When heroes disappoint. June 7, 2010 Jill Ugh Helen Thomas. Jezebel has more. UPDATE: Adam Serwer also has a very good take.
Helen Thomas should have known that while many of the white colonists who first began the 63-year-war against the Palestinian people were indeed from Eastern Europe and from North America, that was 63 years ago: it’s their descendants, and the descendants of the Middle Eastern refugees who came to the new state at the beginning of the war, who continue it now. “Go back to where you came from” applies to Helen Thomas, the descendant of white immigrants, as much as it does to the dscendents of the white immigrants in what is now Israel. Still, it’s worth noting that many American journalists have openly supported the murderous campaigns by the Israelis against the Palestinians, and supported the denial of citizenship to Palestinians and the maintenance of the apartheid state of Israel, without needing to announce that they are retiring immediately. I don’t support what Helen Thomas said: but I could wish that the post on Feministe about Israel’s illegal military attack on the civilian flotilla had not been labelled the “flotilla disaster”, implying that there was some way a military assault on a civilian vessel could have gone right.
Jesurgislac, right. I also winced at Jezebel’s suggestion that there were now other loudmouthed women out there who could fill Helen Thomas’ shoes. Erm, no. She is completely irreplaceable in today’s corporatized media world. The only person I could begin to think of is Amy Goodman, and she plays a very different role within the media. I don’t support what Thomas’s said here either, but let’s not pretend she has parallels. It’s simply not true.
I remember her keynote speech at the 2008 WAM conference in Cambridge. She took some very unnecessary swipes at Obama, essentially taking the “feminists can only support Hillary Clinton” line that Gloria Steinem made infamous. Her remarks about Israel were appalling and indefensible, not to mention reflective of a complete lack of understanding of contemporary demography in the Jewish state. All that said, Helen Thomas deserves our thanks and our praise for a lifetime of public service and glass-ceiling-breaking. Here’s to a long and healthy and happy retirement.
Disappointed is a massive understatement. I’ve been following the discussions on the flotilla disaster, and it’s not just Thomas–there’s been this infusion of anti-Semitism into the debate from all sides. And that’s not unexpected for a Jew to read in any discussion about issues relating to aspects of their identity. What was unexpected was the angle of attack. I’ve never been hit so hard from the left. Ever. I’ve never believed that I had to defend against anything coming from that direction. This last week has been eye opening for me, and I’m so incredibly unhappy with how groups that I felt at home in, groups that I thought were my groups–The feminists, the liberals, the queer rights activists, the anti-racist activists–started on rhetoric that was not only illogical, but hateful. Jews all over the world were forced to re-examine their allegiances after the flotilla debacle. Some, like me, did a lot of research, followed every article, tracked every picture and video released, read all the statements from protesters and soldiers alike, read the responses from world leaders and pundits. Whatever side you came down on–whether the decision to switch over to live ammo was appropriate or not–the language used to describe the commandos, and Jews as a whole, was terrifying. Bloodthirsty. Manipulative. Machiavellian. Fresh off the heels of yet another organ-harvesting/blood libel attack, Jews can barely read the newspaper without hearing themselves described in ways that sound all-too-familiar, but from voices that sounded so friendly until a little while ago– To pre-empt this. People will, and have, argued that “Critiquing Israel isn’t Critiquing Jews!” That’s often true, but when you use anti-Semitic language, you place yourself firmly in that territory. Imagine someone saying “Feminists are hysterical, overemotional, frigid and humorless. This isn’t a critique of WOMEN, this is a critique of feminists. Calling me sexist is just how you people distract from legitimate criticism” How would you respond to that? To continue. The language towards Israel is vitriolic, to be sure, but it goes beyond that. It’s so easy to blame the Jews. The world has been doing that for generations, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that that’s happening again, but I really though that these groups, who placed so much emphasis on deconstruction, on examining privilege, on transcending stereotypes and racial tropes, could get knocked right back into it. Do people who are saying we need to put our support behind Hamas really know what Hamas is? Have you read their charter? Do you support that? I have to assume either that they haven’t, and are doing the same racist knee-jerk reaction that the rest of the world is…and I’m disappointed….or I have to assume that they have, they know about how Hamas treats women, queer people, people of other religions, and what it’s committed to doing to Jews in the region (killing them all)…and I’m frightened. How can feminists take that side? How can queer people take that side? What has Israel done that has made it WORSE than this group? There’s no examination of Turkey’s hypocritical criticism of Israel because the million-or-so Armenians aren’t important, or maybe because the people committing the genocide aren’t Jewish. There’s no breakdown of the timeline of events on the boat and an examination or discussion of at what time would opening fire be appropriate. There’s no counteracting the “Israel is apartheid” claim with arguments based on the exclusivity of Israel. A part of anti-Semitism is holding Jews to a different standard than one would hold gentiles. When Israel places soldiers anywhere outside (or, a lot of the time, inside) the ’48 border, it’s an incursion and an occupation. When anyone else does it, it’s not commented on. The life expectancy in the Gaza strip is longer than the life expectancy on Aboriginal Reservations in Canada, but when Israel does it, it’s a death camp where the inhabitants are being starved while in Canada it’s just a political or social problem. When a Jew opens fire on a person who has just stabbed them shot them, they’re not being a good Jew because “Thou Shalt Not Kill. Your God will be glad to receive you into heaven when you died not resisting an attacker.” I’m tired of listening to people who have been killing us for the last two thousand years tell us when it’s appropriate to fight. I’m tired of people who, not 70 years ago, killed off a third of us, leaving the rest with scars from which we will NEVER heal from, denying a lot of us a past, or a heritage, denying the world the advances that those 6 million Jews could have brought us, now say that we’re in the wrong. You want to examine privilige? How about the privilege of knowing where your great grandparents are buried instead of having them be a bit of ash that was scattered to the wind. How about the privilege of being from a race of people who has BEEN safe for the last two millenia, who has had a homeland, who has had an army to protect them, a government to advocate for their needs. In the US in 2007, 1010 hate crimes reported were anti-Semitic whereas 1,460 hate crimes reported were based on sexual orientation. Using the 10% of the population shorthand, there are five times as many gays and lesbians in the US as Jews, making you three and a half times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime if you’re Jewish than if you’re a queer person, so you’ve got the privilege of being much, much less at risk as well. Why isn’t that challenged? I read over Feministing (who hasn’t even mentioned Helen Thomas) about how, say, the French McDonalds ad may or may not be homophobic, or how Sex and the City may or may not be racist. But when it comes to male circumcision, not only should there not be a debate, but “to keep feminist spaces safe, we shouldn’t allow any pro-circumcision arguments or circumcision apologists.” Discussing gay issues, totally fine. Discussing Jewish issues (not that it gets framed as a Jewish issue)…completely verboten. In fact, any Jew who believes it’s an important part of their heritage should be banned from the space. Compare that to the ever-ongoing debate on the Burqa (which we shouldn’t ever forget is an issue of race and religion as well as sex), and you see a clear double standard. I want to be happy with this so much. I want to work hard for gender equality, I want to work hard for the end of racial discrimination and a safer world for me, my people, your people, every person everywhere. But I feel like the whole left has rotated when I wasn’t watching, and suddenly I don’t feel so safe anymore. Is there anyone who’s willing to restrict discussion because of that? Is there anyone who’s willing to stand up to those who are showing this double standard on my behalf? Or am I just going to have to stick it out alone? I don’t know if I can do it. Calling myself a feminist has never felt bad until this week. When people hit me with the Lesbian separatists of the 70’s or whatever damn thing that makes us look silly, I can maintain my dignity by knowing that that’s a fringe group, and the mainstream is working towards a better world. Now I’m pitted against the mainstream, and it’s disheartening. Read the comments on the Huffington Post, or any other left blog, and see what the people on what I previously thought was my side are saying about my people, and tell me that I’m overreacting or that I’m wrong in my feelings. G-d damn it. There’s nothing else to say.
I’ll add that I hadn’t realised that Thomas actually specified “Germany and Poland” as places that Israeli Jews should “go back to”, which strikes me as being either hopelessly, crassly insensitive, or really horrifyingly anti-Semitic. Samantha b: She is completely irreplaceable in today’s corporatized media world. Yeah. It’s hard to pick what’s the saddest thing of all about this – but that’s on the list.
Yeah, I agree that Thomas is incredible and irreplaceable — I disagree with the Jezebel post on that point. But damn, that makes it SO much more disappointing.
I agree that Thomas’s remarks were offensive. I think of them more as intemperate, though, akin to someone saying in the 80s that the Afrikaaners should go back to the Netherlands. It’s an irrelevant and stupid thing to say. But I’m bothered by the lack of context in much of the coverage of Thomas’s remarks (including here). As the first commenter points out Thomas was referring to the white colonial population that has occupied Palestine for the last 63 years. As the descendant of European Jews, I’m outraged and ashamed that my people perpetrated an ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian indigenous population and continues to fight to ensure a specific “demographic balance;” that Israel has massacred civilians repeatedly and just now showed that it wouldn’t limit itself to Palestinian or Arab civilians; and that Israel continually refuses to submit to international law (regarding the rights of Palestinian refugees, the apartheid Wall, the siege on Gaza, the Goldstone Report, and recently the Flotilla massacre). I read somewhere recently that two major tragedies befell the Jewish people in the 20th century: the Shoah which made us victims, and Zionism which made us oppressors. Thomas was wrong to say that Jews should go back to Europe, to be sure; but we should take her remarks in the context of the Jewish people’s situation and history in Palestine.
Daniel, if there is a lack of context, it’s because Thomas herself didn’t offer any. She never said she was specifically referring to the white colonial population of Israel; she referred to Israelis generally, many of whom are not the descendants of white Europeans. Israel has done a great many problematic and, in my opinion, wrong and immoral things. But those things are not the fault of “the Jews” collectively, nor justification to tell an entire nation of people to “go back to Europe” when (a) many of them weren’t from Europe in the first place, and (b) one reason that so many Jews left Europe is because they were systematically massacred there. More journalists should be critical of Israeli actions, and of the unwaivering U.S. support of Israel; but that isn’t what Thomas was doing. She spat out a flat-out anti-Semitic comment, and she should be roundly criticized for it. To criticize her comment is not the same as saying that everything Israel does is a-ok. And the South Africa comparison absolutely does not hold.
And the South Africa comparison absolutely does not hold. Well, South Africa used to be an apartheid state and isn’t any longer, but Israel still is.
Well, South Africa used to be an apartheid state and isn’t any longer, but Israel still is. But that’s not exactly how Daniel was using the comparison. He was comparing telling Israeli Jews to “go back to Europe” to telling Afrikaaners to “go back to the Netherlands.” It’s not nearly the same situation when you recognize that Jews were persecuted for centuries, and were systematically slaughtered in Europe. The desire for a Jewish state in the Middle East is a complicated one, and it’s informed by different reasons than the desire to colonize Africa. And the history of Jewish people is very different than the history of Dutch people, which is why Thomas’s comment was so vile, and why it would not have been nearly as vile for her to have said the same thing about Afrikaaners in the 1980s.
Jill: you’re right about Thomas not providing the context, and being herself responsible for doing so. I think she is wholly responsible for what she said. And I think the remarks were anti-semitic. But I think they were anti-semitic remarks that came in specific response to an atrocity committed by Israelis. Being a cis Jewish man who tries to work as an ally in anti-oppressive environments I try to think twice before I condemn people who are attacking my identity–which is frequently one of privilege. In Palestine, Jews are privileged. Specifically, Jews of European descent are privileged. Thomas isn’t a Palestinian so I’m less inclined to excuse her remarks in this case–though she is an Arab-American. At any rate, it seems to me that even though Thomas’s remarks are antisemitic, they are not being treated similarly to other bigoted attacks on the identity of people with privilege. You are right that the remarks are specifically insensitive considering the massacre of Jews in Europe. I don’t disupte that. (Zionism, of course, was founded in the 1890s, and the most offensive plans for the transfer of the Palestinians (often excused by “we needed to make a space safe for the Jews after Holocaust”) were finalized in the 1930s.) Again, I want to be clear that I’m not excusing Thomas’s remarks or criticizing people who criticize her. I’m just disappointed by the (typical) lack of context. I’m not sure what you mean when you say the South Africa comparison does not hold. Jews in Palestine are not exactly like Afrikaaners in South Africa. There are many obvious and important disanalogies which are important to remember: the Palestinian refugee problem, the different labor status of Arabs in Israel and blacks in apartheid South Africa, the regional situation and international support for the two states. But there may be similarities that are useful in trying to understand the situation in Israel. One similarity is that both are settler-colonial states and that both states operated under an Apartheid system. Another similarity is that activists are using the boycott, divestment, and sanctions strategy used in South Africa in an attempt to challenge Israeli apartheid. Most importantly though, the wisest commentators like Ali Abunimah see a way out of the current conflict in Palestine on the model of the solution in South Africa. (See the relevant chapter in his book One Country.) I can’t wait for the day when an Israeli and a Palestinian sign a charter that starts, “Israel/Palestine belongs to all the people who live in it.”
P.S.: Thanks for adding the link to Adam Serwer’s post–his post provides exactly the context that I think is necessary here.
G-d Dammit! This is what I’m talking about! It’s not like telling Afrikaaners to “go back to the Netherlands.” It’s like telling African Americans to “go back to being slaves”. And your response is “Well, not ALL African-Americans were slaves.” The Holocaust happened! That occured! Why does no one remember it?
@CAM I can’t say I saw any antisemitism. I saw lots of valid and wholly justified criticism of Israel and its genocidal policy towards the Palestianians. I won’t say there wasn’t any antisemitism, but in my experience when a Zionist says “antisemitism” they generally mean “critical of Israel”. As an opponent of theocracy and religiously founded government I am, and always have been, utterly opposed to the existence of Israel as a “Jewish State” or “Jewish Homeland”. We’ve seen how well that works, both for women and in general, with Islamic Nations and I see no reason to believe that there is some quality in Judaism that will prevent Israel from following the same path (for that matter, they appear to be well down that road already with the tolerance and support of the Haridim and their evil misogyny). I also find the evils committed by the government of Israel to be worthy of condemnation, but I have nothing against Jews. No matter how much you wish to deny it, there is a difference between opposing Israel’s actions and being antisemitic.
It’s not nearly the same situation when you recognize that Jews were persecuted for centuries, and were systematically slaughtered in Europe Afrikaners are, in origin, refugee Calvinist Protestants. That’s a group which has, historically, been persecuted in Europe. There is no Christian group in Europe which has been persecuted for their religion to the same degree as the Jews: but telling any group of refugees they should “go back to where they came from” is, at the very kindest interpretation, crass: it becomes directly discriminatory when it is argued that the descendants of refugees ought to “go back where they came from”. But the parallels between Israel and South Africa are clear, obvious, and direct: Archbishop Tutu is probably the most well-known person to point them out: Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured. The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred. Sadly, the Archbishop wrote that sentence in April 2002 – and there’s never been a period of time in the intervening eight years when it hasn’t been as directly applicable.
I could wish that the post on Feministe about Israel’s illegal military attack on the civilian flotilla had not been labelled the “flotilla disaster”, implying that there was some way a military assault on a civilian vessel could have gone right. I think it’s been pretty clearly shown that the so-long “peace” activists on the flotilla were not civilians. [T]here’s been this infusion of anti-Semitism into the debate from all sides. . . . What was unexpected was the angle of attack. I’ve never been hit so hard from the left. Ever. Interestingly, the idea that Jews are permanent foreigners is more typical of rightist anti-semitism. The great irony is that while Thomas said “go back to Germany and Poland”, the Germans and Polish have repeatedly said “go back to Israel” many times throughout history. As the descendant of European Jews, I’m outraged and ashamed that my people perpetrated an ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian indigenous population See the bolded portion. This is exactly the problem. Arabs and Jews have lived in what they call Palestine and Israel, respectively, for thousands of years. It’s absurd to suggest that because Jews were forcibly exiled to Europe, North Africa, & present day Iraq/Iran, that they are “colonists” when they return to their ancestral land. Whatever you think about the actions of the Israel government over the last 60 years, to suggest that Jews are foreigners in their land is deeply insensitive, at best. We have been foreigners in Germany, Poland, Spain, England, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Egypt – just to name a few – even after having lived in those countries for hundreds of years. Having been foreigners all over the world, we finally migrate to our ancestral home only to be called foreigners again by a new brand of anti-semites who apparently want Jews to forever migrate around the globe.
Thank you, Cam, for reminding Feministe readers about the Holocaust. Seriously, Israelis as colonists? This comment section is making me nauseous.
No matter how much you wish to deny it, there is a difference between opposing Israel’s actions and being antisemitic. Sure. But saying that Jews should “go back to where they came from” — assuming that Jews are not from Israel in the first place, erasing the history that caused many European Jews to flea — isn’t criticizing the Israeli government’s actions.
UGH. I feel so betrayed. But you know what? I’m SO not surprised. Because “Criticizing Israel != anti-Semitism” has become the slogan for anti-Semitism. Oh, but it’s OK, because it was the right wing that conflated criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism in the first place, so we can totally just continue that conflation. I’ve felt so uncomfortable in a lot of liberal forums over the past week. But also felt like, if I called people out on their bullshit, I’d just get shot down. Because the Israeli government doing bad things means that we can hate on, not only all Israelis, but Jews everywhere. Awesome. Business as usual.
It’s not like telling Afrikaaners to “go back to the Netherlands.” It’s like telling African Americans to “go back to being slaves” Exactly. It is simply impossible to talk about the state of Israel’s history without talking about its founding in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. This doesn’t serve as a blanket justification for whatever the Israeli government does, but it does mean that comparisons between Israeli Jews and white Afrikaners is simply unacceptable and inaccurate.
@Sotonohino Fantastic. Thank you for showing up. You are a great example of exactly the person I was talking about. “I can’t say I saw any anti-semitism”. An expert opinion there, especially when followed by “when a Zionist says “antisemitism” they generally mean “critical of Israel”.” No, I mean anti-Semitic. Do you want an explanation as to WHY these things are anti-Semitic, or are you just going to talk about the secret hidden motives and shady tactics of the Zionists? Because there’s a whole book about that you should read.
@Sotonohito again. Sure. Not anti-Semitic. You have a blog that’s apparently devoted to describing how Jews are murderers in the torah, but that’s just honest criticism, right?
It’s not like telling Afrikaaners to “go back to the Netherlands.” It’s like telling African Americans to “go back to being slaves”. And your response is “Well, not ALL African-Americans were slaves.” I think it’s more akin to telling people “Go back to the place where you *used* to be slaves, now that you have power and military force.” I have heard the argument that the appropriate solution to the horrors inflicted by the Holocaust was not for the Jews to be permitted by Britain to take over the territory of people who had had nothing to do with the Holocaust, on the basis of a 2000-year-old land claim, but to take over the territory of the people who’d slaughtered them. In other words, the Jews should have been given a significant part of Germany and/or Poland as their reparations for the Holocaust, and that way they would have been taking territory from the people who were actually responsible for the atrocity. of course, more knowledge of history says this would have been extremely problematic. The Holocaust wasn’t actually a well known or understood phenomenon until most of the Jewish survivors had relocated to somewhere that they felt safe enough to start talking about it. Giving the Jewish people the land of the people who had just rounded them up and killed them would have been kind of like giving an abused wife sole title to her abusive husband’s house, without doing anything to stop him from breaking into the house and beating her up, or their neighbors from supporting him and tsk-tsking that his house was taken and it’s so unfair. The Jews *needed* to get away from Europe in order to heal from the wounds of the Holocaust (and as nearly as I can see, Europe remains vastly more anti-Semitic in general than America does, even now). At the same time, though, was it fair to take land from the people who were already there? The Palestinians were colonized by the British, and to the best of my knowledge didn’t play a significant role in WW II one way or another. It wasn’t the Palestinians who took that land from the Jews in the first place, it was the Romans (so perhaps the Jews should have been given territory in Italy? :-)), and during the Crusades the Muslims were actually much more tolerant of the Jews living in Palestine than the Christians were, so it doesn’t make a lot of historical sense. It’s actually a lot like Americans who were persecuted for their religion coming over from Europe to take territory away from the Native Americans. Good for the victims of persecution, bad for the innocent people who were already living here. Was there *no* alternative but to replicate that mistake? I think there needs to be a Jewish state. I think it was a bad idea to put it in Palestine. Among many other problems, taking people who had just been collectively abused and putting them in a hostile environment where they are surrounded by enemies who have a legitimate claim to the territory they’ve taken, but are less technologically advanced, promoted the development of a frighteningly militaristic mindset. The fact that the Israelis keep “accidentally” killing civilians is unsurprising given the siege mentality of having to control a larger hostile population with better technology and military might, on top of having been horrifically victimized (hell, Americans have done similarly terrible things on the basis of far less victimization). But I want to see a civilized, modern democratic nation with egalitarian ideals do better than that (and now that I’ve learned that my biological grandfather was Jewish, I feel a tiny bit of “I want you to be better than that because you’re partly my people and I want to be proud of you again.”) But, you know, at this point what can you do? Hand over half of Germany to the Israelis to relocate to? Because splitting Germany worked so well last time. *snort* You can’t move the Jews; after 60 years this *is* their land now. You can’t move the Palestinians either, because this has always been their land. All you can do is try to help them work together, but I haven’t seen the situation improving in many years. America, as Israel’s “big brother”, needs to be willing to tell Israel when it is being an ass, and Europe needs to quit acting as if Israel being an ass comes out of Israel just being a lot of big meanies and not a direct result of what Europe itself did to the Jewish people. I mean, after you kill 10 million people or turn a blind eye to their deaths or refuse to let them escape into your country before they are killed, you pretty much lose all the moral high ground to criticize them for what they do to a different group of people 60 years later.
Oh for goodness sakes, Sotonohino. Have you read “Derailing for dummies”? If you haven’t, it’s a good read. I recommend it. For the Cliff Notes, when someone says, “this is oppressive to me,” it’s generally a good idea to believe them. Because they have more experience in that oppression than you do. I’m Jewish. I have Israeli family. I also happen to be highly critical of the current Israeli government for many, many, many reasons. This was an anti-Semitic statement. By denying our viewpoints on the matter (“You’re being oversensitive!”) you are participating in our oppression. Please stop.
“America, as Israel’s “big brother”, needs to be willing to tell Israel when it is being an ass, and Europe needs to quit acting as if Israel being an ass comes out of Israel just being a lot of big meanies and not a direct result of what Europe itself did to the Jewish people. I mean, after you kill 10 million people or turn a blind eye to their deaths or refuse to let them escape into your country before they are killed, you pretty much lose all the moral high ground to criticize them for what they do to a different group of people 60 years later.” Brilliant, Alara. If only…
@Alara The thing about Germany is that it’s the nuclear option. Germany is a place, for Jews, that has very special significance due to the Holocaust. When we’re told “Go back to germany”, it’s not “Go back to where you came from”. It’s “Go back to where they killed you. Please, go off and die.”
You can’t move the Jews; after 60 years this *is* their land now. You can’t move the Palestinians either, because this has always been their land. Please, please, please acknowledge that Jews have a claim to the land just a bit stronger than “after 60 years this is their land now”. Jews have been living in, praying for, and identifying with Israel for thousands of years. I’m not saying that this nullifies other people’s claim. But you can’t ignore the role that the land of Israel plays in Jewish culture, identity, and history.
There are issues on which I support Israel and there are issues on which i do not. But the people who scare me (on both sides) are the ones who seem to think that the solution/blame/cause is “obvious,” “clear,” “simple,” or can be described in a word or two. This is a horrible situation in which a single focus can, oddly, only distort the true problems behind it.
@Cam: I have a blog where I’m reading through and critiquing the Bible a few chapters at a time. As for murder, rape, genocide, and other evil acts, yup there right there in the Bible/Torah and I think they’re pretty awful, I should lie and say that ancient genocide myths are fine and dandy? When I get to the New Testament I’m sure I’ll be called anti-Christian. As for antisemitism, as I said, I didn’t see any. I do know that loudly accusing critics of Israel of antisemitism is a standard tactic of the hard core pro-Israel faction. I do not deny that there may have been some genuine antisemitism from the left WRT the latest debacle from Israel, but I think characterizing the anti-Israeli response from the left as anti-Jewish is quite wrong. I know for a fact that my response was anti-Israeli and not anti-Jewish in the slightest. Again, and to repeat as often as necessary: critical of Israel != hatred of Jews. I’ll also note that many Jews are quite critical of the Israeli response to the flotilla, and the blockade that prompted it. I doubt that they are all antisemitic. @Shoshi: “This was an anti-Semitic statement. By denying our viewpoints on the matter (“You’re being oversensitive!”) you are participating in our oppression. Please stop.” Denying antisemitism is antisemitism…. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Besides, Israel isn’t oppressed. In case you didn’t notice it has the most powerful military in the region, it has the US military at its back, its won every single military campaign its ever been involved in, and its currently oppressing the natives of the land they colonized. Israel is many things, but oppressed isn’t even remotely on the list. Jews have been historically oppressed, yup no question. Jews experience antisemitism in many places, absolutely. That’s wrong, no question at all. But Israel is no oppressed, its the oppressor. That’s kind of why most liberals aren’t fond of Israel, we generally don’t side with colonizers and oppressors. @djf: Nonsense. Jews lived there thousands of years ago, that doesn’t give them any claim to the land today. I don’t have any claim on Europe despite the fact that my ancestors were forcibly removed from there and relocated to the USA (well, some of them anyway, others came of their own volition). Jews currently live in Israel and that gives them claim to the land, many Israelis were born there and that gives them a better claim. I’m an advocate of a two state solution myself, so I’m hardly arguing that Israeli Jews should “go back where they came from” because that’s nonsensical. But the historic existence of Jews in Israel is meaningless. But the Palestinians who lived there for 1500+ years after the Jews were forced out can’t “go back where they came from” either. There has to be a solution that’s equable for both sides and we won’t find that solution by cheer-leading everything Israel does no matter how bad.
Sotonohito, no one on this thread has been “cheer-leading everything Israel does no matter how bad.” People have actually been doing the opposite. But this thread is about what Helen Thomas said. And what she said was not a criticism of the Israeli government, any more than saying all immigrants should “Go back to Mexico” is a critique of the Mexican government. It was a hateful and anti-Semitic comment.
Feministing finally covered the story, and it was more if its usual anti-Semitism apologist bullshit. I boycotted that site long ago for the fact that deeply anti-Semitic comments and community posts made it through moderation but “Jews are oppressed, too!” comments got deleted. Now Thomas’s “Jews, go back to the countries with the ovens” comments are ok because other people are racist too! Ugh. Helen Thomas really disappointed me. But I’m even more disappointed that there is no one to replace her. In 50 years no one could mentor one single female White House reporter to replace her? Really? That is as depressing as anything else.
@Shoshi: I wrote “Denying antisemitism is antisemitism…. Sorry, I don’t buy it.” That’s poorly written because of course in the general application it could very well be antisemitism. I was trying to say something more along the lines of : “denying that the general left response in this particular instance was antisemitic is antisemitism…. Sorry, I don’t buy it.” That I’ll stand beside.
Wow, I expected her remarks to have been *pro* Israel. Which says something about the difference between popular opinion in the US and UK. I am so disappointed in Israel, and angry – it *does* have a right to exist and Hamas don’t recognise that. It’s in the right! But it’s alienating everyone with this aggression.
I’ll also note that many Jews are quite critical of the Israeli response to the flotilla, and the blockade that prompted it. I doubt that they are all antisemitic. Has anybody said that people who criticize the Israeli response to the flotilla are antisemitic? People are saying that telling Jews to go back to Germany is antisemitic. There’s a pretty clear difference there.
Although, I do want to be clear I utterly condemn Helen Thomas’ comment which was anti-Semitic. There’s a difference between legitimate criticism of Israel’s *actions* and well, moronic racist remarks about its *people*.
I am not denying the importance of the Holocaust. But as the descendant of European Jews who fled and were victimized by the Holocaust, I’m offended when it’s brought up in the context of Israeli violence against Palestinians today. (I understand, but dispute, the invocation of the Holocaust to explain the European-Jewish colonization of Palestine.) It manifestly isn’t worthwhile to compare the Holocaust to the Nakbah, the Setback (the 43rd anniversary of which is this week, if anyone is interested), and other tragedies that have befallen the Palestinians.. No one here, I think, is in favor of “oppression olympics” and I’m not saying that Palestinians are more oppressed than Jews. But today, in 2010, in Israel/Palestine, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and as much as it pains me, the Jewish people are oppressors. I feel that the historical trauma that I feel characterizes my identity as a Jew is cheapened when it’s used in the discourse around Palestine. There is a double standard about condemnations. The White House condemned Thomas’s antisemitic remarks “reprehensible,” but wouldn’t even condemn, in any terms, the Israeli state violence that occurred a week ago. (The U.S. government rarely condemns Israel, and notably failed to condemn the Gaza massacre of 2008-2009.) Thomas and the Press Secretary, last week: HELEN THOMAS: Our initial reaction to this flotilla massacre, deliberate massacre, an international crime, was pitiful. What do you mean you regret when something should be so strongly condemned? And if any other nation in the world had done it, we would have been up in arms. What is the sacrosanct, iron-clad relationship where a country that deliberately kills people and boycotts — and we aid and abet the boycott? ROBERT GIBBS: Look, I think the initial reaction regretted the loss of life as we tried and still continue to try to gather the relevant – THOMAS: Regret won’t bring them back. GIBBS: Nothing can bring them back, Helen. We know that for sure because I think if you could, that wouldn’t be up for debate. We are — we believe that a credible and transparent investigation has to look into the facts. And as I said earlier, we’re open to international participation in that investigation. THOMAS: Why did you think of it so late? GIBBS: Why did we think of – THOMAS: Why didn’t you initially condemn it? GIBBS: Again, I think the statements that were released speak directly to that.
I’m just not very sympathetic to having conversations like these. It’s far too damned much like the circus around Michael Vick or Reverend Wright. The miscreant activity serves to increase the robustness of how righteous someone feels when s/he yells out crap to the mediasphere. Tho’ little mr. evil me sorta wishes that Thomas’s comment was taken seriously, just to see the faces of all those super-anti-semitic central europeans (especially Poles) blanche. Anyways, a couple of further comments… 1) Israel was supported by Europeans as a means to get rid of Jews. Take that in whatever direction you wish. Also take into account the likely reaction if the US were to take in so many Jews (most jews in Israel would definitly be of the *objectionable* kind). 2) We routinely send people or peoples back to where they came from such that they will be killed, often despite laws that say we shouldn’t do that. I resent the special pleading that goes on in I/P dialogues. We should care about everyone. 3) There are some pretty sexist and especially ageist commentary throughout the web However, controversies like these are usually wholesale derails of more important underlying issues. Hence adultery scandals for Democrats and not for Republicans. People will go on and on about Vick while doing lots of mumblings and evasive commentaries about Roethlesburger. They do that for a reason, and the current one is to take as much heat off of Israel for the blockade as possible. We should avoid doing that.
Cam – word to everything you said. Only, if you were in the UK you wouldn’t be surprised, the left here have been doing that for a while. I get so tired of arguing with so-called liberals who make utterly moronic ‘we are all Hamas now’ statements. Um Israel is not the devil. Yes I love how when Israel does something it’s ZOMG evol apartheid blah blah. I left one ‘feminist’ site because it kept doing that, yet claimed that criticising China for worse human rights abuses in Tibet is racist!
@Jill: I will grant that Thomas’ statement was antisemitic in the same sense that it would be racist to say that black Americans should go back where they came from. However the comments here, especially Cam, seemed to be addressing a much broader topic. If I was in error by participating in topic drift I apologize.
@Sorohito. G-d you have an entitlement issue. You don’t have to live in Israel, but you don’t get to try and dismantle a Jewish homeland. I suppose you have issues with womens only spaces being sexist, right? Jill, take a good look, take a good read. This is one of the many new breeds of antisemite–the kind that spins and lies about the Torah and the history of Jews, acts with complete assurance that his interpretation is the only valid one, can’t imagine how other people would NEED a homeland because the non-Jewish experience is the “norm” and should be taken as the only true one, and claims a massive conspiracy when he’s challenged on his viewpoints being bigoted.
I admit that I am so torn reading through these comments – because I tend to feel that U.S. policy in general is really apologetic for horrible things Israel does to the Palestinians. But it’s not a black and white question – its not who belongs there and who doesn’t and who is being mean to who and who is the victim. Because both sides are aggressors and both sides are victims and it REALLY does no good to say one should leave or the other should. That’s the problem I have with Helen Thomas’ comment. Saying Israel should leave Palestine completely ignores, as others pointed out, why they founded the state of Israel in the first place – they had, really, no where else to be safe. But it also cannot be ignored that there were innocent people living there at the time that were displaced and that experience tremendous violence. The Holocaust was horrible, but nothing Israel does to Palestine can be ignored because of that. Helen Thomas has touched such a nerve, I think, because her statement painted it as black and white, and now both absolutist sides are screaming from the rooftops about injustice. Serwer’s piece is spot on: “you cannot argue that there’s something morally wrong about leaving Palestinians stateless and then argue that Israeli Jews should be left that way, just as you cannot argue that it is morally wrong to suggest Jews should “leave Israel” while asserting that Israel has the right to permanently displace the Palestinians. Or at least, you can’t argue either of those points while claiming to adhere to any universal moral principle.” I’m not sure I feel like Thomas should have been basically forced to resign because of her statement, despite the fact that I think it was an egregious error of judgment on her part. But really, most Americans – and maybe the world, I don’t know – view the issue as black and white and Thomas just brought that into light. Perhaps her comment can move us forward to understand better that both sides are victims and both sides are aggressors – without this key recognition, peace will never happen.
@Daniel Well, i’m going to have to learn to live with your offense. If you honestly don’t think that Anti-semitism had anything to do with zionism, I really think we’ve been living on different planets for the last 70 years. In Israel, Palestinians are an oppressed class. I’m supposed to let that excuse the civilians they target with rockets, or calls of genocide. Zoom out a little bit and look at the 400 million arabs surrouding Israel, and the fact that people keep trying to invade it, and one would HOPE that that would excuse the defensive actions taken by the IDF. But it doesnt, because Jews are supposed to be BETTER, or something. Meanwhile, people like Hamas and Hezbollah try and, and this might offend you, repeat the holocaust, and we’re supposed to…let them? See my first comment on how a Jew should die.
Sure. I just repeat what I hear. *blech* I think you’ve got a bad back of smoke, Cam, ’cause that paranoia seems a bit much.
Thing is…I said nothing about jews controlling the media. Tho’ I have talked about the media in general, because it’s plainly evident that it seeks to control public discourse, and I do not believe it’s a controversial notion. In fact, I don’t think jews control the media. If they did control the media, Israel would be held to account for its actions in the occupied territories–simply because Israel is a representation of jewish hopes for better worlds. The Israel of today violates the meaning of most of the deeper covenants of the jewish community, and I think most American Jews would strongly wish otherwise and take action. Nope, it’s just the usual imperialist types of the sort the did the sykes-picot treaty and others that want us to “support” Israel. Because Israel serves a key function in controlling Western Asia, nothing more, nothing less. As soon as Israel fails to do so, or her sponsers decline in power (or grows disinterested), Israel probably will be destroyed. Live by the sword… Now, as far is this commentary goes? When the media claims that I should pay attention so some uppity senile bitch doing what uppity bitches do, I actually know to lookaround the fucking silly and demeaning characterizations, because obviously the media wants me to believe something that it’s not in my interests to believe. And the first rank of immunization is simply refusing to believe that women are bitches. Maybe to actually read and interpret and make judgements on whether she is actually senile. Lastly, but oh so not least, is to recognize that speech has to be free for repugnance as for elegant and enrichening. I do not believe that Helen Thomas’s comments were something I should take seriously–but I also note that it was incoherent, made in anger, and very much in isolation. Thus I let it pass, because Helen Thomas might say things to my benefit later. Again, I despise this sort of news event. Actions should always speak louder than words (at least word which are not particularly active or goading). Cheney should be apologizing to his erstwhile “friend” with the pizza-face and not the other way around. And coverage of Israel should be focused on the blockade rather than some offhand comments. Oh, and if people like Cam want to argue with more people, Digby offers a sentiment that’s no different than mine and she has a much bigger microphone than me. Howaboutit, huh?
Nonsense. Jews lived there thousands of years ago, that doesn’t give them any claim to the land today. . . . [T]he historic existence of Jews in Israel is meaningless. It’s absolutely not meaningless. First of all, Jews have always lived in Israel. Despite various exiles, there remained small Jewish communities in Israel throughout the classical and medieval periods. More importantly, the role of Israel in Jewish culture, religion, and history cannot be ignored. Israel has always been the Jewish homeland. Reasonable people can disagree about how this translates into Jewish-Israeli claims to the land today, but it can’t simply be dismissed as meaningless.
djf: Please, please, please acknowledge that Jews have a claim to the land just a bit stronger than “after 60 years this is their land now”. I’m an atheist. I don’t acknowledge any religious claim to territory, especially not when that claim entails killing / dispossessing the people already living there. Jerusalem is a city which uniquely includes sites deeply sacred to three world religions. I acknowledge that as a special status, and in all honesty, I think we’d all be better off if the UN granted governance over the city to the Dalai Lama, with the remit of giving Jews, Muslims, and Christians equal access. My geekily-detailed response to several comments made about Rachel Corrie and MV Rachel Corrie that I’ve read today: We Are Unarmed. We Are No Threat To You. Please Do Not Shoot.
When the media claims that I should pay attention so some uppity senile bitch doing what uppity bitches do, Wow, you’re an asshole.
You don’t have to live in Israel, but you don’t get to try and dismantle a Jewish homeland. I suppose you have issues with womens only spaces being sexist, right? Yeah! It’s just like that time those women set up a blockade around their space, and shot 8 men who tried to enter their women’s-only spac– wait. (Comparing getting banhammered to being shot to death is, at best, tasteless, I think. 9.9) What Thomas said was anti-Semitic, I think. (I have no idea one way or another about if she’s anti-Semitic personally, naturally.) I think it came from a place of emotion, whatever that emotion is, and was offensive. And honestly, despite not being super keen on the whole murdering people thing, I kinda agree with Israel’s actions re the flotilla; the blockade itself may be (probably is) a terrible, terrible stupid evil idea, but I can’t blame them for enforcing it once it exists. However, I disagree that objection in of itself to the actions of Israel is anti-Semitic. I think that in this case a lot of anti-Semites are making the same criticisms that non-anti-Semitic types are making, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those criticisms are anti-Semitic.
I shall explain this once again, as best I can. “Israel made a poor decision in regards to boarding the boat.” Not anti-Semitic. Critique of policy. “There should not be a Jewish homeland.” Anti-Semitic. “Israel has a troubling human rights record.” Not anti-Semitic. Critique of Policy. “Israel practices apartheid.” Anti-Semitic. Either you don’t know what apartheid means, you think that many, many other countries practice it as well (but you want to comment on the Jews doing it), or you think that Jews should be held to a higher standard than the rest of the world. “Israeli policy makes life more difficult for Arabs than for Jews.” Not anti-semitic. “Israel is engaged in genocide.” Anti-Semitic. Also a lie. “Israel’s reaction to terrorist actions has, at times, been disproportionate by western standards.” Not anti-semitic. “I support Hamas/Hezbollah.” Anti-Semitic, since both groups support the total destruction of Jews. “A two state solution should be pursued.” Not anti-Semitic. That’s what most Jews want. “Jews have no claim to Israel and should get back to where they came from.” Anti-Semitic. We came from Israel, and were dispersed many times. However, Jews have a legitimate historical presence in Israel, which is why they chose to put the country there. “The mainstream media has taken a decidedly pro-Israel/pro-Palestine stance.” Not anti-Semitic. “The guys who control the media don’t want you thinking about Israel as a bad country, so THEY manufactured a story to deflect attention.” Anti-Semitic. Conspiracy theorist. If you guys want to know how to criticize Israeli policy without being anti-Semitic, I would absolutely love to teach you. I really would. Maybe people just don’t know HOW. But the more likely scenario is that the hatred of Jews, a hatred which has existed roughly the same amount of time as the written word, is NOT, as we would like to believe, completely over and done with after the Holocaust and still lives on in the media and in the minds of people everywhere.
Rule of thumb: People who are criticising Israel but won’t compare it to the countries that surround it because “They’re different people. They’re connected to the US. They should know better.” Also anti-semitic. Pre-empting your criticism with “Those rabid zionists label everything that criticizes Israel as Anti-Semitic.” before launching into your diatribe? Probably means you’re about to say something anti-Semitic. Jews are grownups. Zionists are rational people. We can spot the difference between legit criticism and anti-Semitism. We’re actually BETTER at it than gentiles, since it’s a part of our history. So, you know, let’s acknowledge THAT tidbit.
shah8, please cut out the sexist language. What Thomas said was horrible, but it is not necessary to insult all women because Thomas did something bad and is a woman. djf, if you claim that Jews have a right to Israel because it’s important in Judaism and, historically, to Jewish people, you must acknowledge the same of other populations. Cam, the Holocaust does not give Jews or Israelis the right to do anything and everything they want.
@Cam: “and claims a massive conspiracy when he’s challenged on his viewpoints being bigoted.” ???? Have you actually read the words I’ve written, or do you just listen to the strawman you want me to be? I neither believe in, nor have mentioned here, any conspiracy. “the kind that spins and lies about the Torah and the history of Jews,” Show me a lie. Mind, I think the Torah is a “history” only in the loosest possible sense of the word. But please, show me one single lie in my blog. I speak nastily about the deity depicted in the Torah, and when I’m through with that I’ll speak nastily about the deity depicted in the rest of the Christian Bible. I’m anti-religion, not antisemitic. Actually, I’ll admit that given where I live I’m Christonormative enough that most of the vitriol I’m directing towards the Bible originated as frustration with Christians, not Jews. “This is one of the many new breeds of antisemite” Again, no I’m not. Judaism as a religion I find as contemptible and misogynistic as I find all other traditional religions. Jews as individuals are the same as every other set of individuals, some are great, others are jerks. But please, explain to me why you think I’m antisemitic despite the fact that I haven’t said one single negative thing about Jews as a people either in my own blog or here. I ask for an explanation because as nearly as I can tell you’re equating my criticism of Israel with being antisemitic, and I don’t think that’s at all right. @djf: Meaningless in any non-religious sense of the word, and frankly I don’t care if 3,000 years ago your ancestors had an imaginary friend who told them the land was theirs for all eternity. The fact that individual Jews have lived in Israel since the diaspora means only that they personally have legitimate claim to the land they bought and lived on. The people who owned, legally and morally, most of the land currently under Israeli control were the Palestinians. But what’s past is past, they’ve been evicted and new generations of Jewish people have been born there and have claim too. I think the only thing that’s obvious is that there are no easy answers. But you can’t say “3,000 years ago some goat herding tribes made up a god and claimed that god gave them title to the land so their descendants today get to have it without question or argument.” The Palestinians lived there, for a very long time, themselves and were evicted by military force. They’ve got a legitimate grievance, and it must be addressed as much as the situation of the Israelis must be. Kicking the Jewish Israelis out isn’t an answer, that goes without saying. But trying to starve out the remnant Palestinian population isn’t an answer either. Right now, like it or not, Israel is the party with power in the area, and they’re abusing that power to create a humanitarian nightmare. That’s the stated goal of the Israeli government, collective punishment, to make the Palestinians so miserable that they go somewhere else. And that ain’t right.
@Bagelsan: The motivations behind women’s-only spaces and a Jewish homeland are actually remarkably similar. An oppressed group, a need for safety and security and self-determination, a way to operate free form influence from the oppressing party. This isn’t something we should be trying to destroy. And the people that ARE trying to destroy it, we should oppose, not support–Or at least make sure they play by our rules before we give them our support, like letting the Red Cross in to see hostages.
@Rebecca: What, exactly, have the Israelis done that they don’t have the right to do, and that other countries haven’t done? And you’re assuming intent–Jews don’t WANT to be in conflict with the palestinians, or anyone else for that matter. Hamas and Hezbollah WANT to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews: They said so themselves, in their charters.
@The whole post, really Absolutely no Jew or Zionist is claiming “Any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.” What We’re saying, what we’ve ALWAYS said, is that criticism of Israel is often based around a double standard which is inspired by antisemitism. There’s a great post on Jewcy about how to talk about Israel and not be anti-Semitic. Everyone should read it. http://www.jewcy.com/post/notes_new_antisemitism
I don’t like the way Helen Thomas phrased her answer, but I have to agree with a lot of it. European Jews living in Palestine are an imperialist force. The state of Israel should get out of Palestine, but maybe Euro-descended Jews can learn to get along as part of Palestine. <3 Helen Thomas. This American Jew thanks you for your guts & standing up to oppression.
djf, if you claim that Jews have a right to Israel because it’s important in Judaism and, historically, to Jewish people, you must acknowledge the same of other populations. I believe I did that. See comment #28.
I disagree that objection in of itself to the actions of Israel is anti-Semitic. I think that in this case a lot of anti-Semites are making the same criticisms that non-anti-Semitic types are making, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those criticisms are anti-Semitic. Of course it’s true that objecting to actions of a particular Israeli government isn’t per se anti-semitic. But it often is. To use a simple example, whenever violence flares up between Israel & Palestinians, synagogues in Europe and South America are vandalized, synagogues that have nothing to do with Israel or Israeli policy. That’s anti-semitism masquerading as anti-Israel protest. It happens on this blog very often when the topic comes up. So when you think about criticizing Israel, stop for a minute to think about where you criticism is coming from and use your words carefully.
I did see that, and I apologize for what must have seemed like a kneejerk reaction. It’s just that I really, really don’t think that a millennia-old absentee claim (for that is what it is when Israel allows people to immigrate just because they are Jews) should take precedence over the kind of Palestinian right of return that people who support the Jewish right of return actively deny.
djf: I think it’s been pretty clearly shown that the so-long “peace” activists on the flotilla were not civilians. No. No it has not. That has not been shown in any way whatsoever, and even the IDF has retracted claims to that end. Please, contradict with actual sources if you like. Seriously, Israelis as colonists? As a Jew myself? Yes. Seriously. You want to claim otherwise, tell it to the Palestinians who still have the keys to the homes they were violently ejected from by even the first wave of settlers. I’m sorry, but when a fellow Jew acts murderously, I don’t think calling their actions “murderous” is blood libel. I think it’s descriptive. Our people’s history of oppression does not license a double standard in our favor any more than it is okay when there is a double standard against us. When Israel violates international law and commits war crimes and crimes against humanity, I agree it should not be held more accountable than anyone else–but it should damn well be held as accountable, and you had better goddamn well believe that if any other country in the world had its soldiers kill a civilian American citizen in an aid convoy, the USA would have a response rather different than “continuing to send millions of dollars of aid, subsidies, and military equipment every day.” There is a double standard, I agree–and it’s not hurting Israel, and as a Jew, I am ashamed. No, I don’t forget the Holocaust, or the pogroms, or any of the rest of our history of oppression–I just don’t think that those give us carte blanche to dump white phosphorus on residential neighborhoods, wall in and starve a million people, or drop commandos onto civilian ships in international waters and start shooting. It’s nice to see Team Hasbara representin’ here, though. For the record–I am not a fan of what Helen Thomas said, and I am not a fan of Hamas. Next?
The Thomas one is the third one down at this time. One of her shorter posts, although I wouldn’t read the comments if I had high blood pressure.. As for this whole thing: I think it’s sad that the IDF fell for the bait. There’s blame on both sides, but let’s not pretend that Turkey was poking the IDF a little bit. That said, I think the IDF’s response to the flotilla was waay over the top.
If you guys want a great example of the double standard of the left, check out the comments at Feministing vs. the comments about the time that Don Imus made his comment. I can’t believe I’m talking about the left like that’s other people, but this is where we are now.
@everyone. Okay, to the Jewish commenters. Show of hands everyone who’s lived over there, who’s done birthright, who’s served their three years. *hand up*. Anyone else?
@everyone. Okay, to the Jewish commenters. Show of hands everyone who’s lived over there, who’s done birthright, who’s served their three years. *hand up*. Anyone else? See, yeah, no. If Israel is a nation-state like any other, than we have a right to criticize its policy decisions like any other. And just like it doesn’t take living in the U.S. or Iran or France or North Korea or Italy or wherever else to criticize a country’s political choices? It doesn’t require doing birthright or serving in the military to criticize Israel.
Deja vu: Much of the discussion in this thread reminds me of the discussion that followed David Schraub’s guest post guest post here last year after Israel invaded Gaza. At that time, I wrote a five part series called “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel” that I think is relevant here again: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Oh, nice one Cam. So now we aren’t allowed to have an opinion on Israel unless we’ve lived there, done Birthright, and served our three years? Way to start setting benchmarks of who is and is not an appropriate Jew. So I suppose, as a convert, I don’t get to have an opinion, then? Cause that’s usually where this line of crap goes next. Telling the Jews to go back to Germany is anti-Semitic. Period, end of story. Comparing it to telling Afrikaaners to go back to Europe is also anti-Semitic, for reasons covered pretty well above. Let’s just agree on that, eh? If we’re going to use the “claim to the land” argument, Jews have a historical “right” to Israel to about the same extent that Christians and Muslims do. It’s arguably a holier site for us, but if we’re talking about who has lived there and when–well, we all have, for a very long time. Fought over it almost as long, too. Regardless, we’re there now. And to suggest that we could or should just “leave” is beyond absurd.
Sorry, pressed submit by accident: For the record, I think Israel’s attack on the flotilla was at best a politically, if not militarily, stupid thing to do. In general, though, and more pessimistically, it feels to me to of a piece with the Netanyahu government’s very clear and increasingly belligerent stance against peace of any sort. An interesting article to read in this context is here.
@everyone. Okay, to the Jewish commenters. Show of hands everyone who’s lived over there, who’s done birthright, who’s served their three years. *hand up*. Anyone else? ” Congratulations! Have some hamantaschen. Now, what’s your point? (As an American Jew, I’ve done none of these things – I certainly have no wish to live in Israel nor serve in its army (although I have friends who did) and given its current policies, would have to turn down – no matter how tempting an all-expenses-paid vacation might be – any hypothetical (gov’t-sponsored) birthright-equivalent for grownups, as a simple matter of ethics. And according to recent research I’m pretty representative of my peers (excepting Orthodox Jews), with younger Jews perhaps even less supportive. The possible consequences here aren’t anything either of us would like, I think – you might want to read Peter Beinart’s recent essay in the New York Review of Books about that . . . well, perhaps not want to, but you should.)
@Cam (and others)– I haven’t been as active on this thread as you, but honestly I feel a little bullied. The way you’re asserting the need to protect Jews from oppression, and to make safe spaces for Jews, saying that I need to have lived in Israel and served in the IOF to be a Jewish voice that counts–this is denying my Jewishness. This is denying the legitimacy of my experience as a Jew which is a diaspora experience and has been in my family for generations. And it is saying that the only acceptable and legitimate identity for a Jew is one that I consider to be participating in oppression and violence: in other words it is antisemitic! I spend a lot of time organizing, as a Jew, in Palestine solidarity groups. In organizing as a Jew I’m often concerned about the extent to which I have Jewish privilege to participate in the discourse around Israel/Palestine in the U.S.. I guess for Cam that Jewish privilege to speak doesn’t come unless you’ve served in the Israeli military or lived in Israel or participated in a program that asserts your birthright to which you have no ancestral ties. (On one side, my family has had no ties to Israel or to Zionism, and was involved in non-Zionist European Jewish socialist groups such as the Bund. On the other side, one relative moved to Israel after finishing his service in the British occupying army there.) At any rate, in my organizing I’m much more concerned with the extent to which my Jewish voice might function to exclude Palestinian voices. There is no question as to the relative power of Jews and Palestinians in U.S. politics or media. I just can’t believe that the concept of safe space was invoked to defend the ethnic cleansing of Palestine–of course the idea of the Judenstaat long preceded the genocide of Jews in Europe. @Jill and others, do you think this thread has been a safe space for Palestinians? Is there concern for that here? Is Helen Thomas’s status as a Lebanese-American relevant? (Israeli troops occupied Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.) My Palestine solidarity work has involved a lot of intersections that seem also important to Feministe, which is why reading Feministe has often supported my work–both in examining the links between Israeli colonialism/apartheid and other oppressions including against women and queers, and in the internal process of the groups I’m involved with, which strive to be anti-oppressive and trans-positive. We also work to reclaim a radical and non-Zionist Jewish identity, which is a big struggle in the United States, thanks in part to the strength of the pro-Israel line that Cam and others support in organized Judaism. So I’m disappointed that I have to be having this conversation in this thread (appreciation, though, to bellim and little light). If any folks here are interested in Jewish anti-Zionist organizing, join us in Detroit before the U.S. Social Forum: http://www.jewsconfrontapartheid.org/
@Jill I’m not asking people to cease their criticism when it’s valid, non-anti-semitic criticism. I’m fine with that. What I’m trying to get across is that for everyone who blasts the IDF for responding, eventually, with lethal force, they’re doing so from a place of privilege and safety not found in Israel. I’ll listen to a lot of people about a lot of things, but I truly do have a hard time accepting the moral judgements of people who have never faced death personally trying to tell me what is and isn’t appropriate to do to a person who’s trying to kill you.
@Jill http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/01/14/%E2%80%9Cwe-cannot-live-without-our-lives%E2%80%9D-either-jews-privilege-and-anti-subordination/ Probably says it better than I can.
@everyone. Okay, to the Jewish commenters. Ooh, purity tests! Those always are a good direction to go! Especially ones that use religious qualifications to affect national policy! But now I need Cam’s wise judgment: I’m only half Jewish-ish, and ditto my friend, but she was raised Jewish and I wasn’t, but she eats bacon and I don’t. Also, I’m going to be sort of a doctor and some times I feel guilty about things, but she grew up in NYC. If we disagree about Israel, who wins? (Perhaps there is a scoring system you could suggest? Or a “you must be this Jewish to ride!” sign?)
Wow, once again with the entitlement. Shockingly, Jews have a better grasp on anti-Semitism than gentiles and that’s what’s being discussed right now.
Judaism as a religion I find as contemptible and misogynistic as I find all other traditional religions. Jews as individuals are the same as every other set of individuals, some are great, others are jerks. I’m pretty much on board with this. I call bullshit on other religions trying to oppress people while hiding behind “tradition” or sky people or whatever, and it wouldn’t be fair not to do the same for Judaism. Jewish state? And it has to be right there? God, like, totally pinky swore a gabillion years ago but you’re the only people he told, see, it’s in this book…? Okay, fine, whatever, it’s your damn sandbox, no skin off my nose once you stop killing innocent people. (And using so much American money to do it. I don’t want to pay for displacing and killing Palestinians.) As for “antisemitism,” I’m tolerant of people who make horrible choices (like, for example, buying into most religions) but that doesn’t mean I agree with their choice. But that doesn’t mean I hate them either. I think it’s fair to say that people on both sides of this mess (Israel and Palestine/et al.) have made some very shitty choices based on some pretty stupid beliefs (any belief more than 1000 years old should get an expiration date, srsly) but that’s all spilt milk now. At this point I would love for everyone to get over the 3000-year-old crap they’ve been obsessing over, start talking modern property law, civil rights, etc. and just resign themselves to sharing rather than trying to perfectly recreate that nostalgic racially/religiously-pure past that they tell themselves totally was true a few millennia ago. And that goes for everyone involved.
Another thing to add is that Walt Whitman HS in Bethesda, MD (where lots of important people send there kids, and such a high jewish population that they get rosh ahana and yom kimpour off from school) – was going to have her as their graduation speaker, just disinvited her. http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/this-helen-thomas-thing-is-tearing-bethesda-apart And I apologize for my spelling of those holidays.
Shockingly, Jews have a better grasp on anti-Semitism than gentiles and that’s what’s being discussed right now. Speak for yourself. As has been made clear in this thread, and the two by David Schraub, not all Jews, myself included, agree with your definitions of anti-Semitism. (Yes, I did slog through the posts and all the comments on those threads.) For the record, though, I second everything little light said.
Cam: What I’m trying to get across is that for everyone who blasts the IDF for responding, eventually, with lethal force, they’re doing so from a place of privilege and safety not found in Israel. And when the IDF uses lethal force against Palestinians, they do so from a place of privilege and safety not found in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank (except inside the settlements). Someone on Obsidian Wings cited an article called “the Forgotten Rachels” – about other people named Rachel also killed in Israel, besides Rachel Corrie. Yesterday I looked up the date of death of each Rachel, and I posted with some of the names, dates of death, and circumstances where discoverable, of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank around those dates. For example: Tom Gross lists Rachel Gavish, killed age 50, with her husband David Gavish (50), and their son Avraham Gavish, (25), shot by a Palestinian gunman who infiltrated the West Bank settlement Kedumim where they lived, on March 28th 2002. Some other people whom Tom Gross does not list who were killed in the Nablus district where Kedumim is located, around that time: Aiman Hawaldi, killed by the IDF age 23, in Zawata, on March 23rd 2002. Muhammad Iyad Mughrabi, age 11, shot in the head on March 17th 2002 in ‘Askar, by soldiers who opened fire on a group of children throwing stones. Died on March 20th, 2002. Witnesses say Muhammad wasn’t one of the stone-throwers. Mahmoud Teysir Ghanem, killed age 16 in Sarra, when he was shot by Israeli soldiers for throwing stones at an army jeep. Yihya a-Shatiyeh, killed age 26 in Salem, by IDF gunfire, on March 7th 2002. Ahmad Fakhri Hashhash, killed age 15 by IDF gunfire, injured on March 2nd 2002 in in Balata Refugee Camp and died on March 4th 2002. I chose those five out of the many listed as having been killed in the West Bank by the IDF in the month before the Gavish family were killed because they were all killed in the same district as the Gavishes: none of them took part in hostilities when they were killed (unless you count throwing stones at a car “hostilities”.) There was also the tragedy of Muhammad Hussein Abu Kwek, killed age 8 while travelling in a car through Ramallah, on March 4th 2002, by gunfire from an IDF tank: he, four other children also in the car, and his mother, were all killed. All of the people I listed in my post are named by B’Tselem as “not taking part in hostilities” at the time they were killed. (B’Tselem does not count children throwing stones as “taking part in hostilities”.) When you compare privilege and safety, compare the privilege and safety of the Israelis who live in the main part of Israel or in the West Bank settlements, to the non-citizens living in the bantustans where the Israeli military can kill them with impunity, and without much public notice being taken except by organisations like B’Tselem – and of course their fellow Palestinians.
What I’m trying to get across is that for everyone who blasts the IDF for responding, eventually, with lethal force, they’re doing so from a place of privilege and safety not found in Israel. Which would perhaps be a valid point if the flotilla had posed a physical threat to the IDF – as opposed to being outside Israeli waters. And if they had, for instance, attacked first (or, more accurately, at all.)
What I’m trying to get across is that for everyone who blasts the IDF for responding, eventually, with lethal force, they’re doing so from a place of privilege and safety not found in Israel. I’ll listen to a lot of people about a lot of things, but I truly do have a hard time accepting the moral judgements of people who have never faced death personally trying to tell me what is and isn’t appropriate to do to a person who’s trying to kill you. Cam, I’m sure, then, that you would accept the moral judgments of the German Jewish group preparing to send an aid flotilla to Gaza, who are surely risking their lives and facing death very personally: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3899915,00.html And could you please explain how peace activists murdered in the recent flotilla raid in international waters were trying to kill *anyone.*
Apologies. Apparently the links to parts 2 & 5 of the antisemitism series in my comment above were broken. Here they are: Part 2 and Part 5.
Of course, ironically, you have the textbook definition of fascism, where a certain ideal is bound up in the idea of a political system or state, and speaking ill of the state is necessarily doubleplus ungood. Of course, I didn’t accept that sort of garbage from the “These Colors Don’t Run” portion of the Bush Administration, and it’s clear from this thread that many Jews inside and outside of Israel don’t accept it from the Netanyahu Administration.
And could you please explain how peace activists murdered in the recent flotilla raid in international waters were trying to kill *anyone.* Easy. When the commandos rappelled down into the ship, they were swarmed by “peace activists” who laid into them with knives and metal rods. Not to mention the footage (from the ship, PRIOR to the boarding by the commandos) that show the “peace activists” signing songs about killing Jews and becoming martyrs, and practising with their knives and rods. Sure, it seems ridiculous to talk about commandos vs. knives – but a knife can kill you as surely as a top-of-the-line assault rifle – especially when the commandos weren’t armed with assault rifles, only with paint guns and personal side-arms. Any other questions?
Seriously, Israelis as colonists? As a Jew myself? Yes. Seriously. You want to claim otherwise, tell it to the Palestinians who still have the keys to the homes they were violently ejected from by even the first wave of settlers. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe we’re using different definitions of colonialism. Maybe you would clarify. At least the way I was using the term, Jewish Israelis can’t be colonists because they don’t have a “home country”. Colonists are a foreign people occupying someone else’s land. I don’t think it’s colonialism when it’s your home (again, this doesn’t imply that it’s not other people’s homes as well). It would be helpful if you would clarify the definition you’re using.
@everyone. Okay, to the Jewish commenters. Show of hands everyone who’s lived over there, who’s done birthright, who’s served their three years. *hand up*. Anyone else? It issue isn’t who has the right to criticize Israel. Helen Thomas said nothing about Israeli policy, the IDF, Gaza, etc. It’s who has the right to say when a certain kind of criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-semitism. As the bloggers here have pointed out many times, when I person says, “I find your words hurtful/offensive/bigoted/racist”, shut the hell up and listen.
“Israel practices apartheid.” Anti-Semitic. Either you don’t know what apartheid means, you think that many, many other countries practice it as well (but you want to comment on the Jews doing it), or you think that Jews should be held to a higher standard than the rest of the world. Which of these criticisms do you want to apply to Archbishop Desmond Tutu? Anti-Semitic or does not know what apartheid means?
OK, my last comment is in moderation. However–as much as Cam’s “are you a real Jew” nonsense gets my back up: “I think you’ve got a bad back of smoke, Cam, ’cause that paranoia seems a bit much.” This, shah8? Not OK. No, I didn’t think you were going for the media conspiracy thing. But that “paranoid” meme IS anti-semitic.
Djf, I don’t have a dog in your fight, but one of the dictionary definitions of colony is this: “A group of people with the same interests or ethnic origin concentrated in a particular area.” It doesn’t have to meant there is an attached homeland.
Samantha b., by that definition, every ethnic neighborhood in every city in the world is a colony. Which might be true by the strict definition, but it doesn’t make all of those people colonists.
@86: Jesurgislac, Is there some reason that you think Desmond Tutu is especially sympathetic to Jews and/or Judaism? Or is there some reason you think he’s some sort of perfect neutral arbiter? He’s a good person, generally speaking, and he’s done a lot. But without listing infinite numbers of examples, that someone is good at (A) does not make them a particular expert or reliable source regarding (B). Same with Tutu. Or, perhaps, even more so with Tutu. I like him, I really do, but does it not strike you as even a tiny bit problematic to be invoking the views of an archbishop who is a patron of a Palestinian Christian organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu#Palestinian_Christians), as an authority in the antisemitism debate? Um, no. @82: And could you please explain how peace activists murdered in the recent flotilla raid in international waters were trying to kill *anyone.* I’ll propose a deal: If you don’t refer to them as “peace activists” when they show up aiming for a confrontation and beat the living shit out of other people, I won’t refer to them as “terrorist supporters,” even though they are funded by groups who are linked to, and support, terrorist organizations and even though some portion of their aid will certainly end up benefiting the forces who seek to murder Israelis. But of course: Who the hell knew at the time that they were or were not trying to kill anyone? Israel certainly isn’t going to trust some random pro-Hamas group to say “oh no sir, no weapons here, move along, nothing to see.” You can put on your 20/20 hindsight cap if you’d like, but the reality is that there have already been smuggling attempts disguised as aid. That resulted in a new tactic: unload the ship (it’s too easy to smuggle things when you have to inspect them on board,) and inspect shit. Now, of COURSE the people on the boat didn’t want to do that. that’s because they weren’t peace activists–they were looking for a confrontation. And that’s because they were in no way neutral–they don’t give a shit about Israeli concerns or Israel’s attempts to stop murders of its civilians, they only care about their side. The fact that you don’t even seem capable of recognizing and understanding the various concerns, and that you seem to think your point is “obvious” is really frightening. What is it like to know so much about one side and so little about the real world effects on the situation?
On colonialism, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism#Israel I don’t have all the material at my fingertips now but Herzl, Weizmann, and other early Zionists were explicit that Zionism was a Jewish colonial movement. They did not shy away from this label. Just for example, the financial instrument of the Zionist movement was called the Jewish Colonial Trust (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=270&letter=J).
Not the the IDF, but to Israel… the flotilla did pose a physical threat to Israel, because if these ships are not routinely searched, then they will be used to import weapons. Cam, you’re doing an incredible job in this thread, and I can only say thanks in the biggest way for being so eloquent and clear on very nuanced points. I just got back from a month in Israel, mostly visiting family. I took a detour down to Masada, which is, in a certain sense, where this whole problem started: when the Jews were kicked out of Israel. What’s sometimes considered the first synagogue in history is on Masada… before the expulsion, there never needed to be what we would recognize as synagogues, because Judaism was centered around the temple in Jerusalem. For a Jew, when you get to the top of Masada, you look around, and you see the Roman ruins there and the sites where the Jews committed suicide rather than become exiled Roman slaves, and it’s a reminder that, yes, in fact, there is an unbroken chain of nationhood between modern Jews, not just as a religious group but as a nation (consider semi-anti-zionistic Hannah Arendt and her comments that Jews need to be considered equally with Englishmen and the French), and the ancient Jews who were ejected forcibly from that land. And that’s not to diminish the claims of Palestinians to a presence with full human rights on the land, but it is to say that Jews in Israel are not colonists, and when you say “Jews go home”, that doesn’t mean “Jews go to Yemen/Morocco/Syria/Persia/Poland/Russia”, it means “Jews go to Israel”, just the same as a Native American can leave his or her reservation and go to ancestral lands that belonged to their tribe and it’s not colonization, and he or she is going home to a land historically belonging to his or her people. Here we all are. There are Jews and Israeli Arabs and Israeli Christians and Palestinian Christians and Palestinians in Israel. And the Jews will have some kind of Jewish state in some amalgam of mostly pre- and slightly post- ’67 land, and the Palestinians will have a Palestinian state *maybe* in mostly pre- and slightly post- ’67 land if they can control their own fanatics enough to give Israel some confidence that a Palestinian state wouldn’t just be a launchpad for violence against the Israelis. And so this fussing over whether Jews are colonists in Israel is a) racist (they’re not) and b) unproductive. And fussing over whether the notion of a Jewish state is antiquated (as a religious state) or racist is also a) racist (a Jewish state is not just a religious state; Jews, regardless of being mizrahi/sephard or ashkenaz or one of the other small groups not frequently cited, have unified ethnic peoplehood in a way that Muslims and Christians do not– Jewish =/= Shiite/Catholic/Baptist) and b) racist (Jews have the same right to national self-determination as any other nation). So many critics keep wanting to make this all about the Palestinians and their suffering, and just dump on the Israelis as oppressors without paying attention to who the Israelis actually are. I’m not saying that’s antisemitism, I’m just saying that it’s *because* of antisemitism… kind of like how the minutemen in the U.S. aren’t doing something racist by enforcing immigration laws, they just *happen to be* racists.
oh, er, I screwed up the quote there… that comment was meant to be in response to Helen at #85 writing “Which would perhaps be a valid point if the flotilla had posed a physical threat to the IDF “
Hey Cam, I can’t really get behind you after your first bout of gay bashing. Nice little, um, tirade? Seriously, which part of your Jewish issues prevents you from being a full US citizen (assuming you are from the US)? Oh, right! Not an issue is it? So yeah, it is a damn good thing we talk about all those queers and their pesky demands to be full citizens. To be protected and stuff. I know you wanted us all to feel teh Guilt, to be troubled by your fractious relationship with feminism. But you know what, you go on with your bad self. Just please refrain from bashing groups of people who do, indeed, have considerably less privilege than you. And, really, privilege just doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of it all.
I like him, I really do, but does it not strike you as even a tiny bit problematic to be invoking the views of an archbishop who is a patron of a Palestinian Christian organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu#Palestinian_Christians), as an authority in the antisemitism debate? Um, no. Supporting Palestinians disqualifies you from speaking to issues of antisemitism? Ouch.
@Cam – Since when is a commando raid in the dead of night “using violence as a last resort?” Since when is shooting people in the back (see http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2010/06/06/kidnapped-israel-forsaken-britain and also see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results)”using violence as a last resort?” I’m cribbing from Norman Finkelstein when I ask why did Israel not take out the propellers of the ship? Why did the Navy not surround the boat, physically preventing it from passing? If the Israelis used violence “as a last resort,” why did they confiscate the tapes of all the journalists on board? Why does Israel refuse to allow an international committee to investigate the raid? @Gillian – Please post a link to the footage of activists singing antisemitic songs. It doesn’t matter too much to me, to be honest. Nothing justifies a commando raid in the dead of night.
Sorry, that Guardian link will give you a “page not found” error unless you remove the “)” at the end!
Hey Cam, I can’t really get behind you after your first bout of gay bashing. Nice little, um, tirade? . . . Just please refrain from bashing groups of people who do, indeed, have considerably less privilege than you. Gay bashing? I just read through Cam’s comments and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Also, how do you know what privilege Cam has? If you want to talk about privilege, let’s talk about the commenters here who don’t understand the context of modern anti-semitism.
Supporting Palestinians disqualifies you from speaking to issues of antisemitism? Ouch. You really don’t get it, do you? This whole conversation is about anti-semitism from the pro-Palestinian camp. Again, reasonable people can disagree about where do draw the line between good-faith criticism of Israeli policy and anti-semitism. But you can’t use a well-known anti-Israel/anti-zionist activist as an authority on anti-semitism.
Sailorman, way to move the goalposts! Cam claimed that anyone who compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians within its borders to apartheid must either be anti-Semitic or have no knowledge of apartheid. Your translation of “not anti-Semitic” to “is especially sympathetic to Jews and/or Judaism” is real goal-post moving. I asked (rhetorically) whether that meant Cam thought Archbishop Tutu was anti-Semitic or had no knowledge of apartheid. If Tutu can be assumed to recognise apartheid when he sees it, and if Tutu judged Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as apartheid, then Cam’s syllogism follows that Tutu is anti-Semitic. From a white German-born South African with regard to Tutu’s comparisons of how South Africa treated black people to Nazi Germany: [Franz Auerbach] served from 1981 to 1983 as president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, one of the great pillars of liberal values in South African society. In addition, Auerbach organized the teachers’ program of the Funda Center, which provided black teachers with supplementary training. Born in Germany, Auerbach fled with his family from the Nazis in 1937, when he was 14 years old. Concurrently with his tireless activities in the broader societal arena, he was active on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other Jewish communal bodies, notably the South African Yad Vashem Foundation. Auerbach drew parallels between the Nazi regime in Germany and apartheid. He argued that there was a key parallel in “the organization of a society in which the most important attribute of human beings is their race, as assigned by the state.” In defense of similar comparisons made by Archbishop Tutu, Auerbach said that forced removal of black people to “homelands” where there was little food and work was an inhuman practice, even if in the South African case there was no intention of killing them. “The persistence of legally enforced race discrimination,” Auerbach said, “makes a comparison between apartheid and Nazism a perfectly valid analogy. . . . In fact I have always held that the experience of the Holocaust obliged me to oppose racial discrimination, especially where it is enforced by law.” (See F. E. Auerbach’s article in the Rand Daily Mail, Feb. 24, 1971, and his letter to the editor, Rand Daily Mail, Jan. 15, 1985, in defense of Archibishop Tutu’s comparisons between apartheid and Nazi Germany.) Since Cam argues that only Jews who have made aliyah can be allowed to criticize: In recent years [published 1988] a few Orthodox and traditional rabbis cast caution aside and ventured to condemn the structural essence of the apartheid system, not just particularities of injustice, going beyond the boundaries of the conventional white consensus. One such rabbi was South African-born Ben Isaacson. A former protege of Orthodox Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, Isaacson was a maverick whose checkered career included aliyah to Israel in the mid-1960s, return to South Africa in 1974 to serve as a Progressive (Reform) rabbi, and, after disagreements in that framework, formation in 1982 of Har-El, an independent traditional congregation (resembling American Conservative congregations) in the prosperous Houghton suburb of Johannesburg. Throughout these mutations, however, Isaacson was a consistently outspoken critic of the apartheid system. Ben Isaacson tongue-lashed the Jewish communal leadership and castigated Jews at large for tacitly enjoying the evil fruits of the apartheid system. He also accused Jewish leaders of distorting Bishop Tutu’s statements and wilfully spreading the false notion that anti-Semitism was rampant among blacks. To Jewish youths entering military service, Isaacson did not shrink from advising that they respectfully request the authorities to refrain from using them to suppress blacks in the townships. Those quotes are both f rom “South African Jews and the Apartheid Crisis”, avaialble online here at the American Jewish Committee Archives, by Gideon Shimoni, former head of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and the author of “Deconstructing Apartheid Accusations Against Israel” (2007). Also from Shimoni’s 1988 article: A key black figure was Desmond Tutu, archbishop of the AnglicanChurch in South Africa, who was recognized throughout the world as a symbol of the struggle against apartheid. Archbishop Tutu repeatedly condemned Israel’s ties, military and other, with South Africa, and called upon the Jews of South Africa to oppose the apartheid system with vigor. Tutu also considered Zionism to have “very many parallels with racism,” since it “excludes people on ethnic or other grounds over which they have no control.” He told his interviewers, rather obscurely, that “in Israel you exclude people and treat those that are excluded as lesser humans.” To recognize that Archbishop Tutu, in common with most black leaders, had imbibed the anti-Zionist stereotype was not, however, to say that he was anti-Semitic. Nor had Tutu ever denied Israel’s right to exist, as had some of the more extreme detractors of the Jewish state among the black leadership. Indeed, he said that he considered it unrealistic of the Arab world to pretend tthat Israel did not exist, and that while sympathizing with the PLO, he did not accept its methods. Some of Archbishop Tutu’s comments aroused resentment in Jewish quarters and even insidious rumors that he had made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks, but these rumors were given short shrift by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies itself. So, in answer to Cam’s claims: Jews who knew Archbishop Tutu did not consider him to be anti-Semitic. These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel’s cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar. – Against Israeli Apartheid, July 2002
@Sailorman you said “That resulted in a new tactic: unload the ship (it’s too easy to smuggle things when you have to inspect them on board,) and inspect shit. Now, of COURSE the people on the boat didn’t want to do that. that’s because they weren’t peace activists–they were looking for a confrontation. And that’s because they were in no way neutral–they don’t give a shit about Israeli concerns or Israel’s attempts to stop murders of its civilians, they only care about their side.” No, they didn’t want the cargo inspected because the list of items prohibited into Gaza by the Israelis is ludicrous. Here’s what would likely have been confiscated were the ship to unload in Ashdod and submit to inspection by Israel (second link is better, but you need Acrobat Reader): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7545636.stm http://gisha.org/UserFiles/File/HiddenMessages/ItemsGazaStrip060510.pdf I don’t believe in any kind of Jewish media conspiracy, but the U.S. media goes to great lengths to gloss over misdeeds by our own government and by the governments of our allies. The fact that so many U.S. citizens are misinformed about the basic facts behind the blockade and the recent massacre is a testament to this.
Cam and djf- I’m going to have to disagree with you on the finer points of your arguments: 1) People are totally not required to live in Israel/serve in the IDF to criticize Israel. That just tries to silence (usually liberal) non-observant/non-Jewish voices. For the record, I’ve been to Israel numerous times and have family there, but I would never live there for several reasons, most of which relate to my feminism. 2) Let’s not dilute the term anti-Semitism by adding additional grievances to the list. It’s not anti-Semitic to be against religiously affiliated countries, period. (Of course, then you should probably also be against other religiously affiliated countries as well, and maybe also France for their militant secularism, which is often oppressive to religious minorities. Singling out Israel IS anti-Semitic.) 3) It’s not anti-Semitic to not believe in a Jewish homeland. It’s not anti-Semitic to think that Israel should have been set up elsewhere. If Israel had been set up in Alaska, but there wasn’t the current situation? I’d take that. I’d take that a million times over, for my people not to become oppressors. Religious Zionism is a recent phenomenon. Yes, we’ve always prayed facing Jerusalem, but for the temple to be rebuilt when the Mashiach comes. Which s/he hasn’t, so this is really a moot point. Don’t pretend like religious Zionism it’s this ancient whatever whatever. 4) Stop with the Oppression Olympics. You’re making us look bad. To everyone else- I had three main problems with what she said: 1) She disappeared Israeli Jews of non-Eastern European descent. Israel is a pretty diverse place. This meme is frustrating. 2) The Poland and Germany bit. Ugh. There’s just nothing to say about this part. It’s anti-Semitic. It’s a clear reference to the Holocaust. Even if it was unintentional, it was still a hateful remark. Yes, my Lithuanian Israeli family will tots just go home to their village which was destroyed. Even when they’ve all been living on the same moshav on the Western side of the country for ~70 years. And the majority of my cousins were born in Israel. 3) She didn’t say “Settlers, get out of Palestine and go back to Israel.” She said “Get out of Palestine and go back to Germany, Poland, America, wherever” This implies that Israel should be dismantled. Leave this whole bit of land, and go back to where they wanted (still do in many places) to kill you. THAT is problematic. 2 state solution, people! Arguing for 1 state on either side is anti-Jew/Palestinian. 4) This is what happens when stuff in Israel is tense. Animosity towards Jews everywhere gets aggravated. Look, privilege is complicated. In Israel, Jews are privileged over Palestinians. But, I’d argue that Internationally, Israel doesn’t have a lot of privilege. It’s tiny, it’s young, and surrounded by countries that want its destruction. And I think that part of the reason why Israel feels the need to be so on guard and build their army up so big is because of that lack of privilege. If a people feel like they can do no right in the eyes of others, then why even try? It pains me to say that the Israeli government has stopped trying to do right, but I think they have. I think they just don’t care anymore. Jews outside of Israel are further discriminated against, pretty much wherever they live. I’ve been gawked at before, felt my life was in danger, hidden my identity because I worried what people will say or think. My synagogue had extra security this past Shabbat. Nobody thought that was unreasonable. Because when things have been this tense, people have shot up our buildings. Whatever the situation in Israel/Palestine, nothing merits oppression of Jews as a whole.
“Also, how do you know what privilege Cam has?” Enough privilege to use a group who is currently and actively denied civil rights in the US as a prop for his/her own sense of oppression. I agree with Cam’s posts in this thread, but I cannot sit by and let my oppression be incorrectly extolled as a place of privilege. I’m not going to go all oppression olympics like Cam did, but I find it hard to believe that he/she has been denied housing, been denied a job, or been denied hospital visitation or medical decision making based solely on his/her Jewishness (in the US). Please correct me if any of these things have happened in, say, the past two years.
PM 6.8.2010 at 10:05 am No, they didn’t want the cargo inspected because the list of items prohibited into Gaza by the Israelis is ludicrous. Are you aware that various ships and “aid” shipments and “peacable” organizations have, at various times, been shown to be carrying weapons/fighters/etc? Sure: if the U.S. Government (or someone else who Israel could actually trust) decided to ship in goods, then Israel would have absolutely no military justification for stopping it, and would have to decide whether or not to stop it based solely on the contents. But outside that unlikely hypothetical, Israel damn sure has a right to be concerned about the contents. That’s the military side. But regarding the list: Yes, I’ve seen the list many times. And since you brought it up, I’ll address it: If you look at the list, it’s obviously limited in what is allowed in. but it is also not limited to a single item. Much is made of the randomness of the list–no coriander is allowed, if I recall correctly. [Shrug] That makes no sense to me. But whether or not coriander gets in, lack of coriander is not a humanitarian crisis or a justification for running a blockade. And of course, there’s the issue of corruption and mixing of military/civilian issues. Whether or not you agree with the existing status quo–and you presumably don’t–you can hopefully understand the view that Israel doesn’t want to aid and abet the groups that have declared or indicated an intent to destroy Israel, kill Jews, and generally cause havoc. And you certainly must know that there are lots of those people in gaza and that the elected government is, whaddya know, one of those groups. That makes it a lot trickier, assuming that you are trying to consider BOTH the interests of innocent Gazans and the interests of innocent israelis. Most people agree (and I suspect Israel would also agree) that Gazans would benefit from more civilian reconstruction. But of course most people are also aware that those anti-Israeli terrorists who are in Gaza have a particular tendency to use civilian structures and goods for their own purposes. And most people are also aware that the Gazan government(s) have, to put it mildly, not been incredibly successful at forcing Gazans to separate civilian and military work.
It’s not anti-Semitic to be against religiously affiliated countries, period. Nobody has said anything about religion on this thread. Many Israelis supporting separating religion & state and dismantling the corrupt Chief Rabbinate. No antisemitism there. It’s not anti-Semitic to not believe in a Jewish homeland. It’s not anti-Semitic to think that Israel should have been set up elsewhere. But it is antisemitic to deny the historical, cultural, and religious role of the land of Israel in Judaism by implying that Jews are foreigners there. As for being set in Alaska – seriously? Religious Zionism is a recent phenomenon. . . . Don’t pretend like religious Zionism it’s this ancient whatever whatever. Religious Zionism is a modern movement, yes. But the religious ideal of living in the land of Israel is as old as the Bible.
Oh yeah: I had to check Wikipedia for the dates, but in july 2008 Israel targeted that particular aid organization as terrorist–and they were by no means the only country to do so. I mean, I suppose you could take the position that Israel should just trust them, not search the ships, not board. But frankly, that position requires a fairly one-sided grounding in the facts.
But it is antisemitic to deny the historical, cultural, and religious role of the land of Israel in Judaism by implying that Jews are foreigners there No one born in Israel can be a foreigner there, whatever their religion – even if the Israeli government has consistently tried to make out that Palestinians are somehow “foreigners” in the land where they were born. But it is unrealistic to argue that a white Westerner who moves to live in a Middle Eastern country is somehow “not a foreigner” in that country, regardless of what religion or tradition says about how God told them t hey own it.
The Left has a problem with Jews. The Right has a problem with Jews. That’s why Jews reflexively defend the idea of a Jewish state. To conflate Zionism with apartheid or racism requires that one either misunderstands the entire concept of a national state, or that one rejects the idea that Jews should exist. The United States is one of very few truly multinational states. The idea that an African or an Irishman or a Chinese can become an American is a fairly novel concept. Hyphenated identities are a recent development, and we’re still struggling with the idea that immigrants can become Americans. But elsewhere, the state is defined by national identity. Poland is a state primarily composed of Poles, Germany is a state primarily composed of Germans and Switzerland is a state primarily composed of Swiss. Jews have never been Poles or Germans or Swiss. Jews are Jews, and were always foreigners in those places, even when they were born there. Until the founding of Israel, Jews were a nation without a state. To suggest that Jews should go back to Europe, or that they should willingly become a minority in an Arab-ruled state is the very definition of a statement colored by arrogance and ignorance and privilege. Israel is not a colonial state; it is the national homeland of the Jewish people.
You really don’t get it, do you? This whole conversation is about anti-semitism from the pro-Palestinian camp. Again, reasonable people can disagree about where do draw the line between good-faith criticism of Israeli policy and anti-semitism. But you can’t use a well-known anti-Israel/anti-zionist activist as an authority on anti-semitism. I’m OK with Jewish-only spaces talking about anti-semitism. But I’m not comfortable that this space is denying the legitimacy of Palestinian voices when a lot of what people are saying is about Palestine and the Palestinians. I’m not comfortable continuing to be in a conversation that is largely about Palestine that isn’t a safe space for Palestinians. About anti-Zionism and anti-semitism, nothing is better than Judith Butler’s classic essay, which is reprinted in Wrestling with Zion. One choice quote: What is ironic is that in equating Zionism with Jewishness, Summers is adopting the very tactic favoured by anti-semites. At the time of his speech, I found myself on a listserv on which a number of individuals opposed to the current policies of the state of Israel, and sometimes to Zionism, started to engage in this same slippage, sometimes opposing what they called ‘Zionism’ and at other times what they called ‘Jewish’ interests. For people interested in discussion of Zionism and its position within Judaism, feminist critic Jacqueline Rose has an excellent book called The Question of Zion on this topic. She discusses the links between political Zionism and early Jewish Messianism, the variety of Jewish voices that objected to the way in which the Israeli state was formed in 1948, and how Zionism has become inextricably linked with violence. A long excerpt is available on the Princeton University Press website.
@Cam, still waiting for you to list my lies and give me one single example of how I’m expressing hatred for Jews as a people. If you can’t do that I’d appreciate an apology and retraction.
Israel is not a colonial state Well, not any more. But it certainly began as one. Is this thread really going to devolve into arguments between atheists/agnostics and believers about whether God exists/has the right to decide who gets which country? I will maintain until my dying day that God does not exist and that no territorial claim – no realworld law – can be based on the justification that “God says” or “God wants” – or on an anti-God denial, what someone upthread called “aggressive secularity”: That applies to the denial of headscarves to women who want to wear them in France, the denial of abortions to women in need of them at Catholic hospitals and the denial of citizenship to people in need of it in Israel. If God does not wish the Arab Muslims of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be citizens of Israel that has no weight with me: God does not exist, and as an atheist I notice people use God for the most part as a dummy to argue for what they want. The Kurds, the gypsies, and the LGBT people of Europe are among the groups who have never had a nation of our own and who have always been outsiders/discriminated against in the countries of our birth. We don’t have a tradition of a country God gave us which is ours if we can go and violently dispossess the people already living there*, and when I look at how many people that tradition has killed, I’m glad we don’t. *Traditionally. I’m tolerably familiar with the Bible, having read it thoroughly in the process of becoming an atheist.
Israel embargoes Gaza because Gaza is ruled by Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist group that targets civilians for murder. Its objective is genocide against Israelis. It is not a legitimate government because its objectives and purpose for existing are fundamentally illegitimate. It can claim it was elected democratically, but plenty of horrible regimes make the same claims. Hamas took over Gaza in a violent coup, and executed most of its political opponents. Hamas is not interested in a Palestinian state. Hamas is not interested in peace with Israel. There can be no final status negotiations and no Palestinian state until there is a governing entity that can offer peace on behalf of the Palestinians, and there can be no such entity until Hamas is destroyed. The primary purpose of the Gaza embargo is to dislodge Hamas from power there. The particulars of the embargo may seem arbitrary in some cases or unfair. But if you try to run the blockade to deliver contraband to the Hamas-ruled territory, that seems to me to be an act in support of Hamas. Nobody supporting Hamas can claim to be a “peace activist.” Hamas’s methods and objectives, both against the Israelis and against its Palestinian political opponents, are exclusively violent.
Jesurgislac, unless I misunderstand you, you seem to be casting the idea that Israel can/should be a Jewish state as one built solely on the idea that God gave it to the Jews, and that’s wrong– lots of atheist Jews believe Israel is the only place for a Jewish state because it’s the traditional land of the Jewish people, irrespective of whether some people claim that’s originally a god-given designation. Lots of peoples claim their lands were given to them by God… Native Americans, Aborigines, Africans… and, for that matter, if you want to send the Jews off to have a land of their own somewhere else, why not send the Palestinians off to have a land of their own somewhere else? Another antisemitic canard is the idea that the claim of the Jews to a homeland in Israel is somehow lesser than the claim of the Palestinians to have a homeland in Israel. It’s been said numerous times here, but there have always been Jews in Israel, and Israel has always had a special significance to the Jewish diaspora– and many, many other diasporic people maintain legitimate ties to ancestral homelands. That the Jews have maintained a distinct and coherent cultural identity for far longer than virtually any other people on earth shouldn’t indict their ties to their ancestral homeland– that’s, to inject a tiny touch of irony into this, ageism.
……… WTF, people saying that Zionism is a new thing. Yes, the modern incarnation of it is new (19th-20thcentury “Religious Zionism” as such). But check your history, check your privilege–try *going to a service in Hebrew* and reading the translations of our prayers. Then tell me the longing for a homeland in Israel is new. That didn’t make it morally right to kick people off the land. But really, saying that our desire to live in Jerusalem is NEW? What. the. hell. Yes, you can go on about a metaphorical homeland and how the rabbis don’t really MEAN “next year in Jerusalem” when they had us start saying it every year…but that only goes so far.
(On behalf of my friend Ellie/Erased, who for some reason has been denied comment here and one of the linked blogs) @cam, Shoshi, others who claim that all non-Jewish Germans and Poles are murderous anti-Semites- I know about the Holocaust, and have done since birth. I know that the claim “Six million dead” should be “Ten million”, but that the 4m non-Jews are conveniently chucked aside by your version of events. That four *million* people, murdered by the Third Reich, should be cast aside as mere ‘collateral damage’ makes bile rise up in my throat. Not only were my queer ‘family’ targeted, and my feminist/activist ‘family’, but my own, actual, biological family. My blood. My Grandfather escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau with his life barely intact, and his family and friends slaughtered. His baby son had his brains dashed out by a Nazi bayonet. He bears a blue number, his eyes are still permanently tear-filled at 95 years of age, and his dreams are filled with horror. But he’s not Jewish, and never was. People assume he is, in fact he was once invited to speak about his experiences at a local school, and then when they found out he wasn’t Jewish, they asked him to leave as his experience wasn’t valid. His identity as a Holocaust survivor is erased daily, and has been since he escaped. The fact that his wife and sisters were walked to Ravensbruck, only to be shot when they got there – not important. The fact that he lived on rats, pebbles and what was left of his shoes? – irrelevant. I was once told, by a convert to Judaism, that the 4 million didn’t count, that the murdered baby was “..lucky he didn’t grow up to be Polish scum…”, and that I should pray for the dead Jews, because they led to me not being born in Poland. The same person told me that no goy has the right to mourn their Holocaust dead, even if they were tortured alongside Jews, because apparently “..they brought it on themselves…”. So yeah, I’m anti-israel, because my family didn’t try to justify their losses by occupying land that’s not theirs. They receive no reparations, their existence and identities are denied and erased daily, while my Grandfather still weeps over his lost people, still bolts down every meal as if it were his last, and still cries out in his sleep.
*trigger alert* And Daniel: “I’m not comfortable continuing to be in a conversation that is largely about Palestine that isn’t a safe space for Palestinians.” Or a conversation that is largely about Israel in a space that isn’t a safe space for Israelis or Jews? This isn’t a two-dimensional conflict. There’s two sides here in a way that doesn’t exist in discussions of rape or lynching, where there *aren’t* two sides. Denying that there’s any legitimate Israeli or Jewish voice to be heard in this conversation is, yes, another kind of antisemitism. And is also cowardly. Justified or not, Israel is also under attack. There are no angels here.
Sorry, I missed out the last part of Ellie’s post: “I’m not anti-semitic, as my family is composed of many types of people including Jews, but to hear someone claiming that one part of my lost family died righteously for their beliefs, while the others were sub-human scum who deserved their fate, tears me in half down the middle.”
@Dan “The Left has a problem with Jews.” Speaking as a leftie, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop lying about me. I don’t have any problem whatsoever with Jews. I’ve got a problem with Israel, and I’d like to think anyone with even a shred of human compassion has a problem with Israel, but Israel != Jews and a problem with Israel != a problem with Jews. I’m getting pretty sick of being told that I’m some vicious evil antisemite when I know damn well I’m not. As for ethnic nationalism, I’m against it in general. We have only to look to Japan to see the harm that sort of thinking produces both to the inevitable population that isn’t ethnically Japanese as well as to the ethnic Japanese. The modern concept of a nation/state cannot realistically be expected to coexist with the archaic notion of ethnic nationalism. Also, I’ve got a few Jewish friends who would take exception to being called “foreigners” here in America. IIRC one of the standard antisemitic lies is the claim that all Jews are first loyal to Israel and therefore, at best, foreigners in the nations in which they reside and at worst traitors waiting for an opportunity. I do also wonder if you are willing to take your professed passion for ethnic nationalism to its logical conclusions. Should Kurdistan be established? If so, where? What about the numerous populations of First People here in the Americas? What about the mixed decedents of the First People and Europeans, do they get their own country or since they’re mixed do they get excluded from your idea of ethnic nationalism? Ethnic nationalism was the defacto way things were for a very long time, yes. But we’ve kind of grown past that. The borders of every nation on the planet now encompass people who are not part of the founding ethnicity of that nation. Either you’re arguing that Israel is a special case, or you’re arguing for the founding of hundreds of new countries and the alteration of the borders and territory of every extant nation. If the latter I salute your intellectual honesty but I must question both the assumed benefit of the plan as well as its practicality. If the former I must disagree. I do not argue that the Jews living in Israel should be expelled, its a bad situation and in an ideal world it never would have developed, but they’re there and it would be wrong (as well as ineffective and foolish) to try an use military force to abolish Israel, and that’s what it would take because they are there. But the Palestinians aren’t just going to go away, and they’ve got a claim on the land too and its legitimate. I do argue that the blockade by Israel is immoral. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” that’s a direct quote from Dov Weisglass [1]. That sounds pretty darn immoral to me. Israel is, essentially, trying to make the Palestinians so miserable that they acquiesce to Israeli demands. That’s wrong. I’m a liberal, that means when I see one group stomping another I take the side of the stompee not the stomper. And Israel is undeniably the stomper in the Israel/Palestine relationship. That doesn’t mean I hate Jews, or even that I hate Israel, but it does mean I don’t approve of the actions taken by Israel and since it is a democratic nation I’m not overly fond of the average Israeli voter. I wasn’t overly fond of the average American voter after they supported Bush and his insane wars of aggression either, that doesn’t mean I hate America anymore than my antipathy towards the average Israeli voter makes me an antisemite. [1] Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel
Flash: you seem to be casting the idea that Israel can/should be a Jewish state as one built solely on the idea that God gave it to the Jews You are misunderstanding me. That’s not what I mean. I object to claims that Israel is specially Jewish because God gave it to the Jews, or handwaving claims about the thousands of years of “tradition” / “culture”, that deny the actual history of the country. I object to that because I’m an atheist, and I won’t take seriously any such claims from any religion to any realworld right to impose their religious beliefs on other people. Nor will I take seriously claims by someone to have an “ancestral homeland” somewhere neither they nor any of their ancestors as far back as they can trace their family have ever been. People who were born in Israel, or who moved there to flee persecution in other countries, ought not to be told “Go back where you came from!”. Helen Thomas’s comments were crass at best, anti-Semitic at worst. My conclusion t hat Israel is functionally an apartheid state was the result of – at this point – quite literally decades of reading and thinking about the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Initially, since like most Western kids the books I read were pro-Israel and pro-Zionist, I don’t think I thought about it at all: then when I did think about it a two-state solution seemed to make sense: but I’m 43, the “Occupied Territories” have been “occupied” for as long as I’ve been alive, and I no longer think the Israeli government ought to be playing this kind of game with people’s lives and land. Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and intends to keep them. Fine. Expansion by conquest is a long-standing tradition: those territories are conquered, Israel is building on them and around them and defending them as within Israel’s borders: the people who live there are inhabitants of Israel. But that means that all of the inhabitants of Israel must have Israeli citizenship – regardless of their religion or their ethnicity. Anything less, and Israel is an apartheid state.
Perro, You blame the Jews for hogging all the credit for dying in the Holocaust? I have never heard of Jews denying that the death camps were used for processing Gypsies and political dissidents as well as Jews. But at the end of the war, German and Polish political dissidents who were persecuted by the Nazis were still Germans and Poles and could return. Jews were rounded up because they were not Germans or Poles. They couldn’t reasonably attempt to rebuild their lives in those countries. Their neighbors had turned against them and murdered them for being Jews. And frankly, I suspect that if a non-Jewish Holocaust survivor had wanted to go to Israel, the Israelis would have welcomed him. And the Jews are not “occupying land that isn’t theirs.” That land has been disputed and conquered and occupied for centuries. The Palestinians are descendants of earlier conquerers. When the British pulled back their colonial forces from the region, they allocated part of the territory to the Jews for their state, and part of it to the Arabs, who had never before had the privilege of self-rule. The problem was that all the neighboring countries immediately invaded Israel when it declared independence from Britain, with the goal of conquering the land and exterminating the Jews. The Palestinians sided with the Arab states in the war, and when Israel fought it to a standstill, the Arab states didn’t take care of the Arabs displaced by the war. Your understanding of the history is seriously defective.
Flash, don’t set up strawmen, it just makes you look bad. No one here is arguing that there are no legitimate Israeli or Jewish voices here; in fact, the person who’s saying that Jews have no right to contribute is Cam, because certain Jews don’t agree with every little thing she’s saying.
Dan, I’m sure you’re in favor of boycott/divestment/sanction for the same reason. Sure, it would hurt average Israelis who may not have voted for the present government (a lot less than the blockade hurts Gazans, though), and it probably won’t affect the government at all, but what does that matter when you can Register Your Disapproval? (I’ll note that yes, Dan is saying that wanting people in Gaza to have houses and medicine is exactly equivalent to supporting suicide bombing.)
chava- Um, thanks, I went to a service in Hebrew on Saturday. It was quite lovely. I also prayed Shacharit this morning. Way to question my Jew-cred. That’s super-sweet of you. Yes, we’ve always prayed to return to the land…when Mashiach comes. The current incarnation of Israel is not a true return, because we don’t have Mashiach. That’s why we still fast on 17 of Tamuz and 9 of Av. Don’t you presume that you know my observance, my knowledge of Hebrew and prayers. Because that’s really obnoxious. Yay, Jew-on-Jew hatred. See, we don’t even need outsiders to hate us. We do it to ourselves. I stand by my statement about Alaska. I didn’t intend for it to be a Yiddish Policemen’s Unit ref, but that may have been where it came from. Really, I think it just came to mind because I live in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and it has a lot of uninhabited space. I’d rather have us be cold than involved in the current Middle East clusterfuck. We’re waiting for salvation either way. Ellie via El Parro- Please, show me where I said that all European non-Jews are scum. And please tell me where I denied the deaths of 4 million people. I’d really like to know. Your family has been wronged by Jews? I’m really sorry to hear that. Honestly. Really truly. No sarcasm. There are some terrible people who are Jews, and it sucks, and I wish it wasn’t the case. I’m really sorry that your grandfather went through that experience, and that his story is erased by the current Holocaust narrative. But I learned about all 10 million people during our Holocaust unit at my Jewish elementary school. Please stop painting an entire ethnicity with one brush. Because that’s what this is all about. That is the heart of prejudice and oppression. Jews aren’t allowed to do anything bad, because then we all look bad. Before we can do anything we have to ask, “Is it good for the Jews?” Because when one of us fucks up, we all suffer. And if you don’t buy that, you haven’t been paying very close attention.
Cam’s choice of words was poor on that issue, but she had a vaguely valid point is arguing that, as someone who has put her money where her mouth is regarding her opinions on israel, she has some entitlement to a slightly louder voice than the chattering classes. Neither here nor there. This thread started as one about antisemitism that’s related to israel. This wasn’t originally a post about israel’s legitimacy, but people who think it’s reasonable to say the israeli jews should be sent back to their killers turned it into one… and saying that this thread should become a safe space for palestinians, who are probably the most antisemitic people in the world after the Polish, seems farcical…
@ Shoshie— I wasn’t questioning other Jews–I presume you can make your own decision about it. But you *also* weren’t the only person in the thread who said that, and I wasn’t talking about you… And for what it’s worth, I actually agree with you religiously speaking. But I can also see why others feel differently after saying these things *that have a very concrete meaning,* over and over for one’s entire life.
So– I re-read my previous comment, and it isn’t clear that I was explicitly talking about non-Jewish people. So, just to be crystal clear about it: that is who I was referencing, sp. people who have never bothered to try and expose themselves in a meaningful way to the culture of the people they are critiquing.
chava- gotcha. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Glad we’re on the same page. I also see why other feel connection to the land of Israel, especially people in our generation who have grown up with Israel ALWAYS being there and ALWAYS being taught connection to the political country. I just question the original necessity of Israel’s establishment in that land in the first place. I think a big reason it ended up there is because Britain saw that land as theirs to give, when it probably shouldn’t have.
Soto, Saying that national identity is unnecessary when the legitimacy of your own national identity isn’t questioned is what I mean when I refer to this kind of criticism as an expression of privilege. Everybody in America came from someplace else and has some other identity as well, and maybe, for that reason, being a Jewish-American is different from being a European Jew. But the very suggestion that Jews are disloyal to America for supporting Israel is anti-Semitic. That’s the same sort of thinking that put Japanese Americans, many of whom were US citizens, in internment camps. That’s the sort of thinking that was used to spread fear about John F. Kennedy taking orders from the Vatican. America’s ideal of a multinational state has had a lot of historical pitfalls and continuing problems. If a populist political movement turns against Jews the way some groups are turning against Mexican-Americans, I am skeptical of the idea that constitutional rights or the protections of citizenship will provide a shield. Many German Jews considered themselves to be Germans living in a post-national, progressive society before the Nazis came to power. We hope that we are safe in America, but historical experience suggests that we should have a place to run. And when every “peace rally” villifies Israel while glossing over the atrocities committed against Jews by Muslim terrorists, yes, the Left has a problem with Jews. And when progressive ideas about post-nationalism means that only the Jews are expected to be minorities everywhere in the world, yes, I say the Left has a problem with Jews.
@Daniel At one point Elie Wiesel and others opposed the inclusion of Roma and other non-Jewish Holocaust victims in the National Holocaust Museum. @Sailorman “Are you aware that various ships and “aid” shipments and “peacable” organizations have, at various times, been shown to be carrying weapons/fighters/etc?” Yes, and I never said Israel couldn’t search the ships in broad daylight in their own territorial waters. Your mention of corriander is a red herring. Corriander is something that anyone can do without. But what about: dried fruit, fresh meat, livestock, wood for construction, plaster, fishing rods, fishing nets, TOYS, irrigation pipe systems, newspapers, heaters, and horses? Even if you believe that it is reasonable for Israelis to board and inspect, that’s not what happened. AN ARMED COMMANDO RAID IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT is not boarding and inspection! What’s incredible to me is that people actually seem to think that this is some sort of accident, an unfortunate event that the IDF did not choose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3-yNRLcQuI&feature=player_embedded @Dan “The primary purpose of the Gaza embargo is to dislodge Hamas from power there. The particulars of the embargo may seem arbitrary in some cases or unfair. But if you try to run the blockade to deliver contraband to the Hamas-ruled territory, that seems to me to be an act in support of Hamas. Nobody supporting Hamas can claim to be a “peace activist.” Hamas’s methods and objectives, both against the Israelis and against its Palestinian political opponents, are exclusively violent.” The particulars do not “seem” arbitrary or unfair, they ARE arbitrary and unfair. The illegal blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Giving aid that Israel will not is not supporting Hamas, that’s ridiculous! The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has already taken responsibility for making sure building supplies like concrete do not make it to Hamas, for doling out aid evenly to the people of Gaza, and many things on the list aren’t even useful for terror anyway (fucking TOYS!?). Look at the pictures of what was confiscated: wheelchairs, medicine, a goddam Pikachu backpack. Was the Berlin Airlift aiding East German dissidents?
Also, Israel has taken the position that terrorism is a legitimate tool of politics by celebrating Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. In 2006, Netanyahu and others held a public celebration of the bombing in which 91 people were killed. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
“And when every “peace rally” villifies Israel while glossing over the atrocities committed against Jews by Muslim terrorists, yes, the Left has a problem with Jews. And when progressive ideas about post-nationalism means that only the Jews are expected to be minorities everywhere in the world, yes, I say the Left has a problem with Jews.” The point of a rally is typically to show support for an unpopular political position or one that is off the radar of the average citizen. Muslim terrorism is on the news every single day, and the U.S. and Europe are riled up against it almost to the point of hysteria. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not considered newsworthy here in the States.
And when every “peace rally” villifies Israel while glossing over the atrocities committed against Jews by Muslim terrorists Actually, in my regular experience of peace rallies, it is impossible NOT to “gloss over” the atrocities committed against Palestinians by Israeli forces: because listing every single one just makes you sound impossibly obsessive. Tom Gross did a piece “the forgotten Rachels” about other victims of the conflict who were also called Rachel, which I used as a stepping point to illustrate what I mean. Every death is a horror. Every one. The children, the young people, the parents, the grandparents. Tom Gross mentions Rachel Charhi, critically injured on April 4th 2002 by a Palestinian suicide bomber, died April 9th 2002 aged 36. Some of the people he doesn’t mention: ‘Abd a-Razeq Satiti, age 23, critically injured by IDF gunfire on February 28th 2002, died on March 6th 2002, almost exactly a month before Rachel Charhi was attacked and died. Ibrahim Muhammad Ass’ad, age 25, and Kamal Salem, age 36, killed by IDF gunfire on an ambulance medical team on March 7th 2002. Mahmoud Fa’iz, age 10, critically injured on March 7th by IDF gunfire, died on March 8th 2002. Nida Suleiman al-’Aza, age 15, ‘Issa Faraj, age 20, Sa’id ‘Eid, age 35, Ahmad N’uman Sabiyah, age 38, and Huda Isma’il al-Khawajah, age 36, killed by IDF gunfire in Bethlehem on March 8th 2002. In Tulkarm: Bassem Darsiyeh, age 40, critically injured on March 7th, died on March 9th 2002. Ghassan Salem, age 36, critically injured on March 7th, died on March 9th 2002. Ahmad Abu Tamam, age 50, critically injured on March 7th 2002, died on March 9th 2002, Khaled Harun, age 27, critically injured on March 7th, died on March 9th 2002. Heijar Persh, age 70, critically injured on March 7th, died on March 9th 2002. Seyd Fa’iz Abu Seifin, age 14, who threw stones at soldiers on March 8th 2002 in al-Yamun, Jenin district, and was killed for it by gunfire from an IDF tank. Aiman Saleh Muhana, age 18, bypassed an IDF checkpoint in Hebron in his car and was killed on March 11th 2002 by gunfire from an IDF tank. Rowan ‘Abd al-Quader Jabrini, age 16, critically injured by IDF gunfire in Hebron on March 3rd 2002, died on March 12th 2002. In Qalqiliya, Yusef al-Aqr’a, age 29, and ‘Atef al-Biari, age 50, killed on March 11th 2002 by IDF gunfire. Na’im a-Zabaineh, killed by IDF gunfire to the head while he was riding in his car in Halhul, Hebron district, on March 11th 2002. Jamil ‘Abdallah ‘Abdallah, age 37, critically injured on March 5th 2002 in Ramallah, by IDF gunfire, died on March 14th 2002. In Hebron: Amjad Bahajat al-’Almi, age 20, a press photographer, killed by IDF gunfire on March 18th 2002. Nidal al-’Almi, age 19, killed by IDF gunfire on March 22nd 2002. Mahmoud Abu Yassin, age 15, critically injured on March 12th 2002 by IDF gunfire during the funeral of those killed in an earlier IDF operation in Jabalya refugee camp, died March 25th 2002. Abu Gharbiya, age 21, killed by IDF gunfire when she and her children fled from their home on March 29th 2002 when the IDF attacked Ramallah. Jud Dar Salim, age 52, shot in the chest by the IDF on the same day, the same attack, just 6 days before Rachel Charhi was attacked. What happens to one person, Rachel Charhi, the victim of a Palestinian terrorist, isn’t glossed over. What happened to 25 people, the victims of Israeli Defense Forces, none of whom were taking part in hostilities at the time they were killed, that is glossed over. I wrote this paragraph, and six more like it, and my eye finds itself falling faster and faster over the many names. Yet each one was as valuable, as valued, as the next: to each family the loss is horrendous, breathtaking in its pain. We can agree it would be atrocious to gloss over the death of Rachel Charhi. Why is it acceptable to gloss over the death of Abu Gharbiya? That wasn’t a good month, March 2002. Good months for Palestinians are months where there are “only” two or three people killed by the IDF or by settler gunfire. When I first began looking at the statistics for Palestinian and Israeli deaths in the conflict, I noticed an odd thing: while news reports understandably gave much publicity to the horrible deaths of Israeli children, still, for every Israeli killed – adult or child – there had been one Palestinian child killed. Far more Palestinian adults were killed than children, but the proportion of Palestinian minors killed by Israelis to total number of Israelis killed by Palestinians remained about the same. That was several years ago. Now the proportions are altogether different: for every Israeli killed by Palestinians, about two Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis. Let us not gloss over that.
@Dan: “But the very suggestion that Jews are disloyal to America for supporting Israel is anti-Semitic.” Yup, that’s why I’m puzzled by your insistence that Jews are, definitionally, “foreigners” everywhere but Israel, it seems remarkably similar to a standard antisemitic screed. I’m not accusing you of antisemitism, but I’m puzzled. “Saying that national identity is unnecessary when the legitimacy of your own national identity isn’t questioned” If I’m understanding your unique use of the term “nation” and “national identity” then by your definitions I don’t have a national identity, just a mere citizenship. “And when progressive ideas about post-nationalism means that only the Jews are expected to be minorities everywhere in the world, yes, I say the Left has a problem with Jews.” First off, I’m going to gently remind you that there’s plenty of non-Jewish minorities with no “homeland”. The Rom spring to mind right off the bat, and there’s dozens of others. Again, I ask if you’re looking to make Israel a special case or if your belief in the absolute necessity of ethnic nationalism requires the formation of dozens (if not hundreds) of new nations and the rearrangement of the borders of every extant nation? Second off, so what? I’m white and I’m going to be a minority in the USA in the next 20 years. I’m already a minority where I live (Texas). When people of my skin tone get upset about that are, rightly I think, considered to be racist idiots. Given the history of the Holocaust I can see the desire for Israel as a “Jewish Homeland”. I just think its a very bad idea. Israel as a rigidly secular state with a majority Jewish population could work, though it would still need to solve the issue of the existence of the Palestinian people. Israel as a “Jewish Homeland” can’t, or at least not without turning into a theocratic hellhole of the same variety as Saudi Arabia coupled with the uglier aspects of Japan’s vicious ethnocentrism. As an atheist I find that the very concept of a nation founded on a religion (any religion, and regardless of ancillary ethnic components) gives me the willies.
Soto, Jews are foreigners everywhere, and everyone is a foreigner in America. In Germany, you’ve got Germans and you’ve got everybody else. In America, you might be Jewish, but the next guy’s Irish and the next guy is German and the next guy is Black and the next guy is Mexican. The otherness of the Jew seems like less of a burden in a place where the population is so heterogeneous, and in a place where everybody has a hyphenated identity. But how safe is that? Napoleon famously emancipated and granted citizenship to the Jews throughout his empire, and that didn’t end up saving them. The entire reform movement in Judaism, founded in Germany in the 1840’s, was about rejecting the idea of Jews as a diaspora and embracing their nation of birth as a homeland. That’s why reform Jews worship in a “temple” rather than a “synagogue.” German Jews believed they were Germans by right of birth and by identity. That didn’t work out too well for them. Jews are as American as anyone else, by law and in our own minds. But I don’t think Jews are necessarily safe in America. A lot of Jewish-Americans deceive themselves about how widespread anti-Semitism is in the United States, and I don’t think I have to bring up America’s seriously checkered history on minority relations. Many Americans have no contact with Jews, and the prevalence of Jews among the professional classes generates a lot of resentment that could easily be harnessed into a populist anti-Jewish movement. I can’t tell you how profoundly terrifying I find Sarah Palin’s language about “Real Americans.” The “East Coast Liberal elite” that she demonizes seems to me to be a caricature of the stereotypical Jew. The vociferous anti-Israel sentiment of the anti-war protesters scared me, and the racism boiling just beneath the surface of the Tea Party movement scares me as well. The persecution of Mexican-Americans in Arizona scares me, because that kind of anger could easily turn against Jews.
if its any comfort, and I don’t think it is, I’m terrified by the rhetoric coming from the teabaggers and Palin myself. I’m quite concerned about the future of my country, and I’m not at all sure its possible to salvage America at this point. I live in Palin’s “Real America” and I’m sufficiently worried that I’m giving serious thought to uprooting my family, abandoning a decent job, and moving to fake America, or possibly out of the USA entirely. I don’t know if what we’re seeing is genuinely a proto or para-fascist movement, but its totalitarian, nationalist, and frightening as all get out. As a non-Jew I didn’t so much see it as a condemnation of the stereotypical Jew, but rather the stereotypical Liberal. Given the overlap between the two I can see how we could each rationally come to the different conclusions we have. Antisemitism has been a central part of most full blown fascist movements [1], and given the odd status of Israel in most fundamentalist Christin doctrine if I were Jewish I’d be nervous even if I was politically conservative. That said, I still don’t agree that a religious/ethnic “Jewish Homeland” is a great idea, and I think founding such a homeland via military invasion was an incredibly bad move. But, as I’ve also said, what’s done is done. That’s the reality and we have to deal with it. But it is also reality that there are 12 million or so Palestinians, and if we evenly apply your ideas of ethnic entitlement to nationhood then they need a homeland too. Of course under your logic so do the Kurds, the Rom, and dozens of other “nations”, but you’re steadfastly ignoring my requests to address that issue, however when it comes to the Palestinians I don’t think we can proceed in the conversation without addressing them. They exist, they used to own the land we now call Israel until it was forcibly taken from them, and something needs to be done to take care of them or this whole bloody mess will never be resolved. Since you’ve decided that the imaginary friend invented by a bunch of goat herds 3,000+ years ago means Israel absolutely must, under all circumstances, belong to the Jews or else they’re forever doomed to be perpetual “foreigners” even in nations where they have full citizenship, you tell me where the Palestinians are supposed to find the homeland you demand for all “nations”. What country shall we carve a piece out of to give the Palestinians? [1] I take the position that Japan was fascist from around 1920 on, this is controversial among students of Japanese history. Assuming I’m right, Japanese fascism is virtually unique among fascist movements in that antisemitism was not part of its particular brand of fascism. Some maintain that antisemitism is an essential part of true fascism, and its absence in Japan means the totalitarian politics of the Taisho and early Showa periods was therefore not fascist.
@ jesurgislac: you’re conflating arguments about ‘god given’ land, and arguments about millenia of culture that, while they may have been originally religiously justified (once again, see: all pre-christian cultural ties to land) are also a secular part of a national identity. The fact that my family only got to Israel in the 20th century doesn’t invalidate my cultural tie to the land, just the same as my irish friends who’ve never been to ireland can still claim certain rights as members of the irish diaspora; that’s what a diaspora IS, and it doesn’t erase or invalidate the connection between a dispersed people and their land. Do you think the Jews WEREN’T in Israel before the Romans kicked them out? Do you think the Jews fast on Tisha B’av, a holiday where God is essentially not mentioned, because the connection is invented? Or maybe the key to occupying a land is to kick almost all the inhabitants out (which, to preempt the claim, Israel did not do. See: the Israeli Arab population) and wait until their grandkids have died… then anyone can take the land and claim the dispossessed people, as a people, have no rights, right? So should palestinian claims regarding land, compensation, rights, hell, identity as palestinian, all require definite and exhaustive documentation? Or do palestinians whose families emigrated pre-’67 still have some status as members of the palestinian people, and a stake in the peace process? @ sotonohito- saying the jews shouldn’t even be allowed to call themselves Jews is definitely antisemitic, even if you’re saying it about other religion-linked nations too. If your atheism doesn’t allow for the concept of nationhood, and if you’re delusional enough to think that we live in a post-national world, then the word “genocide” has no meaning in your lexicon, and you’re a certain kind of holocaust denier, because you think a genocidal agenda is coequal with any generalized mass murder campaign. Genocide, and most palestinian rights activists make this a plank of their position, is its own special kind of wrong. Nationhood exists and is not evil.
Also @ Jesurgislac: isn’t counting piles of bodies and laying them side by side a, frankly, red herring? How many of those palestinian children should be laid at the feet of hamas, for hiding fighters and arms in civilian homes and buildings? How many of those children were used as human shields? The palestinians, once again, are not angels, and blaming every palestinian child’s death on israel obscures the fact that israel is much better at observing certain vital laws of war that palestinian fighting forces violate routinely. If hamas had normal military bases and didn’t hide out in buildings full of children, a lot of those children wouldn’t be dead.
Well, this thread has been fun, but I’m cutting if off now, since I’m pretty confident it’s not going anywhere positive. Thanks, genuinely, to those who tried to make it productive.
@139: Thank you. It was sad enough that so little of the ‘debate’ about the flotilla story focused on the real story: the ongoing and purposeful suffering of the people of Gaza. Sadly, this controversy has created another distraction from this central truth.
Something very strange happened with my blog and somehow my antisemitism series got republished–don’t know precisely how or why–and so none of the links in comments 72 and 87 work anymore. Since people have been coming to read the series, I am posting the corrected links yet one more time (apologies again and again). 1 2 3 4 5 (Maybe a moderator could move these links up to comment 72, which was my first comment and then delete this one and comment 87 to avoid redundancy and confusion? If so, thanks.)
Hi RJM, I am about halfway through your 5 posts on antisemitism but I feel compelled to comment before I continue. I cannot even imagine the kind of hell you went through as a kid. I was a scrawny kid that got picked on a lot, but nothing like that. The way that Gentile adults turned a blind eye is what sickens me more than anything. So, I wanted to say that my family is good friends with a family who moved from Ukraine because of antisemitism. They are totally secular and did not even know what Yom Kippur was when we discussed it with them, but that doesn’t matter in Soviet bloc countries. My fencing coach is an observant reform Jew who also moved from Ukraine with his family because of antisemitism. He did so reluctantly, as he had hoped that the fall of the Soviet Union would diminish antisemitism in his country. It did not. I would hold absolutely no ill will against these families if they moved to Israel, nor any Jew who has felt the fear of being betrayed by their neighbors and “friends.” You’ve opened my eyes a bit – thank you.