A week ago a Ha'aretz tweet linking a story about an insurance company's refusal to insure a Belgian Jewish kindergarten got 39 retweets and was independently tweeted many times over April 1 & 2.
Firm cancels Belgian Jewish kindergarten’s insurance due to 'high risk' of anti-Semitic attack
'It's an absolute
disgrace that the situation has come to this,' says Rabbi Menachem
Margolin, director of the European Jewish Association and of the
Rabbinical Center of Europe.
The article mostly centres on statements from the above-mentioned Rabbi Menachem Margolin such as:
First, not enough is being done to secure Jewish institutions in Europe
despite the repeated requests and numerous warnings – and consequently
insurance companies are using the situation to avoid the risk of
insuring Jewish kindergartens. What a surreal and cynical reality.
No proof Belgian insurer discriminated against Jewish school, watchdog says
Statement by Belgian
League Against Anti-Semitism follows reports that an unnamed firm
declined to insure a Jewish kindergarten citing an elevated risk of
attacks.
Now let's have a taste of the article:
There is no proof that a Belgian insurance company refused to insure
a Jewish kindergarten because it was deemed too risky, a Brussels-based
watchdog on anti-Semitism said.
The statement by the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA, follows reports
last week that an unnamed firm declined to insure a Jewish kindergarten
in Brussels, citing an elevated risk factor due to previous attacks on
Jewish targets in Belgium and Western Europe.
Joel Rubinfeld, a co-founder of the national
watchdog, told the La Capitale daily that after looking into the matter,
“There was no proof confirming a discriminatory character with regards
to a refusal.”
The news about the alleged refusal came from the
European Jewish Association, a lobby group that operates the
kindergarten in question. The association and the Israel-based Tal
Rabina public relations office alerted media to the matter without
naming the insurance company in question.
The association’s director, Menachem Margolin, and
Tal Rabina’s office did not reply to JTA queries asking them to identify
the insurance company to obtain their reaction.
I see. The insurance company was unnamed and the whistle-blowers were a "lobby group" and an "Israel-based PR office who "did not reply to ...queries".
To paraphrase the Rabbi Menachem Margolin there might be a surreal and cynical reality at play here.
Oh by the way. Ha'aretz's tweet that the first story might be bogus only got 9 retweets.
It's because they like Kerry but they're keeping it quiet. See this from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:
AIPAC’s support for the renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks is at this link on its website. Three sentences:
AIPAC welcomes the resumption of direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians. AIPAC has been supportive of Secretary Kerry’s efforts to achieve direct bilateral talks, and we commend his determined hard work and commitment. We hope that these discussions will lead to successful negotiations.
It is on its press page, which can be accessed from a link at the top of the organization’s home page.
I found out about the link, dated July 19, when I asked AIPAC on Tuesday for a statement on the renewed talks. The statement seems never to have been emailed to reporters or to congressional staffers, although other major Jewish groups published endorsements of the renewed talks, and AIPAC routinely emails its press releases. I’ve received every one on this page except for the peace talks endorsement.
I’ve confirmed the non-receipt with six other people, both on the Hill and in the media. A source close to AIPAC insists to me that the statement was widely emailed.
To be clear, AIPAC has strongly endorsed the renewed talks behind closed doors. This June 26 story about an off-the-record meeting with Democrats in the Senate, took place before the July 19 renewal of the talks, but well into Kerry’s efforts to get them started. At that point, the hearty endorsement conveyed by AIPAC was even more critical.
Which begs the question of why its July 19 statement is ostensibly only released upon request.
And what's for AIPAC not to like about Kerry? The plan is that with the Arab states in complete disarray, Morsi out of the way in Egypt and Hamas severely weakened by the deposing of Morsi, Abbas will give Israel everything it wants. Ok he has no legitimacy but then nor does Israel. But the last thing AIPAC wants to do is spoil things by going all triumphalistic and it can't really feign complaint lest the more amateurish groups in the lobby misread the signals.
So AIPAC likes the long face of Kerry but doesn't want to shout about it.
This is just a coincidence but an article I wrote many months ago to the New Left Project has been published. I re-post the beginning below with a link to the full article.
Norman Finkelstein’s recent book Knowing Too Much surveys the
trajectory of American Jews' infatuation with Israel in order to
show—this is Finkelstein's main point—that it has entered a stage of
disenchantment. But are the political implications of this
disenchantment the ones Finkelstein himself draws?
One chapter particularly worth reading in Finkelstein’s book is
dedicated to a thorough debunking of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's
"The Israeli Lobby made me do it"
explanation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and especially
the Iraq War. In an essay and subsequent book, Walt and Mearsheimer famously argued
that U.S. support for Israeli policies harms rather than serves
American interests, and explained it, along with much of the U.S.'s
behaviour in the Middle East, in terms of the machinations of pro-Israel
lobby groups.
In his chapter, Finkelstein establishes a core communality of interests
between Washington and Tel Aviv. Both fear indigenous local
self-assertion that would limit their ability to project power in the
region. Yesterday the principle threat was Egypt's Nasser; today it is
primarily Iran. Israel is fundamentally 'a creature of the West' and
therefore the only U.S. ally in the region whose subservience to the
U.S. stems from deep cultural and popular roots. It therefore continues
to be useful to the U.S. Moreover Finkelstein argues, correctly I
believe, that the probable effect of the 'Arab Spring' in the short-term
will be to increase U.S. foreign policy reliance on Israel, as an
island of pro-western stability in an increasingly volatile region.
Debunking 'The Israel Lobby'
Finkelstein meticulously exposes the leaps of logic that underpin
Mearsheimer and Walt’s theories, such as their claim that the failure of
Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon shows that the Bush administration
was coerced into supporting it, and their insistence that the Iraq war
was contrary to U.S. interests because it failed. (But did the war
“fail”? Only if one accepts the ridiculous justifications and
pie-in-the-sky metrics offered to the public.)
Finkelstein debunks the theory that different U.S. administrations
differed on policy towards Israel because of domestic electoral
concerns. He traces the common thread, ignored by Lobby enthusiasts,
connecting President Truman's tepid support for Israel's creation with
President Eisenhower's purely tactical disagreement with Israel
regarding the best way to remove Nasser from office. Finkelstein argues
cogently that, their protestations notwithstanding, Mearsheimer and Walt
are in fact accusing the American Jewish establishment of disloyalty on
the basis of alleged 'Jewish interests', an accusation Finkelstein
exposes as both false and based on flimsy reasoning.
The bulk of the proof takes Finkelstein into a deconstruction of the
terminology that serves as the basis of the allegations. He takes apart
the term 'neo-conservative', revealing the ingrained opportunism of its
alleged disciples, their almost full alignment with the mainstream U.S.
political vision of the world, and the impossibility of dividing Jewish
from non-Jewish advocates for the same U.S. dominance. He runs
methodically through the record of the Iraq War to demonstrate that
Mearsheimer and Walt's contentions are unsubstantiated and incoherent.
The coup de grace is an approving cite of the demolition of
their thesis on the Iraq War by Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative
himself. Mearsheimer and Walt's supreme achievement seems to be to have
made at least one neoconservative sound reasonable.
Barack Obama, Chief Marketing Officer of US Arms Inc., the greatest arms and war conglomerate history has ever known, visited the offices of the company's important subsidiary, Israel. The US spends over 50% of its discretionary public budget, about 5% of its GDP, on war and armed repression. With 41% of global "defense" expenditures (actually, money spent primarily on repression), and five time more than its nearest competitor, the US dominates the market of death. In global arms transfers to developing countries the US ranked first with $56.3 billions in 2011, over thirteen times more than its nearest competitor, Russia. All actual military conflicts take place in "developing" countries, which therefore account for nearly 80% of all weapon transfer agreements, and the US holds nearly 80% of that lucrative market. The biggest client is in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia was the recipient of $33.4 billions in arms transfers in 2011, mostly for good coin. Historically, the Middle East accounts for about 50% of all weapon transfers to developing countries. In both relative and absolute terms it is the most important "defense" market. And we didn't even mention oil. Oil money (namely primarily the money consumers and businesses in the rest of the world pay for energy), over and above the profits of the oil industry itself, is the source of income that funds practically all arms that get bought in the Middle East, and concomitantly the use and threat of use of these weapons helps keep the price of oil high and the profits flowing.
The President of the US is the man in charge of coordinating maintaining the health of American economy, of which a key component is the safety of these profits. So he came to the Middle East, which is the pivot area of these profits, and talked about peace. What did you expect that he talks about? Do you expect the chief officers of Big Tobacco to talk about cancer when they make public addresses? Do the expect the CEO of Apple to extol the virtues of working employees to the point of suicide? Naturally, the President spoke about peace. Peace is lovely.
If one likens the US to a company, Israel is reporting to the marketing department. Some big business make money in Israel, but in the larger scheme of things it is peanuts. Israel is less a profit center than a freebie that drives up sales in other departments. Iran is a case in point. Few if any policy makers in their right minds want to invade Iran. Plus, the Iranian rulers have no substantial disagreements with the US and have repeatedly sent feelers with offers to join the US dominated world. Their conditions, essentially, staying in power and having some security guarantees, are not significantly different than what every pro-US junta in the world expects. But it is obvious from the consistent blocking of every possibility of dialogue that the US prefers Iran to remain in a belligerent relation. In the words of Michael Axworthy, 'the US and other western countries are not yet willing to take yes for an answer.' All those arms the Saudi state buys must have a reason. And reason number one is the Iranian threat. Iran, however, builds its influence in the region, in particular its ability to threaten the cohesion of pro-American regimes, by hyping up its enmity with Israel and supporting Hizbulla. Peace in Palestine might be the start of a chain reaction that ends, God forbid, with Saudi Arabia no longer needing so many weapons, and, just as worse, not having the oil revenues to pay for them. But I hope you won't lose sleep over such a nightmare scenario. Let me just point out how good US foreign policy has been at keeping the pot of war simmering on low heat with the occasional boil-over and spill. Just trust Obama. He obviously knows how to handle this.
It feels different to those in the simmering pot.
Obama came to Israel to manage the conflict, that is, to keep it simmering, while preventing it from boiling over. Netanyahu represents a tendency in Israeli society that is insensitive to the American preference for slow cooking. His key constituencies make both money and symbolic capital directly from the process of colonization. That has led to some stormy relations. But the US arms industry needs Netanyahu, because it is ultimately the heat that his policies generate that keeps the pot simmering. The problem is having the right "thermostat," control mechanisms to hold Netanyahu and the settlers behind him in check. That is where Israel's famous "peace camp" comes in. Israel's "peace camp" has no deep interest in peace. It represents the segment of Israeli society, affluent, Ashkenazi, that isn't invested directly in the on-going colonization and is most aligned with and attuned to American interests. Its own fortunes depends on the US, and even more so, on access to the Western world. A sour face by a US President can send Israel's "peace camp" into weeks of morbid self-doubt.
The White House was undoubtedly pleased that Netanyahu had been weakened by the last elections. It could have been better, but it could also have been worse. Obama did not come to Israel to advance peace, but to give a boost, a 'hang in there,' to the Israeli "peace camp." Every word he said, especially the tepid, allegedly "pro-Palestinian," parts of his speech, was, no doubts intentionally, music to the ears of Israel's "peace camp," to assure them of their importance and to maintain and bolster their ability to serve as as brakes when the US needs to lower the heat. The message was not directed at Palestinians, except those few Palestinians who are the junior business partners in the peace industry, those who would be tasked with repressing any third intifadah, and are therefore as keen as their Israeli partners on acting as a thermostat for the US weapons industry.
There was however a message also for Palestinians and their supporters in the US and the world. Richard Silverstein called it "Drop dead," evoking New-York City Ford era debt crisis. This is inaccurate. To those that expected him to help them, namely, the PA and such, his message was the very opposite, to keep going on the same path that leads nowhere. The US cannot afford them quitting. But to those who have given up on the US or who understand what the US is really about, the message was different. It was not "drop dead," since, unlike the former, they had no expectations of help. It was more like 'don't even think about it.' Obama practically read aloud from Israel's declaration of independence, mentioning every item on the checklist of Zionist talking points, from the Biblical land rights of Jews, through the holocaust, and to the "villa in the jungle", that democratic oasis of techno-prowess in the blooming desert that Israel fancies itself. That Obama felt it necessary to spell out at length so much that is supposed to be taken for granted was a backhanded compliment to a decade of Palestinian activism that has succeeded in calling these talking points increasingly in question. Obama's 100% Zionism performance was a step into the breach, expressing a complete rejection of that radical critique of Israeli settler-colonialism. It was calibrated to demoralize.
In that, Obama continues the role he played from his very election, both domestically and internationally, as the hegemonic fixer following Bush's decade of naked power, coming to offer a soothing yet firm no to any thought of escaping the American juggernaut To those who had their eyes opened by Bush's blunt indifference Obama offers a blue pill, extending an invitation to recreate the fantasy of a kinder US, with its "values" and its "principles" and its "vision," but with lowered expectations and no meaningful change. To those who refuse, there will be nothing but cold steel.
Rabeea Eid, the Palestinian student who bravely heckled Obama and confronted him with the truth of his policy, challenged that demoralizing performance:
"Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more
weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to
see the apartheid wall on your way here? There are Palestinians sitting in this hall. This state should be for all of its citizens, not a Jewish state only. Who killed Rachel Corrie? Rachel Corrie was killed by your money and weapons!” (EI)
As Eid said later, "the most important part is for this visit not to go on in a normal manner." This empire is not in the mood for compromise. Why would it, when repression not only defends profits but is profitable in itself?
For those fawning over Obama's empathy and vision while complaining of "the lack of substance," seriously, expecting the Chief Marketing Officer of US Arms Inc. to bring peace to the Middle East is like expecting Silvio Berlusconi to usher in a new age of gender equality. Get real!
__________
Ah, and then there is that circus elephant in the room, the famous Jewish lobby, which plays an important role, just like Obama, the Saudi Royals, Iran. Everybody plays a role. Money doesn't flow naturally. It takes work. And that work isn't done by magical elves. it is done through various institutions that support and reflect each other and by people who actually intervene through them at various points to avert whatever risks bringing the system to a halt. It just doesn't play the kind of role that those invested in the fantasy of a pure, innocent America, subverted by foreigners, imagine it plays.
Ugly language and issues over cause and effect from one of the founding Fabians but see this from the Diary of Beatrice Webb anyway:
2 September 1929 Roused by the tragic happenings in Palestine there has buzzed around him (Sidney Webb who worked at the Colonial Office) Jews and the admirers of Jews, great and small in a state of violent grief and agitation demanding revenge and compensation. It is noteworthy that no representative of the Arabs – not even a casual admirer of the Arabs – has appeared on the scene. What one gathers from these excited persons is that the British officials on the spot, are held to be perniciously pro-Arab – not because they love the Arab but because, for one reason or another, they hate the Jew …- this may or may not be true-. Is there any principle relating to the rights of peoples to the territory in which they happen to live? I admire Jews and dislike Arabs. But the Zionist movement seems to me a gross violition of the right of the native to remain where he was born and his father and grandfather were born – if there is such a right. To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of 2000 years seems to me sheer nonsense and hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews? The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some peculiar needs or particular fitness. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realized by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from any parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives! The White Settlers in Kenya would seem to have as much right, on this assumption to be where they are, as the Russian Jews in Jerusalem! Yet exactly the same people – for instance Josiah Wedgwood – who denounce the White Settlers of Kenya as unwarranted intruders, are hotly in favour of the bran new Jewish colonies in Palestine…But the case for the Arab has not yet been heard; whilst the case for the Jew has been vehemently and powerfully pressed on the Government. The Zionist Movement and the mandate for a National Home for the Jews in Palestine seems to have originated in some such unequal pressure exercised by the wealthy and ubiquitous Jew on the one hand and the poor and absent Arab on the other.
Many thanks to my friend, Georgina, for typing this out. As Georgina said in her email, plus ça change.
Oh no, another sickening display of grovelling by Obama is in the pipeline. Here's The Boston Globe:
The White House says President Barack Obama will address the annual conference of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, next month.
The White House says Obama will speak at the conference on March 4. He will hold meetings the following day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will also be in Washington to attend the conference.
The president’s election-year remarks to AIPAC come as Republican presidential candidates question his support for Israel and his handling of Iran’s nuclear threat. Obama says he is a staunch supporter of Israel.
So what's he going to say, "hi guys, I'm the chap who killed Bin Laden"?
Here's Akiva Eldar in Ha'aretz on how America's Jewish (yes, Jewish) lobby successfully lobbied Israel over a racist advertising campaign by the State of Israel in the USA.
An uproar in the "holy city" of New York. An Israeli Absorption Ministry campaign - using the slogan "Before Hanukkah turns into Christmas, it's time to return to Israel" - has convulsed the offices of Jewish professionals in the city. How dare those Israeli beggars patronize us? Who has ever heard of such chutzpah: delegitimizing Jews in America?
Heads of Jewish federations have sent urgent letters to Israel's prime minister, warning that the campaign is liable to harm relations between Israel and the U.S. Jewish community. Really! Ambassador Michael Oren apologized, and Benjamin Netanyahu canned the slogan. Apologies were made, now everyone can prepare for Hanukkah parties. And the main thing? "Jewish leaders" are now free to become involved in a renewed struggle against the "delegitimization of Israel." Or, in other words, they will defend Israel's government, whose forte is promoting the delegitimization of the "other."
Actually it's the State of Israel that delegitimises the "other", not this or that government. Zionism is zionism after all but the Eldar isn't averse to promoting the oxymoron of Israel being "a democratic, Jewish state".
Tony Greenstein covers the whole issue of what prompted Israel's racist advertising campaign in the first place.
Who do you think? This has been doing the rounds for a few days now and I got an email from Editerette about it on the 9th. It appears that "Jewish groups" have intervened to prevent a display of art from children from Gaza. Here's, appropriately, Muzzlewatch:
Berkeley, CA’s Middle East Children’s Alliance broke the news yesterday that the exhibit of children’s artwork from Gaza that they had worked on for months with Oakland’s Children’s Museum of Art was suddenly canceled by the board before the planned September 24 opening reception. The show featured drawings by children about Israel’s infamous Operation Cast Lead, the military assault of December 2008-January 2009 that led to the deaths of some 1,400 Palestinians, over 300 of them children.
War is not the answer
Recognizing that the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council has an established track record of targeting Palestinian cultural expression, I wrote directly to JCRC Executive Director Doug Kahn to find out if they were involved in the board’s sudden decision to cancel the show. Indeed it seems they were, though perhaps not alone. This was his response in full:
East Bay JCRC, working closely with the Jewish Federation of the East Bay, shared with the leadership of MOCHA our concerns about the inappropriateness of this exhibit given the fact that MOCHA – an important and valued community institution – serves very young children.
However, it doesn’t seem likely that this is about concerns for children’s sensitivities to war imagery. As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out in its coverage of the incident today, MOCHA has a significant track record of showing the artwork of children living under war, including WWII, without incident. These images apparently aren’t substantively different.
This is, however, about giving voice to Palestinians-in this case children- who endured a simply extraordinary attack on an illegally captive population of 1.5 million people otherwise known as Operation Cast Lead.
Well there we have it, the Jewish Community Relations Council bringing a whole new meaning to Orwellian newspeak.
The [UK] government has been forced into an embarrassing climbdown after a minister described Israel's security barrier as a "land grab" and said that Israel deliberately took water away from the Palestinians.
The minister's remarks were in a video. Here's more detail:
In the video Mr Duncan declared: "The wall is a land grab. It hasn't just gone along the lines of the proper Israel boundary. It's taken in open land which actually belongs to Palestine". He added: "Israeli settlers can build what they want and then immediately get the infrastructure so that takes the water deliberately away from Palestinians here."
The UK has previously told Israel that it believes the security barrier encroaches on Palestinian territory and the government has a consistent policy of opposition to settlement building.
The Board of Deputies wrote to Mr Duncan on Monday to demand the withdrawal of the video, copying in his boss, Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, and Foreign Secretary William Hague.
The video was taken down shortly afterwards.
So the Board of Deputies can effectively order the removal of a video from a UK government website but it gets worse. In a front page comment, Martin Bright, the JC's political editor wrote the following, under the headline, It was a Palestinian narrative:
Ministers are in a very difficult position on this matter because Mr Duncan was, strictly speaking, doing no more than expressing official UK government policy. It does believe that Israel has failed to keep to its borders in constructing the security wall, and it is opposed to settlement building and the implications for natural resources such construction brings with it.
So a UK minister has used a video on a government website to express government policy on Palestine and the Board of Deputies of British Jews has told him not to do that. And he has dutifully removed the video from the site.
We now have two front page articles in the most recent edition of the Jewish Chronicle boasting of a Jewish lobby group's ability to affect government behaviour and policy. Next week perhaps there will be a couple of front pages telling us that it is antisemitic to speak of a Jewish lobby.
In fairness to Jews like me, it should be called the zionist lobby and the Board of Deputies should make it clear it only represents a zionist perspective. But of course honesty has never been the best policy for zionists and honesty is certainly not going to be the policy of either the Board of Deputies or the Jewish Chronicle any time soon.
The story so far is that the Fundamental Rights Agency (formerly known as the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia or EUMC) came up with a working definition of antisemitism that appeared to preclude most or all criticism of the State of Israel. Check out EUMC in the search bar. Well the Universities and Colleges Union has a motion to its congress on 30 May rejecting the working definition out of hand. The Jewish Leadership Council, a coalition of Jewish lobby groups, has written to the leader of the UK's Equalities and Human Rights Commission. On that, here is the Jewish Chronicle:
The Jewish Leadership Council has written to the equalities watchdog, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, to express its concern at moves within the Universities and Colleges Union to reject the widely-accepted definition of antisemitism.
He says that he is “surprised” that UCU had brought the motion on the definition of antisemitism “without consulting the EHRC” at all.
He expects UCU’s National Executive Committee to discuss the motion with the EHRC as Britain’s National Human Rights Institution, even if it passes
EHRC stands by the MacPhearson Report, which requires organisations to start from the perception of the victim. Trevor Phillips says:
”..if the object of harrasment or attack regards her treatment as being anti-semitic, even if the perpetrator maintains that their action is politically motivated, the presumption is that the victim’s perception is what defines the incident”.
On the issue of reporting incidents - both for students on campus and academics inside UCU – he says: “Nothing should be able to prevent Jewish students (or any other group, for that matter) being able to complain of harrasment, racism or anti-semitism”
He suggests that there could be legal problems under Human Rights and Equality law if the motion is fully enacted.
What Hirsh reports is almost all accurate in that Phillips did say most of those things, but let's have that last para again:
He suggests that there could be legal problems under Human Rights and Equality law if the motion is fully enacted.
Now the only thing that I could find in Phillips's letter that looked anything like that was this last paragraph:
Finally, in practice, the international human rights treaties like the UN's Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Human Rights Act and the UK's mew exemplar Equality Act 2010 give us the guidance we need on this matter, in particular in equality duties imposed on the latter. Nothing should prevent Jewish students (or any other group, for that matter) being able to complain of harrassment, racism, or anti-semitism. Such complaints should be taken extremely seriously by every institution; and it would be hard to imagine any institution which did not provide appropriate remedies for students' complaints being able to comply with its legal duties under the 2010 Act.
Unless I am missing something, and taking the letter as a whole, Phillips appears to be saying that Jews can and should expect protection from racism regardless of the UCU motion. And look at the bit that Hirsh doesn't mention at all:
neither we (EHRC) nor the EUMC has ever considered the EUMC's working definition to be wholly definitive; therefore its retention or abandonment should not be seen as an indication of what should be regarded as anti-racist [sic] or anti-semitic conduct.
Now Phillips could be saying anything about the working definition itself. He could think it contains too much or too little. He could think it is plain wrong or even right but he does not seem to be saying that its abandonment could cause "legal problems under Human Rights and Equality law if the motion is fully enacted."
Overall, whilst it would be nice to see Trevor Phillips distancing himself more from the working definition, his letter is hardly a ringing endorsement of it. Hopefully, if the JLC pushes harder the EHRC will have to openly dismiss the working definition just as, hopefully, the UCU is going to in just a couple of days.
Here's a letter in today's Guardian from Arthur Goodman, Chair of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, complaining of the sheer dishonesty of zionists making false allegations of antisemitism:
Your letter (The space where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism, 24 February) quotes a few extreme cases of criticising Israel, as if they were the generality, in order to smear Universities UK with alleged antisemitism for daring to support universities in hosting speakers who criticise Israel. The authors' main complaint is that a recent speaker referred to the "Jewish lobby" instead of the "Zionist lobby". Supposedly, that proves the speaker and, by implication, many others, was engaging in the Jewish conspiracy theory, supported or at least tolerated by the universities.
What nonsense. Most critics of Israel and its apologists refer correctly to an Israel lobby, or possibly a Zionist lobby, because they know the lobby comprises non-Jewish as well as Jewish organisations. They also know that many Jews, and a growing number of Jewish groups, such as JFJFP of which I am chair, are deeply critical of Israeli policy.
However, a chorus of some establishment Jewish organisations muddies the water by constantly telling the world that all Jews always support what Israel does. (The authors of the letter of 24 February represent three of them.) So it isn't surprising if a few people fall into the trap of referring to a "Jewish lobby". It doesn't mean they are antisemitic, and it doesn't mean the universities which host them tolerate antisemitism.
There is a deep dishonesty in the chorus. Not only does it deliberately fail to acknowledge the wide range of attitudes within the Jewish community towards Israeli policy, it also tries to have it both ways. Having told the world how all Jews support Israeli policy, it cries foul when some people take them at their word.
London Conference 1100-1730 Saturday 4th September 2010
Jews and Palestine:
Our role in the solidarity movement
The global campaign to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is gathering pace, forming the focus for a broad-based solidarity movement.
Many Jews are actively involved but we lack a clear sense of our specific contribution to Palestinian liberation.
Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG) invites all Jews who share this concern to join us from 11.00 to 17.30 on Saturday September 4 at
The Magdalen Centre, St Mary's Church
Eversholt Street, London NW11BN(close to Euston station)
Panel discussion with:
Haim Bresheeth, filmmaker, Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, member of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP)
Antony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research
Moshe Machover, founding member of the Israeli socialist organization MATZPEN, mathematician and professor emeritus, Kings College London
Mike Marqusee, activist and writer. Latest book: If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew
Workshop sessions and plenary on themes including:
- Making Jewish solidarity with Palestine more prominent, more effective, more coordinated
- Clarifying the strategic objectives of BDS and the broader movement
- Considering our role in shifting opinion within the UK Jewish community
- Understanding and combating the Israel lobby
- Dealing with attempts to define BDS/Palestine solidarity as anti-Semitic
- Defining how our understanding of Zionism influences solidarity strategies
- Reviewing current organisations, Jewish and otherwise
- Planning effective structures for the future
Booking essential. To reserve your place email your name and details tojews4big@gmail.com
Contribution payable on the day: £3 minimum per person (Refreshments provided)
The BDS divestment campaign in Berkeley suffered a setback. Here's a summary of the main events:
A vote early Thursday by the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority to overturn a veto of the bill by students' association President WIll Smelko, though the bill could be reconsidered as early as next week...Following a lengthy discussion that began Wednesday night and concluded in the early hours of Thursday, the Associated Students Senate voted 12-7, with one abstention, to uphold Smelko's veto.
The veto was upheld despite high-profile support for the bill from South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Noam Chomsky. In the wake of the initial 16-4 adoption of the bill in March, Jewish campus groups mobilized to engineer its defeat.
Hundreds attended the Wednesday-night session, including Israel's consul general in San Francisco, Akiva Tor...Following the vote, a procedural motion resulted in two more hours of discussion. The Senate then moved to table the bill. (Jerusalem Post)
The setback is temporary. The dramatic vote divided the Berkeley student community on predictable lines. On the one side, organized Jewish power, with its lines of support in the local Jewish community but even more so in Israel and Washington. On the other side, pretty much everyone else who is politically aware and active. What appears as a deep fissure in the student body is therefore in fact an overwhelming unity in support of Palestinian rights. This unity is more important than the actual vote, and the voting process, culminating in an all night session yesterday, helped its emergence and its self-conscious articulation. The Berkeley senate's inability to uphold the resolution despite their own majority view as represented in the original vote should be understood primarily as another case of the failure of representative politics, which works in a place like Berkeley better than at the national level, but not better enough. Senators voted their understanding of their political future in US machine politics, a future beholden to serving and maintaining privilege, not challenging it.
It was also an appalling reminder to what today most commonly hides behind the adjective 'Jewish'. First, it is worth noting that the resolution that targeted two US companies directly benefiting from the occupation, not Israel, not even Israeli companies, was not merely opposed by, but a mobilizing flash point for, the whole of mainstream organized Jewish bodies, including J-Street. Namely, when push come to shove, the occupation itself, not just Israel, has the full support of organized US Jews. The slightest attempt to confront the occupation is beyond the pale; mainstream Jewish organizations, whatever horse manure they may propose as "criticism" of the occupation, mobilize to defend the continuation of the policy of settlements and ethnic cleansing. That helps understand the real import of the false distinction between the occupation and "Israel proper." The settlers' slogan "Judea and Samaria is here (i.e. in Tel Aviv)" is not only true, but understood as such by the US Jewish mainstream, from AIPAC to J-Street and Hillel. These soft Zionist groups talk about two states for two people but mobilize to shield the one apartheid state of Israel from the river to the sea. They use "two states" as a cover up for support of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
The talking points the organized Jewish machine distributed to its student cadres in Berkeley were leaked. It is an interesting document. First, the talking points urge supporters to avoid debating the issue. That's an admission of sort. There is no real argument in defense of Israel, only rhetorical noise, and even that isn't very effective.
Second, apparenlty learning from mistakes, the talking points urge
DON'T mention that Israel is being singled out (don't mention crimes committed by other countries). Don't suggest divesting from other countries. It is a weak argument and implies that Israel has committed war crimes.
A retreating army, apartheid apologists leave behind them positions that they can no longer defend. Do not expect them to admit that they used these fake arguments effectively for years to defend of indefensible. May someone informs, for example, Stephen Walt, that this particular argument has been officially declared exhausted?
The most important point is however the following, which is repeated in a number of variants:
The message: The bill is an attack on our Jewish community. It silences our voices....
The Bill is out of context and based on questionable sources (no need to go into detail). Thus, the bill is in fact an attack on the JEWISH COMML]NITY.
An unjustified attack on Israel is an attack on my Jewish identity. It is attacking ME. (Indybay)
Two important observations need to be made about this strategy. First, Jewish organizations are borrowing the language of marginalization and victimization in the name of the most affluent U.S. identity. Silencing Jews? You gotta be kidding? With leading op-ed writers in practically every newspaper, presenters, editors, anchors and writers in every TV station, over-representation in Congress, a whole cast of members of every US administration in the last few decades, and a slew of top positions in the Forbes list of richest individuals, who can even think of "silencing the voices of Jews"? This not just wrong and silly on the facts, but also an absolutely offensive and disgusting appropriation of the language of empowerment, taking for a ride the real victims of the persistent racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerance that runs deep in US society. That Jewish student organizations can afford spitting in the face of Black, Latino, Queer, Muslim and other students who really belong to groups that are regularly and systematically silenced is a measure of the power they yield. They can talk about racism until the cows come out, but in their actions they put Jews on the side of the perpetrators of racism, not on the side of victims.
Second, the attack on the divestment resolution continues to establish a series of equivalences that testify to deep Jewish folly: US corporations equal the occupation equal Israel equal the Jewish community of Berkeley. No antisemitic demagogue has made this equivalence so convincingly. The equation between capitalism and Jews was (and still is) a figment of the antisemitic imagination. The equation between world Jews and the actions of the state of Israel is universally recognized as racist, and is even part of wretched EUMC "working definition of antisemitism", which lists as an example of antisemitism, "holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel". But thanks to AIPAC, J-Street and Hillel, putting pressure on General Electric because it profits from the occupation of the West Bank is now claimed as "an attack on the Jewish community". Jewish organizations could not better promote an antisemitic understanding of the world if they went and painted Swastikas on the doors of their offices themselves.
To be clear, the claims of the anti-divestment organizers are also false. The Berkeley divestment declaration was supported by many Jews in the student body, as well as emphatically defended by two of the most prominent Jewish professors at UCB, Daniel Boyarin and Judith Butler. What isn't false is the clear line that divide US Jews today, a dominant establishment that supports racism, promotes antisemitism and benefits from both, and an opposition that supports Palestinian liberation and rejects racism in all its forms, including antisemitism.
UPDATE PS. Magnes Zionist responds to the events in Berkely by explaining why even liberal Zionists should support BDS. But even he admits not talking to the organizations that effectively mobilized in defense of the occupation. That only strengthens the point above: the Jewish establishment is not salvagable.
Also, on the impact of the effort that is already a victory, see more by Cecilie Surasky:
...the feeling on campus and in the room was electric. We filled an enormous room that fits 900. Most stayed through the entire night. If you can imagine, the evening started with remarkable statements by divestment supporters Judith Butler, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, Richard Falk, Hatem Bazian and George Bisharat. And then the extraordinary parade of students and community members who spoke on both sides of the issue until it was past sunrise.
And though the final vote still hangs in the balance, the fact remains that the vast majority of the Senate voted to divest. The bill garnered the support of some of the most famous moral voices in the world, a good chunk of the Israeli left (9 groups and counting), nearly 40 campus groups (almost all student of color groups and one queer organization) plus another 40 US off-campus groups.
In addition, the room was filled with Jewish divestment supporters of every age including grandmothers and aunts and uncles and students. Our staff, activist members, and Advisory Board members like Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Noam Chomsky each played critical roles in the effort. And of course, all of you who generated over 5,000 letters of support. (MondoWeiss)
Before we go any further, no. AIPAC doesn't rule America. Nor does AIPAC determine US foreign policy. Capital rules the US, the world, and hence also US policy towards the world, which is all about extraction and domination, and is hostile, not just to the Palestinian people, but to people in general, everywhere and anywhere, but especially if they fail to meet the appropriate standards of docility. Capital hates all people, but it also welcomes people hating each other: it color codes people so that different people can be consumed differently, and some can be the slaves of others.
AIPAC, however, is part of the way capital rules the world, and the fact that it doesn't rule the world by itself is not a get-out-of-jail card. AIPAC is a criminal organization. That the people of the US allow it to hold conferences is a mark of American un-freedom. Of course, the same is true about Congress. Looking for criminals in Washington is like looking for the wicked in Sodom. The embarass de richesse! God was merely practical when he reversed course and searched for the handful of the just instead.
Now watch Dershowitz, the consiglieri of the Cosa Nostra, in the above clip. Watch his authority, and how the wretched J-Street guy defers to him and stands before him like a pupil sent to the headmaster's office. This is the "alternative" to AIPAC? It isn't even funny.
I don't know if Dershowitz really jerks off to clips of phosphor bombs falling on Gaza as Latuff suggested, but that Dershowitz is a liar, a bully, a plagiarist and an impostor is public knowledge. He is also someone whose recent arguments about the Palestinian "responsibility" to the holocaust sunk to the level of historical Nazi propaganda about Jews. Anybody who stands near Dershowitz and nods and doesn't hold their nose is showing by this very behavior that they have no integrity, no principles, no ethics and are nothing but a sorry excuse of a biped, the kind of biped that would feel at home at an AIPAC conference, or anywhere else in Washington.
I would thank Brian Hennessey (letter, 19 February) not to refer to the supporters of and apologists for Israel's crimes (in the US or elsewhere) as the "Jewish lobby". Many such people are not Jewish and, more to the point, many Jews (including many in the US and even Israel) deplore them as much as Mr Hennessey does.
Gaza is the priority for anti-zionists right now but, mindful of this, there are many racist freeloaders who want to gate crash the cause to hitch their own obsessions on to it.
I'm not changing the subject when I say that I gather Atzmon is upset at the exposé of his ludicrous hoax about whistle blowers in the UK's Jewish establishment. While Gaza is starving Atzmon knows what is best for the Palestinian cause: make up another id, write another ludicrous article in the name of that id and get it distributed to as many anonymously produced conspiracy sites as he can.
Atzmon relies heavily on people not checking what he is writing so please do check the assertions made in his latest offering using the name, Salaheddin Ahmad by reading my post (linked above) and Tony Greenstein's and seeing if anything he accuses us both of in that article alone is true. Google the name he has invented as it appears with the Redress article and see if this latter day Saladin has had anything else published on the web or indeed anywhere. Or google the name on its own, scroll down and consider, could it really be the US attorney or the only Salaheddin Ahmad to appear in the US telephone directory? Of course it couldn't. It's Atzmon...again and not because of the impeccable English (which neither Tony nor I could be the judges of) but because of the sheer dishonesty, the racism and the buffoonery.
The UK's Socialist Workers Party has quietly dropped Atzmon as was predicted, there are many Palestinian groups and individuals in the UK that won't touch Atzmon with a barge pole and even Mary Rizzo had to ditch him and the last post he made to the Palestine Think Tank when his racism and his dishonesty had complaints against him outnumbering the trolls she used to rely on to defend him. So there he is, painted into a corner and all he can do now is make up more names, write more silly articles for Redress and other silly and/or nasty conspiracy sites and hope that the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Chronicle are desperate enough to pretend to take Redress seriously or stupid enough to really take it seriously.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J-Street, opened the J-Street policy conference, as Mondoweiss reports, with this gem.
We value the partnership and engagement and support of our non-Jewish friends – both here tonight and in our work overall. We need and appreciate allies and alliances, individual and institutional.
But at heart they know – as we know – that the root of this movement and heart of this conversation has to be in the American Jewish community. For many of us as Jews, this conversation taps into our deepest personal feelings – of family, history and community. (Mondoweiss)
Gee, isn't it nice and progressively post-racial that Ben-Ami is willing to accept Palestinian solidarity with his struggle? Because, you know, it's not like they might have bigger fish to fry.
What is, after all, Palestinian life and liberty compared to the complexity and grandeur of the "deepest personal feelings" of Ben-Ami and his ilk as they sit around and kvetch about their identity? And do take note of the presumptuous tone. Not only is Ben-Ami telling Palestinians to stand aside and let Jews figure out what is good for them, but he also knows that "at heart," however much they may insist on self-determination, "in their heart" they understand that only Jews can lead them to the promised land. Not only does he declare his right to determine their fate, but he also takes command of their voice to represent them as willingly giving him the command of their fate. Ben-Ami's performance of the White Man's Burden is so unoriginal that it calls to mind countless other performances. For example, this oil painting of Colombus landing in the New World to be received in awe by the natives who recognize at once his superior right to dominate them, embodied in the drawn-out cross. Plus ça change...
Horowitz and Weiss and others have repeatedly noted that the attendees at the conference are to the left of the leadership. As good as that sounds, and I do realize that a lot of people went to the conference to make their concerns heard rather than to listen to some of the glutei maximi invited to pontificate (and good that they did,) I don't find these assurances that reassuring. Quite frankly, those who were not troubled by the display of colonial and imperial arrogance are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem. As for those who were bothered, some thoughts about the strategy behind lending support and voice to an organization that speaks this kind of language, lobbies Congress against the Goldstone report, excises Gaza from its agenda, and considers equal rights to be beyond the pale of conversation would be welcome. It's all great that J Street is opening a side door for Jewish dissent, but that does not automatically mean that Jewish dissent should welcome J street regardless of concrete politics. The central issue is Palestinian rights and self-determination, not how they treat other Jews.
I am also not clear about the excitement over the rise of J-Street as a new "lobby". Jews who are to the left of J-Street already have a wide variety of options for expressing their disenchantment with Israel in an active manner, from the radical left groups such as the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Jews Against The Occupation, through Jewish Voice for Peace and the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, and a variety of other fora, Palestinian, Jewish and ecumenical, that are active about the Middle East. It is true that these groups are outside of the "mainstream" and not able to directly impact Washington. But then, they are outside the mainstream because relatively few people support their work. Those who would rather be "supporting J-Street from the left" than, for example, supporting JVP from the right, are making an eloquent political choice, and that political choice is to line up behind a blatantly pro-imperialist, racist organization committed primarily to maintaining Israeli domination. They prefer to deceive themselves that J Street will instigate change that it clearly has no intention to instigate, rather than risk being branded as "outside the mainstream". The centrist dynamics involved here is familiar. Many "want change" but don't necessarily want power to really shift; they want to feel included and they want to feel moral and they want to feel their cognitive dissonance resolved. That is all that J Street promises. And while we shouldn't be dismissive of moves at the political center, neither is there reason for giddiness given how far right the center of US politics really is. It doesn't follow that J Street is necessarily a bad development. Splitting the racist Jewish voice between AIPAC and J Street would be a good thing if it happen. It will open more space for dissent and increase the legitimacy of more radical positions. But that is only a good thing if Jews to the left of J Street stay to the left of J Street. If instead J Street saps energy from further left, that is good news for whom?
There is reason to think that second scenario is precisely what J Street's purpose is. As Daniel Luban writes,
The basic premise of J Street is that it is possible to be both liberal and pro-Israel. If the hardliners succeed in destroying J Street, and with it any viable outlet for liberal pro-Israel sentiment, they will force the younger generation of American Jews — who are overwhelmingly Obama Democrats — to choose between support for Israel and liberalism. No doubt some will choose Israel, but far more will choose liberalism. And in that case Israel will face a predicament far bleaker than whatever it fears from J Street. (IPS)
I don't think J Street emerges primarily from the tensions within the Jewish community. Rather, these tensions themselves reflect larger fissures in US society surrounding US global power. To get J Street, we need a more long-term view of the Jewish lobby. For decades, since 1967 at least, the Jewish Lobby built its power by advancing leading US corporate interests, most notably those of the Military-Industrial Complex, while tying these interests to constituencies supposedly the least friendly to these corporate interests, the Democratic grassroots, liberals, Jews, Labour, etc. In that sense, the Lobby performed an extremely valuable hegemonizing service. That worked well as long as the business of empire was humming along, and AIPAC was able to be bi-partisan and beyond criticism. The slow and surreptitious decline of the American empire become front page news between the collapse of the NASDAQ and September 11. The result was the exacerbation of a split about how the empire should react to its decline, a split between those who called for retrenchment and rebuilding of capability, and the neo-conservatives who advocated a "fuite en avant," aggressively trying to monetize US domination. The second camp won the policy debate under Bush, but at the cost of undermining effective hegemony, and the first camp has been strengthened by the obvious economic and military debacles of the Bush administration. AIPAC, in lockstep with the Israeli leadership, fully lined up behind the neo-conservative wing, thus undermining its own role as a builder of hegemonic consensus and creating a political vaccum in Washington, a vacuum that came under the spotlight with Bush's departure from power. Ben-Ami, apparently, wants to fill that vacuum. To the extent that the need for retrenchment is understood by a section of the US ruling class and capital (and Obama's election shows that it does), whoever can fill than vaccuum will have a very successful career. J Street is still far from achieving that. Ben-Ami needs to do a careful dance in order to show that his organization can generate enough heat to be worthy of donors' money without being too far-out and dangerous. The old guard is going to fight him with everything they have, while Obama and most other politicians are going to adopt a wait-and-see attitude until the donors start coming. This is high politics, the struggle for wealth and power inside Washington, a fascinating byzantine story of courtly intrigue, skulduggery and betrayal, but unfortunately one in which right and wrong, communal identities and human rights are merely theater props. For Ben-Ami to succeed, he needs to show that he can do among Jews what Obama did more generally, sap the grassroots' discontent, especially on the liberal side, and accommodate it within the limits imposed by the primacy of the same interests that dominate Washington. J Street needs to be a better Jewish lobby than AIPAC, but perform the same role that AIPAC is no longer able to perform because of its rightward drift and the growing contradictions of the declining empire, which are also reflected in growing disaffection with Israel among Jews. I am not at all convinced that J Street can do that. But one can easily see why that agenda would appeal, consciously or not, to quite a lot of liberals. Those who truly hope for more will be disappointed.
Clearly, the hope of patching up Jewish support for colonial Israel is one of J Street's main attractions in Washington.
"Getting Israel another thirty F-16s won't help us combat the legitimacy issue [with] people who are trying to undermine the right of Israel to have a state." Luria [Isaac Luria, J Street's campaigns director] says. "Jews need a state. And that legitimacy window--the cracks in that window are getting wider. They're dangerous. Dangerous." (Weiss and Horowitz, The Nation)
Now, after I wrote the above, Max Ajl wrote in a comment to my previous entry that
...the "left wing" of the speakers was different from the "left wing" of the attendees. I can't make a claim to social-scientific sampling, but a good chunk of the people I talked to were far, far to the left of the (on the whole atrocious and dumb) speakers. Kids my age (I'm 25) or a bit older or younger, one-staters, Jewish kids who had been to the West Bank, even the editor of Jewcy.com, a bit older than me, and far more critical than I expected. I don't know how large a component of young American Jewry this was, but I do think there's a generational shift going on, and it's an important one. This is to say nothing of older people I knew who were there, also one-staters. Yoffie attacked Goldstone. He was also booed publicly. I agree with the notion that we're not seeing the transcendence of Zionism that we'd both, I'm sure, like to see. But withdrawal begins in steps. I don't know who Yglesias or twerps like Ezra Klein speak for. Not for me, and I don't know any young people that read them either...
I don't deny that, and obviously I wasn't there and I trust Max's impression, and others had similar impressions. So let me clarify. I do not deny that there is meaningful change in Jewish attitudes towards Israel lately. I think the change is undeniable and a good development. And to the extent that J Street simply provided a mixer for young Jews to realize that their disenchantment with Israel is more widespread than they thought, that is awesome. The problem is that J Street was not formed to express that change in attitudes nor to bring that change to political maturity. It was formed to capitalize on that change by blocking it, taming it, and bringing it back into line, the line of marrying support for colonialism in Palestine with U.S. ruling class interests. The most optimistic analysis I can take seriously is Adam Horowitz's quote from Rabbi Brant Rosen:
Rabbi Brant Rosen, who I had the honor of finally meeting in person, observed that JStreet has opened a Pandora's box in promoting dissent while trying to manage it. He doubted it could be controlled once the box was opened. (Mondoweiss)
May that be true! But Pandora boxes have been closed before. I would like to hear from the people who found J Street so exciting that they are thinking harder about how to draw from this particular Pandora box and how to keep its lid open despite, not thanks to, J Street, and not assuming that the mere existence of that much positive energy guarantees a good continuation.
but he also knows that "at heart," however much they may insist on self-determination, "in their heart" they understand that only Jews can lead them to the promised land. Not only does he declare his right to determine their fate, but he also takes command of their voice to represent them as willingly giving him the command of their fate. Ben-Ami's performance of the White Man's Burden is so unoriginal that it calls to mind countless other performances. For example, this oil painting of Colombus landing in the New World to be received in awe by the natives who recognize at once his superior right to dominate them, embodied in the drawn-out cross. Plus ça change...