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I have written previously about those who claim to be friends of Jews, for example Islamophobes, House Democrats and Republicans, talk show hosts, and Christian Evangelicals, but who (if you scratched them) would probably show a different color underneath their paint job. In Germany, as in the United States and even Israel, there is often quite a difference between having truly learned the lessons of the Holocaust and providing mere lip service. In Germany there are many who utter all the right words but — scratch the surface — and you discover a garden variety anti-Semite. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Philosemitism. The following is my translation of a recent analysis by a German Jewish blogger. It’s important to watch Europe because the degree of its anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is just a preview of what we can expect to be seeing here shortly. And the discussion of Philosemitism is one we should be having as pro-Israel organizations increasingly are sleeping with people who are anything but the friend of Jews.

How do you discredit a woman and turn her into a “controversial” scholar? Another example of how anti-Semitism works.

Tamar Amar-Dahl is a historian who emigrated from Israel. Like many young Left or liberal Israelis, she left Israel and, in 2006 in protest against the Lebanon War, surrendered her passport in exchange for German citizenship. Now Tamar Amar-Dahl has found herself in the crosshairs of Anti-Semitism researcher Clemens Hani.

You have to wonder what motivates Henri’s attack on Amar-Dahl. Is it envy from an unsuccessful political scientist whose best effort is the occasional article in Ha’galil, and who couldn’t manage to get a teaching position as Amar-Dahl did last year at Humboldt-University in Berlin? What leads Clemens Heni, the “Aryan with the oversized nose for anti-Semites” (Posener) to fling dirt at a young political scientist? Is it “only” political differences? Or is it possibly animosity toward people of Jewish ancestry who just don’t fit into Clemens Hani’s preconceived notions of how to be Jewish?

In a pamphlet published a few days ago attacking Amar-Dahl, Heni writes:

“Dr. Tamar Amar-Dahl received her doctorate in 2008 in Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University for work on Shimon Peres. She is a highly controversial political scientist and activist.”

Why Amar-Dahl is “highly controversial” remains Heni’s little secret. In reality he’s less interested in performing after-the-fact “quality control” on political science than in cobbling together conspiracy theories of “anti-Zionist machinations” at German universities, in which he takes on any political scientist who had anything remotely to do with Amar-Dahl — beginning with Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, the director of the Institute for History of German Jews in Hamburg, who had the temerity to invite Amar-Dahl to a lecture; to the director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Prof. Dr. Horst Möller, who together with Prof. Dr. Moshe Zuckermann from Tel Aviv, had supervised Amar-Dahl’s dissertation; to Prof. Dr. Christina von Braun, the director of the newly-established College of Jewish Studies in Berlin, where Amar-Dahl recently accepted a teaching position.

Yes, our relentless little denunciator, Clemens Heni, didn’t even stop with Hans Mommsen, who has praised Amar-Dahl’s work. Don’t forget: Mommsen is without a doubt one of the most internationally well-respected historians of National Socialism and the Holocaust, but Heni nevertheless paints him as “no expert on anti-Semitism.” Apparently those in Heni’s circle still hold a grudge against Mommsen for refuting the Goldhagen hypothesis in 1996 and in so doing discrediting Heni’s great role-model in all things relating to anti-Semitism research.

And so, with his big detector he sniffs at any fart in order to breathe it in, eyes wide open. Even Amar-Dahl’s former supervisor, Prof. Dr. Michael Brenner, was quoted, and Heni apparently phoned around looking for new critics in Munich. In the end he reveals to an incredulous public that Amar-Dahl was not all that serious because she based her work on the theories of Edward Said and even published them in a periodical which reprinted materials from the “anti-Israel agitator” Noam Chomsky. A collection of “facts” that basically just makes you shrug and which ultimately says less about Tamar Amar-Dahl than it does about Clemens Heni. Because the only one who seems to be shocked and stunned is the great sniffer himself.

A bewildered Heni asks:

“Didn’t the faculty of the Institute for the History of German Jewry know who Tamar Amar-Dahl is, how unscientific (sic!) she works, and what she represents?

[…]

Why is Humboldt University funding an anti-Israeli academic?”

Not even Heni is stupid enough to accuse Amar-Dahl of “secondary anti-Semitism” for her remark at an FES [Friedrich Ebert Foundation] conference, where she said:

“I’m shocked that, once again, the subject of the Holocaust and the Jews is — as they say — being replayed and regurgitated here. Sometimes I feel it’s just way too much.”

A quote taken completely out of context — but quite a find for “sensible anti-Semitism researchers,” as Clemens Heni is: is someone who would now accuse the daughter of Moroccan Jews of being an anti-Semite because she — especially as a Sephardi Jew — apparently was not personally as affected by the destruction of European Jewry as the Ashkenazim who survived. In whose personal lives persecution and destruction do not happen to play a more significant role. Almost every family lost relatives or friends — in contrast to most Sephardim or Mizrachim. Such different experiences, which form an individual and are passed along to his children as well as current acquaintances — all this leads Heni to hate the young political scientist.

A person of Jewish faith or ancestry has to match the Jew in Clemens Heni’s mind. And if he doesn’t, he’s bound to invoke the personal animosity of this “Philosemite.” This in a nutshell is the dangerous side of Philosemitism. Just as he has an exaggerated sense of everything Jewish as positive, he threatens to revert to raw hatred when individual Jews or people of Jewish ancestry simply don’t conform to the image he has fantasized.

I have to admit: for a long time I didn’t understand how this kind of Philosemitism really worked. I always thought that it expressed itself in extreme forms of classical anti-Semitism. That someone — even one claiming to be a “friend” of Israel and of Jews, could suddenly become disappointed in some imaginary, only in his own head, with a collective notion of “the Jews” — and then erupting into raw hatred. Precisely against a “collective” Jew whom he had once regarded as infallible. But the real — at least more typical — Philosemitism is even more insidious. It does not direct its type of anti-Semitism at the collective itself; rather, it selects a specific group: those who are in some way not “Jewish” enough, as Philosemites have defined it. He is disappointed in them and he directs his hostility at these “disrupters” of his own picture of Jewry. Precisely this, no difference, is how it works with Clemens Heni: a person of Jewish ancestry who commits the crime of not being “like a Jew should be” can be nothing other than an anti-Semite. Sure, what else can it be, Heni? Of course! But the worst thing is: there will always be more! More and more anti-Semitic Jews. Pretty soon you won’t be able to see Israel because of all the anti-Semites.

That’s why this type of Philosemitism is not the opposite of anti-Semitism, as one might be led to believe. Portraying it as simply the opposite, as positive racism, makes it seem harmless. Because if it is really the opposite of anti-Semitism, it can’t be all that dangerous: it doesn’t result in the destruction of an enemy. But it works another way. This specific form of anti-Semitism doesn’t target Jewry in its entirety, opposing “the” Jews. At least not directly. Philosemites like Heni reserve their worst attacks for those who disappoint them. For these they reserve the most awful portrayal they can think of — which for Philosemites with their moral categories is: to be an anti-Semite.

This is the real hatred of the Philosemites. The moment in which his understanding of Jews leads to disappointment, he targets — not collective Jewry — but “anti-Semitic Jews” whom he equates with them — as enemies whom ultimately he’d like to see wiped out. Admittedly: Heni has gone easier on Amar-Dahl than Alex Feuerherdt. Meanwhile, the latter insults Jews as openly as anti-Semites. But according to Heni it’s only a “secondary anti-Semitic response.” But they mean the same thing.

This is exactly why it’s often not enough to check one’s “facts” in the case of people like Tarach, Feuerherdt, or Heni. Because (historical) proof doesn’t even occur to them. Refute one of their assertions; they’ll just find a new one in order to legitimize their attacks. You can’t address such people with empirical data alone. We also have to expose their followers for what they are: just garden variety anti-Semites, cloaked in fleece as “friends of the Jewish people.”

The Forward listed Charles Jacobs as one of America’s Top 50 Jewish leaders in 2007. Apparently they were looking more at the range of his activism and less at what mischief he was actually up to.

Jacobs has been a founder of Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the American Anti-Slavery Group, and the David Project, a member of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has now created the oxymoronically named Americans for Peace and Tolerance. Jacobs has taken Abe Foxman to task for being too soft on Muslims.

Long before the Park51 project made news, Charles Jacobs spearheaded opposition to an Islamic Center in Roxbury and slammed governor Deval Patrick and Boston mayor Thomas Menino for supporting the project and meeting with Muslim community leaders. Despite widespread repudiation Jacobs continues to maintain that the Roxbury center is linked to global terror plots. He has also leveled personal attacks in the Jewish Advocate on fellow Jews who extended hands of friendship to the Muslim community, notably Rabbi Eric Gurvis. In June seventy Boston area rabbis signed a petition supporting Gurvis and denounced Jacobs’ smears.

In a FrontPage Mag interview Jacobs describes how he – and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – views Islam as nothing more than a rulebook for terrorists:

Two years ago I attended a three day conference in Jerusalem on Global Anti-Semitism sponsored by Israel ‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Senior leaders of American Jewry were present. We all heard how Islamic anti-Semitism – theologically based, was spread with Saudi funding to mosques and madrassas throughout the Islamic world, instructing tens if not hundreds of millions of people that Jews were the sons of monkeys and pigs and that to kill us is a holy deed.

Jacobs is a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace blog and to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag. His “Clash of Civiliations” worldview meshes with pro-Israel advocacy and neoconservatism.

In July of this year Jacobs participated in a panel discussion in Aspen, Colorado, entitled “Conscience and Conflict,” featuring fellow neocons John Bolton, Phillis Chesler and Caroline Glick, at which he bemoaned Europeans as “neopagans” and “socialists,” decried mosques as “victory markers,” and stated “there is no moderate Muslim doctrine.”

Recently Jacobs made a big stink over a visit of students from the Wellseley public schools to an area mosque as part of multicultural education. In an article entitled “Propaganda is not Education,” Jacobs wrote:

Those who care about “religious ignorance and conflict over belief systems” should care about the radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community and the unwitting embrace of radical Muslims by our political and civic leaders.

Not only are Jacobs’ enemies all of the world’s Muslims, the press, Europeans, the United Nations, non-governmental aid agencies, liberals, and academics – but now even political and civil leaders have let him down too.

This was published in Loonwatch on October 26, 2010
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/10/charles-jacobs-americans-for-hate-and-intolerance/

Dennis Prager is at war with leftists, secularists, labor unions, civil rights organizations, Big Government, academics, atheists, Europeans, internationalists, “moral relativists” – and Muslims. Nothing personal, it’s just his worldview – that and the fact that not one Muslim in the entire world is a moderate:

There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude?

Long before it was fashionable to burn Qu’rans, Prager, a Republican convert, began trash-talking them:

In 2006 he wrote that “America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on,” in taking great offense that the first Muslim elected to Congress had decided to take his oath of office on a Qu’ran and not on a Christian bible. The ADL noted the bigotry of Prager’s remarks and conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson pointed out the irony that “here we have a Jew pushing a Muslim to use the Christian Bible.”

In Moment Magazine, which features articles of contemporary Jewish interest, Prager awkwardly (and self-contradictorily) defended his views, even after it was pointed out that many politicians had sworn their oath of office on books other than the bible or on none at all:

America has no state religion, nor should it ever be allowed to have one. But it has always been a Judeo-Christian country. Jews – and America itself – will suffer if we cease to be one. Just ask the Jews of secular Europe how their secular societies treat them and Israel. For that matter, just think about how our secular universities have become anti-Israel hate centers.

On the one hand Prager says America should be secular. But on the other hand he says it should privilege Jews and Christians. This is vintage Prager – a new believer in Kulturkampf between Islam and the West.

Despite his own advanced case, Prager denies that Islamophobia actually exists. As the co-author of a book on anti-Semitism himself, Prager should know better, but he wrote:

The fact remains that the term islamophobia has one purpose – to suppress any criticism, legitimate or not, of Islam. And given the cowardice of the Western media, and the collusion of the left in banning any such criticism (while piling it on Christianity and Christians), it is working.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, however, Prager rejects identical arguments and in fact argues that Zionism is part of Judaism – so any criticism of Israel or Jewry amounts to the same thing:

Among the many lies that permeate the modern world, none is greater – or easier to refute – than the claim that Zionism is not an integral part of Judaism or the claim that anti-Zionism is unrelated to anti-Semitism.

Thus, anyone who challenges Zionism – for example, Palestinians who are in conflict with Israel or the legions of academics, NGOs, international organizations, or human rights groups, even many Jews – is by definition an anti-Semite.

The Middle East conflict? Bah! That’s just anti-Semitism he writes in a piece, “The Middle East conflict is hard to solve but easy to explain:”

Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as “Israeli occupation,” “Jewish settlements,” a “cycle of violence,” “the Zionist lobby” and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel’s enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians – in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders – as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated.

Thus Prager completely dismisses any geopolitical causes or trivial issues like land theft or ethnic cleansing. No, there is just one reason for all this hostility and it can only be Islam. And it’s clear that Prager is not just talking about a few fanatical winguts when he lumps all of the world’s Muslims into this denunciation, in an article entitled “The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats were:”

A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones. But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

But in fact, for Prager, who participated in one of David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events, “Islam is identical to”Islamofascism:

So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims – specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others – the term “Islamo-Fascism” is entirely appropriate.

Dennis Prager’s attitudes toward Muslims are echoed in his views on immigrants in America. A Tea Party supporter, Prager supports Arizona Law SB1070 and believes in American Exceptionalism or Judeo-Christian Dominionism. In this clip at a Tea Party event in Colorado, sitting next to Sarah Palin, Prager describes his revulsion for internationalism and European morality, praising something rather like an American version of Zionism. His a world view common to the Tea Party, Likudniks, and neoconservatives.

As for Islamophobia – it’s just one of Prager’s many hobbies – but integral to this worldview.

This was published in Loonwatch on November 23, 2010
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/11/dennis-prager-at-war-with-muslims/

[

YNet News reported today that the United States has backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for recognition by the Palestinians as a “Jewish state” — even though Israelis themselves heatedly dispute the meaning of the term.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley backed the new Israeli demand, saying, “I’m not making any news here. […] It is a state for the Jewish people. […] What Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday is, in essence a core demand of the Israeli government, which we support.”

In siding with Netanyahu, the US move puts Abbas in an impossible position, but it also ignores the fact that Israel is actually more religiously diverse than the United States.

Israel’s population of 7.64 million is 75% Jewish and 25% non-Jewish. The Jewish population may in fact be lower than the official numbers because of Eastern Europeans who are not halachically Jewish and Druze and Bedouin populations may be higher because some have never been counted. In comparison, the population of the United States is 86% Christian and 14% non-Christian, yet sensible Americans do not define the United States as a Christian state.

Of Israel’s 5.77 million Jews, 42% or 2.44 million are secular. The number of people in the Jewish state who actually want to preserve a Jewish ethnocracy could well be a minority. And yet the State Department feels compelled to butt into a discussion of the character of another state.

When Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat, there was no question he had a Jewish state in mind, although the monarchy he proposed governing a nation of transplanted Europeans, which had purchased (not stolen) the land of natives who then conveniently disappeared, bears almost no resemblance to Israel. But since the first Zionist congresses and even Ben Gurion’s time the nature of the “Jewish state” is something that has deliberately remained a bit vague. Zionism, as a nationalistic movement, promised to offer something for everyone [except of course the native people who did not go as willingly as Herzl had hoped], but the intractable tension between secular and religious Jews has existed since the founding of Israel.

On the one hand, seen from a purely Jewish perspective, the nature of Israel is a Zionist question which Israeli Jews (and perhaps friendly Diaspora Jews) have to dispute. But in this discussion Phillip Crowley and Hillary Clinton don’t get a vote.

On the other hand, seen from a democratic perspective, the nature of Israel as a country with substantial religious minorities is one the minorities should also have a vote on. Unfortunately, the 25% of the non-Jewish population is represented in only 9% of the Knesset and not at all in the governing coalition. And then their remaining democratic rights are to be scrutinized and be subject to loyalty oaths.

Not surprisingly, the Jewish and democratic perspectives do not align at all.

If the United States feels compelled to speak out for something, it should be human and civil rights for all of Israel’s citizens and the subjects of its half century occupation. It is disappointing that the State Department continually demonstrates contempt for the principles of freedom or justice — such as by not intervening on behalf of Abdallah Abu Rahmah or taking an interest in the American citizen killed in the Mavi Marmara flotilla attack. It is shocking and sickening that the Obama administration is backing the religious nature of a state jammed down the throats of its victims — something even inimical to our own constitution — and that this new Israeli precondition is actually a new obstacle to peace.

If anyone doubts the unsuitability of the United States as an “honest broker” in this conflict, this is just one more example.

There’s no pretty way to say it — Zionism is incompatible with American values. American Zionists do not — can not — really claim to respect Constitutional principles of separation of church and state, basic equality, or a democracy for all citizens. To be fair, fundamentalists of all stripes lack respect for these values, but American Jews are not typically fundamentalists.

Yet it is astounding to speak with normally liberal, tolerant fellow Jews — who fear creeping Christian fundamentalism or express contempt for shariah in places like Afghanistan — but who see nothing wrong with creeping Jewish shariah (pardon me, halakha) in Israel. Or who find nothing wrong with expressly making Palestinians second class citizens. Their argument is simple — there are many Arab countries but only one Israel; the Palestinians should simply go away so that a Jewish state can exist. What’s so wrong with that?

Of course such an argument makes as much sense as forcing Native Americans to go back to — where? Asia? — because America is now mainly a Caucasian nation. Yet the argument for Zionism voiced by many American Jews is essentially the same and it could quite easily be turned against us. For example, some future Evangelical Avigdor Lieberman (spawning in a Tea Party test tube somewhere as I write this) could simply declare the US a Christian nation. Legal, social, and professional rights would be restricted for non-Christians in this nightmare world. Jewish heretics who taught evolution would end up in the slammer. Jewish civil libertarians would be given the same treatment they were given in the early 1900’s when everyone suspected them of being anarchists; or given the same treatment that they got in the 1950’s when everyone suspected them of being communists. Most Jews are liberals precisely out of such fears — at least on one side of the brain.

But then there’s Israel. Many Jews regard Israel as an “insurance policy” against precisely the kind of Christian dystopia I just described. But this is where the two hemispheres of our brains do not seem to be connected. On the one hand, we have our fears. On the other, we are completely prepared to inflict the same violence and ill-treatment on Palestinians. In fact, it’s worse than that. We wouldn’t do it ourselves – after all, here in America we have friends everywhere in business, at university, in the community, who are Muslim. But Israel, as the ultimate insurance policy, must be allowed to do anything it likes as long as it exists to protect us from our most secret fears.

But there are many other aspects of Israel for American Jews. Israel is the land of the patriarchs, the landscape of the prophets and of countless Torah stories. Jewish fundamentalists believe it was literally given by God (although they would like to have David’s Kingdom, which includes Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and more real estate). For some Israel is a Jewish Disneyland where American Jews can go to live out a fantasy of returning to our roots — even though, as Helen Thomas pointed out, our roots might actually be in Germany, Poland, Russia, or Lithuania. As a secular Jew, it seems to me that the allure of making aliyah (emigrating to Israel) fulfils a mainly psychological function. American Jews from Brookline to Orange County are not in any kind of real danger, so let’s be honest — they are not moving to Israel to ensure Jewish survival. And let’s be a little more honest — when you move from country A to country B, you do love country B more.

While Jews have always revered the land of our ancestors and desired some kind of return to Israel — at least by the pious among us — Judaism managed to survive thousands of years without the Revisionist Zionism of today. During all these centuries, Jewishness was something preserved in cultural diversity, observance of the law, study of the Torah or — for the more secular — in Judaism’s ethics. Collectively the “Jewish people” — Klal Yisrael — meant many different things. But when the Jewish state came into existence, Zionism expropriated thousands of years of tradition and understanding and replaced “the Jewish people” with a state to which all Jews were able (if not obligated) to immigrate. And this state has not done a particularly good job of preserving the Jewish cultural diversity of the past; as in any society, there are winners and losers. In Israel the Ashkenazim now determine what Germans like to call the Leitkultur. Yet most American Jews now speak of their great love for this particular state, its centrality to their Jewish identity, and even the siddurim (prayer books) make references to the modern state — not just the biblical one — and offer prayers for it. In religious institutions, the preoccupation with the state of Israel has advanced nearly to the point of idolatry.

All these seem to be symptoms of some serious cognitive disorder. We just can’t help ourselves. Real estate has taken priority over values. We are no different from the Wahhabists. Jerusalem and Hebron are our Mecca and Medina. Our attachment to Judaism is now defined only by this new nation-state. Without Israel, our identities would be shattered, our faith incomplete, our hope for redemption lost. And don’t forget the Holocaust! We are a traumatized people! It is argued to the point of annoyance that Israel is necessary as a refuge to preserve Jewish existence. But even if it no longer serves an existential purpose, then it is a psychological homeland for people who can never return to Europe. Of course I am glad that so much positive mental health has been achieved, but I also care about the Palestinians.

I am sitting here on the eve of national elections a free man, permitted to vote, to write letters to the editor, to demonstrate, to live in a neighborhood with people of other ethnicities and religions, and I live under the same laws that apply to all citizens. My home cannot be summarily bulldozed with twenty-four hour notice. My neighborhood cannot be declared a military zone one day and then given to a Christian developer the next. Except for exceptional circumstances If I run afoul of the law I will be tried under transparent civilian laws, not by a military tribunal.

I am a free man and a free Jew not because of Israel but because of a bunch of privileged white male slave holders whose flawed but thoughtful and secular vision of democracy was nevertheless sound enough to endure and to improve upon for a couple of centuries. Meanwhile, the “Jewish state” we love so much exhibits an advanced case of the disease starting to afflict us here. In Israel non-Jews barely merit being treated as human, democracy is in shambles, and I am left to wonder whose perverted concept of Judaism managed to make Israel a nation which (for many Jews) has become a proxy for authentic Jewish values or practices.

You can’t be a Zionist and claim to revere American-style democracy too.

The current Middle East peace talks have played out much as they have in past years. The United States lavishes billions of dollars of military aid each year on Israel, ignores or defends its misuse of military power on civilians throughout the world, and still pretends to be an impartial peace broker. The Israeli Right calls for more settlements. The Palestinians, their unity fractured, call for an end to settlement activity. A few days ago a formal 10-month “freeze” on Israeli settlements ended — although in practice building never stopped in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The Palestinian side had warned that they would walk away from the peace talks if building resumed formally, but so far they have only appealed to the United States to exert whatever influence it can to stop the new construction.

The United States and its Israel Lobby advisors are now asking Israel for a two month extension of the November 2009 ten-month “freeze” in exchange for backing Israel’s annexation of the Jordan valley (goodbye 1967 borders!), offering future vetoes in the UN security council in behalf of Israel, additional aid beyond the $30 billion defense plan, this year’s $205 million Iron Dome gift (which has ballooned to $422 million), a $3 billion missile shield program called David’s Sling, and this year’s outright gift of $2.75 billion for F35 jets, another $1.5 billion in contracts for parts for those jets, and $2 billion in jet fuel. All this for two months of extending a freeze that actually never happened. Or could these bogus peace talks simply be an opportunity for the US to arm Israel to attack Iran? Obama’s willingness to abandon even approximate 1967 borders is something that neither Palestinians, members of the Arab League, Jordan, Syria, or Egypt are likely to accept.

To make matters worse, in this round of talks, Israel has introduced new preconditions which can only be interpreted as signs that, as a recent TIME magazine article reported, Israelis are not particularly interested in peace. Netanyahu now wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. While to some this may appear to be a perfectly reasonable request, it is not the same as recognizing Israel — to which both the Arab League and Hamas have agreed in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders. For the Palestinian Authority, however, it would sign away the civil rights of Israel’s 1.5 million Arab Israelis and claims to property in Israel by Palestinian refugees — which not even the Abbas government dares. Israel has also stated that it will not give up the Jordan Valley or return “consensus” settlements like Ariel or Ma’ale Adumim. And it just keeps building because there is nothing — and no one — to stop them. These are not the actions of a nation that wants peace.

For anyone who has bothered to look at a map of Israeli settlements and military zones in the West Bank, such as the one at peacenow.org/map.php, it is easy to see why the issue of settlements is central to peace talks. There is no longer enough land remaining after decades of Israeli land theft to cobble together a contiguous state. Palestinian writer Ali Abunimah advocates a bi-national state in his 2006 book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Former Israel defense minister Moshe Arens and current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have also promoted a bi-national state — an idea which 56% of West Bank Palestinians support. Mahmoud Abbas has hinted at it as an option. A few years ago, Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, wrote that “the question is no longer whether [Israel-Palestine] will be bi-national, but which model to choose.” It has come to this.

American favoritism, Israeli theft and intransigence, and Palestinian disunity have all led to the failure of a Two State solution. Perhaps it’s for the best, but a single state will plunge Israel and Palestine into several generations of a civil rights struggle we can’t even imagine. Besides the indigestible lumps of an already fractious Israeli society – twenty-two political parties, the ultra-Orthodox, the secularists, the settlers, the Russians, the non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, the Asian immigrants, the Ethiopians, the Mizrachim, the Ashkenazim, the existing Palestinians — the resulting national configuration will have a few million more new Palestinians — and there could still be the problem of Gaza. At some point — whether by politics or demographics — the Jewish nature of Israel will be questioned and — whether one, two or five decades from now — it will cease to be an ethnocracy which privileges only Jews.

The alternative, of course, is a Two State solution. But Israel and its domestic defenders will make sure that unchecked land theft makes that an impossibility.

All that remains is to pick a name for the new, eventual, bi-national state.

This was published in the Standard Times on October 4, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20101004/opinion/10040304

Today Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a well-respected Palestinian activist in Bil’in, was convicted of “incitement” and organizing illegal marches by an Israeli military court. For the crime of organizing non-violent protests Abu Rahma faces up to ten years in prison.

His conviction ended an eight month long trial, during which he was kept in prison.

I have written previously about this case — in which Abu Rahma was initially charged for possession of spent Israeli grenades and rubber bullets used on protestors – well, actually for making a peace sculpture (pictured here) out of them. I also wrote previously about the stupidity of maintaining a military presence so far out in the hinterlands solely to confront peaceful protestors.

But Israel’s goal is to crush all resistance, even peaceful protests. Imagine if Martin Luther King had been sentenced to ten years behind bars for his work. Yes, there are many Palestinians working with non-violent methods of protest and resistance.

Despite the charges, Abu Rahmah did not find himself behind bars because he presents any danger to society. On the contrary: Abu Rahmah, who is a teacher and part-time farmer, is probably Palestine’s most famous non-violent advocate — and apparently an all-too successful one.

As a member of the Popular Committee and its coordinator since it was formed in 2004, Abu Rahmah has represented the village of Bil’in around the world. In June 2009, he attended the village’s precedent-setting legal case in Montreal against two Canadian companies illegally building settlements on Bil’in’s land; in December of 2008, he participated in a speaking tour in France, and in December 2008, exactly a year before his arrest, Abdallah received the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for Outstanding Service in the Realization of Basic Human Rights, awarded by the International League for Human Rights in Berlin.

This is not the work of a violent man.

Last summer Abdallah stood in a group with Nobel Peace laureates and internationally renowned human rights activists, the Elders, discussing Bil’in’s grassroots campaign for justice and was photographed with Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu when the Elders visited his village. Ironically, Abu Rahmah may soon be in prison precisely for his involvement in this peaceful campaign.

Abu Rahma’s work has been characterized by insistence on non-violence and noted for its creativity. Demonstrator in Bil’in have called attention to their struggle by painting themselves like James Cameron’s Avatars and have expressed their solidarity with people in Gaza by creating a parade float like a Gaza flotilla ship. 

Today’s conviction will likely be followed by a sentence in coming weeks. If Abu Rahmah serves any more time than the eight months he has already been held in military prison it will only serve to send a message to young Palestinians that non-violence is a useless option. And if Abu Rahmah serves one more day in prison it will reinforce the view, increasingly justified in even Israel itself, that Israel is a becoming nothing more than a police state.

Please send a message to the Department of State** urging Secretary Clinton to convey a message to Israel** that a sentence of any more prison time for Abu Rahmah would send the wrong message to the world and an entire generation of Palestinians.

After the firing of Helen Thomas for her imprudent remarks that Israel should get out of Palestine, it’s clear our nation has no more tolerance for bigotry. And so, in this new Zero Tolerance climate, I’m surprised by the tolerance shown to Abe Foxman of the now inaptly-named Anti-Defamation League.

Foxman recently sided with bigots in condemning Cordoba House, an Islamic community center patterned on Jewish Community Centers. Some gave Foxman the benefit of the doubt on his position, seeing in his weasel words a possibly nuanced view:

But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

Unfortunately, right above this paragraph were his insinuations that Islamic radicals were behind the project, and highlighting the fact that these Islamic interlopers were not from the Judeo-Christian “shared values” club:

In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.

I wish Foxman were referring to the values most Americans share in condemning religious persecution.

But Foxman’s logic only works for Islamophobes. Jerry Haber points out that:

Perhaps some Christians are offended when those they consider to “Christ killers” wish to build a synagogue nearby? This sort of sensitivity we have to pay attention to?

On the ADL’s Interfaith web page there are a number of items taking various swipes at the Catholic Church, the Presbyterians, and Sabeel (a Christian Palestinian organization). According to Foxman, the Oberammergau Passion Play has not been sufficiently rehabilitated since Hitler’s time; the Presbyterians are still flirting with anti-Semitism, and Sabeel should not be opposing Israel-friendly Christian Zionists or supporting the BDS (Boycotts, Sanctions, and Divestment) movement. No mention of the ADL’s own Islamophobia.

None of this shocks since the ADL long ago stopped being an anti-defamation group and has now become principally a pro-Israel attack organization.

Almost from the beginning the ADL has displayed incredibly poor judgment. In the Seventies the ADL was implicated in spying on American citizens who opposed Israel’s and South Africa’s occupations and passing the information along to both countries. Foxman himself attended the funeral of Meir Kahane in 1990. Kach, Kahane’s organization, is listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and Israel. Foxman equivocated on calling the slaughter of millions of Armenians by Turkey a “genocide” in 2007. Many Jews were not happy with this decision. And in 2006 Foxman sided with the Wiesenthal Center’s decision to build a museum on top of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

These all were, if I may throw Foxman’s own words back at him, “not [just] a question of rights, but a question of what is right.”

Kamran Pasha, in a wonderful essay, calls on Foxman to rethink this position. Pasha reminds Foxman of Hillel’s dictum:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.

Unfortunately, Foxman does not operate from either an ethical or a Jewish ethical framework.

While Abe Foxman’s position may be echoed by some number of Christian bigots, such as Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, or the FOX-based lunatic fringe, and Jewish bigots like David Harris or the David Project (a Boston-area group which opposed a similar community center), most Jews have no problem with Cordoba House. J Street, a Jewish PAC, condemned the ADL’s defamatory statement and mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself Jewish, has welcomed Cordoba House. Even Alan Dershowitz, the self-appointed one-man Israel Defense League, has condemned the ADL’s statement.

Speaking for New Yorkers, Bloomberg expressed nicely the reasons Americans should welcome Cordoba House:

If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship, they should do it and we shouldn’t be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can’t. I think it’s fair to say if somebody was going to try to on that piece of property build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming. And the fact of the matter is that Muslims have a right to do it too. What is great about America and particularly New York is we welcome everybody and I just- you know, if we are so afraid of something like this, what does it say about us? Democracy is stronger than this. You know, the ability to practice your religion is the- was one of the real reasons America was founded. And for us to say no is just, I think, not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.

Foxman, who has been with the ADL for 45 years too long, has not only betrayed the ADL’s mission to fight against religious discrimination, he has unfortunately become a bigot himself. Having backed into the anti-Arab corner he finds himself in, Foxman is hopelessly out of touch with American values of religious tolerance and is also out of touch with mainstream American Jews and Jewish ethics.

It’s time for Abe Foxman to be forcibly retired. Now.

Tisha b’Av recalls the destruction of both temples. It is a time for reflection, reading the Book of Lamentations, and thinking about the darker human impulses which are said to have led to these historical calamities.

As always, a number of thoughtful essays have appeared on the internet. Some predictably hammer away the theme of Jewish power over powerlessness, or beat the drum for war against external powers of darkness, while others recognize that darkness exists in our own souls and that this is a time for reflection and re-prioritization.

http://www.forward.com/articles/129350/

http://rabbibrant.com/2010/07/19/meditations-on-tisha-bav-5770/

http://www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/what_are_you_doing_for_assarah_bav_20100713/

http://www.marcgopin.com/?p=3677

http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2010/07/nine-reasons-for-fasting-on-ninth-of-av.html

http://www.forward.com/articles/110372/

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3921895,00.html

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/anshel-pfeffer-it-is-wrong-to-fast-on-tisha-b-av-1.302241

http://zeek.forward.com/articles/116856/come-in-take-your-shoes-off-a-new-look-at-tisha-bav/

http://jta.org/news/article/2010/07/12/2739856/lamenting-the-gulf-on-tisha-bav

Does this sound great, or what!?

Find the White American Dream in Eretz Yisrael in a totally “arab-free environment“!

Pre-cleaned of riffraff and centrally located in the only Democracy in the Middle East!

Act now!

What have we really learned from the Holocaust? Was it of the suffering of European Jews? Or was it an evil that challenged moral complacency in the 20th century and reverberates even today? Is it a franchise for the state of Israel, Yad Vashem, or the Wiesenthal Center — or does anyone living have a right to invoke it for art or politics or ethics?

In the last week two news articles appeared which raised these questions.

One concerned a video that has gone viral, called “Dancing Auschwitz,” produced by Melbourne artist Jane Korman. The other was the posting, in Hebrew, of the message “Liberate all Ghettos” on a wall of the former Warsaw Ghetto by Israeli conscientious objector Yonatan Shapira, an Air Force pilot who created the 2003 “Pilot’s Letter” signed by 27 pilots who publicly refused to fly missions over the Palestinian territories.

Korman’s video, which features Korman’s father, an 89 year old survivor, and other family members dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” was warmly received in the local Melbourne Jewish press and the Orthodox Jewish world.

Shapira’s graffiti, on the other hand, was immediately slammed on the Jewish Telegraph Agency website, Yad Vashem, and YNet News. Noah Flug, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem, called on Polish police to launch a criminal investigation and said, “Yonatan Shapira and his ilk disrespect the Holocaust and its heritage. His actions harm the commemoration of the Holocaust and hurt the feelings of the survivors and the memory of the victims, including his family members who were murdered by the Nazis.”

Flug’s representative message on Shapira’s political act — and his silence on Korman’s video — make it clear that as long as the Holocaust is invoked in a way that does not stray from Jewish territory, it’s OK. But as soon as the messages of the Holocaust begin to be applied universally, they are condemned.

I have watched Korman’s video a half dozen times, and each time I find myself crying. Tears for both the absolute evil and the resilience and hope of the human race. It is edgy, but Korman’s message is precisely about these themes. While I did not have an emotional response to Shapira’s message, it was equally daring and timely, and — with the message in Hebrew — a challenge to Jews to internalize the universal message of the Shoah. 

I applaud both Korman and Shapira.

In one of the segments of Korman’s video, we are reminded of the absolute universality of the Holocaust. “Lo tir tzakh” (“Thou shalt not kill”) appears in front of the dancing family. In Shapiro’s graffiti, the universal again appears in the message: “Free all ghettos.”

The real messages of the Holocaust, whether in art or politics, will continue to resonate with anyone on earth who has endured persecution. Survival and liberation belong to us all.

After Israel’s attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla, with very few exceptions the organized American Jewish community reacted with overwhelming approval of the hijacking, kidnapping, and murder of nine flotilla activists, which also involved one American ship and one American death. Representatives of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism joined an anti-flotilla demonstration which mocked the flotilla attack and launched their own “Free Gilad” flotilla in the East River. The Union for Reform Judaism was “saddened” by the flotilla attacks but continued to defend the collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. No surprises from the Orthodox Union: even its youth organization was given talking points for defending Israel’s Entebbe-style attack on the flotilla.

As the Forward reported:

… the American Jewish establishment heeded the call of the Israeli government to defend its actions in the face of an extremely negative public relations storm.

“Thank you for listening and understanding and for advocating and for trying to put things in the right perspective, remembering that we are the victims here and we are the ones who were compelled to take these actions to defend ourselves,” said Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, on a conference call June 1, organized by the JFNA and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in which more than 700 people participated. “As you know, today the war is on the screens. The war is a political war, a PR war and also a legal warfare. And for that we need you more than ever.”

Bottom line: American Jewish denominations have not criticized any of Israel’s attacks on Americans or Palestinians. And they have never questioned whether any of these attacks were legal, disproportionate, or ill-advised.

They have willingly enlisted in every one of Israel’s wars and have now entered a state of moral hibernation.

But now America’s Jewish Establishment has a little problem of its own. A conversion bill in the Knesset now threatens to give Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate exclusive control over conversions. The bill actually involves a change to Israel’s Law of Return.

Naturally, American Orthodox Jews see nothing wrong with the change sponsored by Avigdor Lieberman’s Beteinu party, but Conservative and Reform Jews are crying foul. The Jewish Federations of North America, which represents most Jewish movements in the United States, are concerned about changes in the Israeli law.

Haaretz reports that the “Reform and Conservative movements both in Israel and abroad were up in arms” too over the bill which threatens the Israeli Masorti (Conservative) and Progressive (Reform) movements. Both groups are already upset over laws which impose Orthodox practices at the Kotel (Wailing Wall). But, to keep things in perspective, there are only 24 Reform congregations and only 53 Masorti congregations in all of Israel and the movements do not have as much political clout as they do in the United States, where less than a quarter of Jews are Orthodox.

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So it’s not surprising, but quite disappointing, that the American Jewish denominations have been so blind and so quiet on issues of human rights and justice in Israel and the occupied territories, while being so vocal in defense of “religious pluralism” in Israel.

But religious hegemony in Israel is just another side of Zionism. As long as this tiny nation continues to occupy another population almost its own size, continues to occupy land in two other countries — and continues to turn on its own Arab, Druze, Ethiopian, Mizrachi, civil libertarian, and anti-war citizens — is it really so surprising that it also discriminates against Masorti and Progressive Jews?

And then there’s the law itself.

The entire controversy ignores the fact that the Right of Return is, by very definition, a discriminatory law which promotes ethnic cleansing and discriminatory ethnic or racial laws. My children can immigrate to Israel while Palestinians who have lived there for a millennium have their houses razed. Under other Israeli laws, Palestinian refugees cannot return to their homes in Israel.

If justice is the issue, the “Right” of Return should simply be scrapped, rather than amended for the benefit of American Ashkenazim.

Israel is in crisis. Lobbying for religious pluralism in narrow self-interest, while ignoring systemic injustice in Israeli society, is pointless. The American Jewish community must rouse itself from its moral slumber and begin speaking out for justice — for all citizens and the millions whose land it occupies.

For an instruction book, look in the back of any Tanakh.

On July 1^st something rather remarkable occurred in the German parliament. A motion calling for an investigation of the Gaza flotilla, improving the situation of the people of Gaza, and for renewed support of the Middle East peace process passed unanimously. But not everyone thought it was so wonderful.

The Jerusalem Post printed an article with a response from the Wiesenthal Center. The Juedische Allgemeine ran an article entitled roughly “Mental Blockade in Parliament” and pictured an upside-down photo of the Bundestag.

In an article in Der Spiegel written by Henryk Broder, a Zionist journalist who regularly rails against critics of Israel by calling them anti-Semites and whose works can be found on his German-language site, Achse des Guten (axis of good), Broder slams parliament’s “veering” out of its depth into the Gaza controversy. In an article titled, “Einigkeit und Recht und Gaza” (Unity and Justice and Gaza), a play on the German national anthem, Broder invokes the spirit of Kaiser Wilhelm II moving about the room – Germans uniting in an anti-Semitic universe to sing an anthem which before 1952 included the verse “Deutschland ueber alles.” Broder takes CDU representative Philipp Missfelder to task for Missfelder’s remarks:

Now, against the background of our historical responsibility and our history, which is marked in today’s world not by guilt but by great responsibility, it is now a matter of coming together to achieve the objectives of peace.

And he slams Rolf Muetzenich for spelling out the message parliament is sending Israel:

I think we need to make it clear to Israel that the siege on Gaza only achieves the opposite of what Israel really wants to accomplish… It is the responsibility of the federal government to help – something we can do because of our special relationship with Israel – so that this problem area is finally acknowledged by the political actors in Israel. I would hope that both the Chancellor and the Foreign Minister to the Israeli government would be more proactive than those who have preceded them.

Broder concludes:

The debate late Thursday was not a triumph for parliamentary democracy, it was an act of national self-discovery. To deputies who have not tired of assuring each other how great it would be to all reach cross-party consensus, they were presumably unaware that – each for himself and all together – they had conjured up Wilhelm II. If in the past the so-called “Jewish question” was the cross-party tape that held Germans together, it is now the Palestinian question which creates a sense of national unity. A parliament and a government stymied by one self-inflicted crisis after another, which can’t even agree on hotel taxes, now wants to make a significant contribution to peace in the Middle East. Like children playing monopoly who take over Opel and want to save Karstadt from bankruptcy.

Whether making a joint resolution on Gaza or declaring that the earth’s surface rests on the back of the faction leaders, it’s completely irrelevant to the course of world history. On the one hand this is comforting, on the other it’s terrifying. The deputies just want to play. Yesterday it was a trip to Jerusalem, tomorrow it will be cops and robbers.

I don’t agree with Broder’s conclusions, but his article points out that Germany is now confident and independent enough to be motivated by friendship and responsibility – and, yes, no longer guilt. And perhaps there is even a germ of truth in Brodeur’s snotty reference to “national self-discovery.” It could very well be the same kind of national self-discovery that Brazil and Turkey and the Arab League and the EU have experienced in puzzling out the Israel-Palestine conflict. These nations have all discovered that they do not have to imitate the US relationship with Israel.

Aside from Broder’s whining, there is also the fact that Germany really has become a friend of Israel’s.

Since the war Germans have paid reparations, introduced Holocaust curriculum into education, and each government since 1965, when diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany were restored, has strengthened the relationship between the two countries. Holocaust denial violates German law. German presidents have visited Yad Vashem, knelt in supplication at the site of the Warsaw uprising, and pursued a policy of repeated apologetic gestures toward the Jewish state. As Paul Belkin points out in a monograph published by the US Congressional Research Service, German’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer

pursued a foreign policy rooted in the belief that the legitimacy of the young German state depended largely on its willingness to atone for atrocities perpetrated by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime of Adolf Hitler. Accordingly, his policies were motivated by a perceived moral obligation to support the Jewish state. The cornerstone, enshrined in the Luxembourg Agreement, was a long-term commitment to provide unprecedented financial reparations to the state of Israel and restitution and compensation to individual victims of Nazi persecution.

To this date, reparations have totaled approximately $32.5 billion. As Belkin points out, reparations paid were in excess of international expectations. The US actually voiced concern for Germany’s ability to rebuild itself under the weight of the reparations it had voluntarily chosen to pay.

Descendants of German Jews stripped of citizenship during the “Nazizeit” (nazi period) are granted automatic citizenship and Jewish communities have begun to reappear in Germany. In Berlin, which once had 170 synagogues, the largest German synagogue was recently rebuilt at a cost of $10 million. There are now 100,000 Jews living in Germany, compared to over half a million before the war. In 2008 the German and Israeli cabinets met – the only such meeting with a cabinet outside Europe.

Germany is now Israel’s second largest trade partner after the US. A variety of cultural exchange programs exist between the two countries, including a sister cities program. Like the US, German politicians regularly speak of a “special relationship” with Israel and refer to “shared values” between both countries. In short, relations have normalized in a way that would have been unimaginable shortly after the war.

In 2000 Germany paid for half the $1 billion cost of two “Dolphin” class nuclear submarines. Germany’s BND cooperates with the Mossad in intelligence gathering. During the Six Day War Germany permitted the US to make covert deliveries of supplies to Israel via Bremerhaven. As part of UNIFIL, German naval vessels patrol the Lebanese coast, ready to interdict Hezbollah arms shipments.

Many Europeans see themselves as post-national multilateralists. Germany is also constrained by its own reticence to again become highly militarized. And Germany, as one of the wealthiest and most visible nations in the EU, often provides the leadership for pan-European initiatives. This stance (“Haltung”) often brings Germany into conflict with US and Israeli unilaterialism and militarism. While Israel and the US would have been content to let the peace process die, in 2002 Joschka Fisher, Germany’s former Foreign Minister, helped resuscitate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

But, as Fischer’s own history attests, the German electorate can at times be much farther to the left of, say, the American electorate and certainly Israel’s. Germany has not always been in sync with its “special friend.” For instance, Israel (with a US echo) has sharply criticized Germany for its efforts to involve Syria in Israel-Palestine peace negotiations. Israel has also conducted “flyovers” of Germany’s UNIFIL vessels, triggering German complaints for the Israeli harassment. While Germany has repeatedly slammed Hamas for its use of violence and has denied certain Hamas members visas, it has also been open to unity talks between Fatah and Hamas and, to the consternation of Israel and the US, recognizes both political parties. Germany is one of the Palestinian Authority’s donors, and this irks both Israel and the US. Similarly, in the case of Lebanon, neither the EU nor Germany classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization because it plays a role in Lebanese politics and UNIFIL must deal with it.

Nor has Germany always been in sync with the EU. In 2002 Germany blocked EU sanctions against Israel. In 2004 it voted for an EU resolution condemning Israel’s “separation” wall but government officials privately defended it. In 2006 Germany voted against a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. The same year Israel blocked EU condemnation of the Gaza blockade. Germany has been involved in prisoner exchange negotiations in Israel’s behalf since 1996, most recently being involved last year in the case of Gilad Shalit. And Germany is Israel’s voice within the EU, with which it frequently differs on Israel.

Criticism of Israel is “anti-Semitic”

Israel and its American lobbyists were once fond of using a sledgehammer to pound critics. The sledgehammer was, of course, the loosely-wielded accusation that objections to Israel’s occupation were “anti-Semitic.” Of course, for most people anti-Semitism is like pornography — you recognize it when you see it. Swastikas on walls, death threats, discrimination, slurs, publications like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” or stories like the “blood libel” and assumptions about the physiology or psychology of Jews were all recognizable features of anti-Semitism. Jewish “rootlessness,” “clannishness,” “cosmopolitanism,” or avarice were as common as charges that Jews controlled the global economy. To all of this the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia added the rejection of Jewish nationality (meaning “peoplehood” and clearly not, in 1906, referring to a state):

While the term Anti-Semitism should be restricted in its use to the modern movements against the Jews, in its wider sense it may be said to include the persecution of the Jews at all times and among all nations as professors of a separate religion or as a people having a distinct nationality.

So it was understandable when Israel’s critics, in response, uttered a collective “You’ve got to be kidding” and waved the classical definitions of anti-Semitism back at the accusers.

So Israel simply redefined anti-Semitism.

Redefining anti-Semitism

In 2005 Natan Sharansky developed a definition of anti-Semitism which was published in the Jewish Political Studies Review and is now used by many Jewish and political organizations.

Sharansky’s definition of anti-Semitism completely throws out ill-treatment of Jews as individuals or a people and replaces the “Jewish people” with the “state of Israel”:

The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.

The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.

A Jewish child taunted for wearing a yarmulke and bullied on the way home would not be the victim of anti-Semitism according to this revisionist definition.

“Delegitimization” equals a Palestinian State

In the last few years Sharansky’s last “D” has been getting quite the workout. The Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, has developed a strategy for fighting Israel’s critics by labeling them “delegitimizers” and “naming and shaming” them. As BDS becomes a more accepted way of challenging the occupation, Israel is fighting back by categorizing BDS supporters as “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites. The concept has entered Israeli consciousness to the point that politicians bludgeon each other with it. Tzipi Livni recently accused Benjamin Netanyahu of delegitimizing Israel. Everything is potentially delegitimizing. The Gaza flotilla was described as a delegitimization effort. The Goldstone report was seen as another such effort. Refusing to buy Jaffa oranges is too.

But, by far, the most creative application of “delegitimization” is that a Palestinian state will delegitimize Israel, according to Uzi Arad, chairman of Israel’s National Security Council. For Arad, Palestinian legitimacy equals Israeli delegitimization and talk of two states only fosters this:

On the one hand, most of the people of Israel see the two-state solution as the path to a peace agreement. There are even quite a few Israelis who have mobilized for a Palestinian state and the promotion of its legitimacy, and are winning converts to it.

What they do not notice is that this claims a certain price. The more you market Palestinian legitimacy, the more you bring about a detraction of Israel’s legitimacy in certain circles. They are accumulating legitimacy, and we are being delegitimized.

So one doesn’t even have to deny Israel’s right to exist. Simply calling for a parallel Palestinian state makes one an anti-Semite, as Jewish groups like J Street are beginning to discover.

While Arad says that most Israelis want a two-state solution, Israel’s political parties and members of the Knesset have apparently not heard. For instance, no one who has bothered to read the Likud platform really believes that Israel has ever been dedicated to two states:

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.

It is therefore questionable if the polls are correct and Israelis really want a two state solution. Or, if they do, what they mean by two states.

No Palestinian State equals a One State Solution

It is pronouncements like Arad’s that convince many that Israel will never accept a Palestinian state.

But Arad is hardly alone in rejecting two states.

A few weeks ago Moshe Arens, who has served as both defense and foreign minister with the Likud, suggested simply granting citizenship to Palestinians:

Unlike the dire predictions heard so often, Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria would not be the end of the State of Israel, nor would it mean the end of democratic governance in Israel. It would, however, pose a serious challenge to Israeli society. But that is equally true for the other options being suggested for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This option of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria merits serious consideration.

The one-state solution is an option that many Palestinians now recognize as inevitable, although they might take issue with Arens’ claims that Israel would “continue” to govern democratically. For instance, the Palestine Strategy Group, which represents the viewpoints of Israeli, occupied, and Diaspora Palestinians, examined different state formations in a paper it published in 2008, Palestinian Strategic Options to End Israeli Occupation. While a Palestinian state has always been a national goal, the end of Occupation is an even greater goal:

[…] So, if Israel refuses to negotiate seriously for a genuine two-state outcome, Palestinians can and will block all four of them by switching to an alternative strategy made up of a combination of four linked reorientations to be undertaken singly or together. […]

• Fourth, the shift from a two state outcome to a (bi-national or unitary democratic) single state outcome as Palestinians’ preferred strategic goal. This reopens a challenge to the existence of the State of Israel in its present form, but in an entirely new and more effective way than was the case before 1988. […]

Is this what Israel wants? Israel cannot prevent Palestinians from a strategic reorientation along these lines. Does Israel really want to force Palestinians to take these steps?

One of the authors has described this option as simply shutting down the PA and turning the struggle for a sovereign state into a civil rights struggle. Given the fact that Israel’s land grab has already eliminated the possibility of a viable contiguous state and Israel itself is ideologically opposed to a Palestinian state, a single state appears inevitable. And because of demographics, that state will not remain exclusively Jewish.

A number of political analysts share this view. John Mearsheimer recently discussed the inevitability of a single state in detail in a talk last April at the Palestine Center, in which he began:

Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans — to include many American Jews — Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa.  Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream.

It is ironic, but Zionism’s own excesses, rather than external enemies, have destroyed the dream of a Jewish state.

Once again J Street’s positions fail to significantly distinguish it from AIPAC. Today J Street joined with AIPAC and broke with Americans for Peace Now in applauding new sanctions on Iran. To its credit, J Street made one distinction from AIPAC — in calling for continued diplomacy and warning against war:

We believe that a dual track approach that combines meaningful diplomatic engagement with broad-based sanctions is necessary to convince Iran to clarify its nuclear intentions. We commend the President for his efforts in strengthening the resolve of the international community on Iran. […]

We reiterate that nothing in this bill should be taken as authorizing or encouraging the use of military force against Iran. We are opposed to the use of military force by Israel or the United States against Iran.

While J Street joined with AIPAC in welcoming the sanctions, it broke with APN and Gush Shalom. Americans for Peace Now, on whose board J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami also sits, condemned the sanctions. APN’s Deborah Lee issued a statement which contained this critique of sanctions — any sanctions:

APN’s core concern about this bill remains unchanged: imposing sanctions the goal of which is to ‘cripple’ the civilian economy and inflict misery on the population — in the hopes that this population will rise up against its government — is a flawed and in all likelihood counterproductive approach.  It is an approach that has failed for decades in Iran. It failed in Iraq and Haiti. It has failed in Cuba and North Korea. And it is an approach that only last week Israel abandoned in Gaza, recognizing that squeezing the population of Gaza with a blockade on civilian goods had not only failed to force Hamas out of power, but had enabled Hamas (and the world) to blame Israel for all the misery the people of Gaza were facing. It took Israel three years to recognize the error of this approach.  It is regrettable that Congress did not draw the obvious lesson from these experiences.

While J Street has taken it on the chin from mainstream Jewish organizations and the Israeli Lobby for its unwavering support of a Two State solution, many of its recent positions — endorsing supplemental military aid for Israel and sanctions on Iran — seem designed to blunt right-wing criticisms and win supposedly “moderate” Jewish support.

But aside from a position truly supportive of two states, J Street is beginning to look much like AIPAC. J Street has adopted the Obama approach: position yourself as a progressive, but consistently make tactical political calls that sell out progressive principles. Positions on the Goldstone report, BDS, sanctions, supplemental military aid,  slamming the UN — all have been disappointing echoes of AIPAC.

Today J Street took the additional step of distancing itself from even the progressive Zionist peace movement.

J Street has a short window in which to establish itself as a voice for something new in the Middle East.

Where is that voice?

Sometimes disparate news items all come into focus as parts of a larger story.

“Material Support” for terrorists expanded to include Free Speech

This week the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a ban on providing “material support” to terrorist groups. The particular “material support” in a case brought by the government against the Humanitarian Law Project referred to the Project’s efforts to advise the Kurdistan Worker’s Party on non-violent means to resolve conflicts with the Turkish government. In its 6-3 ruling the Supreme Court essentially scrapped the First Amendment by declaring that, in the interests of fighting terror, the government had the right to determine who Americans can talk to and what kind of speech is permitted.

“Not even the ‘serious and deadly problem’ of international terrorism can require automatic forfeiture of First Amendment rights,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. “There is no obvious way in which undertaking advocacy for political change through peaceful means or teaching the PKK and LTTE, say, how to petition the United Nations for political change is fungible with other resources that might be put to more sinister ends in the way that donations of money, food, or computer training are fungible.”

“The decision sends a clear message that the First Amendment does not protect even the most benign forms of advocacy on behalf of groups designated as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ by the Secretary of State,” said Stephen I. Vladeck of the American University Washington College of Law.

Even conservative Justice Roberts wrote that Kagan’s positions had gone too far. “The government is wrong,” he wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he nevertheless concluded that combating terrorism trumped protection of free expression.

Justice Sotomayor, in dissenting, said that “under the government’s definition, teaching these members to play the harmonica would be unlawful.”

Demonstrating the high caliber of arguments for the majority position, Justice Scalia replied, “Well, Mohamed Atta and his harmonica quartet might tour the country and make a lot of money.”

Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court

The ruling highlighted President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan, who appears to on her way to be the Court’s newest conservative justice.

It was Kagan who argued the government’s case as Solicitor General. Kagan has also defended indefinite detention without trial.

When liberal Justice John Paul Stevens retires, he will most likely be replaced by Kagan. To the many other disappointments with the Obama administration this can be added.

Freedom of Speech will now be regulated by lobbyists

Although the Secretary of State maintains the official lists of whom Americans can talk to or visit, this list is subject to tinkering, political posturing and lobbying by foreign governments and their friends.

A case in point is the recent call by AIPAC, an Israeli lobbying group, to redefine the Turkish charity, IHH, as a terrorist group. The call was enthusiastically endorsed by a majority of Congressmen from both parties.

Based on documents supplied by AIPAC, echoing Israel’s claims that the charity “has well documented ties to Hamas and has been linked to other Islamic terrorist organizations, including al‐Qaeda,” Congress will likely add it and additional politicized (but hardly terrorist) organizations to the State Department’s watch lists – even though the State Department itself has never established such “documented ties.”

Oh, well, with a bit more lobbying and a few more PAC contributions I’m sure such ties will be “established.”

Over the last few years I have struggled with the idea of BDS. A year and a half ago I set about informing myself of the different kinds of BDS tactics.

About a year ago I visited Israel and Palestine. One of the people I met was Omar Barghouti, a well-known voice for BDS. Nothing about divestment from occupation or military-related industries – whether Israeli or international corporations – seemed inappropriate at the time, but I had reservations about cultural boycotts and felt that consumer boycotts were meaningless or even destructive. Part of the reason is that I have Israeli friends – great people who share a vision for peace but will be affected by these campaigns.

This year – having seen the occupation up close and having a chance to think about it – it was more difficult to define the parameters of what was appropriate and what was not, but I gave nuance and thoughtfulness my best shot.

And I’m not alone. Lots of Jews have grappled with BDS. Jerry Haber, in an excellent piece, analyzes Bernard Avishai’s nuanced and thoughtful reflection on the subject in his Nation article. Avishai is a decent guy, a progressive Zionist whom I heard speak last October in Washington. His ethical gyrations reminded me of my own.

Avishai, like numerous other liberal Jews, voices the great fear that BDS will drive even progressive Israelis into the arms of the right, and that BDS would create a “siege mentality” in Israel – and on this basis he advocates selective application of BDS tactics. Yet Haber parts with Avishai and describes how he added his name to a petition for TIAA-CREF’s divestment from Israel.

Where I part with Avishai’s arguments – an argument shared by well-respected figures in the Israeli peace movement like Uri Avnery – is that it’s way too late: Israel has been in a siege mentality almost since its founding. If this is the primary progressive Jewish argument against BDS, it’s a non-starter.

As we have by now been forced to recognize, Israel itself admits that the blockade of Gaza is meant to strangle the Gazan economy and punish its people. This has become such a well-known secret that Chuck Schumer can recite the same rationale (“Strangle them economically”) to Orthodox constituents without fear of being labeled a bigot, as Helen Thomas was. And it’s not just Gaza. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot travel and their economy is still severely limited by Israeli control. Critics of Israel, NGOs, and just recently a German development minister, have all been barred from Israel-controlled areas.

Finally it was clear to me: the Israeli government doesn’t appreciate nuance and that force might be the only language they understand. Economic force.

All this being the case, why is it not appropriate that Israel drink its own medicine as long as the Palestinians are forced to? There are no longer any justifications for any more tortured, nuanced discussions of BDS. It’s a matter of justice, and a simple matter at that.

Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions should be applied to Israel until the day that the Israeli equivalents of BDS (economic strangulation, restrictions on travel, etc.) cease to be imposed on Palestinians and international critics of Israel’s occupation.

If anyone thinks that Israel has any intention of sharing Palestine with its existing inhabitants, please read the Peace & Security portion of the Likud’s platform:

http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm

The Likudniks are still peeved that they never got what they regard as their proper amount of land from the British:

Settlements

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

Self-Rule

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem, including the plan to divide the city presented to the Knesset by the Arab factions and supported by many members of Labor and Meretz. […] The Likud government will act with vigor to continue Jewish habitation and strengthen Israeli sovereignty in the eastern parts of the city…

The Jordan River as a Permanent Border

The Jordan Valley and the territories that dominate it shall be under Israeli sovereignty. The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel. The Kingdom of Jordan is a desirable partner in the permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians in matters that will be agreed upon.

Security Areas

The government succeeded in significantly reducing the extent of territory that the Palestinians expected to receive in the interim arrangement. The government will insist that security areas essential to Israel’s defense, including the western security area and the Jewish settlements, shall remain under Israeli rule.

The Golan

Based on the Likud-led government’s proposal, the 10th Knesset passed the law to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration over the Golan Heights, thus establishing Israeli sovereignty over the area. The government will continue to strengthen Jewish settlement on the Golan.

Let’s let British Petroleum conduct an investigation of what it did wrong in the Gulf of Mexico.

One has to wonder what kind of fool would suggest this. But the Obama administration and Congress have agreed to let Israel investigate its own attack on a group of ships bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza on May 31^st — an attack that killed one American citizen and took control of an American ship and affected citizens from numerous countries.

The Associated Press report which most Americans saw, reads:

The White House backs Israel’s inquiry into its deadly raid last month on a flotilla trying to break a blockade against Gaza, saying the independent public commission is “an important step forward.” … Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Israel’s panel can meet the standard of a “prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation.”

The McClatchy News Service ran a similar article, titled “Israel plans impartial inquiry of its deadly attack on aid flotilla,” by Jerusalem-based reporter Shera Frenkel.

Not only are we getting a whitewash, it’s being packaged as an “independent” and “impartial” investigation.

If citizens of the 40 countries whose citizens were hijacked, beaten, or killed by Israel are content that at least “some kind” of investigation is being conducted, think again. A whitewash is under way. Whatever Israel’s own probe concludes – and Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised that it will exculpate Israel – the world must keep pressing for a credible, independent, international commission to investigate the flotilla attack.

With US approval, Israel appointed a commission to investigate itself composed of chairman Yaakov Tirtel, 75, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge who still serves on a military appeals court; member Shabtai Rosen, 93, who worked on maritime law issues while at the UN; and member Amos Horev, 86, a retired major-general in the Israeli army, former president of the Technion, and an advocate for the Israeli defense industry.

Besides old guard members of Israel’s military-industrial complex, Israel appointed two “international observers” without voting rights. Neither of the men hastily chosen, a Canadian general who may have looked the other way on human rights abuses in Afghanistan and a Loyalist politician once associated with Ian Paisley and British colonial abuses in Ireland, is likely to stand up to much scrutiny.

Ken Watkin, the Canadian, was implicated in the Canadian Afghan detainee issue, in which several detainees arrested by Canadian Forces disappeared or were tortured following transfer to the Afghan National Police. According to a report in the Toronto Star, while acting as the Judge Advocate General, Watkin refused to answer questions when testifying in Canada’s House of Commons about whether he had been told to authorize the transfers or knew of the torture, and claimed attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer the House’s questions.

Irish Loyalist David Trimble, the second Israeli observer, is known for his association with Ian Paisley and British suppression of the Irish independence movement. Trimble is a neoconservative who supports interventionist foreign policy, as his membership in the Henry Jackson Society indicates. Trimble opposed the appointment of former US Senator George Mitchell as chairman of multi-party talks which resulted in the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (GFA) of 1998. He recently founded the “Friends of Israel Initiative” to combat “international delegitimization” of the Jewish state. Trimble also has been quoted as saying, “One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry.”

With an investigative body like this, don’t get your hopes up. My guess is the whitewash has probably already been written. Israel’s forthcoming report should be ignored and, instead, there must be a truly credible, independent, international investigation of the flotilla attack. As a recent Ha’aretz editorial concludes:

… both its puzzling membership and weak mandate – bodes ill for Israel. A committee whose makeup and authority are perceived as predetermined will be unable to satisfy international leaders and their constituencies abroad who demanded the inquiry in the first place. It would therefore have been better if the Turkel committee had never been born, sparing us the deceptive appearance of a real investigation.

J Street today applauded increased sanctions on Iran at the UN. An enrichment processing proposal brokered by Turkey and backed by Brazil, which had previously been acceptable to the United States, was rejected by the US in backing Israel’s demands for sanctions on Iran. A J Street press release supported the move:

J Street welcomes the passage of enhanced multilateral and broad-based sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council today.

This vote would not have been possible without the tireless diplomatic efforts of the Obama Administration. We commend President Obama and his team for their effort and this step in the right direction, and urge them to continue employing a dual track approach – meaningful engagement plus multilateral sanctions – to convince Iran to change course.

Today, the Government of Iran hears a clear message from the international community that there are real consequences to continued obfuscation, delay, and intransigence over its nuclear program, as well as real benefits should they fully address international concerns.

We expect the Iranian regime to immediately make clear it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, to submit to international inspections, and to end its support for groups that use violence and terror against Israel. Such action will put Iran on the road to reintegration into the international community.

Other nations seem to be held to a different standard than Israel on nuclear weapons. J Street has not called on the UN for an end of Israel’s formal policy of nuclear ambiguity/obfuscation or asked it to rejoin the world community in respecting the international laws it continues to break. Such lopsided resolutions are guaranteed only to ratchet up the rhetoric from Teheran and make the Iranian regime more unpredictable.

These sanctions are particularly stupid because there was an opportunity to try a reprocessing scheme the US had once supported and to insist on monitoring access. Teheran had warned that the offer would be off the table if sanctions were imposed, and this now gives them a domestic popularity boost in standing up to the United States. There will also now be no monitoring, and Iran will have scored points for its home team.

The imposition of sanctions, however ineffective they are expected to be, coupled with the attack on the Mavi Marmara, is also a setback for NATO ally Turkey and a gain for Israel. A message certainly not lost on certain Middle Eastern and new European allies, these sanctions make it crystal clear that the United States is willing to betray NATO allies and friends when it comes to Israel. Stephen Walt calls it right when he cites Stephen Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations complaining about how Turkey needs to be “kept in its lane.” We can’t have just anybody running around being a regional power broker in the Middle East. There’s already a reserved seat.

This move is also exceptionally misguided because it further complicates the United States’ relations with other nations in the Middle East. But the president, the State Department, and apparently J Street, all continue to see the world as it was during the Bush administration. The US with the help of Israel will continue to try to project its power in the Middle East – at least for a few more years. Other regional players need not apply for the job.

To the editors:

Stuart Forman’s letter on the Gaza flotilla makes several statements which distort or put a spin on Israel’s war with Hamas, the blockade of Gaza, and attempts by protesters to break it.

Stuart writes that as a result of Israel’s evacuation of Gaza Israel became the target of 10,000 Qassam rockets. This is a distortion of the timeline. In 1996 Shimon Peres declared war on Hamas. In September 2005 Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza. In January 2006 during Olmert’s term Hamas won popular elections in Gaza. In 2008 Israel and Hamas agreed on a cease-fire of hostilities which had dated back to the 90’s. During much of this time Gaza was under periodic bombardment by Israel and a number of Hamas leaders were assassinated, often with significant collateral damage. In December 2008 the cease fire ended and Israel attacked Gaza, killing more than a thousand civilians.

Thus, the hostility between Hamas and Israel long predated Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. The thousands of rocket attacks must be considered over decades, not just a few short years – and within a context of a war declared by Israel.

Stuart states that Israel provides 15,000 tons of humanitarian aid each week to Gaza. This aid is actually provided by humanitarian organizations like UNWRA or foreign NGOs and is funded by foreign nations like the US or the EU. The delivery is simply managed by COGAT, the office for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. And the UN estimates that the amount of aid is only one-quarter of what Gazans actually need.

Stuart suggests that Israel is only doing what is necessary to protect its citizens, but banned aid includes: biscuits and sweets, cardamom, cattle, cement, chickens, chocolate, coriander, cumin, donkeys, dried fruit, fabric, fishing nets, fishing rods, fresh meat, fruit preserves, ginger, glucose, goats, greenhouse planters, halva, heaters, horses, iron, jam, margarine, musical instruments, notebooks, nutmeg, pens and pencils, plaster, potato chips, razors, rope, ropes, sage, salt, seeds and nuts, seltzer, sewing machines, size A4 paper, tar, tarpaulins for shelter, toys, various containers, vinegar, and wood. Israel has also apparently estimated the minimum number of calories required by Gaza inhabitants, though it claims this data has never been used to restrict food.

Stuart portrays the Israeli government’s blockade as a reasonable effort to keep weapons out of terrorist hands and that humanitarian aid could have been delivered if only the protesters had first docked in Ashdod. But as we see from the list above, Israel’s intent goes well beyond protection, to punitively crippling the Gaza economy and depriving its inhabitants for voting for Hamas in 2006. The flotilla organizers’ intent was clearly to point out this collective punishment by an act of civil disobedience.

Israel still has stores of confiscated materials that have never been delivered to Gaza from eight previous attempts to break the blockade. Thus, Stuart’s repetition of promises by the Israeli Foreign Ministry are simply not to be believed. In addition, by failing to deliver humanitarian aid and impounding it, as it has done with all flotilla shipments, Israel is violating any number of international laws.

While Gazans may have originally voted for the political wing of Hamas, the Israeli blockade has only entrenched the military wing. Israel is making the same mistake it made in 2002 in the West Bank when it decided it didn’t like the Palestinian Authority and bombed the government compound in Ramallah. The more Israel beats and bombs and deprives Palestinians, the more radicalized they will become.

But the deprivations of Gazans are not all to be laid at the feet of Israel. Egypt has been complicit in the boycott by closing its Rafah crossing into Gaza. Hamas itself has diverted aid that might have gone to the Fatah faction. Assisting Israel in its punitive measures, a Democratic congress actually cut US aid to Gaza in March 2009. There is plenty of blame to go around. But now that the world knows how dire the situation in Gaza is, it’s time to fix it.

not printed

Today, 78 miles in international waters, Israel Defense Forces boarded a small flotilla of six ships bound for Gaza with food, building materials, medical equipment, books, and toys – killing 19 on board with live ammunition, according to Israel’s Channel 10 and the BBC. Most of the deaths occurred on the Mavi Mamara, a Turkish ship.

The “Freedom Flotilla” consisting of 700 people from 40 different countries, including many Americans, a Nobel Peace laureate, European parliamentarians, and non-violent peace organizations, was again attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. In the past, many of the same organizations and individuals found similar ships boarded, contents inspected, passengers brought to Israeli jail, then deported. This time, Israel displayed the same callous disregard for the lives of Western civilians that it has previously shown toward Arabs.

Since Israel’s siege of Gaza in 2008, which killed thousands of civilians, Israel has maintained a clampdown on imports and exports in Gaza – punishing Gazans collectively for supporting the political wing of Hamas in elections – and creating hardships which have predictably increased support for the military wing of Hamas. Despite initial promises to investigate the situation in Gaza, such as Senator John Kerry’s visit shortly after the siege, the United States has turned a blind eye to the resulting hunger, homelessness, poverty, and unemployment in Gaza. Israel has been permitted to impose capricious bans on imports such as pasta and spices and on exports such as fish and Gazans have had to rely on a network of tunnels to survive. Israel’s actions are in violation of numerous human rights principles and international law. The flotilla was intended to raise awareness of this and the hopelessness of life in Gaza.

The flotilla attack comes at a time when Israel’s rightwing government has clamped down on civil liberties, barred foreign critics from entering Israel or the West Bank, arrested journalists, banned NGOs, placed numerous non-violent Palestinian leaders in prison without laying charges, proposed stripping some of its own citizens of their citizenship, and stepped up harassment of peace organizations.

Despite Israel’s recent entry into the OECD – a club for the world’s wealthiest nations – and despite our own financial difficulties – the United States continues to pamper Israel with $3 to $5 billion a year in military aid, loans, military and energy development projects, and occasional splurges like last week’s “Iron Dome” boondoggle which gave one of Israel’s state-owned military industries, Rafael Systems, $205 million for a missile shield system that in 2008 was judged to be useless against Qassams.

It is high time to pull the plug on aid to Israel and to make that nation accountable for its attacks on American citizens. It has long been clear that Israel has used US aid to finance racist settlement programs, build separation walls, private roads for settlers, maintain checkpoints, and to inflict casualties on civilians in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Gaza. Now this military aid is being used against our own citizens.

In the long run, the leverage this will apply on Israel will actually benefit it. Unless the United States stops asking “pretty please” and applies meaningful pressure on Israel to coexist with a Palestinian state, its 62 year occupation will continue until the same fate befalls Palestinians as American Indians – where they live in isolated reservations within Greater Israel. When that happens, Israel will be in precisely the same position that white South Africans found themselves. It will be the end of either Israeli democracy or a Jewish state.

This was published in the Standard Times on June 3, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20100603/opinion/6030329

What BDS is

BDS, short for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, is an umbrella term for several non-violent tactics used by opponents of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. BDS is also a movement originated by Palestinians who wanted to replicate the success of a similar campaign in South Africa. Just as farm worker boycotts in the United States were joined by Anglos who refused to buy Gallo wine, product boycotts and institutional divestments from Occupation-related companies have been embraced by individuals, schools, religious organizations, investment advisors, and trade unions. On many college campuses a large proportion of BDS supporters are Jewish. The basic purpose of BDS is simply to apply economic pressure on Israel to end the Occupation.

Israel’s foreign revenue

In 2008 Israel’s GDP was $207 billion. For purposes of comparison, Israel’s population and area is roughly equivalent to New Jersey, which has a GDP of $475 billion. Israel’s exports are about $45 billion, with about a third to the United States, and roughly the same amount to Europe. Israel’s major domestic product is weapons systems, and it is the 4th largest defense exporter in the world, right behind the US, Russia, and France, and slightly ahead of Britain. Many of its defense industries are government owned, such as IMI and Rafael Systems which was recently given $205 billion by the United States for the Iron Dome missile system.

In 2009 Israel’s major exports to the US were gems ($6 billion), medical ($4b), computer ($3b), military ($2b), and electronics ($2b). While some of these products are benign, many of Israel’s industrial and agricultural zones, such as Mishor Adumim, Barkan, Katzerin, Tulkarem, Hinnanit, Ariel, Maale Efrayim, Ataroy, Qiryat Arba, and the Jordan Valley, are built in or around settlements. This makes selective boycotts of particular products almost impossible because the Occupation is so deeply integrated into Israel’s entire economy. While products from these industrial zones could be forced to be correctly identified or banned, as Britain has begun to do, this is a tedious task which requires massive categorization and publication efforts from the BDS movement. Consequently, blanket boycotts of Israeli products have been proposed.

Besides military subsidies, Israel also enjoys period gifts from the US, such as this month’s $205 million Iron Dome project, various loans, joint military and energy development projects, and a free trade agreement dating from 1985 – a decade before similar agreements with our Canadian neighbors.

BDS and Israel advocates

Israel advocates have been predictably hostile to BDS. In Israel the Reut Institute published a 92-page document delivered at the 10th Herzliya conference last March, “Building a Political Firewall Against Israel’s Delegitimization,” which attacked BDS as a “delegitimization” tool of anti-Semites. A similar document, “Delegitimization of Israel: Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions” by Mitchell Bard and Gil Troy, also conflates BDS with anti-Semitism. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs recently issued a “Resolution on Campaign to Delegitimize Israel through Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement,” painting BDS as “reminiscent of the ancient blood libel.”

Acknowledging that the Occupation is morally indefensible, Bard and Troy describe their counterattack: “Israel advocates are always going to lose a fight over ‘settlements’ and ‘occupation,’ or at best get mired in stalemate. BDS shifts the terrain, making the battle one over Israel’s right to exist, over the legitimacy of Zionism, over the anti-Semitic tropes shaping the anti-Israel movement, and the rank anti-Semitism behind the disproportionate, obsessive focus on Israel.”

In its “Firewall” paper, the Reut Institute writes that BDS is a “primary assault on Israel’s existence today [which] is directed at its political and economic model; [and] it may become existential…” It goes on, “Ending ‘occupation’ and resolving the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is very important to combating delegitimization; yet Israel’s delegitimization is fundamentally ideological, and stems from a core rejection of Zionism’s and Israel’s political model. Therefore, it is likely to continue even following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Reut’s other prescriptions are varied, from PR efforts like softening discrimination in Israel toward Arabs, to cultivating more effective hasbara networks. Another of their strategies is to attack specific BDS supporters by “establishing a ‘price-tag’ for attacking Israel by ‘naming and shaming’ delegitimizers.” Yet accusations of anti-Semitism are rarely made with much discrimination.

But Reut’s most troubling recommendation is that “Israel [my italics] must identify delegitimization hubs, usually metropolitan areas hosting strong anti-Israel sentiments and containing a concentration of international NGOs, media, corporations, and academia. Within these hubs – such as London, the San Francisco Bay Area, Madrid, Paris, Toronto, and Brussels – Israel must significantly increase its diplomatic and public diplomacy activities. Contending with each hub requires a tailor-made approach based on unique constellations of hundreds of relationships with local elites in political, business, media, and security spheres.”

In other words, Israel is to develop a hit list of mainly academics, NGO’s, and progressives and then unleash local American Jewish organizations on them. These “delegitimization hubs” must be obliterated like terrorist hideouts by drones. This new Jewish McCarthyism has already brought back the pogrom and led to censorship and blacklisting of progressive Jewish groups by more “mainstream” Jewish organizations. In the Bay Area, for example – one of the Reut Institute’s targets – the Jewish Federation actually created a blacklist of Jewish peace groups who work with BDS supporters. In Boston and Seattle this story has been repeated. This is troubling on many levels, not the least of which is that a foreign nation is directing attacks on individuals in the United States.

For these defenders of Israel, the basic tactic is to use fear-mongering to change the subject from the Occupation to an existential threat from rabid anti-Semites. This is not a new tactic and it isn’t playing to younger Jews. It’s also not succeeding with older American Jews and is indicative of a greater split between Disapora Jews and Israel, in part over the Occupation.

BDS and liberal Jews

BDS is also suspiciously or negatively viewed by many liberal Jews. Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Michael Lerner, both lightning rods for their criticism of the Occupation, oppose BDS, as do Israel’s Gush Shalom founder Uri Avnery and various progressive American Jewish groups such as Meretz USA and J Street. They see BDS targeting not only the Occupation but also positive aspects of Israeli society and democracy, and they complain that BDS targets only Israel.

Well-known critic of Israel, Noam Chomsky, judges BDS to be ineffective because, in his calculations, only the US government, not consumer pressure, will work on Israel to end the Occupation. Chomsky also opposes BDS on principle because “breaking contact with Israeli academics, artists, writers, journalists … means breaking contact with many people who have played an honorable and courageous role well beyond what can be found here, and are a much more substantial element within their own society.” Americans for Peace Now, like J Street, opposes cutting US military aid to Israel, preferring diplomatic efforts and reductions of non-military aid (both unsuccessfully tried).

Arieh Zimmerman, a friend who lives on a kibbutz a couple miles from Gaza, understands the Palestinian use of BDS: “We so outgun the Palestinian side of the equation that any serious resistance to Israeli rule is effectively ruled out. Personally, I prefer the idea of economic resistance to that of suicide bombing. But what is clear is that any people with their backs to the wall will find some means of resistance to their conqueror.” But he also believes that BDS is a crude tool where precision is required, and boycotts raise the same ethical issues posed by Israel’s own collective punishment of Palestinians: “There are boycotts and there are boycotts. Boycotting the corner butcher because he is known to have a heavy thumb is one thing; boycotting his neighborhood to teach him a lesson is another. Can collective punishment ever be excused? Unless collective guilt is proven, what justification can there be for collective punishment?”

But some Jews regard BDS more as a set of tactics than just a movement – tactics which must be at least selectively tried, given the lack of political will by presidents and congress to resolve this festering international issue. Jewish Voice for Peace cautiously supports BDS as a tactic. Independent Jewish Voices in Canada and Americans Jews for a Just Peace cite human rights as their justification for supporting BDS.

But cultural boycotts are especially troubling for many Jews because of strong family, cultural, and religious connections. Rabbi Brant Rosen echoes Zimmerman and describes the painful realization that “though a movement like BDS might feel on a visceral level like just one more example of the world piling on the Jews and Israel, we need to be open to the possibility that it might more accurately be described as the product of a weaker, dispossessed, disempowered people doing what it must to resist oppression.” Orthodox Jewish studies and philosophy professor Jerry Haber recently enumerated 13 reasons for Liberal Zionists to give guarded support to the BDS movement.

BDS is as American as apple pie

While Palestinians may have recycled BDS from the South African anti-Apartheid movement, boycotts have precedents in American and Jewish history. The original Boston Tea Party was part of a wider boycott of British goods. The day after Rosa Parks was arrested, 35,000 flyers were distributed urging a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama transit system. Recently a number of cities have passed resolutions calling for a boycott of Arizona over several pieces of legislation directed at Latinos. Rather than being a tool of hate, boycotts have more often been used as a tool of justice.

And boycotts have been frequently used by Jews, too. The Talmud recounts the boycotting of price-fixed myrtle. In 1936, American Jews organized a counter-boycott of German products. In 1989 Jews boycotted the 50th anniversary of WWII in Poland. In the 90’s, the Reform movement proposed boycotts of several states. In 2008 Israelis in Acre boycotted Arab merchants. Jewish organizations have at various times promoted boycotts of Pepsi, Coke, Burger King, and Starbucks. Were these signs of bigotry or simply acts born out of principle?

Divestment, too, is an everyday investment activity. Whether to avoid supporting defense or tobacco industries, or to promote green products, we often align our investments with our ethics. Churches apply their own teachings to guide investments. Catholic Church doctrine on abortion and contraception frequently initiates their divestments. Similarly, many Protestant churches have pursued selective divestments because of the Occupation, not because they hate the people who brought them the Old Testament.

Finally, American sanctions have been imposed on Cuba over human rights abuses which have affected far fewer people than in Palestine. Sanctions have also been slapped on Iran in recent years. Unfortunately, sanctions as practiced by the US have often been a proxy for warfare. Despite Israel’s hostility to the US and intransigence toward repeated demands to end settlements, any use of sanctions on Israel – at least by that name – would not fly in the US in the present political climate. However, pulling the plug on Israel’s many sources of American taxpayer-funded revenue might during our economic disaster. Israel is becoming an economic liability.

BDS can be applied selectively

I tend to agree with critics of BDS that it’s basically a poor replacement for US pressure on Israel. But what kind of pressure could be applied – and what grassroots efforts would convince the US government to translate public sentiment into political action? Largely due to AIPAC, Christian Evangelicals, and other Jewish organizations’ stranglehold on the discourse, the average citizen’s more moderate views generally go unheeded by his congressman.

Administrations come and go, going through the motions of proximity talks and shuttle diplomacy, but it is increasingly a heartless, unconvincing performance. BDS is a real way that individuals can move the Israel-Palestine issue forward. While the BDS movement may prefer to see their whole program implemented, we are free to select those tactics we are comfortable with. Here are my preferences:

The most effective pressure on Israel to end the Occupation and vacate illegal settlements would be withdrawing its $3.15 billion a year military subsidy. If this does not work, it’s money well saved – especially since Israel just joined the OECD, an exclusive club for the wealthiest nations. But if Americans still want to reward Israel’s bad behavior, these funds could be placed in escrow to assist the eventual evacuation of settlements rather than to subsidize them.

Temporarily cutting joint economic and energy development projects, suspending the 1985 free trade agreement with Israel, and making it known that we will no longer be a rubber-stamp for Israel at the UN would also go a long way toward resolving this issue. The United States keeps timidly pleading with Israel to simply freeze settlements, not evacuate them, and is generally rewarded with the diplomatic version of an obscene gesture by Israel. Using leverage with demands, rather than useless pleading, is a language Israel will finally understand.

I oppose a cultural boycott of Israel because I am opposed to the suppression of ideas by anyone. Avigdor Lieberman should have an opportunity to make his views public so that Americans can actually hear what spews out of his mouth. The same applies to athletic, artistic, academic, or any other human boycott. Despite Israel’s own use of collective punishment in the West Bank and Gaza, racist visa policies toward Arab Americans, and harassment of NGOs and critics, no individual Israeli should have to answer for people’s displeasure with his government, even if he supports its views. Here I agree with the critics.

I have no such ethical qualms about an economic boycott. But consumer boycotts of non-military Israeli products are economically meaningless. Most of the economic value Israel receives from the United States is in joint military projects and outright gifts, such as the recent Iron Dome giveaway, and this could be best addressed by sanctions.

Boycotts of Israel’s non-military products are economically meaningless for another reason: Americans have not been known to deprive themselves of consumer goods for political principles for roughly 40 years. And that’s the problem with tactics – they depend on the times and the situation. Resurrecting anti-Apartheid economic tactics, despite all the “existential” warnings from the Reut Institute and others, will probably be ineffectual today.

One of the attacks on BDS is that it targets only Israel, but it’s hardly the case. Foreign and multinational corporations producing particularly repugnant products, such as the militarized Caterpillar and Volvo tractors used to crush Palestinian homes (and occasionally people), have more often been the target of boycotts and divestment. Motorola has been a target because of products used for monitoring the “separation wall” and on civilians in Gaza. The list of targeted companies includes almost every global defense corporation from Boeing to Raytheon.

While an individual consumer may find it impossible to avoid the Motorola cell phone that comes with his phone plan, divestment is a more powerful tool. Investors have every right to eliminate tobacco, nuclear, or Occupation-related industries from their portfolio.

Don’t write off BDS

There are many Jews who, despite the conflation of BDS with anti-Semitism, “existential” threats, “blood libels,” and other forms of rhetorical hysteria, simply want the Occupation to end. We see BDS as a less-than-ideal grassroots tactic in the absence of any real political will to create Two States. Whatever your flavor of Zionism (or not), a Jewish rebirth in Israel should not mean the demise of Palestinians or their hopes self-determination.

BDS should not be regarded just as a monolithic movement but as a non-violent toolkit for registering our individual and collective rejection of Israel’s Occupation. You don’t need either the BDS movement itself or Jewish defense organizations to tell you which elements you can or can’t use. Moral foreign policy would be ideal, sanctions would be great, divestments are your own concern, and the jury’s out on the effectiveness or appropriateness of economic and cultural boycotts.

But let your own conscience be your guide. Don’t write off BDS.

(Welcome to the Soviet Union)

Today Israel barred Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank. Chomsky was to have given a talk at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.

Chomsky attempted to cross into Palestine at the Allenby Bridge, directly into the Occupied Territories, and his speech would not have posed a security risk to Israel.

Barring foreign nationals from Palestinian territory is one more method of denying Palestinian sovereignty. It is also a way of punishing critics of Israel, even while it violates international human rights agreements. It is a way of collectively punishing Palestinians for their resistance to the Occupation. And, importantly, it is another nail in the coffin for Israeli democracy. Like the former Soviet Union, Israel is rapidly becoming a nation that can’t take any sort of criticism – whether from liberal Jews or American politicians who perform obeisance at AIPAC conventions.

Israel has limited entry to the Occupied Territories to non-governmental organizations, intellectuals with critiques of the Israeli state and, amusingly, this week deported a Spanish clown who was going to perform in Ramallah, on the grounds that the clown was a terrorist.

In 2008, Ha’aretz reported that the number of people denied entry to Israel had risen by 61%. Krista Johnson, an employee of an NGO, was denied entry to Israel after attending a Sabeel conference in Boston (suggesting that the Shi Bet is spying on American here in the US). A Druze family was denied re-entry into Israel after making a condolence call to family in Syria. Kate Maynard, a British human rights lawyer, was denied entry to Israel in 2005. Recently, Jared Malsin, an American Jew who had been hired by the Palestinian news service Maan to produce English-language news, was arrested, imprisoned and deported. Israel has regularly turned away physicians attempting to enter Gaza to provide medical care. One American Jewish critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein, has been banned for ten years from entering Israel.

If you are an Arab-American, travel is even more difficult. Last year an American law student from Harvard was deported because she was conducting research on Bedouin land claims.

What does the United States Department of State have to say about all this? > “Palestinian-Americans Must Enter Through Allenby.  For some time, the government of Israel has not permitted Americans with Palestinian nationality (or even, in some cases, the claim to it) to enter Israel via Ben Gurion Airport.  Many are sent back to the U.S. upon arrival, though some are permitted in, but told they cannot depart Israel via Ben Gurion without special permission (which is rarely granted).”

In other words, we know our own citizens are being racially profiled but we aren’t going to do anything about it.

This reminds me of the Cold War decades when one of the things which upset Americans most about the Soviet Union was the tight control of cultural visas. Or that American Jews were routinely arrested or banned from the Soviet Union for attempting to free or organize Soviet Jews.

Of course, for Palestinians themselves, deportation is nothing new. During the Nakba roughly 800,000 Palestinians were expelled and not permitted to re-enter Israel. In 1967 another quarter of a million Palestinians were expelled. Since 2002 Israel has deported “undesirables” from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, truly making Gaza a gulag.

While the word continues to look away from these violations of human rights, many Israelis and a growing number of American and European Jews are becoming concerned by the erosion of any last pretense of democracy. Deportations and expulsions may have served the Soviet Union for some time, but eventually the contradictions of that system collapsed it. Creating “Fortress Israel” may play to the most extreme elements in Israeli and American Jewish society, but ultimately it is a prescription for self-destruction.

Today President Obama just handed Israel another $205 million gift of American taxpayer money. Beyond the $3+ billion the United States gives Israel annually without question or oversight, this extra gift is intended to subsidize an Israeli missile defense system called “Iron Dome” built entirely by Rafael Advanced Systems, one of Israel’s larger defense contractors.

This little present comes immediately on the heels of Israel’s acceptance into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – a club for the 31 richest nations in the world.

Aside from the many questions raised after Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza, its refusal to stop building illegal settlements, the demolition of Arab homes in East Jerusalem, and its open hostility to American efforts to restart peace talks, this no-strings-attached gift begs an additional question – why are we giving an ostensibly rich nation our money?

Most taxpayers may not realize it, but American costs of subsidizing Israel’s military are enormous. Massachusetts taxpayers alone will spend $870 million over the next 8 years on military aid to Israel. Our neighbors in Rhode Island will have $130 million diverted to Israel – enough to pay for health care for 10% of the state.

Here in Massachusetts the money siphoned off taxpayers could provide 10,000 families with housing grants each year, job training for almost 15,000 unemployed workers, could fund early education for 26,000 children, or primary health care for 721,000 citizens. Why are the Tea Party patriots not in revolt over this?

In a time of extreme economic distress, this spending is simply reckless. And it does nothing to ensure Israel’s long-term security. Only by pressuring Israel to go back to honestly-brokered talks with the Palestinians will that nation ever become more secure.

In squandering American tax money to subsidize an Israeli defense boondoggle, we are throwing away any leverage on Israel to solve this issue once and for all. Instead, we are signaling to the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors that the United States has no intention of being honest peace brokers. Next to Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, our ongoing military support of Israel and its occupation of Palestinians is (and is rightly seen as) a third war.

But, worst of all, we are stealing money from our own citizens. If American taxpayers begrudge arts programs in the schools, satellite library locations and wonder where all their tax money is going, here’s a good place to start tightening the belt. Tell your congressman it’s time to pull the plug on military aid to Israel. For that matter, we could stand to reign in our own “defense” spending.