Tuesday 20 October 2009

Now even the United Nations Human Rights Council is “anti-Semitic.” Well, that’s the view of Israel’s Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, who is outraged that the body rubber-stamped the Goldstone Report on war crimes committed in Gaza. Some years ago, that accusation would have had enormous shock-value, whereas, nowadays, the label has been so propagandized the only thing it elicits is a yawn.

Anti-Semitism is a genuine scourge on humankind in the same that racism and bigotry are and should be eradicated, but Israel is in danger of devaluing the term by attaching it to anyone who doesn’t agree with its policies. Moreover, when used loosely as an insult, it doesn’t help Israel’s cause or standing in the world.

On the contrary, terming “anti-Semitic” the 25 member states that voted to back the report’s recommendations, last Friday, will make them even more determined to see Israel before the International Criminal Court. And it is worth remembering that two, Russia and China, hold veto-power in the UN Security Council.

When Israeli officials have to resort to name-calling and evocation of the Holocaust as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently did during an address to the UN General Assembly, it signifies that they are losing the argument.

It seems that Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy is of like mind. Netanyahu “cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the UN General Assembly…” he wrote. “He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.”

According to the Israelis, anti-Semites are lurking everywhere. In 2002, Netanyahu — then Israel’s foreign minister — accused Belgium of “anti-Semitism” and “blood-libel” when the Belgian Supreme Court ruled that members of Israel’s military were open to prosecution for the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

Netanyahu called this “an outrageous decision” that “reminds us of ‘Old Europe’ and all its sicknesses,” even though an Israeli commission found then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible.

In 2004, the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin of “anti-Semitism” and “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups” following a boycott of the BBC for broadcasting a documentary on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. That same year, Israel handed British news outlets dossiers it had compiled on the anti-Semitic leanings of various reporters.

More recently, Sweden was accused of “blood-libel” for refusing to condemn a newspaper story concerning the theft of Palestinian organs by Israeli soldiers. Up popped Yuval Steinitz again to announce that “the Swedish government cannot keep silent any longer. In the Middle Ages, slander was spread accusing Jews of preparing Passover matza (unleavened loaves) with the blood of Christian children.”

Last September, Israel’s ambassador to Spain Raphael Schutz urged the Spanish government to control “anti-Semitic attacks” from Spanish leftists and intellectuals. Anti-Semitism in Spain has reached intolerable levels and was “rampant” among the general public, he said, but was ‘kind’ enough to add ‘the Spanish government is not always anti-Semitic.”

Even US presidents haven’t escaped Israel’s regular “anti-Semitic” lashings. In June this year, head of Israel’s National Union Party Yaakov Katz blasted “the Obama-Clinton ‘no natural growth policy’ for 650,000 Jews in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem,” as “nothing less than anti-Semitism.”

Israel’s Science and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz also rejects President Obama’s settlement freeze, and characterizes his decision to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former UN Rights Commissioner and President of Ireland Mary Robinson as “borderline anti-Semitic”; a ridiculous view that was heartily echoed by AIPAC.

Earlier, former US President Jimmy Carter was branded with the “anti-Semitic” slur for his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Ironic, when, arguably he did more than any US leader to broker regional peace.

It’s time that the international community got together to tell Israel to quit such undeserved attacks on its leaders and institutions. The Israeli government and press need to be told “that dog will no longer hunt.”

If Israel wants its arguments to be heard it needs to make them without such knee-jerk abuse, based on the long-time illusion of Israel’s victim status. The fact is that Israel is far from being a victim today.

Unconditionally protected by the superpower, it is the only state on earth that is allowed to get away with a policy of so-called nuclear ambiguity and given a free pass to snub international court rulings, UN Security Council resolutions, international law and the Geneva Conventions without fear of repercussions.

Poor little Israel surrounded by hostile Arab nations that do not want peace no longer exists. Every Arab country — along with all-important Palestinian factions — is more than ready to take a place at the negotiating table. It is Israel that is reluctant to trade land for peace and normalization of relations with its neighbors, and now threatens the Palestinian National Authority with an end to the peace process due to its support of the Goldstone Report and UNHRC vote. What peace process? Exactly!

Instead of flaying around with accusations, insults and threats, Israel would be far better served answering the report’s allegations. Did its military use Palestinian civilians as human shields? Were Palestinian infrastructure, factories and homes wantonly destroyed? Were weapons such as white phosphorous or DIME bombs used illegally in heavily populated areas? Were UN facilities and ambulances wrongly targeted under the pretext they harbored militants?

These and more are the questions that need answering, not because the world illogically detests the Jewish state but because it is a militarily powerful occupier and aggressor that is holding 4.5 million Palestinians hostage.

The resolution, which is now set to be debated in the UN Security Council, merely calls upon Israel and Hamas to conduct open and credible investigations into the report’s allegations within six months, else be referred to the International Criminal Court. It applies to both sides. But, whereas, Israel vehemently rejects it, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas welcome it.

In reality, the resolution will not be passed by the UN Security Council because Washington will use its veto, but it does shine a spotlight on Israel’s crimes. When former Israeli prime minister gave a speech at the University of Chicago, last Thursday, he was interrupted by calls of “war criminal.”

At the same time, six Norwegian lawyers are petitioning the chief prosecutor to extradite and arrest Ehud Olmert, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and seven senior IDF officers for war crimes. Are those lawyers anti-Semitic or simply human beings with hearts and a moral conscience sick of seeing images of dead Palestinian babies on their screens? You decide.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=127579&d=20&m=10&y=2009

By JOHN V. WHITBECK

In a commentary published in the Arab News (Jeddah) on October 17, the British journalist Neil Berry focuses on a reality which is rarely mentioned in polite society: that Zionism is, and has always been, an anti-Semite’s dream come true, offering the hope that one’s own country’s Jews can be induced to leave and move elsewhere.

Berry writes: “The imperious British statesman, A.J. Balfour, who gave his name to the declaration, was an earnest supporter of the 1905 Alien Act, which was specifically designed to stem the inflow into Britain of Jews who were fleeing from persecution in czarist Russia. A century ago, immigrant Jews were seen by many, much as Muslims are now, as subversive intruders menacing the British way of life…. Zionism and anti-Semitism became inextricably bound up with one another.”

Citing a better-known cause for the enduring shame of Western states, Berry continues: “In the aftermath of the liquidation by the Nazis of some 6 million Jews during World War II, the United States, Australia and Canada, brushing aside Arab pleas to treat displaced Jews as a challenge for the whole world, refused to relax their immigration restrictions, thereby ensuring that the great majority of them poured into Palestine, even though many would have preferred to settle elsewhere…. It was with shrewd foresight that Herzl predicted that anti-Semitism would become Zionism’s greatest ally.”

Western governments which, today, are not anti-Semitic should, rather than feeding justice, human decency and international law into a shredder through blind subservience to a racial-supremicist, settler-colonial experiment (and thereby earning themselves the hatred of much of mankind), be opening their doors wide to any and all Israeli Jews who might be tempted to build a new and better life for themselves and their children, with less injustice and less insecurity, by returning to their countries of origin or emigrating to other countries of their choice, offering them immediate residency rights, generous resettlement assistance and a rapid road to citizenship (if they do not already have it).

Such “Laws of Return” would be profoundly philo-Semitic, pro-Jewish and, yes, anti-Zionist. They would reflect a moral, ethical and self-interested recognition that Zionism, like certain other prominent 20th century “isms” which once captured the imaginations of millions, was a tragically bad idea — not simply for those innocents caught and trampled in its path but also for those who embraced it — which is unsustainable, which does not deserve to be sustained and which has already caused (and, if perpetuated, will continue to cause) profound problems for the Western world and the Western world’s relations with the rest of the world.

Democracy and equal rights in a unitary state in the land which, until 1948, was called Palestine, coupled with freedom of choice (with attractive choices for resettlement being generously provided) for those who would prefer not to live in such a state, would offer a far greater hope for eventual peace in the Middle East than continued cyncical recycling of a partition-based “peace process” which is now widely recognized to be both a fraud and a farce and which, even if “successful”, would simply legitimize, reward and perpetuate ethnic cleansing, racism and apartheid — scarcely a recipe for lasting peace, let alone for any measure of justice.

If Western politicians cared more about the welfare and happiness of individual Jewish human beings than they do about the money and ability to hurt them of a few wealthy and powerful Zionists, most of whom live comfortably and safely far from the Middle East, democracy, equal rights and freedom of choice, all principles to which Western states profess devotion, might actually come to the “Holy Land”.

Politicians being what they are, civil society will have to take the lead in delegitimizing Zionism and pointing the way toward a better future for all concerned — and, like it or not, everyone on this planet is concerned.

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitbeck10192009.html

John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of “The World According to Whitbeck”.