My questioning of the antisemitism moniker has prompted some interesting comments on Tony Lermans blog. I thought I might as well post my response to those comments: For the record: I don’t think I am all that different from many responsible people on the liberal side of the equation over here (America). I am more or less where President Obama is on the issue, I believe, and I also support Jeremy Ben-Ami’s efforts at “J Street” to support a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” solution to the ongoing Middle East conflict. I do not support Hamas or sympathize with Hamas. I also detest the way they use antisemitic tropes to make their anti-Zionist arguments. This leads their supporters and their opponents to mistake the anti-Zionist sources of Hamas’s resistance to Israel. I also do not condone the use of antisemitic tropes, or any form of violence against Jews, anywhere or in any form--certainly not in Europe or America, and not in Israel/Palestine. Just as I do not condone the use of violence against Palestinians, in Israel/Palestine or elsewhere. I am pro-Israel, and I am also pro-Palestinian--above all I am pro-peace. As a liberal democratic pluralist--and Jew, I do not believe in the exclusive logic of “us” v. “them” but rather in the inclusive logic that allows both “you” and “me” to live together on this small planet in peace and prosperity, pursuing happiness as we see fit. Ultimately there is no “them”, only “us”. Call me naïve, but I think it is a huge, tragic mistake for Jews, whether in Israel or outside of Israel, to demonize their enemies to such an extent that the only solution appears to be violence. And that is what is achieved by calling each and every criticism of Israel and Israeli policy, no matter how self-defeating that policy is, or how unnecessarily provocative to the rest of the international community and to Muslims and Arabs in particular, “antisemitic”. The fact that Jewish communities outside Israel then support Israel right or wrong, out of a sense of solidarity, also does not help, because it implicates those communities in Israel’s behavior. Calling criticism of, or protests against, these Jewish communities for this support of Israeli policy “antisemitism” is equally misguided, because it is like waving a “magic wand” to end all discussion and obfuscate the actual causes of hostility to Jews and to Israel, when what is desperately needed is clear-eyed analysis of what Israel and its Jewish supporters worldwide can do to come to an accommodation with its Palestinian adversaries and their supporters in the Arab and Muslim world. That is what we should be doing, figuring out the real causes of this hostility--which have to do with damage to real Palestinian interests since Israel’s creation--looking for real partners to make peace, encouraging co-operation with reasonable people on the other side (which there are, I assure you), and, yes, finding some way to have Hamas and Hezbollah, and all the other militant enemies of Israel, or at least the more reasonable parts of those organizations, come to the negotiating table. That is what the British ended up doing with the IRA in Northern Ireland, and, with a few stumbles here and there, it has worked very well (and solved a political/national problem caused by the division of Ireland into North and South as old as, if not older than, the Arab-Israeli conflict).As, I believe, Yitzhak Rabin said once, you don’t make peace with your friends, but with your enemies. That is not the strategy being pursued by the current Israeli government and its supporters. A piece by Michael Oren(former ambassador of Israel to the USA) the other day, in the Washington Post, basically said “Give war a chance”--almost exactly a century to the day after the start of the First World War. Apparently irony is not his forte. But nor is long-term thinking--war will never give Israel the long-term peace and security that it needs, and if it continues to defy the international community by building settlements on land of which is not, by international law, sovereign, that peace is highly unlikely ever to be achieved. And yes, I do think that the current Israeli government’s policies are not only bad for Israel, but also an obvious cause of increased hostility to Jews the world over. They are not simply reviving a sleeping beast of past prejudices, they are--unnecessarily--creating anger against Israel and Jews. If one claims that the “other side” (Hamas etc.) is also provoking Israel into these actions, and exacerbating the anger by manipulating antisemitic tropes, then I accept that, but I would say--revealing my own prejudices-- that Israelis and Jews ought to be more intelligent than to fall into this obvious propaganda trap of their enemies. This road of Jewish machodom leads nowhere good. The only way to give Israel peace is by negotiation and compromise, not war and land-grabs. Simply calling anyone who says otherwise “antisemitic” might wave the “magic wand” that makes the critic an inheritor of the Nazi genocide’s mantle, and hence end all reasoned discussion of the issues, but it ends up leaving Israel and its well-wishers ignorant of the true grounds of its enemies’ hostility, and creates obstacles to mutual understanding and the pursuit of mutual interests. Instead of calling each other names, and casting blame and aspersions at will, we should be trying to set the world aright--starting with the Israel/Palestine issue--and, what with the current state of the world, Ebola, ISIS, global warming, Putinism, there are plenty more issues to fix after that…..
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 19:44:49 +0000
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