Israel Lobby | ukwatch.net

This smearing of Israel's critics must stop

JamieSW — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:12:34 +0000

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is now nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, and now even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage is being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements onto Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ‘pro-Israel’ writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and CAMERA – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to accurately describe the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ‘Honest Reporting’ claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ‘Honest Reporting’ will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of ‘The Case For Israel.’ He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary… It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population.” She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Honest Reporting quotes Phillips frequently as their model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 percent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several leading Universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus-battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called ‘From Time Immemorial’ by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book ‘The Case For Israel’, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis.

The campaign worked. Finkelstein – a distinguished scholar, lauded by some of the leading figures in Holocaust historiography – was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and ‘Honest Reporting’ becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism – which is growing: my Jewish nephews go to a school with bomb-proof windows – harder to deal with.

To respond to this new McCarthyism, we need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

POSTSCRIPT: In my column today, I talk about how an organisation called ‘Honest Reporting’ orchestrates barrages of complaints against writers who criticise the Israeli government. I thought it might be interesting to give readers a taster of what these e-mails are like. Don’t read them if you are offended by swearing and references to child molestation.

Hundreds have asked a variant of “why do you never criticise Muslims or Arabs?” I always e-mail back with links to dozens of articles in which I have vehemently criticised Islamic fundamentalists and the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and for which I have been widely (and stupidly) accused of “Islamophobia.” So far, one has written back to acknowledge they were wrong. The rest either go silent, or change the subject.

To be fair, a handful of the e-mails have been polite and rational, and I’ve had an interesting if heated exchange with those readers. But the vast majority are, I’m afraid, like the following three.

(To give some context, in the article they are responding to I described the raw sewage I’ve seen pumped out from Israeli settlements on the West Bank at the Palestinians and how it smells.)

Ivan Stux from ivanstux@hotmail.com writes: “When I pass male homosexuals on the street, I sometimes can smell a distinctive pungent scent of shit emanating from them. Might it be that the smell of shit you are sensing as you describe in your article comes from your own behind or mouth, or both, because you forgot to wash after you have been copulated by a man? Does that make you a dirty M.F. (as in male fucked)?”

Somebody who doesn’t give their name e-mails from southernwolf@gmail.com to say: “When I think of ‘Hari’ I smell shit. You aren’t good enough to write about Israel, Jew hater. Long after the so called “Palestinians” have faded into the shithole of history where they belong Israel will remain, proud and strong. By then Jew haters like you will have another “cause”.”

John Norman from jdnorman@btopenworld.com writes: “Surely, it’s your own smell that you smell when you write about Israel. After all, a fat faggot like yourself cant smell of anything else. It must have been your Swiss-nazi Dad that fucked you up the arse when you were a kid and fucked yr tiny brain box to bits. How you were awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism must remain an unexplained enigma for decades to come.”

I’ll spare you the hundreds more along the same lines.

Intellectual Terrorism

Ellie Keen — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:49:25 +0000

The newest and least attractive import from America, following on behind Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Friends, is the pro-Israel lobby. The latest target of this US-style campaign is the august Oxford Union.

This week, two Israeli colleagues and I were due to appear at the union to participate in an important debate on the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine. Also invited was the American Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein. At the last minute, however, the union withdrew its invitation to him, apparently intimidated by threats from various pro-Israel groups.

The Harvard Jewish lawyer and indefatigable defender of Israel, Alan Dershowitz, attacked the topic of the debate as well as the Oxford Union itself. In an article headlined “Oxford Union is dead”, he accused it of having become “a propaganda platform for extremist views”, and castigated its choice of what he termed anti-Israel and anti-semitic speakers.

Yet Dershowitz could have restored the balance as he saw it; he was the first person invited by the Oxford Union to oppose the motion but he declined due, as he put it, to “the terms of the debate and my proposed teammates”.

Dershowitz’s article attacking the Oxford Union appeared in the Jerusalem Post in Israel and Frontpage magazine in the US. [Because of British defamation laws Cif has been advised not to provide a link – Ed.]

Dershowitz and Finkelstein were protagonists in a much-publicised academic row in the US, though it is unclear whether this has any relevance to the Oxford Union spat.

In solidarity with Finkelstein and to oppose this gross interference in British democratic life, the three of us on the “one state” side – myself, Avi Shlaim, of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe – decided to withdraw from the debate. This was not an easy decision, since the topic was timely and necessary given the current impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, where innovative solutions are in short supply.

Dershowitz and the other pro-Israel activists may rejoice at their success in derailing an important discussion. But it is of little comfort to those of us who care about freedom of speech in this country. Last May, Dershowitz interfered in British academic life when the University and College Union voted overwhelmingly to debate the merits of boycotting Israeli institutions. He teamed up with a British Jewish lawyer, Anthony Julius, and others, threatening to “devastate and bankrupt” anyone acting against Israeli universities.

In another example of these bullying tactics, the Royal Society of Medicine, one of Britain’s most venerable medical institutions, came under an attack this month, unprecedented in its 200 year history. It had invited Dr Derek Summerfield, a psychiatrist (who has also documented Israelıs medical abuses against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories), to its conference on Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health. The RSM was immediately bombarded with threats from pro-Israel doctors demanding Dr Summerfield’s removal on the grounds that he was Èpoliticalı and biased, and that the RSM’s charitable status would be challenged if he remained. Intimidated, the RSM asked Dr Summerfield to withdraw, although they later reinstated him.

The power of the Israel lobby in America is legendary. It demonstrates its influence at many levels. Campus Watch is a network that monitors alleged anti-Israel activity in US academic institutions. The difficulties of promotion in the US for scholars deemed anti-Israeli are notorious. The notable Palestinian academic, Edward Said, was subjected to an unrelenting campaign by pro-Israel groups at Columbia University with threats on his life. His successor, Rashid Khalidi, is the current object of the same campaign of vilification and attack. Finkelstein himself has been denied tenure at his university and everywhere else. The authors of a recent study of the Israel lobby’s influence on US foreign policy have been called anti-semites and white supremacists. Former president Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: peace not apartheid, has earned him the label of “Jew-hater” and Nazi sympathiser. The British publisher, Pluto Press, is likely to be dropped by its American distributors, the University of Michigan Press, because pro-Israel groups accuse it of including “anti-Semitic” (ie pro-Palestinian/critical of Israel) books on its list.

Such activities are familiar in the US. People there are hardened or resigned to having their freedom of expression limited by the pro-Israel lobby, and the threats of Dershowitz would cause no surprise to anyone. But Britain is different, naively innocent in the face of US-style assaults on its scholars and institutions. No wonder that those who have been attacked give in so quickly, nervous of something they do not understand. The UCU leadership, shocked and intimidated by the ferocious reaction to the boycott motion from pro-Israel groups, resorted to legal advice to extricate itself and announced in September that a call to boycott Israeli institutions would be “unlawful”. The Oxford Union jettisoned one of its participants rather than stand up to the threats of its critics. The RSM tried to distance the offending speaker from its conference to protect itself from abuse.

All this is understandable, but it is exactly the wrong response. Appeasing bullies like Dershowitz will not stop them. It will rather encourage them to go further. The question is, do we in this country want a McCarthyite witch hunt? If not, then we must confront the bullies and expose them for the intellectual terrorists they are, bent on destroying the values of a free society. To do otherwise will invite the fate of all repressed people, cowed and intimidated, hating their tormentors, but too afraid to say so.

A shameful silence

JamieSW — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:57:45 +0000

We have become accustomed to theatrical displays of intolerance: death threats against writers, bonfires of novels, plays shut down, vandals defacing paintings. The danger, however, is that this obscures the more insidious forms that the suppression of dissent can take.

Announcing that the proposed boycott of links with Israeli universities would be illegal, the University and College Union asserted that debates related to the topic under its auspices would also be “unlawful”. On the basis of last week’s legal opinion (the details of which remain shrouded in mystery), the union’s leadership has summarily cancelled public debates to have been attended by “legitimate representatives of organisations from both Israel and Palestine”. Scheduled for a national tour this autumn, the carefully balanced debates had been described by the union leadership itself as a “sensible basis” on which to approach the divisive issue. As such, they were supported by many of us who, while condemning the abuse of Palestinian human rights by the Israeli state, questioned the ethical and strategic merits of a boycott. Now all engagement on the issue is off the table.

Some argue that this fractious union would do better to focus on domestic matters, after the ignominious end to last year’s action for better pay. Academics, however, can’t afford to ignore this appalling attempt to undermine that most fundamental intellectual value – free debate. How, in an apparently democratic context, can it be “unlawful” to discuss an issue or possible action? Are discussions of economic sanctions against, say, Burma illegal? What about sanctions against Hamas-led Palestine? It is a particular travesty when such a blatant attack on civil rights comes from the very organisation members expect would defend them were they to be harassed for their scholarly opinions.

The move comes at a time when academic freedom cannot be taken for granted. In the US, it is under increasing assault from within and outside academia. Even as freedom of speech is invoked as the great western value to be spread across the globe, by force if necessary, its limits are marked by two unbreachable taboos: anti-Americanism, and criticism of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestine. Organisations such as Campus Watch monitor what academics write and teach, compile blacklists and attempt to shut down debate, despite their claim to support free speech. Respected scholars who have faced campaigns include Columbia University’s Middle East specialist Joseph Massad, who was accused and then cleared of anti-semitism; outspoken Michigan professor Juan Cole; and Norman Finkelstein, refused tenure and forced to resign after DePaul University came under external pressure. Most recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was banned by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota because of his stance on Israel/Palestine.

Dissenting Jewish academics are themselves the target of what Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer call “the Israel lobby”. These authors, by no means anti-American radicals, came under fire simply for attempting to open discussion on US-Israel relations.

Though encomiums to free speech underpin displays of civilisational superiority by America and other western polities, it is undermined in practice by flagrant breaches of academic integrity and protocol. It is impossible to imagine a white European or American head of state, even an authoritarian such as Putin, being described in the demeaning way that the Columbia University president Lee Bollinger introduced Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – as “a petty and cruel dictator”. The same Bollinger was president when the investigation of Massad and other scholars took place. There is no excuse for inviting an elected leader to talk at your university only to undermine him as lacking in “intellectual courage” before he has had a chance to speak. It’s called a set-up.

The UCU leadership’s call for constructive engagement over a divisive boycott is looking like a set-up, too. Sadly, the pressure exerted by people identified as part of the Israel lobby – including the Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is quick to denounce criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitic (never mind if it comes from Jewish intellectuals as well) – has succeeded in shutting down discussion, let alone criticism, of the Palestinians. Is silence the only constructive approach to the Palestinian question?

Writers and intellectuals have a moral obligation to criticise violations of human rights and freedom wherever they occur – Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, Guantánamo or South Africa. The military occupation of Palestine should be no exception. Whatever their views on boycotts, academics must not allow such persistent exceptionalism to suppress debate in an organisation expected to defend, not undermine, their right to freedom of speech and engagement.