Independent.co.uk
Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics
Thursday, 8 May 2008
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to
describe the plight of the
Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a
large degree, it works. There is
nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as
anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis,
even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn't especially im****tant, but it illustrates how the wider
process of intimidation works. I
have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi
Holocaust deniers to
expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge
the anti-Semitism of
Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a
Zionist-homo pig" and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also re****ted from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week,
I wrote an article that
described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli
settlements on to Palestinian
land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has
been do***ented by Friends of the
Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high
profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including
Honest Re****ting and Camera –
said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud
Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips
even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles
like mine. Vast numbers of
e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met
like this. If you recount the
pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Re****ting" claims you are
reviving the anti-Semitic
myth of Jews "poisoning the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby
died in 2002 because she
was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the
West Bank, "Honest Re****ting"
will say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in,
um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau,
calls the behaviour of these
groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of
their own that place them
way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips
are two of the most prominent
figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right.
Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard
professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a
trifling matter, writing:
"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such
movement is not always voluntary
... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive
urban renewal." If a prominent
American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz
often takes to the airwaves to
call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last
year a group called Independent
Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: "Palestinians
and Israelis alike have the
right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and
Rabbi David Goldberg joined.
Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and said they
"encourage" the "killers" of Jews.
Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial"
people who can be collectively
punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that
while "individual Palestinians may
deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national
project". Honest Re****ting
quotes Phillips as a model of reliable re****ting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by
their standards, a majority of
Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy
Carter's decision to speak to the
elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll
last month found that 64
per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it
more aid than anywhere
else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has
ever enjoyed. He also
wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he
wrote a book called Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major
human rights re****ts. There is
nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day.
Carter's comparison of life on
the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new.
The West Bank is ruled in the
interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the
Jewish settlers from which
Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this
"bears striking similarities
to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US,
Carter has widely called "a
racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President
speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
scientist in the US whose parents
were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration
camps. They lost every
blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time
Immemorial by Joan Peters
which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers
arrived, and the people claiming
to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to
cash in. Finkelstein
showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of
sources. From that moment on, he
was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was
when Finkelstein
revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement,
drawn wholesale from
Peters' hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began.
Dershowitz campaigned to make
sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that
Finkelstein's mother – who
made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated
with the Nazis. The
campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for
speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Re****ting becoming
more shrill because they can
sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now
setting up rivals to the
hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this
campaign of demonisation is
damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest
discussion of their plight. It
damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive
and futile path. And it
damages dias****a Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal
with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said
to Joe McCarthy himself:
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? H
ave you left no sense of
decency?"
j.hari@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
©independent.co.uk Legal Terms & Policies | E-mail sign-up | RSS | Contact
us | Syndication | Work for INM |
Advertising Guide | Group Sites | London Careers
Il mittente di questo messaggio|The sender address of this
non corrisponde ad un utente |message is not related to a real
reale ma all'indirizzo fittizio|person but to a fake address of an
di un sistema anonimizzatore |anonymous system
Per maggiori informazioni |For more info
https://www.mixmaster.it
|
