The Anti-Semitism Canard

by Drew Forrest

Comment in The Mail and Guardian, South Africa 

10 June 2005 08:59 

The M&G advocates a two-state solution. It must include a deal on Jerusalem, which the Palestinians also regard as their capital. (Photograph: AP) 
To hear many South African Zionists, one would think there can be no good grounds, or unsullied motives, for impugning the state of Israel. All criticism — of Israel’s discriminatory laws, of the systematic annexation of Palestinian land, of the conduct of the Israeli Defence Force — apparently boils down to ignorance or worse, anti-Semitic prejudice.

The Mail & Guardian, which makes no bones about its hearty dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government and its sympathy for the unfortunate Palestinians, has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism in recent years. The charge resurfaced over the cartoon accompanying Ronnie Kasrils’s recent defence of the academic boycott campaign against Israeli universities.

It was a bad cartoon, which slipped through because of the frantic conditions on a day when the paper was fighting an interdict. There was absolutely no will to offend, a possibility Kasrils was decent enough to concede in a complaint to the editor. He described the image as “tasteless ... whatever the cartoonist’s intention”.

What irked us, then, was the attempt by hard-liners to hold up the cartoon as evidence of entrenched anti-Semitism at the M&G.

Witness the near-hysteria of another complainant, Felicia Levy: “Any credibility your newspaper might have had as offering legitimate criticism of Israel dissipated with the publication of this cartoon. Your ‘newspaper’ ... was reduced to nothing more than an anti-Semitic, racist, neo-Nazi publication.”

Neo-Nazi? The M&G? Please! When the paper has spent two decades fighting the perverted idea of a natural hierarchy of races!

The theme is repeated by the Zionist Federation’s Bev Goldman, who wrote that we “typically” accompanied the Kasrils piece with “a despicably anti-Semitic cartoon”. Again, the suggestion is of a pattern of anti-Semitism.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that the underlying motive is to bully the M&G into drawing in its horns on Israel-Palestine.

For the record (if such was needed), our view is that anti-Semitism, like all racism, is a dangerous neurosis that society has a duty to stigmatise, even outlaw. We reject the disguised anti-Semitism of Holocaust denial, and believe some Palestinian supporters only discredit themselves by flirting with it.

For the record, also, the M&G has never called for the destruction of the state of Israel — though the call for a secular state is not necessarily anti-Semitic and, indeed, is made by some left-wing Jews. We advocate a two-state solution — a secular state looks unattainable — but one with justice. It must entail a fair land settlement, a deal on Jerusalem (which the Palestinians also regard as their capital) and talks on the issue of Palestinian exiles.

We are alive to the centuries of European atrocity starting with the Romans, passing through the flagellants, Inquisition and pogroms, and culminating in the Holocaust. The desire for a Jewish state is rooted in a unique sense of insecurity engendered by a unique history of persecution.

But what we cannot accept is that the Palestinians must suffer for Europe’s crimes. It is simply undeniable that the state of Israel is a settler-colonial undertaking, where Jews have constituted themselves as a majority by immigration, military force and legal device — including a bar on the return of Palestinian refugees. 

A consequence has been the systematic dispossession of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs, which continues to this day in the building of a security wall that further erodes Palestinian land, and the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Israeli bona fides in current peace talks must be weighed against this background.

For more than 30 years, 3,5-million Palestinians in the impoverished West Bank and Gaza Strip have groaned under Israeli military occupation, prey to the destruction of houses, farms, and businesses; land confiscations; extra-judicial executions; detentions without trial; collective punishments; curfews, checkpoints and raids.

Conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers have themselves lifted the lid on some of the horrors of occupation. In 2003, for example, Staff Sergeant Liran Ron Furer told Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper that soldiers at checkpoints, with “the chance to be masters” and unrestrained by fear of punishment, became “animals”. Among other abuses, his colleagues had assaulted a dwarf for fun and had a “souvenir picture” taken with bound Palestinians they had beaten.

It is not just for the M&G that these are human rights concerns — we follow Jewish objectors, including Israel’s Gush Shalom and South Africa’s Not In Our Name. In fact, by urging a land settlement that returns to the pre-1967 war “Green Line”, we take a softer stance than the latter, which wants a reversion to 1949.

Faced with persistent allegations of war crimes, conservative Zionists resort to evasions, many of them strongly reminiscent of Nationalist propaganda under apartheid. One response is simply to block out the unpalatable — like the M&G letter-writer who angrily dismissed a Guardian report that Israeli army snipers were targeting children in Gaza, without evidence or, apparently, independent knowledge.

A common red herring, which recalls Nationalist finger-pointing at Africa, has been to contrast Israel’s democracy and economic achievements with the failures of its Arab neighbours. How do these mitigate Israeli injustices?

In a reversal of cause and effect, it is argued that Palestinian suicide bombings justify occupation and military crackdown, much as PW Botha used necklackings to justify sending troops into the townships. Suicide attacks on civilians are indefensible — but like the necklace, they are the pathology of desperation.

And even more objectionably, the Palestinians are accused of bringing their plight on themselves by spurning former premier Ehud Barak’s “generous” settlement terms, which failed even to concede full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Arafat is demonised as the single-handed author of the Palestinian uprising — much as Joe Slovo was presented to white South Africans as opstoker-in-chief.

There are other courses open to South Africa’s Zionists than spinning the indefensible. As the M&G suggested to an enormous outcry, it could concede the manifest wrongs in Israel-Palestine and take them up with Sharon’s government.

The sadness is the apparent deadening of moral sensibility among defenders of Israel. In debate with them, one detects no grain of pity for the Palestinians — despite the traditional Jewish values of compassion and sympathy for the underdog.

Palestinian writer Omar Barghouti produces a telling quote from former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni, who complained in the Irish publication Handstand about the “gross insensitivity” of Israeli society. Referring to the German response to Nazi atrocities, Aloni said: “I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: ‘We did not know.”’ 

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