topic by
real watcher
5/30/2002 (19:21) |
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Israel and ..
Wednesday, May 29 2002 @ 04:35 PM GMT
By Alexander Cockburn
Right in the wake of House Majority leader Dick Armey's
explicit call for two million Palestinians to be booted out
of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza as well,
came yet one more of those earnest articles accusing a
vague entity called 'the left' of anti-Semitism.
This one was in Salon, by a man called Dennis Fox,
identified as an associate professor of legal studies and
psychology at the University of Illinois. Leaving nothing
to chance, Salon titled Fox's contribution, 'The shame of
the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and anti-Semitism are
undercutting the moral legitimacy of Israel's critics.'
Over the past 20 years I've learned there's a quick way
of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a
brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing 'the
left' of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying
strategies. Particularly intricate, though I think
well-intentioned, was a recent column by Naomi Klein
who wrote that 'It is precisely because anti-Semitism is
used by the likes of Sharon that the fight against it must
be reclaimed.' Is Klein saying the anti-globalization
movement has forgotten how to be anti-anti-Semitic? I
don't think it has. Are all denunciations of the
government of Israel to be prefaced by strident
assertions of pro-Semitism?
If this is the case, can we not ask that those concerned
about the supposed silence of the left regarding
anti-Semitism demonstrate their own good faith by
denouncing Israel's behavior towards Palestinians? Klein
did, but most don't.
In a recent piece in the New York Times Frank Rich
managed to write an entire column puportedly about
Jewish overreaction here to news reporting from Israel
without even a fleeting reference to the fact that there
might be some factual basis for reports presenting Israel
and its leaders in a bad light, even though he found time
for plenty of abuse for the 'inexcusable' Arafat. Isn't
Sharon 'inexcusable' in Rich's book?
So the left gets the rotten eggs and those tossing the
eggs mostly don't feel it necessary to concede that
Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable
intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress
Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller
enclaves and in all likelihood ultimately drive them into
the sea or Lebanon or Jordan or Dearborn or the space
in Dallas/Fort Worth airport between the third and fourth
runways (the bold Armey plan).
Here's how Fox begins his article for Salon: ''Let's move
back,' my wife insisted when she saw the nearby
banner: 'Israel Is a Terrorist State!' We were at the
April 20 Boston march opposing Israel's incursion into
the West Bank. So drop back we did, dragging our
friends with us to wait for an empty space we could put
between us and the anti-Israel sign.' Inference by Fox:
the banner is grotesque, presumptively anti-Semitic. But
there are plenty of sound arguments that from the
Palestinian point of view Israel is indeed a terrorist
state, and anyway, even if it wasn't, the description
would not per se be evidence of anti-Semitism. Only if
the banner read 'All Jews are terrorists', would Fox
have a point.
Of course the rhetorical trick is to conflate 'Israel' or
'the State of Israel' with 'Jews' and argue that they
are synonymous. Ergo, to criticize Israel is to be
anti-Semitic. Leave aside the fact that many of Israel's
most articulate critics are Jews, honorably committed to
the cause of justice for all in the Middle East. Many Jews
just don't like hearing bad things said about Israel,
same way they don't like reading articles about the
Jewish lobby here. Mention the lobby and someone like
Fox will rush into print denouncing those who 'toy with
the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the
press.'
These days you can't even say that New York Times is
owned by a Jewish family without risking charges that
you stand in Goebbels' shoes. I even got accused of
anti-Semitism the other day for mentioning that the Jews
founded Hollywood, which they most certainly did, as
recounted in a funny and informative book published in
1988, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented
Hollywood by Neal Gabler.
So cowed are commentators (which is of course the
prime motive of those charges of anti-Semitism) that
even after the US Congress recently voted full-throated
endorsement of Sharon and Israel, with only two
senators and 21 US reps (I exclude the chickenshit 28
who voted 'present') voting against, you could scarcely
find a mainstream paper prepared to analyze this
astounding demonstration of the power of AIPAC and
other Jewish organizations, plus the Christian Right and
the military industrial complex which profits enormously
from military aid to Israel since Congress put through a
law concerning US overall aid to Israel, to the effect that
75 per cent of such supplies must be bought from US
firms like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, lobbying for
Israel.
The encouraging fact is that despite the efforts of the
Southern Povery Law Center to drum up funds by
hollering that the Nazis are about to march down Main
Street, there's remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US,
and almost none that I've ever been able to detect on
the American left, which is of course amply stocked with
non-self-hating Jews. It's comical to find the left's
assailants trudging all the way back to Leroi Jones and
the 60s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic jibes. The
less encouraging fact is that there's not nearly enough
criticism of Israel's ghastly conduct towards Palestinians,
which in its present phase is testing the waters for
reaction here to a major ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,
just as Armey called for.
So why don't people like Fox write about Armey's
appalling remarks, (which the White House declared he
hadn't made,) instead of trying to change the subject
with nonsense about anti-Semitism? It's not anti-Semitic
to denounce ethnic cleansing, a strategy which
according to recent polls, around half all Israeli Jews
now heartily endorse. In this instance the left really has
nothing to apologize for, but those who accuse of it of
anti-Semitism certainly do. They're apologists for policies
put into practice by racists, ethnic cleansers and in
Sharon's case, an unquestioned war criminal who should
be tried for his crimes.
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