Understanding Deligitimation and its Jewish Component

Understanding Deligitimation and its Jewish Component

By Sally F. Zerker

I can assure you that I have a nice calm academic article and talk planned for today, and Fred will likely get it for the post-conference publication, but this is no time for academic niceties. This is the time for plain, blunt talk.

What we’re seeing today in Israel/Gaza is the most egregious hypocrisy yet, in a world where dishonesty has become the usual, the norm, where Israel is concerned. Here’s what we’re looking at directly, right now. On Israel’s northern border as we speak a war has been going on in Syria for almost two years with approximately 50,000 deaths, I don’t know how many wounded, but we know there’s easily a quarter of a million refugees, and large parts of several cities are today rubble. But this is Arabs killing Arabs. No parade of foreign ministers from the UK, France, the Eu, US, Can. Aust., or heads of state worrying about the Middle East tinder box exploding, no Arab countries condemning Assad as a human rights criminal. Who cares? Arab killing Arab even if it is 50,000 people, civilians notably, young, old, babies, sure. Painful to absorb but true.

But let Jews defend themselves which inevitably involves Jews killing Arabs, the world goes frantic, and all the above takes place, the foreign ministers’ parade to the microphones, the so-called friendly heads of state asking or demanding Israel’s restraint, the unfriendly ones denouncing Israel in vicious language, the Arab countries now wake up to the human rights violation but not for Syria’s, only for supposedly Israel’s, even though the numbers of death and wounded are a tiny fraction in comparison. Why? What reason could there be for this inequity and excess? I’ll tell you. It’s clear to me at least. It is that Jews have no business defending themselves? For two thousand years until 1948 the only roles for Jews were two, victim and scapegoat. The chutzpa! Giving up their expected roles as victims, or/and scapegoats.

Has what I’m saying here anything to do with the deligitimation of Israel? You bet! The Palestinians know they will not destroy Israel with their rockets. This will only do what Hamas says in its leaflet number 65, “Every Jew or settler is a target and must be killed. Their blood and their property is forfeit”. But the advantage to Hamas is precisely this prejudiced world reaction, the deligitimation outcome that is meant to undermine Israel’s “right to exist”. That is the objective of the deligitimation operations.

I must say something about this outrageous question or even when it is a statement of support for “Israel’s right to exist”. How can it be that only one country in the whole world, where there are 195 other nations on Earth, (acc. to US state dept. figures, UN lists 193 countries) that the one Jewish state is challenged as to its legitimacy? Not only is Israel the nation with the most valid national identity historically in this land, it is also by reason of practice, the clearest case for national existence. (re.fraudulent, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia right to exist??) Menachem Begin would have none of this. He bristled even when someone supported Israel’s right to exist. This is what he said ;

“We are granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago! And so it is that the Jewish people have an historic , eternal and inalienable right to Eretz Yisrael, the land or our forefathers. And for that right which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unequalled in the annals of the nations”.

Now back to the issue under consideration today. The facts are that the tactics of deligitimation , such as boycott, Israel as an apartheid state, the Israel/Nazi inversion and others have all been around for a long time. But there’s a difference now with the programs and projects for deligitimating Israel. Today this operation is in all respect an aspect of the war of the Arabs against Israel, a substitute for belligerent war. Two previous techniques of the Arabs to destroy Israel failed to do that. You know them: one, the combined armed forces of Arab neighbouring countries, in 1948, 56, 67, 73, and two, the Palestinian suicide and other dreadful terrorist attacks. Both have failed to destroy Israel and they know it now. The objective of the deligitimation of Israel is the same, the destruction of the Jewish state, but there’s a difference. What we are dealing with today is globalization in the deligitimation of Israel, in an era where communications technology offers unprecedented opportunities for organization and co-ordination. You and I are today involved whether we like it or not. If we care about Israel’s security and wellbeing then we too have work to do to combat the evils of those who hate the Jewish state and the Jewish people. For those who don’t care, by their indifference they are willy-nilly part of the equation.

That brings me to the most distressing aspect of this campaign. For me, it is the fact that we have a sector of the deligitimation operation that is composed of Jews. They matter more than their numbers or organization. They give a hechsher to the church groups, the pro-Palestinian political activists in the universities, the Islamists, and others who want to harm Israel. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor calls what they do, Jew-washing. That aroused a storm of angry diatribes by some of these types, but I think he’s dead right. Moreover, I’ve come across statements by any number of our Jewish Israel-haters and so has Steinberg that confirms that they know they are indeed adding license to gentile anti-Israel activists and organizations.

Let me give you some idea of whom and what I’m talking about in this regard. There’s an institution called the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN that is made up of Jewish affiliates from all over the Western world, (Argentina, Canada, Germany, Austria, France, United States, South Africa, Australia, and United Kingdom). This organization is indeed a network on a global scale. These organizations separately and together use all the tactics of deligitimation. They are in agreement that Israel should indeed be destroyed, by a widespread, preferably universal attack that leads to its isolation and economic destruction. They have an active campaign in support of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against what they call the apartheid and colonialist state of Israel. Also the network endorses academic and cultural boycotts. They also demand the right of return of all so-called Palestinian refugees to Israel, which of course is a prescription for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, decidedly in this network’s positive agenda. There’s no doubt that IJAN is a product of the internet.

I also think that because deligitimation has gone global there’s a new and profitable industry that is composed of Jews both in Israel and in the diaspora who hate Israel and either want to see its existence as a Jewish state abolished, ended.  And there is a ready-made infrastructure available for this industry. So, let’s look at the composition of that industry and its infrastructure.

The industry is pretty well universally composed of Jews committed to a leftist ideology. I am familiar with gentile right wing anti-Israel activists, but I know of no right wing Jews so motivated. The left, in its hostility towards Jews goes back to the father of modern leftist thinking, Karl Marx, who was a virulent antisemite as we learn from his own words. But interestingly and specifically, many contributors to the school of socialist thought and activities who in one way or another expressed their hostility to Jews, were themselves Jews ( to name a few,  Bernard Hesse,  Bernard Lazare, Moses Hess, Ferdinand LaSalle, Karl Kautsky, Victor Adler, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Bruno Kreisky, Isaac Deutscher and others[1] )and they laid the intellectual or rather anti-intellectual groundwork for today’s Jewish anti-Zionists.

So, what is the nature of this industry I have suggested to you? It is an opportunity for fierce Jewish critics of Israel to acquire enormous benefits and fame directly as a result of their defamation of Israel. Their books get published and translated to sell in foreign parts, these often become best sellers, articles are written about them in the mainstream press, they are invited to present their views all around the continent, Europe and elsewhere, and receive lucrative payments for such appearances, and so on. And while receiving unusual and exceptional exposure they always complain that they are being shut up and shut down, which is the height of their hypocrisy. 

Now, every industry needs an infrastructure. The ready-made one in this globalized world of communications is the mainstream press which has a consistent bias in favour of negative views on Israel, the publishing industry that  profits more from books by Jews critical of Israel than the opposite, and universities that are obliging hosts for voices of disapproval of Israel, and the social media

I am going to list a few names with whom we have become familiar because of their fame as beneficiaries of this industry: Noam Chomsky,[2] Uri Avnery, the late Israel Shahak[3] Norman Finkelstein,[4] Jaqueline Rose , Ilan Pappe, Yigal Tumarkin, Neve Gordon,  Avraham Burg, the late (unlamented) Tony Judt, George Steiner, John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt and in Canada Michael Neumann[5] of Trent University.

Too often these academics are touted as great scholars who therefore bring to their condemnation of Israel special authority. But I contend that there is no way they would have articles written about them in the New York Times, the Guardian or the Atlantic magazine based on their academic scholarship. Even Noam Chomsky, who we are told is a fine scholar of linguistics at MIT, of all places for this subject, would I believe have merited attention only as far as academic conferences, and unless we had a special interest in linguistics, I doubt the non-academic world would have had exposure to Chomsky. Finkelstein was denied tenure at St. Paul University because he’s done nothing worthwhile in his field, nevertheless his books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were best sellers in the US and in translation in Germany, and he is a popular speaker on the hate-Israel circuit. What would Finkelstein have been without Israel to bash? Another obscure failed academic.   Remember, there are thousands upon thousands of professors in each country, 8000 in Israel alone. Basically, they are not famous and their books are rarely money-makers, and are known perhaps only in their narrow specialty. So, I think there’s a great return to be had from telling lies about Israel.

I think in a way, you and I are caught in an insurmountable trap. We probably aid and abet the lucrative results for these Israel haters because we pay attention to their intolerable lies in order to refute them. But in doing so we create more of an audience for them and add to their proceeds. However, I’m afraid we cannot avoid this conundrum because all of us, each and every one of us, who are committed to the Jewish state and the Jewish people bears a responsibility to fight this latest, dreadful stage of the Arab war against Israel.

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[1] Wistrich,  “From Ambivalence to Betrayal, The Left, the Jews and Israel”

 

[2] Chomsky may sound rational but I think he goes so far that there is madness there.  For Chomsky Israeli apartheid is far worse than South Africa’s, Islamic terrorism is at most a minor irritant, Palestinians are bastions of moderation, sees similarities in planning, policies and thinking between Hitler’s actions and those of Israel and the United States, and that he was personally “agnostic” about the Nazi massacres. There’s more but that’s another subject

 

[3] Said the contemporary Israel was a terrorist state far more racist than Nazi Germany, was admired by Edward Said for his courage as a dissident.

 

[4] Finkelstein, says Wistrich , is the go-to Jewish icon for Islamists , neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and deluded leftists that is determined to believe that demonic Israel is the source of all their woes. Pg. . 674

 

 

[5]  For Neumann Israel and Jews in general are complicit in crimes against humanity, more so than Nazi Germany.