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This is cross posted from Richard Millett’s Blog
Last wednesday I went to hear two pro-Hamas supporters give a talk to a group of revolutionary communists at a London pub. The subject of the talk was “Ten years of Intifada – What Future for Palestine?”.
I cleared it with the pub manager beforehand so I wasn’t barred as happened to me when I tried to attend a Middle East Monitor meeting at the House of Commons in July.
Seems our pubs are more democratic than Parliament.
When I entered the room the front table was adorned with a “Victory to the Intifada” banner and the banner next to me read “Boycott Marks and Spencer”.
The chairperson opened the meeting by telling us how M&S was closely entwined with the growing of the Zionist project and how past M&S directors had made many racist statements.
The two speakers, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a Palestinian surgeon, and Manal Masalha, a Palestinian activist and PhD student, spent the next hour basically telling us how Fatah/PLO had sold out to the racist imperialists and Zionists.
Fatah had, apparently, now conspired in the Zionist project via the Oslo peace accords and will eventually either agree future landswaps with Israel so that Israeli Palestinians will be transferred to a new Palestinian state or there will be an outright ethnic cleansing of Israeli Palestinians.
What was needed was a national liberation movement and although Hamas was far from perfect (Abu-Sitta acknowledged that Hamas demolishes Palestinian houses which don’t have permits) it was the only organisation capable of doing what was necessary to free the Palestinian people.
We were told that during the Oslo peace process the Palestinians were offered only 42% of the West Bank and 60% of Gaza and that Israeli Palestinians live in Israel under laws reminiscent of the Nazis
During the Q&A a Sri Lankan man asked whether Hamas should be either more democratic in its behaviour or step aside. He compared Hamas to the Tamil Tigers who, he felt, had caused chaos in Sri Lanka and that Sri Lanka was now benefitting from their demise.
Abu-Sitta disagreed and told us just how democratic Hamas is and how it had gone along with the Oslo Accords until Fatah had finally sold out the Palestinian cause.
I didn’t want to complicate issues by mentioning Hamas suicide bombers walking into Israeli restaurants to blow up families who were at lunch.
I kept it simple and asked:
“If the Palestinians were offered 100% of the West Bank and Gaza for a Palestinian state and the Israeli Palestinians living in Israel could stay put, wasn’t peace better achieved that way than continuing the Palestinian struggle?”
This is cross posted at Richard Millett’s Blog
Matthew Gould: Britain's new Ambassador to Israel
Middle East Monitor (MEMO) is one of those nasty anti-Israel think-tanks which aims to win the ear of the political establishment.
It describes itself as “an independent media research institution founded in the United Kingdom to foster a fair and accurate coverage in the Western media of Middle Eastern issues and in particular the Palestine Question.”
Fair and accurate? Pull the other one.
They won’t even let you into one of their meetings if they disagree with your views.
Now MEMO asks: Is Britain’s new ambassador to Israel really going to be objective?
The question under discussion is:
“Can a Jewish ambassador to Israel ever be truly objective when advising his home government on relations with the Jewish state? That is going to be the big question for Britain’s new ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, who has just taken up residence in Tel Aviv.“
This is not the first time the someone’s Jewish background has been held against them recently in the media. When respected historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman were appointed to the panel of the Chilcot Enquiry to investigate the Iraq War Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, wrote in The Independent:
“Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but The Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind. All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.”
Should being Jewish really disqualify them from all aspects of political life involving Middle Eastern matters?
And yet I wish I had a pound for the amount of times that someone’s Jewish background has been utilised to make a political point when it is to Israel’s detriment.
This essay, by Jonathan Rynhold, appeared recently in the MERIA Journal (Middle East Review of International Affairs). MERIA is published by The GLORIA Center (Global Research in International Affairs).
The campaign for an academic boycott of Israel is symptomatic of a wider campaign by the extreme Left to delegitimize the State of Israel. Although the extreme Left is a marginal political force in the UK, the boycott campaign gained significant purchase in the much larger moderate Left by blurring its ideological foundations. While the moderate Left is also hostile to Israel, it is possible to counter the boycott campaign successfully by framing Israel’s case in broadly liberal terms that appeal to the moderate-Left and center-Right, while exposing the ideological gulf between moderates and the extreme Left.
What does the academic boycott of Israel by trade unions representing British academics tell about British attitudes to Israel and the Middle East? Many Israelis and American Jews tend to view it as classical antisemitism. Sometimes they generalize, assuming that this was a reflection of a general disposition in Britain toward antisemitism. Others tend to dismiss the boycott campaign as the ranting of a small and insignificant minority; while the boycott campaigners and their sympathizers tried to present their actions as legitimate criticism of Israel. However, these are all misperceptions.
The boycott campaign was driven by a small cadre of extreme Left anti-Zionist activists. While not driven by classical antisemitism or hostility to Jews per se, their approach often gave expression to the New Antisemitism, which discriminates against, and demonizes, the Jewish State: Israel, and by extension Jews politically supportive of Israel.
Although their underlying ideology lacks significant appeal in the UK, they were able to leverage their power by gaining control over the policy of trade unions with hundreds of thousands of members. Outside the trade union movement, they gained a significant amount of sympathy on the moderate Left and have contributed to shifting the boundaries of legitimate debate in the UK regarding Israel and the Middle East. While the movement has not succeeded in sustaining an academic boycott of Israel, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as politically irrelevant.
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The Guardian’s Linda Grant and fashionable anti-Semitism in the UK
March 2, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Christian Dior S.A., Comment is Free, Guardian, John Galliano, Linda Grant, UK | by Israelinurse | 68 comments
To those who do not live in the United Kingdom (and to some who do) the reasons for the amply documented rise in antisemitism there can be something of an enigma. Why should a developed, first-world country in one of the most affluent regions of the world succumb to such an archaic prejudice? The hypotheses are many and varied, but it is my belief that one cannot analyse the phenomenon without an appreciation of the changes which have occurred in the sociological and anthropological structure of modern British society over the past three or four decades.
March 1st saw the publication on CiF of an article by Linda Grant in which she ‘contextualises’ the recent well-publicised antisemitic rant by fashion designer John Galliano. The class structure has, of course, always played an important role in shaping and defining British society and whilst there has undoubtedly been some fluidity within that structure in recent years, the basic framework still remains a decisive factor. In Grant’s article we see a classic example of the upper middle classes defending their own.
In the middle class milieu which is the stomping ground of holders of the Guardian World View, antisemitism is akin to head lice. Nobody wants to admit that it exists in their social circle – it is something which probably infects the lower classes, but not nice, educated and enlightened professionals. And so, the Guardian has wheeled out a Jewish author to absolve the ‘brilliant’ Galliano of a sin for which a council estate yob would not find forgiveness on its pages. Who can possibly question the Guardian’s verdict if a Jew declares that Galliano is probably not really an antisemite?
Grant offers up a plethora of extenuating circumstances for Galliano’s behaviour: He was drunk, he’s a genius, he is undergoing some sort of mental breakdown attributed to stress, he has made a career out of breaking taboos, and the industry pushed him into being extreme. And now he is even unemployed, having been sacked by those rich Jews upon whom his livelihood depended. In other words, Grant (and the Guardian) is prepared to believe that Galliano is everything except that which the evidence he himself provided (on more than one occasion) would indicate.
And so Galliano joins an ever-expanding gallery of figures of varying degrees of prominence within certain sections of British society whose antisemitic outbursts are contextualised, excused and overlooked. The closing – of –ranks protection of Foreign Office officials, media types, peers, artists, politicians and, now, fashion designers has its limits, however. Such protection is not afforded to those who break ‘taboos’ of other kinds. Racist or bigoted rants of other definitions are not treated with kid gloves. It is not considered excusable by ‘genius’ or ‘daring’ to break other social prohibitions such as child abuse or gay bashing.
In addition, were Galliano not some over-paid purveyor of useless artistic eccentricity (what can possibly be more vacuous than un-wearable clothes?) functioning within a bubble sustained by the classes who aspire to display their affluence, social class and ‘success’ by means of ownership of the ‘right’ handbag, shoes, jewellery or car, nobody would be scratching around for mitigating circumstances by means of which to excuse his behaviour. A working class council-house inhabiting, supermarket shelf-stacker who abused a shopper with a rant about how he loved Hitler or sprayed graffiti on the walls of a railway station indicating approval for the gassing of Jews would not merit protection or understanding from either Linda Grant or the Guardian. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In my personal experience – and I write this ‘as a Brit’ – middle class antisemitism in the UK is, to say the least, no less prevalent than its rawer working class version. Indeed it is possibly even more pernicious because not only does it often infect policy makers, educators and opinion shapers, it is too frequently either ‘contextualised’ as ‘anti-Zionism’ or just denied . At least the Combat 18 supporting, swastika – painting mobs I encountered on the streets of England were honest about their racist prejudices.
So isn’t it time for people such as Linda Grant to confront their inner fashion victim, nurtured by middle class snobbery functioning within a ridiculous celebrity-obsessed culture, which results in the double standards and inexcusable leniency displayed all too often towards those of ‘their own’ who engage in antisemitism? Isn’t it time for them to acknowledge that they are not morally superior to the average BNP voter just because they belong to a different class, own expensive handbags or attend fashionable social gatherings and that their whitewashing of antisemitism is contributing to the worrying resurgence of a phenomenon which is much more than just a ‘taboo’ occasionally transgressed by the daring, the drunk, the stressed or the genius?
Antisemitism, like any other form of racism or bigotry, is an ugly and dangerous prejudice which has a detrimental effect on the lives of the people towards which it is directed. In the case of antisemitism, we should need little reminder of how quickly and pervasively it can infect an entire society and how tragic the results of that can be. For Linda Grant and the Guardian to be complicit in trying to disguise and downplay the extent to which antisemitism is present in all levels of British society today makes them part of the problem, not the solution.
After all, they wouldn’t be seen dead in their ‘progressive’ social circles defending anti-LGBT, anti-black or anti-Muslim bigotry, so why the attempted exoneration of Galliano’s obvious antisemitism?
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