By Robin Shepherd, The Commentator
Of all the bigotries, in the world today, one stands out for special consideration. That is not simply because it is so odious, though it is certainly that. It is because it is the one bigotry that presents a clear and present danger of translating into a genocidal outcome. It is also the one form of bigotry that has been openly accepted and internalised by large sections of a British and West-European political intelligentsia that remains dominated by the liberal-Left.
I am talking, of course, about anti-Zionism – a uniquely discriminatory agenda aimed at deligitimising the State of Israel and ending that country’s existence as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
In the context of Iranian threats to destroy the country, the loss of Turkey as an ally and the new pre-eminence of extreme, anti-Israeli Islamists in Egypt, the rantings of Western anti-Zionists have now acquired a new and more dangerous significance.
Think of it this way: it’s one thing to spout abuse about black people to a group of equally bigoted but basically passive racists when nobody else is listening; it’s quite another to do exactly the same thing in front of a frenzied, knife-wielding mob of skinheads heading towards a black neighbourhood.
I make no direct analogy, but enter Ben White, author of, “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide“. On Sunday, he published an extensive piece in the leading weekly magazine of the British Left, The New Statesman. Essentially, it’s a trash job on Israeli democracy. It, perversely, charges a British pro-Israel grouping, BICOM, with having unwittingly revealed, in a series of recent essays, that Israel is not in fact a proper democracy at all: it’s a racist “ethnocracy“ run by and for Jews.
You’ve heard it all before, of course. And I will come to the “substance“ (if such a word is appropriate in the circumstances) in a moment.
But let me first re-emphaise the point made above, and make it relevant to the fate of Israel in the Middle East.
For there is nothing new about fanatical hostility to Israel in the British and European mainstream. The Guardian newspaper – the media-intellectual home of the British Left and, effectively, the house journal of the BBC – has been at it for years.
What is new is the context in the Middle East where Israel now looks set to be ensnared in a potentially deadly triangle of annihilationist regimes. On one point on that triangle is Turkey – a country that in little more than a blink of an eye has moved from being an ally to an enemy; a country whose leadership is increasingly using anti-Israeli rhetoric as a rallying cry and which has even gone so far as to threaten sending its warships to protect pro-Hamas “aid“ flotillas to Gaza.
Now draw a straight line from Ankara to Cairo for the second point on the triangle. Egypt’s parliamentary elections were resoundingly won by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists – both of which combine extreme forms of anti-Semitism with resolute opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. Together, they took over 70 percent of the seats.
Now go to Tehran, drawing the line necessary to complete the triangle from both Ankara and Cairo. (Iranian hostility to Israel surely needs no elaboration.)
That’s the neighbourhood Israel has to reckon with: Iran to its east; Turkey to its north and Egypt to its south. There are lots of other unpleasant characters to contend with. But these are the region’s big three – each with populations approximately 10 times greater than Israel’s.
Now, back to Britain and Ben White’s article in the New Statesman. Mostly, it’s a re-hash of the old arguments that because Israel is a Jewish state it can’t be a true democracy. The fact that it’s had an elected parliament for longer than almost half the countries in the European Union – the 10 members from central and eastern Europe plus Spain, Portugal and Greece – is obviously not mentioned. Nor is the fact that it has one of the finest supreme courts in the world. Nor is the fact that Arabs in Israel have a tradition of living in a liberal-democratic environment that has been absent for Arabs living anywhere else in the region. (And the way things are going that is not likely to change due to the so-called “Arab Spring. “)
Instead, there is a list of items starting with the Law of Return which purports to demonstrate White’s case by showing that Israel has given a certain, minimum degree of primacy on immigration and citizenship policy to Jews over anyone else.
But since that is also the minimum that was necessary to correct a vast historic wrong done to the Jewish people who were driven out of a homeland to which they have now in large numbers returned, White’s argument amounts to nothing more than the tired old mantra that the Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancient homeland and Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.
It’s worth pondering on this for a moment. All democracies have immigration policies which discriminate in one way or another. People from other countries have priority in the immigration queue due to ancestral ties and marriage, for example. People without such ties are often excluded from that queue altogether.
But in other cases the country in question has not had Israel’s need to reconstitute and reconnect the people with the land and the state. That need derives from the uniquely painful history of dispersion and persecution of the Jewish people – a point that White, of course, shows no sign in his article of recognising.
Unless you are up against a thoroughgoing anti-Semite who believes that Jews and only Jews are to be denied the right to meaningful self-determination these are easy arguments to win, and the ground has been covered many times.
If you’re not Jewish and you get into Israel you will live and work in one of the freest, law-based democracies in the world. You will have opportunities to go to great universities and better yourself. You will have access to a health system that is the envy of much of the world, and certainly far superior to Britain’s National Health Service.
It has its downsides, and very particular downsides — just as Britain’s downsides are particular to Britain, France’s to France, America’s to America. But as countries go, the Israelis have made a pretty good go of it by any standards, and they should be proud of themselves.
Which is more than can be said for Ben White and the New Statesman.
Consider this:
“Search BICOM’s essays in vain…,“ he says, “for serious acknowledgement that Israel the ‘liberal democracy’ was founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and mass land expropriation; that the only reason there is a ‘Jewish majority’ at all, is because of the historic fact of the forced exclusion of Palestinians from their homes and lands.“
The historical ignorance would be incredible if it weren’t so predictable. First, there was no policy of ethnic cleansing. As I have remarked many times before, if Israel had attempted to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians they did a remarkably bad job of it: between a fifth and a quarter of the Israeli population is not Jewish.
The departure of Palestinians in 1948 was due to the dislocations caused by a war started by the Palestinians and the Arabs themselves following their own rejection of the United Nations partition plan which would have formed a Jewish and an Arab state living side by side.
This was not Czechoslovakia after World War II where approximately three million ethnic Germans were expelled, their property expropriated. The German population of Bohemia and Moravia dropped from around a third to around half of one percent. Now that’s ethnic cleansing, and I am certain that White writes about it frequently. (Or would the gentleman in question be so kind as to correct me, giving reasons if he does not?)
Second, if the Palestinian/Arab side had accepted the partition plan, the Jewish state would still have had a Jewish majority as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the circumstances of the time should know. White really needs to check out some schoolboy-level facts.
But I return to the central purpose of this essay. White is well known for his extreme hostility to Israel and, sadly for the future of our own liberal democracy, there are many like him.
What matters is that with the emergence of an exceptionally dangerous environment in the Middle East, mainstream media outlets are sending out the message that the deligitimisation of the most defamed and threatened state in the world is acceptable practice.
If the West is looking to calm anti-Israeli emotions as the Islamists take power, how will we respond when they retort that respected magazines in Britain and elsewhere in Europe publish sentiments that are much the same as their own?
In a free society, White and the New Statesman have the right to say what they want about Israel. Their incitement is too indirect to be actionable under any legal provision I am aware of. They are too distant from the object of their hatred for the skinhead analogy above to apply to them directly.
But make no mistake about it. In an interconnected world, the validation of prejudice is no longer something with a purely local character. You do not need to be standing in front of a crowd with a megaphone to have an effect on people.
What White and the New Statesman are part of is a globalised agenda of hate. They won’t be the ones to pull the trigger. They’ll just help the person who does pull the trigger feel that his victim had it coming all along.
Robin Shepherd is the owner/publisher of @CommentatorIntl. You can follow him on Twitter @RobinShepherd1
Britain’s pre-war policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, blocking the creation of a Jewish homeland that had been promised in the Balfour Declaration and the partition plan, all contributed to complicitly in the virtual annihilation of European Jewry.
Following World War Two, largely due to Jewish resistance fighters, the British admitted defeat in administering Palestine and withdrew.
Ever since, the British ego has remained bruised, following only the second humiliation to the British Empire since being booted out of America.
Although British politicians profess to be friends of Israel, its perpetual condemnation of Israeli acts of self-defence and reverence for the “dispossed Palestinians” belie their status as an ally. With friends like this, who needs enemies?
Unfortunately Israeli leaders have been so obsessed with courting the favour of the British, that they have thus far failed to expose the shame of British collaberation in the efforts to exterminate the Jewish people, both before and after the Shoah.
The acceptance out of desparation of the British and later the UN partition plan, does not negate the eternality of the legality of Jewish residence, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, according to the Torah, the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations’ San Remo Conference, which was also confirmed by the US Congress.
Following the unification of Fatah and Hamas{a unversally proscribed terrorist organisation}, the Oslo Accords must be torn up, and the time has surely come for Israel to make the case for extending Jewish sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.
There is a rising discontent with Muslim fundamentalism in the West, and Israel’s case for the unviability of an Arab Palestinian state west of the Jordan and Israeli annexation of the territories will increasingly be persuasive.
Baruch Hashem the Jew-haters are now in the minority.
“Source for what? — the upper line or the bottom?
It is remarkable to note that Mr. White seeks ideological support for his assertions in a parenthetical (literally)underlying assertion: namely,
that “due to the (theologically false) mergence of Zionism with Judaism”
[Counter Punch, June 18, 2002]..blah, blah.
Would that he would step out of his ideological parenthesis, and elucidate all as to why ‘it ain’t necessarily so’. Theologically.
genealogically Jews constitute a sub racial group, which traces it’s origins on the male side to Abraham or at least to one from the time Abraham was supposed to have lived.
What’s your point? I never said that all mankind did not have common original origins.
Why not extend your gene pool logic back to Adam and Eve?
Jewish genes are as widely dispersed as the Jews. Yet having some Jewish genetic material does not make one Jewish or Israelite unless they can show unbroken continuity of decent from a Jewish matrilineal line. Otherwise they would like any gentile need to formally convert to be considered part of our tribes.
I prefer to use anti-Jew (Jew Hater)and anti-Judaism,more descriptive terms, which at it’s core is anti-The G-d of Israel.
Jewish nationalism is central to the beliefs and practice of Judaism and cannot be separated and still be true to the intent and purpose of being Jewish.
The Land of Israel is fundamental to the purposes of Jewish existence. Modern political Zionism only gives the practical form to the core Jewish religious commandments. The Jewish people is a National-Religious people whose fulfillment of purpose rests in the reclamation of Eretz Yisrael and in the Jewish institutions that govern it. Israel is unique among the nations, only the Jewish people is a people for whom it is a religious and national obligation to establish an independent polity. As important to the physical reclamation of the land is the physical return of the Jewish people to the biblically promised lands of our forefathers.
G-d has promised the Jewish people the Land of Israel as the physical homeland for its national existence. There can be no other reasons for the establishment of a Jewish State other than for it to represent the totality of Torah thought and observance. Put more succinctly, the only viable Jewish state is a state in which Jews behave as Jews: that the law of the land is the Law of the Jews. There is no other way for one to justify the need for an independent Jewish polity.
Modern Zionism established some of the prerequisites: The reclamation of the land and the in-gathering of the exiles.
In summation, Zionism is Judaism and Judaism is Zionism.
dweller says:
Your source is?
The second one was more a message to the Russians than the Japanese.
Not the first.
Antisemitism and antizionism–both are of the same fabric.All Jews are
Israelites but not all Israelites are Jews. Yet, they are from the same fabric
as One Nation of Israel—different tribes but One nation. The tribe of Judah
was one of twelve and their members were called Jews.
Judaism is Zionism
Is war a moral act? War is moral when it is fought for moral ideals and principles. There is no greater moral principle than fighting in self defense and the preservation of as many of your own people as possible while killing as many of the enemy as needed to prevail as quickly as possible. Shortening any conflict saves lives on both sides.
The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo were far more destructive and took more human life than the two A bombs dropped on Japan. Those bombs were a message to the Russians more than the Japanese.
In Judaism Jews are commanded to defend themselves and even fight rather than pay tribute of any kind, even if straw and hay are demanded in payment. In Judaism whatever G-d says is moral.
Great thinking Whitson, Israel can easily defeat these nations using deadly force, pacify the natives, and then commence a twenty year occupation and finally install pro Israeli surrogates. Quite doable.
WOW!! Sounds ominous! Turkey to the North; Iran to the East; Egypt to
the South. It’s an ideal situation. Israel has them surrounded and can
attack in all directions at the same time. Excellent military strategy.
It evens up the odds and shortens their supply lines. Remember who has
“THE CLUB”.
Well, they began losing their prominence, but they didn’t disappear from the UK, not right away.
e.g., Google:
“Orde [Charles] Wingate,”
“J.H. Patterson,”
“Richard Meinertzhagen,”
etc.
That’s the wrong white powder you’ve been snorting, fella. You really gotta lay off that Dutch Cleanser stuff; it’ll corrode your synapses for sure.
Ah, but it DOES involve the language of moralizing (if only in spite of itself).
The problem here is that you’re theorizing strictly from universalistic assumptions, Bland, without looking to the particulars of the specific people you’re referencing. So it leads you into an intellectual cul-de-sac.
Look, the objective in combating antizionism is, as you rightly conclude, to defend Israel.
But who is to do the defending? (Okay, okay: who — in the final analysis — is to do the defending?)
— obviously, the Jews themselves. Ultimately, it must always come down to the Jews themselves.
But now, how do you get the Jews (of all peoples) to be willing to spill the enemy’s blood — rivers of it, if need be — without those Jews first seeing (for themselves) the morality of their own existence?
In the end, in order to defend Israel, you HAVE to speak the language of morality after all
— but not to the world.
To the JEWS.
As for the difference between antizionism & antisemitism:
Antizionism is the world’s weapon against Jewish nationalism.
Traditional antisemitism was the weapon of the world against individual Jews — when individuality was all they had.
The difference between antisemitism & antizionism is that the latter begrudges Jews their strength as a people, as a collectivity — and their power to control their destiny as a nation — something they didn’t have before statehood.
To say that one ‘isn’t antisemitic but only antizionist’
— amounts to saying, ‘I prefer my Jews. . . . well, frankly. . . . weak.’
what about the Heredis community of Israel who largely don’t recognize the authority of the government and don’t regard themselves as Zionists- how would you consider them, antisemites? They are the fastest growing segment of Israeli society
I think that Ike, who had some experience with war, was perfectly correct to voice his hatred for nuclear devastation.
The New Statesman is edited by Mehdi Hussein. Need I say more?
One can not exist without the other. The person who says that he.she likes Jews and does not like Israel, is a liar.
Then, I suggest that the Jews learn the difference. You can’t fight antizionism with the same weapons you used to fight antisemitism. Achmadinejad will not be stopped by community organizers, lawyers and marches. He will be stopped by bombs; hang the rest. Besides, the antisemites are right: The Jews belong in Palestine.
Two completely separate points:
To Bland there may be a difference between antisemitism and antizionism, but to the Jew who cares there is no difference. “Morality” is too poorly defined to be worth considering in making the distinction that Bland seeks. “Suppression of minorities” as a guiding principle – Jewish or Muslim – in Great Britain does not make sense either. The dissimilarity between Jews’ goals and Muslim goals as citizens within British culture are as real as the similarities. Language has gotten all fouled up with differences that make a difference and differences that don’t. Morality or “suppression of minorities” are far too abstract to depend upon in forming British policy at home. Far be it from me to formulate a good policy, but I know a bad one when I see it.
Let us clearly understand that White is opposed to all national entities, but he is particularly opposed to Jewish national identity because when historic Judaism informs policy, practice, interaction, self-perception, perception of others, etc., the outcome is likely to be more successful than anything that White can conceive of or produce in the real world. White is livid about the roaring successes of the Jewish state that should not exist in the workers’ paradise. Good enough, a la Alinsky, is never good enough. In a proposed public conversation with White, he would be hard pressed to allow anything positive out of his mouth about Israel. Alinsky (as a tactic) and Marx (as a philosophy) would not permit it. What we have here is White as a blinded savage animal who feels cornered by Israel’s apparent success. Anything that comes out of his foaming mouth is justified by his need protect the purity of his faith.
Yeah — I’m glad Ike was just a General, and the President was a more sensible person. Eisenhower got his chance at being President — a time, by the way, during which the US developed one nuclear weapon system after another and our field commanders had the authority to start a nuclear war. I was too young under his administration to comment. All I know, is that while the people of Hungary were crying out for out help, Ike was too busy running for re-election and stabbing our allies in the back in Suez. He may have done the right thing; I wasn’t in the White House at the time, so I don’t know. Dick Nixon cut his teeth in Presidential politics under Ike.
It’s easy to be an idealist, when you’re not the one who has to make the decisions. It’s easy to be reckless too. God help our leaders.
Bland demarcates the difference brilliantly. And, he elucidates clearly the underlying amorality of politics, particularly geopolitics. Were Hiroshima, and Nagasaki moral acts? Dwight Eisenhower thought they were monstrous crimes against humanity.
As am I. How’d that happen?
I am with laura all the way.
Britain: a perfect storm of Jew-hatred
Ironically, Jewish Israel now exists because 100 years ago there were still a few Christian Zionists in England. Lord Balfour declared the formation of a Jewish State, in order to maintain Jewish support for England in World War One. (Some consider this to be a sign of HaShem’s Supervision).
But almost immediately afterwards, Christian Zionists disappeared from England (and now exist mostly in Red-State America).
With the disappearance of the British Christian Zionists, Jew-hatred in England reigned supreme, and incredibly, across every single aspect of the political spectrum. The British aristocrats hated Jews (politely, of course) as “uppity vulgar peasants”, the Conservatives hated Jews as “communists wrecking the Empire”, the socialist Labor Party hated Jews as “capitalist bankers”, the liberals hate Israeli Jews as “real nazis, colonialists, and imperialists”, the British christians (if any are left) hate the Jews as “christ-killing devils”, and the British muslims hate the Jews as “the enemies of islam and the prophet muhammad, the most perfect man who will ever live.”
The apologists for Britain will say that “it is only a coincidence” that christian Britain passively helped their christian German cousins to slaughter the Jews in europe, while forbidding their escape to Jewish palestine, while that today, the children of those christian Brits now single out Jewish Israel as the only illegitimate nation on earth, the only nation that deserves to be annihilated, and the “single greatest obstacle to world peace.”
(The race towards the bottom is on, though. Because of their lunatic liberalism, Britain, the EU, America, etc., are all essentially bankrupt, but so far there has not been a major crash because everyone agrees to pretend it is not there (our modern version of the Emperor’s New Clothes.)
If someone were to tell you that they want England destroyed but they don’t hate British people, would that sound credible to you? Bland, get real, you are smarter than that.
Bull! There is no difference whatsoever.
Which of course would mean the genocide of its Jews. Again, where is the differentiation? There is none. People who want Israel destroyed do so because they hate Jews. You play into the hands of rabid antisemites by saying there is a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. That enables them to pretend their hatred of Israel is not about hating Jews. How many times have I heard these cretins proclaim they are not antisemites, they are anti-Zionists. Speak to them long enough and their feelings about Jews are revealed. Clearly Ben White hates Israel because it is a Jewish state. He states so explicitly.
“Antisemitism” is not the same as Antizionism. Antisemitism was a movement, largely among Europeans, to rid their countries of Jews. One result of Antisemitism was the creation of the State of Israel, as a refuge for those Jews driven out of those countries. Antizionism, on the other hand, aims at destroying Israel, and largely ignores Jews in the rest of the world (who, of course, are always under the threat of Antisemitism).
Do you see the clear difference? Antisemitism involves intolerance within societies, and is usually combated with measures against intolerance. That is why Jews in the Galut got so involved in the movement in the US, for instance, to give blacks and other minorities equal rights. With the arrival of Muslims in the Galut, where they usually greatly outnumber Jews, the measures to curb Antisemitism have backfired: Now it is Moslems who demand equal rights; and “equal rights”, to them, means the right to bash Jews whenever and wherever they please. It has become one big sticky mess; and the solution today, as far as Jews are concerned, is to either (1) can their moralizing and leave the dangerous countries of the Galut (Israel is the obvious destination), or (2) try to change their identity and become non-Jews (P. S. Jews tried this before and it didn’t work; but who’s to stop a fool?)
Antizionism is such a completely different kettle of fish, it should have nothing to do with Antisemitism. Antizionism seeks to destroy Israel. The Jews of Israel are foolish, to try to use the methods used previously to combat Antisemitism (methods, which in the long run don’t work anyway), in order to combat Antizionism. The way to combat Antizionism is to defend Israel. This does not involve the language of moralizing: It involves the language of diplomacy, namely, nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, coupled with an adamant refusal to cede one inch of Israeli territory, nor one iota of sovereignty. It involves destroying those who want to harm Israel, and holding so-called “friends” accountable to prove their friendship.
But moralising? THERE IS NOTHING MORAL ABOUT POLITICS, ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY, NOR ABOUT THE NEED FOR NATIONS TO EXIST: These are amoral entities; and there are plenty of reminders from our past, from Dresden to Nagasaki, to remind us that even the most “moral” of people must stoop to the most “immoral” behavior, to deal with them.
“Antisemitism” is about “morality”. “Antizionism” is not. There’s a BIG difference.