Look how powerful the Jewish lobby is!

Apropro Zbigniew Bzrezinski: Walt and Mearsheimer play Hebrew University. I guess McCarthyism ain't what it used to be.

David McWilliams: good for the Jews

If only we were more like them, he says. Indeed. Thanks, David.

Keret outtake - the boycott

Last month Israeli author Etgar Keret generously gave me an hour of his time for an interview, most of which didn't find its way into the short piece I wrote for the Sunday Tribune to mark his inclusion on the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist.

Keret is an anti-occupation leftist, yet his translator Miriam Shlesinger (herself a pro-Arab activist), was one of the first victims of the British anti-Israel boycott - you can read here how she got dumped from the editorial board of The Translator. I believe the editorial board of The Translator is now Judenfrei, but I couldn't be sure. I do note Lawrence Venuti, an old professor of mine, has stuck around. What a disappointment.

Anyway, here is some of what he had to say on the subject:

I really think the boycott is a product the same hysteria that causes people [in Israel] to go to the right. Instead of seeking a productive solution, it goes for the thing that is simplest and easiest to do. It basically generalises and discriminates against a group of people and not individuals for their actions. The israeli case is a very strange one. I've never heard of any boycotts against Iran or any of those countries that don't allow basic civil rights. Israel is the only one worthy of this capital punishment. It's like if British academics were boycotted for their country taking part in the Iraq war. It doesn't make any sense.

Miriam Shlesinger is a perfect example. She was head of Amnesty Israel. She was not only left wing, but was an activist. She ran one of the biggest programmes in Israel to get Arab translation in Israeli hospitals. She really dedicated her life to Arab patients being able to get interpretation in courts and in hospitals. She invested more time in that than in academics. To boycott a woman like her shows just how the system sucks.

The right wing [in Israel] is pro-boycott. Because it's proof that you cannot please the world. The world will always hate us so there is no point in listening to it. Except to make people feel very worthy without having to sweat, I really don't see any help in it. If those people really wanted to help they could find other ways.

Oh well. Boycotters to Arab hospital patients: drop dead!

Trocaire on the retreat

Trocaire's Palestinian programme officer and former IPSC activist Eoin Murray has withdrawn from tonight's Leviathan debate at Crawdaddy, for which Israeli government press officer Danny Seaman has been flown in. Sources unfriendly to Murray's perspective have told me that Trocaire isn't prepared to stand in the firing line given the organisation's censorship trouble with the BCI over it's Lenten ad campaign and, more relevantly, the righteous slapdown Ian O'Doherty delivered to the agency over its naive relationship with Murray's erstwhile activist comrades and it's unbalanced criticism of Israel's human rights record:

They disgraced themselves on July 31 last year by organising a protest outside the American embassy in Dublin during the unpleasantness in Israel, while ignoring the true aggressors in that war, Iran, whose embassy is in Blackrock.
...
And Trocaire themselves have also consistently criticised Israel while seldom offering any real condemnation of her neighbours.

In fairness to Trocaire, when contacted they were quick to point out that they also offer assistance to Israeli human rights groups.

But this is simply not good enough.

Indeed, especially when Trocaire's Israeli partner is B'Tselem which, despite being the "Israeli information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories", has very little to say about Palestinian human rights violations, apart from a small section on their site devoted to terrorist attacks against Israelis. In other words, B'Tselem doesn't share Trocaire's concern for gender inequality, an area O'Doherty helpfully illuminates:

Removing all politics from the region for a moment - and forget about which side of the political divide you stand - if you were to give birth to a baby girl in that region, where would you prefer she was born?

A country where honour killings are still common? Where mutilation, torture, acid baths and beatings for the smallest infraction are the order of the day? Or would you prefer her to be born into a democracy, where she will enjoy exactly the same rights and responsibilities as her brother?

It's exactly the kind of moral disconnect which shames so many left-wing organisations - their attitude towards Israel allows them to completely ignore the disgusting cultural and religious misogyny of her neighbours.

There's a wry comment to be made here about Catholic religious misogyny, of course, not to mention the troubling re-emergence of Catholic anti-Jewish animus, as recently displayed by groups of Irish and German Catholic delegations. Recall the charming Fr Eoin Cassidy who a week ago let fly a string of gross distortions about the conditions in Gaza and the West Bank (open prison! worse than apartheid South Africa!) gleaned right from the pages of the Palestinian propaganda playbook and then concluded with a little polite Holocaust minimisation:

There was an "understandable reluctance to be seen to be criticising the Jews", but "if for no other reason than it dishonours those who have died as innocent victims in the Holocaust, one cannot remain silent in the face of the manifest injustice that is visited primarily but not exclusively upon the Palestinian people".

In other words: "I'm reluctant to criticise Jews, but not so reluctant that I won't hold them to an absurd moral double standard which their status as victims of the Holocaust, Christianity's greatest moral catastrophe since the Spanish Inquisition, validates." I've written before about the disgrace of using the Holocaust as a stick to beat Jews, but let's just say for now that Catholics are the second-last people, after the Germans, who should feel entitled to do it.

The Germans? Oh, just a little late to the pogrom. Really, the Jews are finished taking lessons in justice from Christians. I think Trocaire rightly sensed Catholics have stepped onto some shaky ground in the Holy Land.

Irish Friends of Israel

There are some out there! Sean Gannon, chairman of Irish Friends of Israel, gets in an economical response to some of the Palestinian delegate-general's more fantastical claims. (Strangely, Hikmat Ajjuri's op-ed from November 10th is not available in the The Irish Times archive.)

Peace Now report

Melanie Phillips highlights a critical assessment of the Peace Now report that claims 40 per cent of West Bank settlements have been built on private Palestinian land. According to Alex Safian of CAMERA (worth reading in full), Peace Now is misrepresenting the legal status of certain types of land in the West Bank. If he's correct (and I'm not in a position to judge), this report would seem to epitomise the Big Lie about the "occupation": that Israel has illegally confiscated land that legally belonged to the Palestinians all along.

Also, if Safian is correct, it seems clear that the tribal/feudal legal system the Arabs were living under when Zionism was gathering pace - and especially when Israel was established - left them totally unprepared to cope with the Western notions of property, enshrined in international law, that would obtain in the post-colonial and post-World War II Middle East. It's easy to fathom, in that case, why so many in the Arab world seem completely dumbfounded by the situation they find themselves in vis-a-vis the West. The fact is that the nation state and individual ownership rights are powerful (and legitimate, I would say) tools in land disputes. Judging by what's been happening in Lebanon, though, Hizbullah may have developed a way of reversing the Arab disadvantage.

Saving Darfur

Anne Applebaum ponders why Darfur has inspired a coalition of activism while concentration camps in North Korea and religious persecution in Iran elicit shrugs from the international community:

I can offer no scientific explanation for why the tragedy of Darfur conjures up the specter of history's judgment and why other tragedies do not. But the answer must lie in the fact that this conflict has so few strategic or geopolitical implications. Because it seems to be in no one's "interest" do so so, a call for a U.N. intervention in Darfur surely feels—at least to Americans and Europeans who haven't followed China's involvement in Sudan's oil industry—like an act of real charity and not more evidence of the West pursuing its interests.

I think she's nailed a peculiar aspect of contemporary morality: you may only care about that which means nothing to you.

Of course, some think certain hidden interests are at work in Darfur. I refer, naturally, to the ur-hidden interest: Zionism. Remember what James Bowen and the IPSC say: paying attention to Darfur is just another one of the (no doubt many) "Zionist tactics to suppress criticism of Israel". I mean, "Applebaum" sounds suspicious to me.

NOTE: The commentary on the IPSC's insane entry on Zionism and Darfur now carries the following dubious disclaimer: "by a person who is not a member of the UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign". I suppose Bowen, who is the chair of the organisation and the database administrator, just lets anybody include commentary on the database entries. I suppose also that he'd leave alone any comment he disagreed with, even one that alleges that the Save Darfur movement "is a Zionist movement used for propaganda purposes". Why interfere anti-Jewish animus if it advances your agenda?

Muslims as the 'new Jews'

Ken Livingstone has become the latest person to make the suspect argument that Muslims are being demonised as Jews were earlier in Europe's history:

Over recent weeks we have seen a demonization of Muslims only comparable to the demonization of Jews from the end of the 19th century.

He cited Jack Straw's angst about the niqab as indicative of the trend.

I find this argument persuasive insofar as it identifies a transhistorical xenophobic streak in European culture - witness the tolerant Netherlands - but "only comparable"? Really, Ken, you've said worse about Jews today than most will dare utter about Muslims, let alone what people were prepared to say and do regarding Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe. Has there been any anti-Muslim demonisation in Europe even remotely comparable in nefariousness and impact to the Dreyfus Affair?

I'm afraid Livingstone's comments are part of a strategy to square two incompatible leftist articles of faith: anti-fascism/anti-racism and "anti-Zionism". To reconcile these it helps to minimise Jewish suffering and exaggerate Muslim suffering - indeed, to replace Jews explicitly as the victims par excellence of European racism and fascism with Muslims, now cast as victims of Zionism and/or the war on terror (which to much of the left are co-extensive). Livingstone's remarks strike me as a softer iteration of Zionism=Naziism, as both seek to overwrite Jewish victimhood with a new narrative of demonisation of Muslims. This new kind of Vernichtung has the benefit of at once papering over the left's morally suspect hatred of Israel with a freshly painted banner of anti-racism, while expiating lingering European guilt for the Holocaust by relativising and trivialising the monumental persecution that characterised mainstream Europe's relationship to its Jewish population for centuries. It's especially troubling given that Jews in Europe still live under threat - in many case from Muslims! - and have to devise expensive security arrangements just to attend normal community and religious functions.

I'm alert to the dangers of anti-Muslim hysteria and certainly see parallels between the rhetoric used to describe Muslims of today with Jews of 100 years ago, but it strikes me as intellectually dishonest (and more than a little counterproductive) to eradicate the history of the latter in order to elevate the former.

Re: Anti-Semitism and the Lebanon war

"anonymous1" responded to my post below on Jew-baiting in Cork by leaving this link. My response got long, so I've made a post of it.

"You haven't explained why you've drawn my attention to that quote, but I'll assume the point is that if Jews can misuse Holocaust iconography, anti-Israel protesters can legitimately pretend the near-successful annihilation of Europe's Jews by the Nazis is comparable to the accidental killing of a few dozen Lebanese by the Israeli air force at Qana. (I don't know what it says about Jews in Cork, but I'd love to hear someone explain why their synagogue had to be disfigured by this grotesquerie.)

There are a few things to say about this. The first is that the settlers in Gaza behaved in a disgraceful manner when they acted as if disengagement was some kind of liquidation. That, to me, is Holocaust minimisation. It's a dangerous game, made all the more repugnant by the widespread enlistment of children in the political pantomime. Most Jews, I think, were disgusted by the ploy, especially since the disengagement policy was so divisive to begin with.

However, it's one thing for Jews to dishonour the Holocaust; it's quite another thing for the supporters of people who openly a) deny the Holocaust and/or b) seek to annihilate the Jews of Israel to evoke the Holocaust in order to shame Jews - in this case Jews who are not even Israeli. That's called Jew-baiting. It's a punier version of the game Mahmoud Ahmedinejad plays when he first questions whether the Holocaust ever happened, and then threatens a second one.

I note that James Bowen of the IPSC has filed this quote in his infamous database under "Zionist usurpation of the Holocaust". That strikes me as a form of unflattering projection. (I note also that he files this quote, in which the killing of 52 Palestinians - most of them armed - in Jenin by Israelis who themselves lost 23 soldiers is ridiculously compared to the carnage of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, under "Israel: abuse of basic Palestinian rights".) Jews, by definition, cannot "usurp" the Holocaust since it is rightfully part of their history. Bowen's followers, however, have usurped the Holocaust by assuming a mantle of moral authority that derives from someone else's experience and then wielding against the very people to whom it rightfully belongs. In his bizarre formulation, the only people denied the rightful invocation of the Holocaust are the Jews themselves. That should tell you everything you need to know.

The IPSC can't have it both ways. You can't condemn Gaza settlers for putting on yellow stars and one year later go marching with paint-splattered children's shoes, let alone perpetrate the fraud that Jenin 2002 was replay of Warsaw 1943. But bigotry is all about double standards, isn't it?"

Dubious Dubai

Michael Jansen forgot to mention something in her breathless letter from Dubai in Thursday's Irish Times:

Dubai, a hub of Middle Eastern commerce, is changing rapidly, globalising; its people are reaching out boldly to embrace new things, new experiences.

But not Israelis. Drogheda United has had to cancel a trip to a football conference in the UAE because the team's Israeli general manager, Ophir Zardok, has been refused permission to enter the country. Even Israeli diamond traders who want to trade on the Dubai exchange have to travel on non-Israeli passports.