the Israeli army razed to the ground the Palestinian villages of the Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba villages in 1967 and expelled their inhabitants, the JNF took over the construction of the Canada National Park on the ruins.

The JNF’s position was formalised by the 1953 KKL Law whereby its memorandum of association had to be approved by the minister of justice. In November 1961 a covenant was signed between the state of Israel and the JNF which accorded the latter effective control of the land allocation policies of the state of Israel, which together with the Israeli Lands Administration, controlled 93% of Israeli land. According to Article 3a of its constitution, the JNF was established “for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands and properties” as it could obtain.

The British royal family have a constitutional role greater than their private prejudices. They are seen as the representatives of British society and their invitation to the JNF will inevitably be seen as giving a royal seal of approval to the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. Britain’s role in arming the Zionist militias who fell like wolves on largely defenceless villagers, while suppressing the 1936 Palestinian national uprising, is infamous enough without the monarchy celebrating the consequences of Britain’s perfidy.

Not that the association between royalty and the most barbaric aspects of colonialism is anything new. Today’s royals may hold gala dinners in celebration of the abolition of the slave trade and Wilberforce, but when slavery was a going concern, its most ardent supporters were royalty. Elizabeth I went into business as a partner of slave trader John Hawkins, Charles II was a major shareholder in the Royal African Company and William IV, then Duke of Clarence, spoke out strongly against the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation in the House of Lords.

With the solitary exception of Princess Diana and her campaign against landmines, the royals have been associated with the most atavistic and bloody aspects of British imperial rule. From the Indian Mutiny and the Amritsar massacre to the Hola death camp in Kenya, the royals have always been associated with militarism and empire. Prince Harry’s role in Afghanistan is a continuation of this inglorious history.

In 1995 an Arab couple, the Kadans, tried to buy an apartment in Katzir. For 10 years the JNF and the Israeli Lands Authority tried to prevent the leasing of “Jewish” land to non-Jews. Eventually the supreme court ruled that state land could not be sold to Jews only.

This caused huge embarrassment among Jews worldwide. How could Jews protest against anti-Semitism when condoning blatantly racist practices in Israel? America’s Reform movement, to which most Jews adhere, condemned the practice unequivocally.

The JNF itself, though, was anything but embarrassed. It began a campaign to reverse the court’s decision and last summer a JNF Bill was introduced into the Knesset, where it was passed on the first reading by 64-16 votes. Under the headline “KKL-JNF – Trustee for the Jewish People on its Land” it noted that:

A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.

The implications are quite clear. If Israel is a Jewish state then it cannot be a state of its own citizens, still less a democratic state.

This prompted Israel’s liberal newspaper, Ha’aretz, to publish an outspoken editorial, “A racist Jewish state”, in which it wrote:

“Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed.”

Even the staid old Jewish Chronicle ran a debate: “Is it racist to set aside Israeli land for Jews only?”

Yet this is part of a wider debate about the “demographic problem”, which is shorthand for there being too many Arabs. Academics such as Professor Arnon Sofer, of Haifa University, are quite blatant about this “problem”:

“You should remember that on the same day as the Israel Defense Forces is investing efforts and succeeding in eliminating one terrorist or another, on that very same day, as on every day of the year, within the territories of western Israel, about 400 children are being born, some of whom will become new suicide terrorists.”

The JNF sits on the opposite side of the fence from those who wish to see Israel as a state of all its citizens as opposed to just its Jewish ones. It is bad enough that our prime minister, Gordon Brown, is a patron of the JNF. But for the royal family to have as their guests those who are dedicated to maintaining Israel as a state of only a part of its citizens is a disgrace.

A letter from Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt Davies, private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh, seeks to excuse the royal hosting of the JNF by stating that “the proceeds from the dinner are going to a number of charities, one of which will be the Israeli Youth Award for Young People, which is the Israeli branch of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. This charity plays a significant part in attempting to bridge the gap between young people of all faiths and backgrounds, in amongst other places, Israel and Jordan.”

So, according to this logic, the royal family will be hosting a dinner for an organisation which explicitly discriminates against Palestinians and non-Jews because the proceeds will be going to a charity which apparently does the complete opposite. You couldn’t make it up.

A War on Rationality

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:26:21 +0000

When I was contacted about being interviewed for Richard Littlejohn’s The War on Britain’s Jews I had, to put it mildly, some doubts. Despite the reassuring words of producer Anna Ewart-James, it was clear that any programme fronted by Littlejohn would have a set agenda. This was no balanced documentary.

So did the programme live up to my worst fears? Yes. Do I regret being interviewed? No.

Firstly Channel 4 deserve to be heavily criticised for this programme. At least the BBC does bias subtly; with Littlejohn it’s laid on in spades. The bias throughout the programme was unremitting and at times tedious. And that is why Littlejohn’s programme will only fool the gullible.

The message was quite simple. Anti-semitism is on the increase and it’s mainly the fault of these nasty Muslims and those dupes on the left who oppose Israel. Hizbullah are apparently one of the most anti-semitic groups in the world. (Actually it’s their opponents, the Christian Phalange, who were responsible for attacks on Beirut’s Jewish community, not Muslim groups, and it was the Palestinian guerilla group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who defended the Lebanese Jewish community in the civil war.)

If Channel 4 was seriously concerned about anti-semitism then the last person to present it would have been Richard Littlejohn. This is the same person who said of the Rwandan genocide: “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them” – which is a direct take from the late Alan Clark‘s infamous remark about “bongo bongo land”.

He has also called the Palestinians “the pikeys of the Middle East” and suggested that it was time to “wring [their] necks”. “Pikey” is a racist reference to Gypsies, one of Littlejohn’s pet hates, along with gays and asylum seekers.

The main thrust of the programme was the alleged increase in anti-semitism. Yet even the statistics used by the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Anti-semitism show (paragraph 29, page 14) that there was a 14% decline in anti-semitic incidents from 2004 to 2005.

What made Littlejohn’s concern about anti-semitism so grating is that he has never hesitated to demonise asylum seekers as benefit scroungers, malingerers and fakers, using some of the crudest racial stereotypes.

He is someone who delights in pillorying different minorities, and he looked startled when I held up a copy of the Daily Mail from August 20, 1938, which proclaimed that “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage: the number of aliens entering the country through back door – a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed”

The truth is that when Jews were really the targets of anti-semitism, the Richard Littlejohns of the day were vehement in attacking them. And the paper he writes for, the Daily Mail, was an ardent enthusiast for Hitler and Oswald Moseley. What it says about Muslims today was then directed at Jews.

For Littlejohn anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism. Why? Because the “new anti-semitism” means opposition to the Israeli state. If you oppose a state where, in an opinion poll, 75% of Jews don’t want to live next to an Arab, why is that anti-semitic?

Every anti-semitic act is to be condemned. Likewise all forms of racism, but the programme generalised from a few anti-semitic attacks. And pretending that Muslims, who are the primary victims of racism in our society, are the main perpetrators, is to stand the truth on its head. No group has been more assiduous in feeding this racism than the pro-Israel lobby. Muslims are seen as backward and reactionary, rather than as people whose lands have been colonised.

Of course political Islam is reactionary but who was it who supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and helped create the Taliban and al-Qaida but the United States? And wasn’t it Israel’s secret service, Shin Bet, in their efforts to undermine secular nationalism who helped create Hamas? Inconvenient facts are easily forgotten. But what is called Muslim anti-semitism is in reality a pale reflection of European anti-semitism, lacking its social roots, and borrowing its ideas without ever understanding them. As Marx said about feudal socialism, it is “half lamentation, half lampoon, half echo of the past, half menace of the future … always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”

But what Littlejohn failed to comprehend was that if it is wrong for anti-semites to associate Jews with Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians, then it is equally wrong for the leaders of Zionism and the Israeli state to proclaim that Israel’s war against Lebanon was waged in the name of Jews throughout the world. The fact is that if some people misguidedly attribute Israel’s crimes to Jews, one of the reasons for so doing is that Israel and its apologists claim that it acts on behalf of world Jewry.

Conflating Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Alex Doherty — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:18:00 +0000

When the incitement to religious hatred bill was laid before parliament two years ago, numerous figures from the media and entertainment industries, as well as the human rights, humanist and civil liberties lobbies, condemned the legislation as an attack on free speech. In the words of the actor Stephen Fry, the legislation was “a sop to the Muslim community”, whose problems really centred around race, not religion.

Yet barely a murmur has greeted the report of the all parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, chaired by the rightwing Labour MP Denis MacShane, who in a previous life as a junior Foreign Office minister greeted the CIA coup that temporarily overthrew Hugo Chávez of Venezuela by denouncing the latter as “a ranting, populist demagogue” (Hugh O’Shaughnessy, March 12 2007).

The committee itself had no status when it drew up the report. It was self-selecting, and not one of the 14 members of the inquiry voted against the war in Iraq on March 18 2003. In other words, they came to the question of anti-semitism from a rightwing political perspective.

Yet the report on anti-semitism, which the government has accepted by upgrading the committee’s status to that of a select committee (Jewish Chronicle, March 30 2007: “Police told to focus on hate crime”), is deeply disturbing in its cavalier approach to the definition of anti-semitism, which it conflates throughout with anti-Zionism.

Even the basis for the report itself is hyped and unconvincing. By the reports own’ admission (paragraph 29), the year 2005 saw a fall of 14% in recorded anti-semitic incidents compared with the previous year. Of course each and every incident is to be condemned, but where, one might ask, is the all-parliamentary committee on incidents of anti-Muslim abuse; and what, one wonders, would be the level of recorded incidents?

What is more worrying is how anti-semitic incidents are defined. In Brighton and Hove there were two demonstrations against the Lebanon war last summer. Police from Sussex and Surrey swamped the second demonstration, alleging a “serious racial incident” had occurred.

The incident concerned a motorist who had yelled “terrorist” at an Arab demonstrator on the previous march and got into a verbal altercation as a result. Despite a number of eyewitnesses, the police made no attempt to investigate the alleged crime. Instead, it was used as a pretext for some of the heaviest policing of a demonstration, including the use of racial profiling against Arabs, that I have ever seen. It has taken a six-month campaign for Brighton police to accept that the right to demonstrate is not a privilege handed down from on high.

In the course of a conversation I secretly recorded, Brighton’s chief of police, Kevin Moore, admitted that before the demonstration, “We made contact with the local Jewish community leaders within the synagogues.” In other words, it was the police who made the association between the bombing of Lebanon and the local Jewish community. And in an equally revealing remark, Moore let slip that the police had received a single complaint about the march and, because a “racially motivated incident is one which is declared by any person to be racially motivated”, had therefore classified the march as anti-semitic!

The inquiry report is part of a continuum that began with the creation of an offence of “glorifying” terrorism and is continuing with the suggestion that anti-Zionism – that is, opposition to the Israeli state and the movement it created – is anti-semitic. Ironically, it is repeating one of the oldest anti-semitic myths: adopting the EU’s working definition of anti-semitism, the report states that anti-semitism includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.

Yet it has long been an article of faith among anti-semites that Jews, wherever they lived and whatever they did, formed a nation separate from those they lived among. The major difference between modern and feudal anti-semitism was that the Jews were seen not as a religion but as a race or nation. It is one of the hallmarks of New Labour that contested political arguments are now being resolved by the criminal law.

And then there is the suggestion that to criticise the nature of the Israeli state, which is unique in defining itself as a state not of its own citizens but of Jews worldwide, is to apply “double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”. This is the argument that supporters of apartheid in South Africa used to make. States that accord privileges based on racial/ethnic criteria are indeed unique.

It is argued that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is in itself anti-semitic. Now, it might arguably be offensive, but why anti-semitic? In her book The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz reports that it was the position of the SS that “the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position, and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state”. Is it anti-semitic to point out that “ethnic cleansing” and the transfer or forced migration of civilian populations was also Nazi policy; or that only in Israel and Nazi Germany were Jews barred from marrying non-Jews?

And it is supporters of the Israeli state itself who have regularly made comparisons between the Palestinians and the Nazis. Who can forget when in 1982 the Israeli premier Menachem Begin compared Arafat in the siege of Beirut to Hitler in his bunker? How many times has the Holocaust been used to justify the Israeli state?

The report defines anti-semitism as “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”. Agreed. But is it any wonder that there are some misguided people who criticise the Board of Deputies of British Jews when it holds rallies in the name of the Jewish community in support of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon?

This report has nothing to do with anti-semitism and everything to do with creating a rightwing political agenda whereby opposition to British and US foreign policy is deemed anti-semitic. If Israel is the west’s principal strategic partner in the Middle East and you question the whole basis of that partnership, then you will inevitably be criticised as anti-semitic. In the United States, it has even been argued that if you oppose the majority positions of the Jewish community in favour of the Iraq war, that makes you anti-semitic.

The all-party parliamentary inquiry made no attempt to interview a broad cross-section of Jews, including anti-Zionists; it played softball with the Jewish establishment. Nor did it seek the views of Jews who have been active in the fight against the BNP and National Front apart from those of the pro-Zionist Searchlight magazine. Instead what it has done is produce a report whose only purpose is to try and criminalise political debate in the name of “anti-semitism”.