Charging
Anti-Semitism
To Silence Dissent
By Ida Audeh
07 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
charge of anti-Semitism is used by supporters of Israel to silence and
discredit voices that conflict with Zionist orthodoxy. Two recent examples
illustrate this point: The publication of Jimmy Carter's book Palestine
Peace not Apartheid triggered a well-orchestrated campaign of vilification
and character assassination of a former president whose "crime"
was to characterize Israeli policies in the occupied territories as
apartheid. (South African anti-apartheid activists say it is much worse.)
The March 2006 publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay
"The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books was accompanied
by the familiar charge of anti-Semitism directed at two university professors
who simply analyzed the disproportionate power of the Israel lobby AIPAC
in shaping US Middle East policy. To anyone who follows the US Middle
East policy, their conclusions were not news, but the publication of
their article unleashed a flood of abuse on two establishment academics.
Similar tactics are used
at the local level, too. For years I worked with a university committee
to identify panelists to invite to an annual conference. Invariably,
pro-Israel committee members casually smeared as an anti-Semite any
nominee whose single crime was criticism of Israeli policies in the
Palestinian occupied territories. In the name of protecting the student
body from exposure to "anti-Semites," they could accuse honorable
people of bigotry without paying a price for their slander. Needless
to say, nominees so smeared were instantly rendered unconfirmable and
dropped from consideration. When friends and I publish op-ed pieces
or letters in our local or state newspaper, ad hominem responses are
swift; more often then not, they casually incorporate sentiments that
would be correctly identified as bigotry were they targeting Blacks
or Jews.
Predictably, Israel's supporters
level the anti-Semitism charge against Arabs, too, to explain away Arab
outrage over Israel's racist and colonialist policies toward Palestinians,
defined by land theft and control through ethnic cleansing, imprisoning
walls, and the imprisonment and assassination of any Palestinian with
leadership potential. As though these are insufficient reasons for hatred
of Israel; as though Palestinians would tolerate the ongoing assault
on their existence as a nation were non-Jewish oppressors responsible.
Claims that Muslim clerics
and Hamas and Hizballah officials regularly endorse slaughtering Jews,
supported by alleged quotes, ring false to anyone with familiarity with
the region, with the language, and with religious and political rhetoric.
In the United States, translations of Arabic and Farsi are frequently
wrong; it has been demonstrated conclusively that Iranian president
Ahmedinejad never vowed to wipe Israel off the map, for example, yet
the lie is slyly and regularly repeated to drum up support for an attack
on Iran. These "quotes" cannot be trusted because they cannot
be verified, the context is questionable, and they come from sources
(like
memri.org) with an ax to grind.
But even if you assume that anti-Jewish quotes are in fact authentic:
How is this relevant? This pretense that Israel is being persecuted
by malevolent Arabs is easily debunked when the facts are considered:
take for example kill rates (an average of 4 Palestinian civilians killed
for every Israeli killed; about 8 Palestinian children for every Israeli
child); house demolitions (thousands of Palestinian homes, 0 Israeli
homes); checkpoints (more than 400 in the West Bank alone, 0 in Israel);
prisoners (more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, including about 300
children; 1 Israeli soldier held prisoner, and no Israeli children).
Israel's supporters must resort to a blizzard of lies, half-lies, and
non-sequiturs because the facts about Israel cannot be justified by
fair-minded people.
Read any newspaper or watch
television (non)coverage of Middle Eastern events, and evaluate for
yourself whether Blacks or Jews would be discussed with the same disdain,
the same callous disregard for their loss of life, as are Arabs and
Muslims generally and Palestinians specifically. Missing from discussions
of self-righteous concern over Arab or Muslim "extremism"
is any acknowledgement that the whole colonialist enterprise that engages
Israelis is an extremist one, that just about every leader democratically
elected by that bastion of democracy has been a military figure, and
that Israel's Jewish population as a whole, with a few notable exceptions,
are at best indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians their government
has waged a relentless war against for almost 60 years now.
One never hears those who
profess concern about anti-Semitism speak out against Israeli policies
that discriminate against Semites like me -- US citizens of Palestinian
ethnicity -- from going to the occupied territories to live with or
even visit our families. Right now thousands of Palestinian families
are faced with an impossible choice: the spouse of a Palestinian resident
cannot obtain residency rights and so must either live with their families
illegally and face deportation if caught; live elsewhere, even though
that means splitting the family; or move the entire family to a foreign
country where they must struggle to build a life for themselves. In
the past 12 months, I tried 3 times to visit my elderly mother. Twice
I was turned back from the border. It is a safe bet that I would not
have been treated as an undesirable element had my surname been Jewish;
a Semite of the Arab persuasion is a different matter altogether.
What do Israel's apologists
propose as a resolution to the conflict that grips Mandate Palestine,
where 5.4 million Semitic Jews rule over 5.2 million Semitic Muslim
and Christian Arabs? In the not too distant future, Jews will be a minority.
Will Israel's apologists continue to cry anti-Semitism when an Israeli
Jewish minority dominates the non-Jewish majority, and will they denounce
as anti-Semitism the inevitable and irrefutable description of Israel
as an apartheid state?
Can Israel's supporters support
a state in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians have equal rights as
citizens? Surely the goal of equality among all Semites in Mandate Palestine
is worth pursuing by those who claim to be appalled by anti-Semitism.
Ida Audeh
is a Palestinian-American who lives in Boulder, Colorado. Her interviews
with Palestinians who have lost land and their livelihoods to Israel's
wall have been published on the Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net),
an alternative source of information about "the question of Palestine,
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal,
and human dimensions of Israel's 40-year occupation of Palestinian territories."
She can be reached at [email protected]
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