False Dichotomies

Everyone knows that Israel/Palestine is one of the easiest conflict zones in the world for activists to visit. This is one of the reasons it receives such overinflated coverage in the international media. While some people do get turned away, a vast majority of internationals who want to travel to the West Bank are able to do so. This arrangement is based on the status quo that those who intend to travel to the West Bank for political purposes don’t make too much of an issue about it upon their arrival in the country.  Read more

A couple of months ago, in London, I witnessed what one might call a Luis Suarez moment. I was on the Northern Line, where a group of drunken British men were standing around doing what drunken British men do. Nothing threatening at first, just songs and inaudible bawdiness, but then one of them began saying something about blacks. His friends immediately realized that he had crossed a red line and tried to quieten him down, without much success. A young woman walked over to the group and told them that their behaviour was unacceptable; then, at the next station, as if from nowhere, a couple of transport policemen appeared and ordered the men to leave the train.

The appearance of the transport policemen must have been a coincidence, but I was impressed with the quiet and dignified way the problem was dealt with, particularly the young woman, who firmly but without hysteria told the gang that their behaviour was unacceptable.

I tried to imagine a similar response to racism on a public bus in Israel, without much success. Israel clearly has a much bigger problem with casual – and indeed explicit – racism than the United Kingdom. I don’t know anyone here who hasn’t heard someone make a remark about how the only good Arab is a dead Arab or something similar. And sometimes, this racism gets even more sinister. Following the tragic bus accident in February, when ten Palestinian children were killed, a number of people drew attention to the celebratory remarks posted by a number of young Israelis on Facebook. Some responded by claiming that these were isolated cases. As a sober piece on Channel Ten television demonstrates, this wasn’t the case. Although the programme didn’t cite any opinion polls on the subject, it’s clear that many young Israelis, from all sorts of different backgrounds, responded in a similar vein to this tragedy. The Channel Ten feature was a thoughtful, carefully documented examination of the problem, complete with practical suggestions as to what to do about it. Read more

“Liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms,” is the premise of Yousef Munayer’s debut post on Peter Beinart’s Zion Square blog, where he seems to have been enlisted as the token anti-Zionist. First, he says that Liberal Zionists “construct an artificial dichotomy between the states and the settlements; they pretend that the Israeli State and its settlements are somehow separate or separable.” Specifically, he objects to Beinart’s use of “undemocratic Israel” to describe the West Bank, as opposed to the “democratic Israel” inside the Green Line. Munayer goes on to point out that settlements exist because of the policies of successive Israeli governments, which is why BDS must “target the state, not just the settlements”. Read more

The critical praise for The Stranger’s Child was probably inevitable, and in many ways reflects the ecstatic reception given to Jonathan Franzen’s similarly uninteresting epic, Freedom, in the United States. Both novelists’ previous works – The Line of Beauty and The Corrections respectively – were superior, and The Line of Beauty was a worthy winner of the 2004 Booker Prize. But one acknowledged classic should not mean a free pass for subsequent works; particularly as The Stranger’s Child is so obviously inferior to its predecessor. Read more

Sometimes the BDS crew remind me of the manager of a mediocre football team desperate to convince everyone that their team is brilliant. When a football manager uses every result (no matter how poor) as evidence that the great change is imminent, you know that they are destined to remain in mediocrity. When he’s honest about the team’s strengths and weaknesses, however, it’s a sign that they might yet become a force to be reckoned with.

In +972, Sean O’Neill argues that BDS is on the verge of achieving widespread support. His evidence? Norman Finkelstein’s declaration of civil war on the boycotters. Demonstrating that the BDS movement remains habitually unable to deal with honest criticism, O’Neill declares the interview “a sign that the ground is shifting on Israel/Palestine issues”, without producing much evidence to back up this claim. The following is all he could come up with: “I recently witnessed BDS’s growing clout at a meeting I attended with a woman working with an Israeli artist helping set up a series of salons in New York to explore and question the Birthright Israel programs, and the idea of a “birthright” in general. The project sounds very interesting, and the woman was visibly frustrated at their inability to find people willing to work with them in the city. They are partially funded by the Israeli Consulate, and as a result have had the proverbial door shut on them by activists, artists, and professors, Arab and Jew alike. This would have been incomprehensible five years ago, when I first heard of the BDS movement at the annual Bil’in conference and it was, at that point, divisive even among conference attendees.” Read more

I had a horrible feeling that it might happen. There had been some speculation that Evra might refuse to shake Suarez’s hand, but nobody seriously entertained the possibility that Suarez would be the one to deliver the snub. I guess they didn’t know Suarez so well. It was gruesome to watch, so gruesome that I could barely watch the super-slow replays. By half-time, though, I had a further thought: whatever else one might say about Suarez, you can’t deny that he’s got balls. Read more

The critical consensus declaring Shame to be a classic is to be welcomed, but it comes at the expense of an elementary error about the film. Almost every critic has reduced it to a film “about” a sex addict, as if there is no more to it than that. But sex addiction is not the cause of Brandon Sullivan’s problems. It is a symptom of them, one of many symptoms, the one with the most obvious cinematic potential, but the film is still “about” much more. Indeed, it is about nothing less than the failure of liberal democracy, with its deification of individual rights, to address the fundamental problem of human loneliness. Read more

The best – and kindest – way to describe Richard Silverstein is that he’s silly. Very silly indeed. He sincerely believes that his blog makes an important contribution to world peace, so important that he regularly asks readers to give him money. After a frustrating first few years as a blogger, while he tried to find a bigger audience, most respectable publications realised that he was silly and wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Then he realised that he could reinvent himself as a ‘whistle-blower’, publishing stories that wouldn’t pass the Israeli military censors. This got him the attention he craved, including one or two profiles in the Israeli media. Some of his exposes were accurate; many were not. In assessing his sources, he seems to go by the principle that if it seems to be bad for Israel then it must be true. Needless to say, this isn’t necessarily the way to go if you want to be taken seriously. Read more

Everyone knows that the Jews control Hollywood. Everyone also knows that Jews are ‘Israel-firsters’. Which means that those who are not ‘Israel-firsters’ are going to have a tough time making it in the movie industry. Take Tilda Swinton. Even falsedi’s resident film critic, the Highbury Gaon, said that We Need to Talk About Kevin was brilliant. Never mind that the ‘Hollywood Reporter’ has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she hasn’t been nominated for the Oscars (as George Orwell might have put it, just because it’s nominated for the Oscars it doesn’t mean that it’s good, and vice-versa). The reason she wasn’t nominated for the Oscars was because she once wore a Palestine scarf in ‘British Vogue’. Because the Jews control Hollywood. And the Jews are Israel-firsters. And because Israel-firsters are so committed to the cause that they won’t let a brilliant and deserving actress be nominated for the Oscars. And of course wearing a Palestine scarf means that Swinton must be the most deserving of the ‘Best Actress’ gong.

No  more evidence required. You can count on less than one hand the number of times I’ve called out anti-Zionists for anti-Semitism on this site, but if the allegation insinuated by Phil Weiss isn’t anti-Semitic, then nothing is. Unless, of course, he has more evidence that he’d like to share.

PS I am Love came out before the appearance in Vogue, and she wasn’t nominated for that either.

PPS Steven Spielberg wasn’t nominated for War Horse. Any keffiyehs in his closet?