Tag Archives: Boycott

May 8 2013

The Guardian got it wrong: Stephen Hawking is NOT boycotting Israel (Updated)

Last night, May 8, the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood and Matthew Kelman ‘broke’ a story claiming that Stephen Hawking was joining the academic boycott of Israel, and that he was “pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

The report, based it seems on claims made by British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), was picked up by news sites around the world, was featured prominently on the Guardian website and was followed up with a poll asking readers if they agreed with Hawking ”decision” to boycott Israel.  

Here’s how the Guardian’s Israel page looks at the time of this post:

hawking

As you can see, the original story was read by quite a few Guardian readers:

hawking

There was just one problem.

The Guardian evidently didn’t check their facts, as information has been released strongly suggesting that the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Professor at Cambridge pulled out of the Israeli academic conference purely for health reasons.  

The Commentator reported the following:

…a Cambridge university spokesperson has confirmed to The Commentator that there was a “misunderstanding” this past weekend, and that Prof. Hawking had pulled out of the conference for medical reasons. A University spokesman said: “Professor Hawking will not be attending the conference in Israel in June for health reasons – his doctors have advised against him flying.”

Further, a spokesman for Cambridge University sent the following email to a CiF Watch reader in response to an inquiry, which is consistent with the following story in the Cambridge News:

email

The only questions which seems to remain is how long it will take for the Guardian to issue a mea culpa on their faux scoop.

Update: The Guardian’s Matthew Kalman is now claiming that the Cambridge denial is untrue, and that Hawking indeed supports the boycott.

Update II: It now appears that the original denial by Hawkings spokesperson was not accurate, and that Hawking indeed cancelled his trip as an expression of support for the boycott of Israel.   

May 7 2013

A ‘Jew of color’ speaks out against Berkeley’s racist BDS movement

One of the more insidious elements of the BDS movement is the supremely dishonest racial narrative which suggests, in varying degrees of explicitness, that Zionism is a racist movement in which ‘white’ privileged European interlopers continue to displace indigenous Palestinians ‘of color’.  

Whilst the racial demographics of Israel alone disproves the fiction of a ‘caucasian nation’, facts clearly have never been an obstacle to those intent on demonizing the Jewish state. 

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Yemeni Jews arrive in Israel, 2009

Aryella Moreh, a Jew of color whose mother was a refugee from Iran, addresses the racial dynamic of the BDS movement (at Berkeley and elsewhere) head-on in an eloquent and inspired essay published on May 6 at the Daily Californian – the student run newspaper at UC Berkeley:

I come from a family of refugees. My mother was younger than I am now when she was forced to flee for her life from the Islamic Revolution of Iran. My mother recalls being forced to sit in the back of her classroom along with a group of young Jewish children during her school years.

When my mother went to buy groceries in the market, she was not allowed to touch the produce because she was considered a “dirty Jew.” These are only a few indicators of the systematic oppression of the Iranian Jews, some of the oldest inhabitants of Persia. At the age of 20, she was forced to abandon her life in Iran as her family was scattered across the world. My grandmother, Mamanjani, was never allowed to return home because of her active involvement in Jewish organizations. Though she had no ties to any other government, she was warned not to go home for fear of execution without trial. Despite calling Persia home for 2,500 years, in 1979, my family and many Jewish families like my own were forced to forced to flee their homes. My family’s home, business and property was confiscated. We were torn from our homes, forced to flee to whichever country would take us in.

Though these experiences define me, some students on our campus seem to think my history does not count. During the “divestment” meeting two weeks ago, Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted about those opposed to divestment: “the Zizis are literally white people crying about their privilege, lol.” Apparently, Zizi is SJP shorthand for Zionist. And later, Daily Cal Blogger Noah Kulwin discussed a clear division he seems to see between “students of color” and “Jewish students,” implying that Jewish students like me cannot be considered students of color. I am here to address ignorance about what truly defines the Jewish people. Amid claims — or rather accusations — of “privilege” or the inability of Jews to understand the plight of “colored people,” I realized many people on this campus are unaware of who the Jewish people actually are.

We encourage you to read the rest of Moreh’s passionate plea, by clicking here.

Also, you can learn more about the broader issue of Jewish refugees from Muslim and Arab lands here and here.

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May 5 2013

Univ. of California as a case study in the impotence of the Divestment ‘movement’

The following is a guest post by Jon from ‘Divest This!’

Paraphrasing from one of the greatest responses to criticism ever:

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house with the UC Berkeley Student Senate divestment resolution in front of me.  Soon, it shall be behind me.

Honestly, could anything possibly demonstrate the impotence and moral bankruptcy of the BDS “movement” better than the mayhem the boycotters have been causing up and down the West Coast over the last two months in their frantic effort to get student governments to pass divestment resolutions that – win or lose – are ignored by nearly everyone?

UC BERKLEY - Protest the veto of Israel Divestment

UC Berkley: Pro-Divestment Rally, 2010

Even the BDSers themselves have been decrying why the few votes that have gone their way are barely being noticed in the Jewish press, much less the mainstream media. 

But if they had thought about it for a moment, the response (or lack thereof) to these latest student government shenanigans (vs. the massive coverage divestments votes received when this same game played out in Berkeley in 2010) was entirely predictable.

For student government boycott and divestment votes have no political meaning whatsoever if they cannot be claimed to represent the broad opinion of the student body.  And while enough confusion surrounded where the student body stood on the Middle East conflict in 2010 to justify concerns that a “Yes” vote could be convincingly presented as representing student opinion, three years later everyone understands that these votes mean nothing of the kind. 

How do we know this?  Well even putting aside statements by school administrators condemning the votes and assuring everyone they will be completely ignored (since that just represents the views of “The Man”), every school where this subject has been fought out included heated all-night  debates between opposing sides (which alone demonstrates lack of consensus even among people passionate about the subject).

At most schools, divestment was voted down (sometimes for the third or fourth time in as many years).  But in the few cases where the boycotters managed to eke out a “Yes” vote, those decisions were immediately condemned by student leaders, editorials and letters to the editor in the student paper.  Which simply demonstrates that while some BDS groups have managed to figure out how to get their supporters elected to student government (where they could bully their colleagues during grueling all-nighters), the notion that these votes represent anything even remotely resembling student consensus is laughable.

The BDSers demonstrate their own understanding of this lack of broad support whenever they try to sneak their measures in through the back door (as they did at UC Riverside in March).  For whenever their measures are exposed to the light of day, they tend to be voted down or reversed (as they were at Riverside which threw out their earlier divestment vote a month later in open debate).

And one need only look at Berkeley’s latest “Yes” vote to see how Pyrrhic even a non-backdoor victory is for the BDSers.  For in order to get their vote passed, the local Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group had to basically throw the BDS movement under the bus, insisting that their motion had absolutely nothing to do with the international organization which calls for the very things students were being asked to vote for.  And even this peculiar vote was challenged for being taken against student government rules (which led to it being watered down still further).   Making matters stranger still is this story of a student leader’s attempt to blackmail the President of the Student Senate, offering to drop a lawsuit against him if he chose not to veto the divestment measure (as the previous Student Senate President had done in 2010).

To some of us, that last story mostly raises questions about the nature of a UC student government that seems to spend so much time suing, prosecuting and impeaching its members rather than organizing the next sock hop or condom drive.  But what is unimpeachable is that statements made by a body that behaves in such undemocratic ways is hardly in a position to cast moral aspersions on the Jewish state that anyone else needs to take seriously (given that they are neither a representation of student opinion, nor the result of just and thoughtful deliberation).

Fortunately, the BDSers themselves have taught us again and again how to best deal with student government resolutions of this type.  For year after year, in student council after student council, divestment resolutions have been voted down again and again.  And each and every one of these votes was immediately ignored by the boycotters who refused to take them as representing student opinion against their cause, or the final word on the issue.

So if Students for Justice in Palestine are allowed to embrace the notion that votes rejecting their opinions carry no weight and have no meaning, why shouldn’t the rest of us follow their lead and do the same?  

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Apr 8 2013

Letter to Iain Banks on the eve of Yom HaShoah

The following was written by Bataween, and originally published on April 7 at ‘Point of No Return‘ - a blog about Middle East’s forgotten Jewish refugees.

On the eve of Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust memorial day, Point of No Return was inspired by the words of a little-known Iraqi-Jewish writer to address the announcement by celebrated Scottish writer Iain Banks that he’s supporting a cultural boycott of Israel.
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Dear Iain,
 
I was sorry to learn that you have terminal cancer and will probably not be long for this world. It is  a matter of deep regret that the world is about to lose a talented writer and a noble human being.

However, I was surprised that the Middle East ranks so high on your list of priorities that directly after you had announced news of your cancer,  The Guardian chose to print a piece about your personal boycott of Israel. In it you wrote: 

“The particular tragedy of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is that nobody seems to have learned anything. Israel itself was brought into being partly as a belated and guilty attempt by the world community to help compensate for its complicity in, or at least its inability to prevent, the catastrophic crime of the Holocaust. Of all people, the Jewish people ought to know how it feels to be persecuted en masse, to be punished collectively and to be treated as less than human. For the Israeli state and the collective of often unlikely bedfellows who support it so unquestioningly throughout the world to pursue and support the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people – forced so brutally off their land in 1948 and still under attack today – to be so blind to the idea that injustice is injustice, regardless not just on whom it is visited, but by whom as well, is one of the defining iniquities of our age, and powerfully implies a shamingly low upper limit on the extent of our species’ moral intelligence.

The solution to the dispossession and persecution of one people can never be to dispossess and persecute another. When we do this, or participate in this, or even just allow this to happen without criticism or resistance, we only help ensure further injustice, oppression, intolerance, cruelty and violence in the future.”

We’ve heard it all before from your fellow boycotters of Israel: scores of trendy opinion-formers, academics and artistes. They actually believe that neat paradox: a persecuted people is now persecuting another. Don’t the Jews of all people know any better?

What really pains me is that you will be going to your death without knowing how wrong you have been. Israel is full of people -  Jewish people – persecuted simply for being Jews and expelled from land and property they have lived on since time immemorial by Arabs.This is a truth that even Jews from Europe haven’t grasped. The Arabs did this barely three years after the monumental tragedy of the Holocaust, in which the Palestinian leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, among other Arabs, was complicit. The Mufti plotted the extermination of the Jews of the region well before Israel was established. Arabs and radical Muslims have been seeking to destroy the Jewish state ever since. 

To illustrate my point, on the eve of Yom HaShoah, when Israel marks the anniversary of the Holocaust, let me quote Aharon, an Iraqi Jew you won’t have heard of, who wrote a chapter in a book* you won’t have heard of either:

“Two thousand years of persecution, execution and forced conversion culminated in Hitler’s Final Solution, a solution which wiped out nearly half the world’s Jewish population. And this was followed by, and compounded by  the ethnic cleansing by the Arab Countries of all their Jewish populations. Both events took place on the watch of the civilised world which responded by a deafening silence. Jews therefore feel themselves to be permanent refugees even after the rise of the State of Israel which is now anyway precariously balanced within the vast  Muslim Middle East.”

At the end it was the Arab world, not Hitler that executed their final solution, and no power can move the clock back. That is why  today it is worrying Israelis and Jews alike that what happened in Germany under the Nazis in the early 1930s is being re-enacted in a startlingly similar way again in Europe today. Every aspect of life in Israel, its people, its institutions, its places of learning, even its acclaimed courts of justice are being demonized. Recently this demonizing has been organized and reinforced by concerted bans and boycotts here in Europe in protest, they say, against the occupation of Palestinian lands to which the majority of the citizens of Israel are opposed. All this sends shivers in the hearts of Jews everywhere reminding them of the anti-Semitic demonizing propaganda of the 1930s, which was the precursor of, and prepared the ground for the Holocaust. As Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, stated recently: Anti-Semitism is not just a historical fact but a current event.

“The Arab World has played and continues to play its active part too in the Jewish tragedy. During World War II they made Jewish life in their midst a living hell. By the early 1950’s when the safe haven of Israel opened, some 900,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed to Israel from Arab countries leaving all Arab countries what the Nazis called “Judenrein”, lands clean of  Jews. Therefore what the Nazis failed to do, the Arab countries accomplished and perpetuated. And the world accepts that as normal.

“These 900,000 Jewish refugees are forgotten because Israel did not leave them in camps to rot and did not ask the UN to set up agencies to serve to perpetuate their misery and status as refugees. With help from Jews worldwide these Jewish refugees with their bare hands gave themselves dignity, security and a future in stark contrast to the way rich, very rich, Arabs treated the then 700,000 Palestinian refugees and disgracefully continue to treat their descendants today.

“I was a victim and a witness of this ethnic cleansing. My personal story tells it all. I wanted so much to be part of my country Iraq and to participate actively in its revival after World War II.  When I finished my pre-university studies in Iraq and secured a place with various universities in England and France  to continue my studies the Iraqi authorities refused point-blank to allow me to travel. Why? Because I was a Jew. And as a result of accumulations of other violent events around the Jewish community  I could see that there was no way to be both Jewish and Iraqi. So I took the only way I could that was still open for me out of the country. Together with about twenty desperate Jews, we managed to cross the borders of  Iraq into Iran in the north, literally  on foot. We got there from Baghdad in a truck.

“The truck driver had managed to bribe the border guards to close their eyes as we were nearing the border,  pretending to be carrying cattle from one town to another. At the last-minute, after the truck was approaching the border, some border police started shooting, probably only to justify their surprise to see that the cattle  had turned into human beings, but more likely  because the bribe was not big enough to go round. The driver left us in the middle of nowhere pointing to us the direction to the Iranian borders.  I was young, barely 19 years old at that time. Fleeing Iraq, in my case via Iran, whose people I will always be indebted to for their hospitality and safe passage at my desperate time of need, I arrived at the absorption centre in Israel in 1949 by air from Tehran. I found there a mixture of people all dejected all helpless. My fellow refugees from Arab countries were desperately trying to rebuild their lives out of nothing in a land of nothing.”

But it was the sight of the remnants of the Holocaust camps that broke my heart and my spirit. I saw frightened shadows of human beings dazed, confused and broken trying to regain their existence as humans. But worst of all instead of hatred, rage and bitterness I found many trying to remove the concentration camp numbers on their arms feeling guilty of being alive and ashamed of not having put up a fight before allowing themselves to be led as sheep to the Gas chambers. It is the combined images of the ethnically cleansed Arab Jews who lost their countries, and the Holocaust remnants of European Jews who lost their dignity, that are engraved in my being and in the mind of every Jew who says “never again”.  That is why Israelis feel the need to keep their citizen army and even their nuclear shield not because they are on a Samson-like suicidal mission. It is because they are determined to live with pride and dignity denied to them in those dark days of the 30s and 40s. And this time, if they must die, they want to die fighting.”

And so, Iain, by blindly aligning yourself with the Palestinian cause, you are siding, not with innocent victims, but with some among them who would commit a second Shoah if they could. 

If they haven’t fulfilled that intention, it is only because the Jews of Israel have been strong enough to thwart it. It is they, not the Israelis, who nurse in their children with hate. 

Sorry if self-defence is so very unpopular in your postmodern world, Iain. As someone once remarked: “it is better to be unpopular than dead.”

*From Chapter 14: The Prophet of the Libyan Desert by Max Melli, Vladimir Pavlinic and Aharon Nathan (Amazon and bookshops)

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Apr 3 2013

Antisemitism at the UCU: David Hirsh responds to Tribunal ruling against Fraser

On March 29 we commented on a ruling by London’s Central Employment Tribunal which rejected Ronnie Fraser’s charge of  institutional antisemitism against the University and College Union (UCU).  

Fraser had charged the UCU with fostering an atmosphere of antisemitism which created an ‘intimidating’, ‘hostile’, ‘humiliating’, and ‘offensive’ work environment’ for Jews – citing, in part, the union’s decision to reject the EU Working Definition of Antisemitism on the grounds that it had the effect of ‘silencing debate on Israel’.

The EU working definition (as it pertains to Israel and Zionism) characterizes the following as antisemitic: denying the Jewish state the right to exist, applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not demanded of any other democratic nation, using the symbols associated with classic antisemitism (such as blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis, holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel, and drawing comparisons of Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

UCU motion rejecting EU Working Definition of Antisemitism

UCU motion rejecting EU Working Definition of Antisemitism

Further, as David Hirsh detailed in a superb post at Engage yesterday, in addition to the UCU’s rejection of the EU working definition, there were a number of other incidents representing a culture whereby “antisemitism was accepted as normal within the union” – many of which Hirsh outlined:

In 2006 Ronnie Fraser stood as a delegate to NATFHE conference (a predecessor to UCU).  It was said at the regional meeting that Fraser could not be a delegate because he was a Zionist and therefore a racist.  NATFHE held an investigation and found that this statement had not been antisemitic.

Israel has been relentlessly condemned at every UCU Congress, often by motions to boycott Israel.  There were no motions to boycott any other states.

The Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism reported that the boycott debates were likely to cause difficulties for Jewish academics and students, to exclude Jews from academic life and to have a detrimental effect on Jewish Studies.  UCU responded that these allegations were made to stop people from criticizing Israel.  76 members of the UCU published a critique of the union’s response, but the union took no notice.  John Mann MP told the Tribunal that UCU had been unique among those criticized by the inquiry in its refusal to listen.

Sean Wallis, a local UCU official, said that anti-boycott lawyers were financed by “bank balances from Lehman Brothers that can’t be tracked down”.  Ronnie Fraser asked him whether he had indeed made this antisemitic claim.  Wallis admitted having said it.  But it was Fraser who, for the crime of asking, was found to have violated union rules concerning “rude or offensive communications”.

Gert Weisskirchen, responsible for combating antisemitism for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) asked the union leadership for a meeting to discuss antisemitism relating to the boycott.  The union did not meet with him.  When 39 union members protested publicly, the union ignored them.

The union invited South African Trade Unionist Bongani Masuku to speak at a pro-boycott conference in London.  Masuku was known to be under investigation by the South African Human Rights Commission for antisemitic hate speech.  Here is an example of what he had said:  “Bongani says hi to you all as we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and Zionists who belong to the era of their friend Hitler!  We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.    Masuku also said  that vigilante action would be taken against Jewish families suspected of having members serving in the Israeli military, and that Jews who continued to stand up for Israel should “not just be encouraged but forced to leave South Africa”  The union ought to have known Masuku’s record.  Ronnie Fraser told the union about Masuku’s record.  Masuku was found guilty in South Africa of hate speech before speaking as a guest of UCU.  And months later, UCU Congress explicitly rejected a motion to dissociate itself from Masuku’s “repugnant views”.

The Activists’ List is an email list hosted by the union.

Ronnie Fraser argued on the list that there was no absolute blockade of Gaza.  In response, another union member said that he was like the Nazis at Theresenstadt.  The union found that there was nothing inappropriate about this comment.

Josh Robinson put together a detailed formal complaint about antisemitic language being employed by union members on the list.   He documented how people who opposed antisemitism on the activists’ list were routinely accused of being: deranged, crazy, nutters; Israeli agents; hysterical; dishonest; twisted; rotten Zionists; less than human; believers in a promised land; motivated by the fairy story of the Old Testament; genocidal; accepting of the murder of innocents; racist; pro-apartheid; supporters of ethnic cleansing; Nazis.  The Holocaust was referred to as an ‘attempted genocide’.   There followed volleys of insults made against those who raised concerns about this description of the Shoah.  The formal complaint was given to Tom Hickey to adjudicate.  Hickey himself, the Tribunal was told, had said that Israel is “more insidious and in some sense almost nastier” than Nazi Germany.  In the end, nobody even bothered to tell Robinson that his complaint had been dismissed.

A number of other people made similarly careful formal complaints.  The union did not once, ever, find that anything complained of was antisemitic.

A significant number of union members resigned over the issue of antisemitism.  Congress voted down a motion to investigate these resignations.  There was no mechanism for counting resignations over antisemitism, and such resignations were instead counted as being because of disagreements over the Middle East.

People who complained about antisemitism in the union were routinely confronted with accusations that they spoke in bad faith.  They were told that they were making it up in order to try to silence criticism of Israel.  They were accused of ‘crying antisemitism’.

In court Sally Hunt, the General Secretary of the union was asked hypothetically:  “If somebody said ‘if you want to understand the Jews, read Mein Kampf’, would that be antisemitic?”  She answered that it would not necessarily be antisemitic.

Astonishingly, not only did the Tribunal rule that these incidents did not represent antisemitism, but, in a close approximation of the Livingstone Formulation, outrageously accused Fraser and his 34 witnesses of trying to ‘intimidate’ and ‘silence’ critics of Israel with an invented accusation of antisemitism.

May the examples cited above, of the undeniable racism suffered by Jewish members of the UCU, serve to shame those who have been critical of Fraser and his supporters – some of whom have even suggested that the UK Jewish community should never have taken on the fight in the first place.

Fraser, and those who had his back, should be admired for acting on principle, morality, and justice – and continue to deserve our unqualified support. 

You can read the rest of Hirsh’s masterful response to the Tribunal’s outrageous ruling here.

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Dec 4 2012

Two footballers cited by Chris McGreal as endorsers of anti-Israel petition flatly deny signing it

H/T Raphael

The Guardian’s Chris McGreal published a story (‘Footballers condemn plans to hold U21 European Championship in Israel‘) on Nov. 30 about a petition signed by some footballers calling for European football’s governing body to cancel Israel’s hosting of an important 2013 European competition in response to the recent Gaza war.

mcgreal

McGreal’s piece begins, thus:

“A group of Premier League footballers and players in other major European leagues have condemned plans to hold the Under-21 European championship in Israel next year, saying it will be seen as a “reward” for this month’s assault on Gaza in which young people playing football were killed when a sports stadium was bombed.

The signatories, who include Eden Hazard of Chelsea, Abou Diaby of Arsenal and five Newcastle players – Papiss Cissé, Cheick Tioté, Sylvain Marveaux, Yohan Cabaye and Demba Ba – also criticised Israel’s continued detention without charge or trial of two Palestinian footballers.

Several former Premier League players have also signed the letter, including Didier Drogba and Frédéric Kanouté, both of whom now play in China. Players with QPR, Stoke, Blackburn and Ipswich are among the signatories along with footballers in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Turkey.”

While you can read our post about the broader issue of McGreal’s lack of interest in the fact that Hamas used the Gaza sports stadium in question as a rocket launching site during the war, at least two of the players cited by McGreal in this latest report have flatly denied signing the petition.

Former Chelsea player Didier Drogba denied signing the petition, and wrote the following on Twitter: “Please note I did not sign this petition or give my support to this initiative.”

Additionally, Newcastle midfielder Yohan Cabaye says he, too, didn’t sign the anti-Israel petition. According to the Daily Reporter, Cabaye says that he “has never been a signatory” to the campaign.

The petition appears to have been organized by former Tottenham and Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute, whose personal website lists 62 players (including Drogba and Cabaye) allegedly supporting the anti-Israel action.

You can Tweet Fredric Kanoute @FredricKanoute and ask that he remove the names of Drogba and Cabaye from his site. 

Also, Kanoute has an open Facebook page, which means that you can comment beneath links he shares, such as this one:

fb

While you’re at it, you can also Tweet Chris McGreal @ChrisMcGreal and ask that he revise his report accordingly.

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Sep 12 2012

3 Cheers to Batsheva

A guest post by Stephen Hoffman, Campaigns Intern at the UK Zionist Federation

Once again, just over a week ago, the anti-Israel movement excelled itself in its disrespect for international culture and dialogue, whilst promoting a vision of hate. Rather then let the many concert goers watch the internationally acclaimed Israeli Batsheva Company perform, anti-Israel boycotters tried to ruin the enjoyment of everyone by protesting at the event.

It is absolutely shameful that on three separate nights pro-Palestinian demonstrators brought a halt to the performance of Batsheva Dance Troupe. They were in effect sticking two fingers up at those who had paid their money to see a world-class dance performance and putting their own discriminatory views above the enjoyment of others. Truly, the protests were awe-inspiringly selfish. Quite how it is in the interest of the Palestinian cause to act in a discriminatory way and undermine artistic expression I do not know. It was with immense courage that despite all these interruptions, Batsheva produced a world-class dance display which received much applause from the audience who were lucky enough to see it.

Batsheva’s crime is that they just happen to be Israeli. This is why the protestors who were there on behalf of the organisation ‘Don’t Dance with Israeli Apartheid’ Campaign shouted “Your tickets are covered in Palestinian blood”. This paints an incredibly inaccurate picture, where just being Israeli means that you would like to harm Palestinians. It also belittles the suffering of those who know the true horrors of apartheid and that for all its faults Israel is in no way, shape or form an Apartheid state.

This pernicious campaign group, alongside other anti-Israel groups, illustrates Israelis – and everything to do with them – as evil monsters. If the boot was on the other foot and Pro Israel protesters painted the Palestinians as the spawn of the devil, there would quite rightly be an outrage.

The idea that Israeli people are just like people over the world – and in the case of the Batsheva Dance Company extremely talented – does not seem to compute in the protestors narrow mindsets. Thus they single out Israel disproportionately and use anything related to Israel to spread their message of hate.

It is time all sane people, who believe that all nations and individuals should be treated with respect make their voices heard. This can be done by writing articles, contacting your local newspapers or working with Organisations such as The Zionist Federation, to show that people will stand up to the message of intolerance. Otherwise those engaging with cultural vandalism and undermining freedom of expression will win the day. This is something we simply cannot allow to happen.

Those involved in boycotts and protests that unfairly demonize Israel work against the interests of freedom of expression, peace and prosperity which they claim to cherish. Thanks to the Zionist Federation’s brave leafleting counter protest this was highlighted to the wider British public. However, now is not a time to rest on our laurels and we must redouble our efforts in the face of a determined and unreasonable opponent. If we do not, we allow them to win the narrative and therefore the argument.

This would be a travesty as we have the truth on our side and we should not be afraid to use it.

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Aug 5 2012

The British Ambassador in Israel’s TV interview – and some home truths.

In recent weeks, Israelis have had to put up with the ‘evaporation’ of their capital city and the placing of rather revealing pictures supposedly portraying their country on the Olympics-dedicated pages of the BBC website. 

In addition, they discovered that the organisers of the London Olympic Games – whilst lacking the backbone to stand up to the IOC’s refusal to include a minute of silence for the 11 Israeli athletes murdered in Munich – did manage to weave a tribute to their own losses to terror into the opening ceremony and that a ‘mood of reflection’ was – appropriately – possible after all. 

Obviously feeling the heat, the UK government seems to have attempted some sort of rather bizarre damage control by sending its ambassador in Israel to an interview with Channel 10 news which was broadcast on the prime-time main news slot on August 2nd. 

Somewhat uncharacteristically for an Israeli journalist, the interviewer failed to challenge the ambassador’s swift side-stepping of the BBC scandal, allowing him to fabricate the impression that the British government (and in particular the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) has no input into the BBC and that ‘soft diplomacy‘ is not part of the remit of certain arms of the corporation. 

Apparently attempting to deflect the embarrassment caused by the highly publicised BBC website row, the ambassador launched a classic FCO-style assault – thinly veiled with passive-aggressive pseudo pathos – ostensibly aimed at saving his Israeli audience from themselves by mirroring British attitudes towards them. 

In stark contrast to the statements made during his recent speech in the Knesset, the ambassador informed Israelis that “support for Israel is starting to erode and that’s not about those people on the fringe”. Less than a month ago, when the same ambassador was trying to drum up Israeli interest in academic and economic co-operation with recession-struck Britain, Israel’s detractors were described as being “on the margin of political life”. Now all of a sudden, the same ambassador speaks of “members of Parliament in the middle; the majority”. 

Predictably, the onus of responsibility for “lack of progress towards peace” which Gould cites as a cause of “growing concern” was placed exclusively at Israel’s door, with – according to him – British patience being tried by “a stream of announcements about new building in settlements” and anti-Israel sentiment growing as people “read stories about what’s going on in the West Bank” and “read about the restrictions in Gaza”. 

However, home truths can work both ways and it therefore must be said that it is highly regrettable that the British Ambassador refrained from honestly evaluating the role of his own government and the media in his own nation in propagating exactly the kind of stories to which he refers as affecting “majority” opinion. 

As the ambassador correctly states, the British people are by no means “stupid” but they, their politicians and apparently also their diplomats, are fed a constant largely monotone diet of one-sided and chronically misleading coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict by media organisations such as the (partly UK government-funded) BBC, the Guardian, the Independent and others, which nourishes the “Israel as Goliath, Palestinians as David ” myth. 

(And as if on cue, Harriet Sherwood was quick to use the ambassador’s interview to add further oxygen to the bubble of mutually assured myth.)

No less importantly, the blind eye deliberately turned by the UK government to lobbying, fund-raising and campaigning by organisations linked to Hamas and other terror groups and their supporters on British streets and even inside the British parliament – in many cases with Charity Commission approval and resulting tax exemptions – needs to be included  in any honestly compiled list of factors affecting British public opinion. 

And of course the fact that successive British governments have donated vast amounts of money to NGOs engaged in the delegitimisation of Israel (and continue to do so) also contributes to the adoption of warped views of the conflict, as do the decidedly undiplomatic activities of some of Mr Gould’s colleagues. 

In other words, the big stick carried by Britain’s soft-speaking ambassador contains no small amount of British wood. 

Israelis know exactly how much they have sacrificed in the quest for an elusive peace. They have thousands of graves to remind them of the pre and post-Oslo victims of the Palestinian refusal to come to terms with Jewish existence in the Middle East. They have many more thousands of neighbours and family members injured, maimed and disfigured in terror attacks or uprooted from Sinai and Gush Katif to remind them of the price paid by the living. Millions of Israelis live daily with the threat of terrorist missiles and attacks from Gaza in the south or Hizballah in the north. 

As a diplomatic guest in Israel, the British Ambassador should be aware of these painful testimonies to Israel’s numerous attempts to advance peace. He should be capable of recognising the fact that the responsibility for the failed outcome of  those attempts to date cannot be laid exclusively at Israel’s door and indeed that his own country has a long-standing tradition of contributing much to past and present failures. 

One would think that after almost a century of somewhat inglorious history in the Middle East, the FCO would finally have grasped that its traditionally imbalanced and inaccurate assessments have done no favours to the region. 

Some recognition on its part of the fact that whilst the Israelis are committed to pursuing peace with their neighbours, they are also very well acquainted with – and realistic about – the factors preventing that hope from materializing, would contribute significantly more to bringing about positive change than such anachronistic – if all too predictable – patronising  finger-wagging from Westminster.  

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Aug 3 2012

BDS enthusiast David Martin, MEP, and a Hamas-linked trip to Gaza

The following was written by Hadar Sela and published at The Commentator

In the economic climate currently plaguing Europe, one would expect elected officials (and perhaps in particular, members of the Labour Party) to be among the first to support an initiative which has the potential to contribute to easing the strain both on government budgets and the purses of ordinary citizens – especially those with lower incomes. 

However, it seems that for some UK MEPs, political posturing is far more important than the well-being of their constituents.

The European Union – Israel Agreement on Conformity, Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) was approved by the European Council of Ministers in March 2010 and then sent on to the European Parliament for ratification. The European Parliament has delayed that process for over two years – supposedly as a reaction to the May 2010 flotilla incident in which nine Turkish political activists were killed after having attacked Israeli soldiers.

As the wheels of that process begin to turn again, anti-Israel activists are once more trying to scupper the ACAA; among them Labour Party member and Scottish MEP David Martin, who spoke against the agreement in the European Parliament, had a letter of objection published in the Guardian and wrote about the subject on his blog.

If ratified and enacted, the ACAA will mean that European pharmaceutical companies will be able to purchase Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and medicines from Israeli companies at lower costs as the need for additional testing in Europe will in many cases be significantly reduced or even no longer exist.

That of course will bring about lower manufacturing costs for European drug companies, ultimately resulting in savings for the European governments which provide their citizens with healthcare, as well as cheaper  medications for European citizens paying for certain products out of their own pockets .

In addition, as the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the EU move closer towards putting into place legislation that would require APIs from non-EU countries to be certified as guaranteed to conform to EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards, some of the EU’s current main suppliers (for example in China) are likely to have difficulties in meeting EU standards immediately and could require significant time and investment to adjust.

In such a situation, a cheap and reliable supply of APIs which already conform to EU standards – such as those found in Israel – could be vital both for the guarantee of an uninterrupted supply of medications to European patients and the safeguarding of jobs within the European pharmaceutical industries.

None of that appears to be of any interest to the members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has been lobbying MEPs to vote against the ACAA.

But the PSC’s lack of respect for the right of European citizens to effective and reasonably priced healthcare appears to be of no concern to quite a few British MEPs, including David Martin, with the PSC claiming that no fewer than 23 of them are against the agreement. Unsurprisingly, several of the same names have also publicly endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

Read the rest of the essay, here

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Jul 26 2012

BDS is for Bully! Disturb! Spam! or: Tali Shapiro’s pathetic #BDSFAIL

Cross posted by Or, who blogs at ‘BDS Gone Bad‘

Despite it’s humble dimensions, Israel is both a major consumer and a significant exporter of culture.

Only in these last few months Tel Aviv was honored by great visitors such as Madonna, Guns N Roses, Chris Cornell and Morrissey who rocked the stages;  RHCP and the Prodigy are yet to come later this summer.

Alongside the “big names”, international indie artists perform in Israel every month, one of which is the Brian Jonestown Massacre band who played in Tel Aviv last week. In an interview given before the show, singer Anton Newcombe explained that he was addressed by BDS activists who urged him to cancel the gig and boycott Israel, a request he briefly  refered to as “bullshit”.

The concert was covered positively by fans and critiques, a fact with which the BDS crowd just can’t accept.

The one and only infamous Tali Shapiro applied her usual methods of lies and harassment of which I’ve written in the past.

Frustrated with Newcomb’s attitude and refusal to give in, Shapiro posted on her blog on July 19th, a post  in which she once again personally harassing Anton and DEMANDS that he reads her materials, change his mind and express regret and understanding that performing in Israel is in fact an “apartheid supporting” deed. On this I shall use Anton’s own words- Bullshit.

The following Saturday, a person claiming to be a Joneston Massacre fan contacted The band’s leader on Twitter and linked to Shapiro’s post. This started a chain reaction of public harassment, which you can read over at Shapiro’s Twitter Account, and lasted for three days and countless tweets

 

This  discussion was doomed to escalate. Anton wrote repeatedly that he is being harassed by Shapiro and the others, asked them to stop mentioning him and eventually blocked her account – And still, the BDS crowd just wouldn’t let go.

 

Anton Newcomb is not the only artist who’s being spammed and bugged by the BDS network of activists. They are targeting musicians and performers in general, they systematically follow upcoming concerts in Israel, and then nag them before (and AFTER…) with Facebook pages, online petitions and twitter accounts calling them to cancel their gigs – through harassing, obsessive  Spam campaigns.

Check out their Facebook page “TAG an artist Against Apartheid”‘ which I think should have been called:  “Tag an artists and mention and message and spam him till he wants to shoot himself”.

I want to dedicate this post to brave and patient Mr. Newcombe. I don’t know him personally but I do know that if it was me being harassed like that (AFTER the goddamn show!), I’d go for massive user reports…

Related articles
Jul 23 2012

Phoebe Greenwood’s anonymous EU diplomat despairs at trade upgrade with Israel: #BDSFAIL

In what must be sad news for the BDS folks and other anti-Zionists of all stripes, the Guardian reported that “The EU will offer Israel upgraded trade and diplomatic relations in more than 60 areas at a high-level meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.”

The report by Phoebe Greenwood noted the following:

“The EU will widen its relationship with Jerusalem on a range of areas including migration, energy and agriculture. It will remove obstacles impeding Israel’s access to European government-controlled markets and enhance Israel’s co-operation with nine EU agencies, including Europol and the European Space Agency.”

The new areas of co-operation include what’s known as the Agreement on Conformity, Assessment and Acceptance of industrial products, or ACAA, which refers to the “elimination of technical barriers to trade”, thereby increasing the accessibility of Israeli markets to products from the EU and vice versa”.  The package also promises to “further bilateral co-operation” between Israel and key EU agencies, including the EU’s Judicial Co-operation Unit and the European Police Office.

However, Greenwood dutifully located an ”anonymous” EU diplomat to question the wisdom of such an upgrade in relations with Israel.

“One senior EU diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that despite private complaints of the inconsistency of chastising Israel with one hand while rewarding it with the other, not one minister was prepared to oppose Tuesday’s agreement.

“I was struck by the fact that a whole range of relations was offered to Israel – at the request of Israel – as if nothing is happening on the ground,” the diplomat said. “Most ministers are too afraid to speak out in case they are singled out as being too critical towards Israel, because, in the end, relations with Israel are on the one hand relations with the Jewish community at large and on the other hand with Washington – nobody wants to have fuss with Washington. So [ministers] are fine with making political statements but they refrain from taking concrete action.” “[emphasis added]

Yes, of course: Hapless EU ministers are pressured into upgrading relations with Israel due to the fear of offending “Washington”, and the Jewish community.

The EU diplomat, who chose not to use his or her real name out of fear, it seems, of the possible dangerous consequences of speaking truth to Zionist power, added:

” “The only possible tool for the EU to make Israel change its behaviour is to use the weight and power of these [diplomatic and trade] relations,” he said.”

Greenwood adds:

“Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, admits the EU and Israel may have their differences, but, dismissed the idea of trade sanctions as nonsensical:

“Both sides would suffer terribly if we start throwing eggs at each other. With Greece and Spain imploding, it doesn’t make sense for the EU to do anything to damage trade with anyone at this point,” Hirschson said, pointing out that two-thirds of Israel’s imports are bought from EU member states.”

Indeed, the Israeli spokesperson makes an important point, one which has broader significance in the Jewish state’s battle against delegitimization tactics such as BDS.

The purpose of BDS, which has its origins in the NGO Forum of the UN’s 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, “is to isolate Israel via boycotts of Israeli academic, cultural, and consumer institutions, divestment from companies doing business with Israel, and sanctions in the areas of military, economic, and diplomatic cooperation agreements between Israel and other states.”

However, what BDS activists never seem to take into consideration, despite a pitiful record of failure upon failure, is that Israel’s increasing technological and economic prowess serves as a natural bulwark against such pressure.

EU officials’ reluctance to embrace BDS, either de facto or de jure, is not based on fear of angering Jews (a community which, after all, represents a measly two tenths of 1% of the world’s total population) but, rather, on a sober understanding of their own political and economic interests.

For instance, Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds, and first in venture capital investments (as a percentage of GDP) compared to 34 OECD nations, not because venture capitalists are passionate Zionists, but because they intuitively understand that Israel’s economic success, highly educated workforce and relative political stability makes it a sound investment.

Additionally, Israel’s recent emergence as a regional energy superpower will likely mean that the ability of the anti-Zionist Arab governments to influence political opinion in Europe and the rest of the world may decline.

In short, there is a direct and necessary relationship between Israel’s culture of success (which is, by nature, immune to outside influence) and the increasing irrelevance of  BDS – a supremely immoral movement which is destined to continue to fail spectacularly.

Related articles
Jul 13 2012

Matthew Gould provides another glimpse into delusional British attitudes towards Israel

The following essay was written by Hadar Sela, and published at The Commentator.

How much does Matthew Gould’s speech reflect the institutionalised views of the FCO?

Recently, The Commentator offered some insight into attitudes towards Israel within the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Further illumination was available this week when Matthew Gould, the British Ambassador to Israel, spoke at a sub-committee meeting in the Knesset in Jerusalem.

There is much in the Ambassador’s speech (which, obviously, reflects the attitudes of those he represents rather than his own opinions) to raise quizzical eyebrows, but insufficient space here to address all the points.

Not the least bizarre was the statement that last year the British government allocated £2 million for security in Jewish schools — without addressing the rather obvious follow-up question of why Jewish schools in the UK (and only they) are in need of security in the first place.

No less bizarre is the following claim:

“…[T]here is indeed a small group of people in the UK – as in many other countries – who are determined to promote a fundamental assault upon Israel’s very legitimacy.  They represent a small minority, but they are active, loud and hugely dedicated. 

They try, and sometimes succeed, to marshal civil society organisations to their cause. These people are on the margin of political life, but they have made occasional inroads into mainstream politics.”

One can but speculate as to how Palestine Solidarity Campaign patrons such as Jeremy Corbyn MP and Baroness Tonge will react to the knowledge that the FCO considers them to be ‘on the margin of political life’.

Equally, one wonders how the 17 trade unions affiliated to the PSC – representing, according to their own claims, 80 percent of the members of the 6.5 million-strong TUC – became a ‘small minority’. And, according to the Ambassador’s theory, apparently the Church of England can also now be classified as a fringe group.  

But among all the claims made in the speech, there are two in particular which merit further discussion. The Ambassador – again, presumably reflecting FCO accepted wisdoms – stated that:

“There is an important battle for public opinion to be had in the UK, but it is not the one at the far fringes of political life.  Rather, it is for the centre ground, where the issue is not delegitimisation but a genuine concern about the absence of progress towards peace, about settlements and the occupation. 

“By contrast, progress towards peace will further discredit the delegitimisers and allow Israel’s supporters to shift their energy away from extinguishing fires to embracing Israel positively.”

Notably, this view places the onus entirely upon one party involved in the conflict: Israel. It completely ignores the many efforts –and sacrifices – Israel has made over the years in order to try to achieve a settlement to the conflict.

Read the rest of the essay, here.

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Jul 5 2012

It’s the Settlements, Stupid: Alon Liel’s Fantastic Vision for Peace in our Time

A guest post by Gidon Ben-Zvi, who blogs at Jerusalem State of Mind

The road to peace? A Jewish child sits in front of the rubble of a structure demolished by Israeli police in a settlement outside Ramallah, on Sept. 5, 2011.

A frenzy of sorts has broken out surrounding a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa’s recent backing of international efforts to prevent produce originating in Jewish settlements in the West Bank from being labeled “Made in Israel”.

The goal of such a policy, according to former ambassador Alon Liel, would be to protect and reinforce the pre-1967 border. Liel goes on to commend the decision of South African and Danish governments to delineate between products originating in Israel and those coming out of “settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories…” since such settlements “…are not [in] Israel [but] are built on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognised borders and are illegal under international law.”                                                                                                     

While Liel’s piece is loaded down with references to “international law”, the esteemed former diplomat fails to communicate a most basic fact: international law makes a clear distinction between land occupied during a war of aggression and land taken as a result of a defensive war.

Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a war of survival. In fact, Israel’s seizing of land in 1967 was, arguably, the ONLY legal acquisition of this territory in the 20th century. In contrast, Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank from 1947 to 1967 had been the result of an offensive war launched against the fledgling Jewish state in 1948. With the exception of Great Britain and Pakistan, this particular occupation was never recognized by the international community, including the Arab states.

Having delegitimized Israel’s claim to the territory it acquired during the Six Day War, Liel then takes aim at that pesky, perpetual enemy of peace in the Middle East: the settlements. According to the former ambassador: “[t]he continuing settlement expansion threatens to make a two-state solution to the conflict impossible.”

Indeed, concern over Israeli settlement construction is not a new issue. Yet, despite the “the expansionist policy of Israel’s rightwing government led by Binyamin Netanyahu”, serious, concerted efforts have been made to determine and cement the legal status of the outposts in the “occupied territories”.

On July 3rd, 2012, a committee tasked with examining the legality of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, headed by a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice, concluded that international law does not preclude Israeli construction on land owned by the state. The committee also declared that communities built with government assistance were implicitly authorized.

However, the report that the committee, established by Prime Minister Netanyahu, issued went far beyond merely asserting Israeli sovereignty over the disputed territories. It also made a concerted effort to address lingering legal issues regarding communities which were not built on privately owned Palestinian land, but whose status was still in doubt due to legal bureaucracy.

The report also criticized Israeli government action in the territories, stating that “dozens of new neighborhoods have been erected, without government authorization and at times without a contiguous link to the mother community… several were built outside the legal jurisdiction allotted to the community.”

Having whitewashed the existential threat faced by Israel that precipitated its military response in June, 1967 – against Arab nations openly committed to the destruction of the Jewish State - Liel then proceeds to demonize the Jewish inhabitants of homes that were subsequently built in these territories.

Liel aims to shock with his presentation of the old and intellectually fuzzy demographic time bomb argument: 550,000 Jewish settlers now squatting in the “occupied” lands. Truth be told, over two-thirds of the Jews in the West Bank live in five settlement “blocs” that are all near the 1967 border.

Most Israelis believe these blocs should become part of Israel when final borders are drawn.

Furthermore, built-up settlement area is less than two percent of the disputed territories. An estimated 70 percent of the settlers live in what are in effect suburbs of major Israeli cities such as Jerusalem. These are areas that virtually the entire Jewish population believes Israel must retain to ensure its security.

In short, the main obstacle to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors has never been the territories, or the settlements, or the settlers – it has been the very existence of Israel. From 1949–67, when Jews were forbidden to live in the West Bank and “East” Jerusalem, the Arabs nonetheless refused to make peace with the “Zionist Entity”.

It is worth considering that the growth in the Jewish population in the territories may actually serve as a catalyst for peace since the Palestinians now realize that time is on the side of Israel, which can build settlements and create facts on the ground. Realizing this, Israel’s peace partners may finally acknowledge that the only way out of its dilemma is face-to-face negotiations, without preconditions. 

Ultimately, the disposition of settlements is a matter for final status negotiations. While one may legitimately support or challenge Israeli settlements in the disputed territories, they are not illegal. Furthermore, Alon Liel’s favorite obstacles to peace have neither the size, population, nor placement to have a serious impact on sincere efforts to reach a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians on issues of disputed territories.

Jun 24 2012

Columnist for Ha’aretz, a Guardian protege paper, seeks Alice Walker’s wisdom on Israeli racism

Here’s a multiple choice question:

Maya Sela, literary correspondent for Ha’aretz, penned an essay for ‘Comment is Free’ (Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple” should be read in Israel, June 22nd) opposing the American writer’s decision not to allow her novel to be translated into Hebrew (a boycott against the entire Hebrew speaking country) because:

A) Singling out Israel for BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions) is morally hypocritical and inherently racist.

B) Alice Walker is an antisemite with no moral authority by which to lecture the Jewish state and indeed has engaged in Judeophobic narratives including the following: evoking the ancient decide charge by conflating the “persecuted” Palestinians with Jesus Christ, advancing the odious charge that Israel’s sins can arguably be compared to those of Nazi Germany, and morally legitimizing a Palestinian women who prayed that God would protect her from the Jews.

C) Whatever her literary talents, many of Walker’s political views are facile and downright juvenile and she represents an embarrassment to serious left-wing critics of Israel. For instance, she believes that Israel is the greatest terrorist organization in the world and has referred to Jews who live across the green line as being on a par with the KKK.

D) Preventing Israelis from reading ‘The Color Purple’ denies Jews Walker’s liberating wisdom on how to combat their nation’s “primitive”, “sick” and “extensive” racism”.

If you guessed (D), you’re correct.

Sela begins by arguing:

“[BDS supporters like Walker] are feeding the flames of a lingering sense of victimhood. Victimhood is one of those mental constructs that is hard for Israelis to rid themselves of – and therefore, one which the Israeli establishment itself nurtures because it is convenient.”

The Ha’aretz ideological bubble which Sela inhabits is evidently as blind to the ugly reality concerning very real regional enemies possessing undeniable malevolence (insatiable antisemitism, a collective desire to wipe Israel from the map, and terrorist movements on its borders which launch hundreds of rockets into its towns each year) as it is to the circular logic it often peddles.  

What Sela is essentially saying is that singling out the democratic Jewish state for sanction doesn’t suggest that Israel is the victim of a malicious movement intent on isolating it from the community of nations but rather that it erroneously reinforces the nation’s belief that it is being victimized.  For Sela, the BDS movement is convenient for Israelis because, on some psychological level, it allows them to nurture the evidently fantastical notion that antisemitism (in its classic and anti-Zionist manifestations) is a malign and dangerous force.

Sela continues:

“Walker, of all people, who has confronted racism and written a powerful fictional critique of it, is preventing Israelis from being exposed to the very kind of literary work that is crucial for them to read….”

Whatever the powerful truths about the evils of racism imparted the book ‘The Color Purple’, Sela doesn’t offer her Ha’aretz readers so much as a clue regarding Walker’s profound blind spot when it comes to Israelis. Walker’s anti-racist street cred is necessarily eroded by an acquiescence to the most crude, often unintelligible, hate speech about Jews as such.  

Ultimately, Walker is only granted political legitimacy and moral authority by virtue of the failure of journalists like Sela to take her task (or even minimally hold her accountable) over this visceral loathing she seems to possess for one nation: the particular Jewish inhabitants of the state of Israel.

Walker may have confronted racism in her own life but when it comes to Jews, she has come to represent the hate which hate creates.

Sela concludes:

 ”It is precisely here in Israel that her voice needs to be heard, and in Hebrew.

[Walker should] have found that the occupation is only one of our problems. Perhaps it’s the most acute of our problems, but the manifestations of racism in Israeli life are far more extensive than solely attitudes towards the Palestinians. The incarceration and deportation of African migrants living in Israel…is eliciting unprecedented racism from Israelis…

Something inside us is sick.” [emphasis mine]

Perhaps the most acute pathos of the Israeli left is the failure to even marginally comprehend the ethical imperative of political and moral proportion. It is representative of a Western left, more broadly, which routinely engages in self-flagellation over every imaginable societal sin, without acknowledging that such social imperfections pale in comparison their profound progressive virtues and undeniable liberal advantages over the non-democratic world.

This is the “sickness” which, as much as any other factor, continues to define the hard left: “intellectuals” who cannot distinguish between free nations consisting of imperfect citizens with ethnocentric biases and the capacity for toxic rhetoric (but where such behavior typically elicits social opprobrium) and nations where racism, intolerance (and violence) directed against “the other” is normative, and encouraged by the state, religious leaders, the media and popular culture.  

Guardian protegés such as Ha’aretz journalist Maya Sela are also plagued by an acute moral myopia – the willingness to bestow liberal anti-racist credentials to nearly anyone who fancies themselves anti-Zionist.

A genuine intellectual left – one with a serious moral claim to that mantle – would immediately exclude any “activist” from the progressive community who, like Walker, engages in tropes about Jews which are indistinguishable from those employed by the extreme right. 

Alice Walker is no anti-racist and Jews need not take seriously her self-righteous, and supremely hubristic, lectures on intolerance.

A genuinely progressive Israeli voice would understand this intuitive truth.       

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Jun 22 2012

Antisemitism with a literary glow: Alice Walker’s ugly caricature of Israeli Jews

Written by Hadar Sela and Adam Levick

“Jesus, a Palestinian – is still being crucified.” (Alice Walker’s blog, per CAMERA)

“[Israeli] settlers are the [Ku Klux] Klan” (Alice Walker, during interview with Jesse Rosenfeld.)

“I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world. And I think in general, the United States and Israel are great terrorist organizations themselves.”  (Alice Walker, Foreign Policy, in June, 2011.)

“I feel that the Israel that many Jews dreamed of having – that one is gone. That’s demolished. I think it’s time for people to accept that. Because what you have now is something that is so frightening. Israel is as frightening to many of us as Germany used to be.” (Alice Walker: Why I’m joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, Guardian, June 25, 2011).”

The literary foot-stomping  which is Alice Walker’s recent refusal to permit her book ‘The Colour Purple’ to be translated into Hebrew – bizarre as it is – can hardly have come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with the writer’s history of anti-Israel activism. Neither does the Guardian’s decision to showcase extensive sections of Walker’s letter of refusal to the would-be publisher exactly come as a shock.

Walker is a long-standing activist in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), and indeed allowed her letter to the Israeli publisher which requested permission to translate the book to be posted on the website of PACBI – the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel – which leads and sets the tone for the BDS campaign.

PACBI does not aspire to a two-state solution – it promotes the ‘return’ of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees, thereby rejecting the existence of Israel within any borders. PACBI opposes ‘normalisation’ and has produced a document which defines that term as:

“participating in any project, initiative or activity whether locally or internationally, that is designed to bring together-whether directly or indirectly Palestinian and/or Arab youth with Israelis (whether individuals or institutions) and is not explicitly designed to resist or expose the occupation and all forms of discrimination and oppression inflicted upon the Palestinian people.”

PACBI founding member and steering committee member Omar Barghouti believes (mistakenly) that:

“International law does give people under occupation the right to resist in any way, including armed resistance”.

In other words, Alice Walker chose to make her statement on the platform of an organization which aspires, by any means, to oppose co-existence in the Middle East and bring about an end to the Jewish state.

That too should not be surprising, for another of Alice Walker’s pet hobbies is supporting an additional Palestinian organization which opposes dialogue, seeks to bring about the end of Israel and openly calls for the murder of Jews – Hamas.

In 2011 Walker joined the (failed) flotilla to Gaza, engaging in self-promotion on the pages of the Guardian (where else?) along the way. Walker’s flowery prose was full of buzz-words such as ‘justice’ and ‘respect’, but any concern for the people of Israel’s south – battered and traumatized for over a decade by the terror organizations involved in organizing that flotilla – was remarkably absent, as Howard Jacobson pointed out to her at the time.

And then of course there is Alice Walker’s involvement in that self-appointed kangaroo court-cum-echo chamber known as the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which flits from venue to venue in order to reach the foregone conclusion of Israeli’s immutable guilt based on carefully pre-selected ‘evidence’.

Walker claims that her decision not to allow her book to be translated into Hebrew is part of her ongoing attempt to “rid humanity of its self-destructive habit of dehumanizing whole populations”, yet it has obviously never occurred to her that she is supremely guilty of that fault herself.

A woman who would liken Israelis who live on the “wrong” side of the green line” to the KKK is an unserious political poser – an extremist engaged in incendiary, hateful, and dehumanizing rhetoric about hundreds of thousands of Jews.

A once  celebrated literary figure who holds steady with the sophomoric belief that the United States and Israel are the “great terrorist organizations” of our time is someone who has become a 60′s political anachronism: an embarrassment to those who may have succumbed to the temptation of imputing to Walker true wisdom by virtue of her literary achievements.

A person who excuses terror and murder by claiming that “[t]his is David and Goliath, but Goliath is not the Palestinians. They are David. They are the ones with the slingshot. They are the ones with the rocks and relatively not-so-powerful rockets. Whereas the Israelis have these incredibly damaging missiles and rockets” is severely lacking in even basic human empathy.

Much of Walker’s self-allocated expertise and supreme authority on the subjects of terrorism, discrimination and apartheid is, by her own account, based upon her experiences growing up in the south of the United States.

But by choosing to support a plethora of organisations which seek to deny Jews the right to self-determination like any other nation in the world and in promoting her own radical-chic credentials by deeming a language – and the nation which speaks it – beyond the pale, Walker shows herself to be no better than the Deep South racists of her youth.

Walker, schooled in the art of compassion, liberalism (and the theology of liberation) evidently fails to note the succor she is providing for the most illiberal, reactionary Islamist movements: forces of antisemitic intolerance which resemble – indeed, wildly exceed – the fervor of hardcore racism arduously defended during the 1950s and 1960s in places like Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama.

In an essay which Walker wrote in 2009, she described giving a gift to a Palestinian woman:

“I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me. Looking into my eyes she said: May God Protect You From the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one.” [emphasis added]

It may be too later for her, but Alice Walker seems intent on at least protecting others from the perfidy of the Jewish people.