The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics
Johann Hari
The Independent UK, 8 May 2008
http://tinyurl.com/6lr6ue
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to
describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to
intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is
nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as
anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn't especially im****tant, but it illustrates how the wider
process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the
Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the
Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the
anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling
me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also re****ted from Gaza and the West Bank. Last
week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being
pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land,
contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been
do***ented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media
monitoring groups – including Honest Re****ting and Camera – said I was
an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in
North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came
flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met
like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land,
"Honest Re****ting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews
"poisoning the wells."
If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was
detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the
West Bank, "Honest Re****ting" will say you didn't explain "the real
cause": the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau,
calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those
responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to
the right of most Israelis.
Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent
figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right.
Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For
Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing:
"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such
movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous
in many respects to some massive urban renewal."
If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of
this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites
and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last
year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this
mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to
peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi
David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide",
and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews.
Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial"
people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist
population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may
deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a
national project". Honest Re****ting quotes Phillips as a model of
reliable re****ting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that
by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic
tendencies.
Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas
government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month
found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving
it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an
Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe
and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through
the major human rights re****ts. There is nothing there you can't read in
the mainstream Israeli press every day.
Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to
Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the
interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the
Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human
rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the
racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US,
Carter has widely been called "a racist". Several universities have even
refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the
Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood
relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time
Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually
empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be
Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash
in.
Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross
misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an
anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book.
But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz
had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his
book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to
make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even
claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek and two
slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign
worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for
speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Re****ting becoming
more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument?
Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the
hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this
campaign of demonisation is damaging us all.
It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of
their plight.
It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an
aggressive and futile path. And it damages dias****a Jews, because it
makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch
said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of
decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
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