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The blog Point of No Return, dedicated to the memory of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, aptly states:
In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been ‘ethnically cleansed’ from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, which absorbed most of these Jewish refugees, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.
NYT Headline, May 16, 1948
Yes, in a mere fifty years roughly one million Jews were expelled from Arab lands for the sole crime of sharing the religious identity of the resurrected Jewish state. Thousands of communities were wiped out of existence, as well as the world’s collective imagination – those for whom nobody (and no UN agency) will speak.
And, in less than fifty words ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Rachel Shabi morally absolved Arab rulers who initiated the ethnic cleansing of Jews of the guilt typically assigned to those who commit such reprehensible acts.
Shabi’s latest CiF essay, “Equality must be the legacy of the Arab Spring“, included this moral obfuscation:
the main reason Arab countries were all but emptied of Jewish communities during the 1940s and 1950s [was that] the ideologies of Zionism and Arab nationalism…yanked at opposing ends of hyphenated Arab-Jewish identities and forced them to fall apart.
It’s vitally important that you read, and re-read, this passage to fully appreciate the art of Shabi’s moral inversion.
In a remarkably thrifty polemic apologia for antisemtism, Rachel Shabi distributes guilt for the expulsion of one million innocent Jews evenly between two abstractions: Jewish and Arab “nationalism”.
However, it is simply undeniable that Jews were expelled from their homes by quite particular Arab rulers – those who cynically exploited prevailing antisemitic mores to justify freezing Jews’ bank accounts, confiscating their assets and expropriating their property, revoking their national citizenship, and inciting murderous riots.
It is not an overstatement to compare such measures which stripped Jews of their citizenship to the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 (Nuremberg laws), and Arabs’ theft of Jewish assets (estimated to be valued at over $100 billion) are similarly analogous to Nazi measures against Jews initiated in the late 1930s.
Further, as Bataween, of the blog Point of No Return, observed:
From 1949 to 2009, General Assembly resolutions focused much greater attention on the issue of Palestinian refugees – some 20 percent – than on any other Middle East issue. There were never any General Assembly resolutions that specifically addressed the issue of Jewish refugees, nor any resolutions on other topics that even mention Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
As a definitive report, co-authored by Irwin Cotler, concluded about the issue of Jewish refugees, their expulsion was part of an intentional and coordinated effort by Arab rulers:
These massive human rights violations were not events that occurred coincidently or haphazardly; nor were they the result only of state-sanctioned patterns of repression in each of the Arab countries, though this would be bad enough; rather, as the evidence discloses, they were the result of an international criminal conspiracy by the League of Arab States to target and persecute the Jewish populations in their respective countries.
Shabi’s attempt to blame Zionism for this massive crime employs the same moral logic of those who blamed the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII on the military acts of the Empire of Japan.
Just as Japanese Americans bore absolutely no responsibility for the acts of Japan, Jews in Arab lands could not conceivably be blamed for the creation of Israel – even to those sympathetic towards the Arabs’ fanatical intolerance towards Israel’s existence.
Scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld’s latest book, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory addresses, among other dynamics, the “denial of the Holocaust…the distortion of its memory, justification, deflection, and whitewashing.”
Similarly, Rachel Shabi’s attempt to deflect moral responsibility for the Jews’ expulsion away from the Arab perpetrators (and blurring the clear causation) is a similarly reprehensible abuse of the memory of the nearly one million Jews, and their descendants, who suffered immeasurably due to an intentional and systemic act of ethnic cleansing.
Related articles
- CiF’s Rachel Shabi, Israeli democracy and the rank dishonesty of the anti-Zionist Left (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch exclusive interview with Smadar Bakovic, who fought anti-Zionist bias in UK Academia & won! (cifwatch.com)
- Newt Gingrich, the Guardian, and the invention of a moral outrage. (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch post “Better Jews: The moral vanity of Israel’s leftist Jewish critics” wins political essay contest (cifwatch.com)
- Fight or flight? CiF Watch, David Yehuda Stern & Ben White (cifwatch.com)
- The continuing notoriety of Guardian journalist Deborah Orr’s perverse antisemitic logic (cifwatch.com)
- When CiF commentary about the Holocaust elicits contempt for Jews by Guardian readers (cifwatch.com)
H/T Judy
“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” – 1984, by George Orwell
George Orwell, prolific writer and a staunch opponent of totalitarianism (including communism), writing in the spring of 1945, in a long essay titled “Antisemitism in Britain“, for the Contemporary Jewish Record, stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was “irrational and will not yield to arguments.”
He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could “swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.”
Anti-Zionists today, those who are opposed to the Jewish state’s very existence and engage in demonization beyond any limits of reason, as those active in the fight for the state’s survival are acutely aware, is often equally irrational and unable to yield to even the most lucid arguments.
Indeed, the quote I cited above from 1984 reflects one of the common understandings the word “Orwellian” – the capacity to hold inherently irreconcilable, hypocritical, and/or irrational political views without the slightest cognitive dissonance.
The Orwell Prize for Journalism is characterized, on their website, as:
“Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. Every year, we award prizes for the work – the book, the blog which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.”
The 2011 list includes prolific Israel haters such as Robert Fisk (See here, here, and here), the man with the proud distinction of engaging in journalistic bias so egregious as to inspire the word “Fisking“) and Guardian contributor, Rachel Shabi.
In discussing a review of “Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands”, the New Centrist succinctly sums up Shabi as follows:
“Shabi is part of small group of post-Zionist Mizrahi intellectuals who want to reclaim the non-European aspect their identity. I think this is a positive thing. But some of these post-Zionists have a tendency to borrow analytical frameworks from Marxists and others who view Ashkenazim and Zionists as imperialists and colonialists. In this narrative, the Mizrahim are indigenous people who have been victimized by Zionism, just like the Palestinians. In other words, Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians are people of color and Ashkenazis are whitey. Shabi and her political allies, in turn, are part pf the global resistance against the forces of global empire.
Here’s a sampling of Shabi’s offerings on the evils of Zionism and the moral sins of Israeli Jews:
“Most Israelis, in other words, seem to have convinced themselves that their own moral superiority somehow sanctions and justifies their own acts of moral repugnance. As a line of defence, it’s hard to see how this will stand up in court.” The self-defence defence January 23, 2009
But Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib says there is another factor at play in the overall media skew. “Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages, Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida,” he says. As a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel – because it fits the “us or them” binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.” Winning the media warJanuary 10, 2009
“Kfir Brigade’s own former members describe its role in enforcing the Israeli occupation as having turned them into “monsters”. This brigade is the nightmare of bed-wetting Palestinian children and its deeds should be the nightmare of any Israeli who seeks peace, rather than perpetual loathing, between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples of the region.” Bruiting about brutes November 29, 2008
In the mind of Shabi, every Israeli act, her every fear and concern, can be contorted in a way to suggest the state’s inherent and immutable bigotry.
Indeed, her capacity to twist and turn prose in a way which assigns maximum malice to the Jewish state seems to have no limits as, more recently, she penned a piece for the Guardian which managed to spin Israeli concerns over the potential rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as evidence of Israeli racism.
The Muslim Brotherhood, as we noted previously, is a viciously anti-Semitic movement, which openly calls the destruction of Israel and whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi has endorsed the Holocaust as divinely inspired just punishment of the Jews.
The capacity to engage in such a profound moral inversion – accusing Jews of racism for expressing their concern over a movement inspired by a man who endorsed the Holocaust – represents the dangerous doublethink so eloquently illustrated in the totalitarian dystopia of Orwell’s novel and seems, at the very least, inconsistent with the moral parameters of the prize which bears his name.
Elder of Ziyon again has a great scoop – another “Palestine Paper” the Guardian chose to bury.
This document demonstrates that, in 2008, the PLO wrote a paper describing the legal rights of Jews to lands that they owned prior to 1948 in Judea and Samaria (land confiscated by the Jordanians when they took control of the territories after 1948 war).
Here’s one paragraph:
“Jews who owned land have the right to have their land restored to them or to be compensated, if restitution is not materially possible. Jews are entitled to compensation for other material and non-material losses, including lost profits, lost income, etc. caused by their displacement and dispossession.”
As we reported during the “Palestine Papers” expose, the Guardian didn’t so much as mention compensation for such refugees, and, indeed, in a piece prior to the “Palestine Papers”, Rachel Shabi completely dismissed the broader issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands – characterizing the issue as relatively unimportant, and Israeli efforts to highlight the plight of such Jews, during the course of negotiations, as insincere or cynical.
As Elder noted, the Palestinians likely wrote the above passages to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy in the context of their own demands regarding the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Apparently, such moral consistency (concerns about the appearance of employing double standards) is not something the Guardian spends too much time worrying about.
Amos Harel’s column in CiF today, “What will become of Israel if Mubarak falls?” laid out the concerns Israel has concerning the possibility that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak may be replaced by a leader from the Muslim Brotherhood, or Brotherhood affiliated group – and the potential ramifications for the 30-year-old Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
However, the sober and non-tendentious analysis by Harel, a correspondent for the left-wing Israeli paper, Ha’aretz, still managed to elicit a flurry of anti-Israel vitriol beneath the line.
It’s quite telling that, even when Israel expresses the desire to maintain peaceful relations with its neighbors, it’s still vilified by Guardian readers – many whom seem prepared to demonize the Jewish state no matter how unrelated their hyperbole is to the commentary their supposedly responding to.
While the words and themes may differ, all such commentary is usually united by a one core narrative: That Israel is a uniquely oppressive (even evil) state that has no moral legitimacy – and should be seen as an ogre among the community of nations.
Only four hours after the article appeared, here’s what we have:
Israel is a belligerent state, and the U.S. is merely Israel’s puppet: (See Israelinurse’s post on a CiF piece by John Whitbeck, who described the U.S. as “slavishly subservient” to Israel.)
Israel has no moral right to exist:
Israel is an apartheid state which should be boycotted. Israeli fears of the Muslim Brotherhood, or other radical Islamist movements are actually a sign of Israeli racism. (See our post on Rachel Shabi’s CiF piece making a similar claim.)
The commentary by the Ha’aretz correspondent represents nothing but Mossad propaganda.
Israel is a criminal state.
Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman is actually an Israeli agent.
Israel is a cruel, inhumane, oppressive state, which betrays the memory of Holocaust victims – and indeed inflicts suffering on others that is reminiscent of the suffering inflicted against Jews through history.
Rachel Shabi’s animosity towards Israel seems to have no boundaries, and is not governed by even the most rudimentary sense of journalistic fairness, or decency. I’m overstating the case, you say. Hardly.
Shabi’s latest smear job, “Israel’s government raises alarm at events in Egypt”, begins thusly:
As pro-democracy demonstrations continue in Egypt, Israel‘s reaction has been of rising panic…”The Israeli government is freaking out,” said Dr Shmuel Bachar, at the Israel Institute for Policy and Strategy. “For the past 30 years we have depended on Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.”
Of course the word “panic” to characterize Israel’s concerns over the fate of their 30 year peace treaty with Egypt is nothing but hyperbole, and is also completely at odds with the sober and measured way the Jewish state has responded to much worse threats over the years (which included several Arab invasions).
Shabi continues:
Israel has been troubled by sight of masses of Egyptian people on the streets calling for democratic rights, freedoms and the ousting of Hosni Mubarak…in a poll published by mass-circulation daily Yediot Ahronot, 65% of Israelis think Mubarak’s removal from office would be a bad thing for Israel.
This passage is something approaching rhetorical malpractice. First, it implies, bizarrely, that Israel – the only real liberal democracy in the Middle East – is somehow hostile to democratic rights and individual freedoms. Then, it misleadingly cites a poll demonstrating Israeli concern over the upheavals in Egypt - and the potential that the crisis could lead to a government even more hostile to Israel – as evidence of the nation’s contempt for Egyptian democratic aspirations.
But, it gets worse:
Of primary concern are fears that the Muslim Brotherhood, perceived as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, could take control and reverse relations with Israel. [emphasis mine]
This passage is where Shabi’s piece pivots from being awful to outright dishonest.
Framing the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement which is merely “perceived as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic” represents a classic trope of the anti-Israel hard left – employing rhetoric that intentionally obfuscates the well-documented and simply undeniable facts about Islamist groups’ clear rejection of Israel’s right to exist within any borders.
Harriett Sherwood’s recent blog post, “Israel’s disobedient women“, about Israeli women who illegally bring Palestinians across the border was consistent with a broader Guardian narrative which often portrays Israelis who violate the law in a sympathetic light – at times portraying citizens who commit acts of treason as victims, and even heroic (here and here).
Sherwood clearly saw an angle to tackle the story – also covered by Rachel Shabi – which is an increasingly common theme on the hard left – one which posits that democratic Israel is moving towards right-wing extremism.
Commenting on the fact that the women she spoke to were merely questioned by police, Sherwood says:
“Some see this as part of a bigger picture of intolerance and harassment of groups and individuals supporting co-existence, civil and human rights, and opposing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”
Of course, the argument that merely questioning women engaged in illegal activities represents a broader trend of measures to harass citizens who support co-existence is simply absurd.
Guardian columnists like Sherwood, Shabi, and Mya Guarnieri suffer from an especially egregious case of confirmation bias – and much of their work seems to seek out stories, no matter how thin, which can serve to reinforce the narrative about Israel which their readers have come to expect.
Not surprisingly, Guardian moderators are not pleased when such assumptions are challenged. Of note was this comment, which asked that Sherwood at least attempt to balance her reporting:
And, then:
Well, the great thing about reading comments below the line is that we sometimes see the valiant efforts of those who persevere, in spite of the rhetorical pit they are in, and often come up with quite effective rhetoric, and pithy rebuttals, in response to the hostile inquisitors who surround them.
As such, I’m now inaugurating this post as the start of what will no doubt be a long series of posts refuting Sherwood’s blog posts, hereby named: Harriet Sherwood’s Jaundiced View of Jerusalem.
It has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? Something the no-doubt highly educated Sherwood may term, a Je ne sais quoi.
This is cross posted by David Matas, and was originally published on the website of the group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries. It is a response to Rachel Shabi’s article: ‘The problem with Israel’s Jewish ‘refugee’ initiative‘ in the December 16th edition of the Guardian. (See our post on Shabi’s piece, here.)
Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries should, it seems, be an uncontroversial position. Who, after all, favours injustice?
Yet, Rachel Shabi in an opinion piece in the Guardian on December 16th, 2010 under the title “The problem with Israel’s Jewish ‘refugee’ initiative” labelled the call for justice as “cheap political point-scoring.” That is an odd response to a call for justice. Shabi does not claim that there was no injustice, no history of mistreatment of Jews from Arab countries. She acknowledges that Jewish properties and possessions in Arab countries were impounded, that Arab governments sacrificed Jewish communities for short term political expediency.
Shabi does not claim that the call for justice arose recently. She dates it from the 1970s, though, in fact, it existed long before that. Shabi questions the sincerity of those who call for justice, Israeli deputy foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), arguing that neither is “genuinely concerned” with justice for Jews form Arab countries because they have not proposed “setting up heritage centres to commemorate Jewish life in Arab lands”. Yet, JJAC has proposed exactly that for many years. For instance, in November 2004, JJAC issued a statement calling for “Building a Museum to preserve and portray the vibrant, 2,300 year heritage and history of the Jewish Community of Libya”.
Shabi also charges the advocates with insincerity because of their attempt “to corral the subject into the frame of Palestinian refugee claims”. Yet, equality is an element of justice. When there are two victims, both similarly victimized, then both should receive justice. When one does and the other does not, the victim without redress is doubly victimized, the first time by the original injustice, the second time by the inequality of treatment.
Shabi argues that there is a difference between Palestinian and Jewish refugees because some Jewish refugees do not like being called refugees but rather would prefer to be described as being “uprooted” from Arab lands. This argument is terminological flim flam. Moreover, it ignores the history of Palestinian refugees. For decades, Palestinians rejected the refugee label. The PLO objected as late as 1974, to the component of the 1967 UN Resolution 242 which calls for “a just settlement of the refugee problem” not because it recognizes, by implication, that Jews from Arab countries were also refugees, but rather because, so the PLO said it “deals with their (the PLO’S) cause as a refugee problem”. Palestinian refugee rights did not arise for the first time when Palestinians, relatively late in their history, embraced the refugee label. Nor do Jewish refugee rights cease to exist for those Jewish refugees who reject the refugee label. Human rights are inalienable.
Our post on Dec. 31 noted that Guardian columnist Rachel Shabi (an outspoken critic of Israel) is Facebook friends with a notorious anti-Semite (and Wikileak celebrity) by the name of Israel Shamir.
To recap our previous post, Shamir is an outspoken Holocaust denier, who has referred to Jews as “virus in human form,” and has claimed quite explicitly that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world.
Well, it turns out that Shabi’s Facebook friendship with Shamir is no fluke. We’ve learned, from a highly reliable source, that Shabi is also FB friends with the Hamas and Hezbollah-loving former MP, George Galloway.
But, that’s not all.
Shabi’s FB friend list also includes CiF columnist, and apologist for anti-Semitism, Ben White, and Moazzem Begg, the British Muslim (former inmate at Guantanamo and Amnesty International poster boy) who acknowledged attending al-Qaeda training camps and is a supporter of the Taliban.
Think about this. A Guardian columnist who writes about Israel is friends with virulent anti-Semites, an outspoken supporter of radical Islamist movements, and even one known former al Qaeda member.
Knowledge of the company Shabi keeps certainly places her gratuitous criticism of Israel in much better perspective.
Shabi’s comments in her Guardian piece on Jan. 23, 2009, The self-defence defence, speak volumes about the disdain she has for the nation the Guardian deems her fit to objectively cover:
“Most Israelis, in other words, seem to have convinced themselves that their own moral superiority somehow sanctions and justifies their own acts of moral repugnance.”
Yes, “morally repugnant” is certainly one term that comes to mind when meditating upon the views, and friendships, of Rachel Shabi.
H/T Harry’s Place
Guardian contributor Rachel Shabi, frequent and vociferous critic of the Jewish state (See CW posts here, here and here) also just happens to be Facebook friends with notorious anti-Semite, Israel Shamir. (Shamir, its worth noting, is also FB friends with Norman Finkelstein, Lauren Booth, Philip Weiss, and Ken O’Keefe.)
Just to be clear about what a prolific anti-Semite Shamir is, here are a few highlights.
- He’s said: “It’s every Muslim and Christian’s duty to deny the Holocaust.”
- He’s described Jews as “virus in human form.”
- He’s endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
- He’s Stated: Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; The world is. Palestine is just the place for the world state headquarters.”
It kind of puts everything she’s written about Israel in perspective doesn’t it?
A guest post by AKUS in Washington and Harried Sherbet in Finchley Park
Britain is offering imams who are victims of Islamophobic arrests on the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) asylum in Finchley Park. “We are shocked by the lack of good Samaritans in Samaria willing to take in these victims of religious persecution”, said Prime Minister, David Cameron. “We have a huge mosque in Finchley Park where they can preach their hateful messages under protection of British law”. To applause, he added: “If Israel won’t take them, we will”.
Independent Jabbering Jewish Voices (IJJV) has offered to buy properties to house the Imams in Hampstead and Golders Green. “Living among your Jewish neighbors in those suburbs will make you feel as if you are back on the West Bank”, said their spokesman, Tony Blurman. IJJV has asked the British Government to propose a law that would prevent Jews from building apartments in Golders Green and Hampstead, a move enthusiastically supported by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has made it one of his top priorities for 2011.
Prince Charles has offered asylum on one of his estates. “After talking to some of my trees I have decided to convert to Islam next year. My mother has agreed with Mr. and Mrs. Booth that after Haj I will marry the bint Booth as my second wife”, he said. “I have an empty chapel which we can convert to a mosque, and need an Imam to perform the ceremony.” The British press, led by the Guardian, has applauded Charles’ decision to further the rapprochement with the world of Islam and the bint Booth’s willingness to help in any way she can. Her only condition is that Camilla also wear the niqab. While many in Britain have approved of this request following recent pictures of her in riot-torn London, Camilla was not available for comment. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams noted approvingly: “Hats off to royal Charles and commoner Lauren. Their wedding will be a nail in the coffin of an obnoxious Church”.
Britain’s offer of asylum was greeted with fury by the Palestinian Authority at a recent press conference held at Monaco’s Casino Royale. “This is nothing short of a second nakba”, said Saeb Erekat. “Just like in 1948, outsiders are colluding with the Zionists to encourage Palestinians to leave their ancestral home land”. Mohammed Abbas chimed in: “If these people become refugees in Britain, we demand that they receive aid from the international community onto the hundredth generation. We insist that Britain set up a new aid organization, BUIMWRAPS (British Useful Idiots’ Muslim Refugee Association (Permanent Status), to be funded by those responsible for this”.
At this point, the conference erupted into a brawl as Mahmoud Habbash, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of religious affairs, wrestled the microphone from Erekat’s hand. Unaware that it was still live, he was heard shouting: “H’mar (donkey) –we are ones arresting them, not the Zionists!! How will we pay for this when you lost all our money at roulette?” Not one to be dismissed lightly, Erekat was heard to mix his metaphors as he hissed: “You are a Zionist stool pigeon like those Mossad sharks in Egypt! We always blame the Jews!! We are the victims!!”
The following is a guest post by Bataween of Point of No Return
Rachel Shabi must be one worried woman. She is troubled because the Israeli government, led by deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, has lately been putting the issue of Jews driven out of Arab countries on the peace talks agenda.
Turning up the volume on Jewish refugees has shaken avowed anti-Zionists like Ms Shabi out of their comfort zone: a second set of refugees, they fear, has popped up to challenge the Palestinians’ hitherto exclusive monopoly on victimhood. Except that these Jewish refugees have not suddenly popped up. They and their descendants comprise 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. They have been in the background all along, these silent, reproachful reminders of a great and unacknowledged historical injustice. Just because the Arab world has chosen to deny or falsify their narrative, the media have chosen to ignore them, and successive Israeli governments have made the monumental mistake of not making a public issue of them – does not mean that these Jews do not deserve recognition and redress.
Even as Saeb Erekat insists that there will be no peace without justice for Palestinian refugees, so can there be no meaningful peace without recognition for the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab countries. In fact, addressing the suffering of both sets of refugees is more likely to lead to a lasting peace.
In truth, Jewish refugees, even if not explicitly stated as such, have been on the international agenda from the word go. UN GA 194, UN SC Resolution 242, international and bilateral agreements all address a just settlement of the ‘refugee problem,’ without specifying whether the refugees are Jewish or Arab.
Mya Guarnieri’s recent article on CiF prompted me, not for the first time, to ask myself just what makes her ( and others like her who sometimes grace the pages of CiF) qualified to analyse events in Israel according to ‘Guardian think’. A Master of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University is no doubt a worthy achievement in itself, but it hardly seems to be the natural qualification of choice to be demanded from a person engaging in analysis of one of the more politically and historically complicated regions of the world.
Like Seth Freedman with his background in the London stock market and Rachel Shabi with her degree in politics and literature, Guarnieri’s major qualification as far as the Guardian is concerned appears to be that she relatively recently relocated to Tel Aviv-Yaffo. But that in itself is obviously not enough to secure a column on CiF – otherwise we would have several hundred newish residents of Israel’s second city furiously scribbling away on behalf of the Guardian. The point seems to be that the English-speaking new immigrant should be able to combine a familiar Anglo-centric view of Israel which the Guardian reader will not find remotely challenging, together with the moral justification of being a Jewish Israeli in order to deflect criticism of anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic bias.
And thus the reports the reader is served by writers such as Guarnieri, Shabi and Freedman are like choosing a kosher McDonald’s hamburger in a region rich with unfamiliar, exotic food. It may be kosher, but it’s still a hamburger; it has no connection to the deep-rooted traditions and culture of the region. It doesn’t reflect anything of the environment in which it is served – instead it keeps the consumer safely within the confines of known and comfortable reference points. It is neither challenging nor outlook-broadening. It demands nothing of the reader other than to file yet another already anticipated experience in the memory file labelled ‘Israel’.
Like all fast-food, this junk journalism can become addictive, both to the consumer and the producer. A perusal of Guarnieri’s blog shows that since its establishment in April 2008, she has been churning out the same old stuff again and again for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Ma’an and, of course, CiF. She also contributes to sites which explicitly call for the end of the Jewish state such as Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada. Her promotion of the one-state ‘solution’ and her recurrent theme of Israel as an ever-more totalitarian and fascist state no doubt go down well with the audiences at those outlets, but that doesn’t make her material any more representative of what really goes on in the country which for some reason she has chosen to live than a McDonald’s hamburger eaten between the cramped and bustling market stalls of shouk Hacarmel.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Jews & the charge of ‘Dual Loyalty’: CiF’s Rachel Shabi excuses a classic antisemitic canard
February 18, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Dual Loyalty, Guardian, Rachel Shabi | by Adam Levick | 28 comments
Rachel Shabi
Rachel Shabi is a journalist who writes for ‘Comment is Free’ and Al Jazeera whose contempt for the Jewish state, and seeming indifference to antisemitism, is consistently demonstrated.
Shabi has blamed Zionism for the ethnic cleansing of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands; characterizing their plight as being caused ”either by agitating Zionist emissaries, or by the shockwaves that Zionism sent through the Middle East.” [emphasis added]
She has accused those who raise the issue of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands of engaging in cynical “political point-scoring”, and has even mocked the notion of historic Arab antisemitism.
She also dismissed Israeli concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – writing that the MB was merely “perceived as…anti-Semitic - characterizing the Jewish state’s fear of the Islamist group’s rise (a movement whose spiritual leader literally called for Allah to murder every last Jew on earth) as evidence of Israeli racism!
In addition, while Shabi has carved out a successful journalistic niche as a Jewish critic of Israel I have found nothing Shabi has written on the subject of antisemitism, and absolutely no indication that she is at all burdened by the malign Jewish obsession which is normative in the Arab world – all of which provides relevant context to her latest essay at ‘Comment is Free’, “False accusations of antisemitism desensitize us to the real thing“, Feb. 17.
Shabi, in arguing that “rightwing pro-Israelis [have] sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country”, argues:
Briefly, the controversy Shabi is referring to arose when it was discovered that Zaid Jilani, who blogged for a Center for American Progress (CAP) website, ThinkProgress, used Twitter to call US supporters of the Jewish state “Israel Firsters” – evoking the antisemitic narrative that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.
As several progressive commentators observed following the row, “liberal” voices who defend this dual loyalty canard are evidently unaware of or unburdened by the fact that the idea that diaspora Jews are insufficiently loyal to the country where they reside has a decidedly reactionary pedigree.
The charge of dual loyalty was central in the Dreyfus Affair through the Nazi’s rise to power – and, indeed, this notion in large measure underlay the failure of European emancipation. In the 1920s American industrialist Henry Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Problem where it was asserted that disloyal American Jews were pushing the U.S. into WWII, though the war was not in the national interest.
While after WWII manifestations of this charge often remained on the fringes of American society, Paul Findley, a former Republican U.S. Congressman, wrote a book in 1985, They Dare to Speak Out, which became a best-seller. In it, Findley maintained that American Jews utilized “tactics which stifle dissent in their own communities and throughout America” to benefit not their own country but, rather, Israel.
Paleoconservative commentators, not surprisingly, have similarly championed this narrative. Pat Buchanan wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran”, and has previously written that Jews “harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.”
As liberal columnist Spencer Ackerman noted on the term “Israel-firster”:
As David Bernstein observed upon researching the term:
Rachel Shabi, a “progressive” commentator writing for a publication which fancies itself the “worlds leading liberal voice”, not only doesn’t recoil from such a malign narrative, questioning the loyalty of Jews but, rather, is outraged that those who engage in such Judeophobic tropes (popularized on the far-right) are being “smeared” as antisemites.
As A. Jay Adler concluded in a recent CiF Watch cross post about those, like Shabi, who would defend or excuse such a slur on Jewish Americans”.
To this I’d add one more caveat.
Activists like Shabi, like so many others at ‘Comments is Free’, seem to believe that self-proclaimed “progressives” are ipso facto free of prejudice, and so should be granted a kind of impunity from accusations of racism even when trading in the most classic Judeophobic stereotypes.
Such supreme moral hubris continues to inform so much of the the commentary about Israel and Jews by Guardian reporters, contributors and their “progressive” fellow travelers.
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