the edge of where?

Eretz nehederet in the kindergarden

2011-01-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Check out this hilarious offering from Eretz Nehederet, an Israeli satirical show. Kids these days...

From Hasbara to Hakshava: rethinking Israel education

2011-01-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this essay is to examine and critique the characteristics and effects of Israel education in Britain today. I argue that current approaches to Israel education have tended to prioritize teaching love for Israel – and a particular kind of love for Israel – over teaching knowledge about Israel, and have consequently given rise to a problematic discourse on Israel among Jewish students. In order to avoid this problem a new approach to Israel education is needed.

To begin, we need to acknowledge the centrality of Israel education to Jewish education in Britain today. Every Jewish student in the country who goes to a mainstream Jewish school or youth movement receives some Israel education. Most Jewish education providers, both formal and informal, view Israel education as a necessary and central part of a rounded Jewish education. The mission statement of Britain’s largest Jewish school, for example, explains that it aims to develop ‘young citizens with a strong sense of identity with Judaism and Israel’[1]; most other Jewish schools express similar aims on their websites.[2] Cheder teaching also generally includes Israel education. The mission statement of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) calls to ‘inspire’ an ‘enduring commitment to Israel,’ while the 2008 annual review of one of the largest Jewish charities engaging in Jewish education, the UJIA, explains that one of its three key objectives is to place ‘Israel at the heart of Jewish connectedness in the UK’.[3] Month long tours across Israel run by Jewish youth movements are now attended by over half of all British Jews aged sixteen[4] – and for many participants these have become something of a modern day Jewish rite of passage. After their bar or bat mitzvah, Israel tour is arguably the single most formative Jewish experience for most Jewish teenagers in Britain today.

The education someone receives shapes their views and beliefs. Because of its evident centrality to Jewish education in Britain today, the nature and effects of current approaches to Israel education in Britain therefore warrant careful consideration, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the kinds of Jewish identities that the Jewish education given to young Jews today is likely to foster. They will also be of interest to those concerned with the climate of debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially on campus, in light of the obvious connection between the education people receive about Israel and the opinions they hold – and the way in which they express those opinions – about Israel.

The Key features of Israel education in Britain today

The nature of ‘Israel education’ in the Jewish community often differs from what we would expect of education on other topics. So while we would expect ‘Belgium education’, for example, to focus on teaching knowledge about Belgium, Israel education sometimes seems to be concerned less with teaching knowledge about Israel than with teaching love for Israel. This is illustrated by the stated aims of Jewish education providers. Thus the Jewish education department of JFS ‘seeks to give a positive view and experience of... Israel.’[5] At Rosh Pinah Jewish primary school, the Jewish studies department aims to ‘instil a love and understanding of Israel and its culture’.[6] In a video by the Jewish studies department at King Solomon High School, placed on the school’s website under the words ‘learning what it means to be Jewish’, a Jewish studies teacher says that one of their educational programmes looks ‘at making our students the best Israel advocates that we can’.[7] The forum for leaders of Jewish youth movements to meet and discuss is not called the Jewish youth council but the ‘Zionist Youth Council’, reflecting the fact that a central aim of most of the youth movements is to promote Zionism and support for Israel through informal education.[8] Evidently, inculcating positive dispositions towards Israel is a guiding aim behind the Israel education offered by many of the major Jewish education providers in Britain today.

A second feature of Israel education is its focus on hasbara[9] – encouraging students to defend or promote Israel’s image. The Union of Jewish Student’s manhigut (leadership) trip, for instance, is in fact a political ‘advocacy trip’ to Israel, designed to ‘highlight the key messages to bring back to campus’.[10] But this sort of hasbara education begins before students embark on their university careers. During my time in sixth-form at JFS, the Jewish Informal Education Department gave me two books for free. But they were not what you might expect – a siddur, a chumash, or Jonathan Sack’s latest – instead they were both Israel-advocacy books: Mitchell G Bard’s ‘Myths and Facts’, and Alan Dershowitz’s ‘The Case for Israel.’

The clearest example of hasbara education by British Jewish education providers is ‘The Ambassador.’ This is an annual competition for Jewish sixth-formers in JFS and King Solomon School to find the best advocate for Israel. Styled on the BBC’s apprentice, the competition involves a series of Israel advocacy tasks such as public speaking and opinion-piece writing. In the course of the 2005-2006 competition, in which I took part, school assemblies for year 13 were for several weeks devoted to footage being shown of the competition, or Israel-advocacy speakers being invited to talk; and so any Jewish part to our weekly assemblies became an Israel part, and more than that – an Israel-advocacy part.

In these assemblies and throughout The Ambassador in general there was little teaching about Israel. None of the tasks we were given were knowledge-related; skills, not knowledge, were being taught and tested. We were being encouraged and taught how to support Israel despite being taught very little about the country.

Furthermore, Hasbara schemes like The Ambassador present ‘support’ or ‘love’ for Israel as something one expresses by refuting criticisms of Israel. This kind of love is like that of a mother who is unable or unwilling to accept that the teacher may be right when they say her child misbehaves; rather than considering the teacher’s claims and working to improve her child’s behaviour, such a mother expresses her love by defending her child from the teacher’s allegations – whatever their validity. From the perspective of the child’s best interests, this is clearly unhelpful. Likewise, with Israel, one can express a blind or uncritical love for the country – a ‘support Israel right-or-wrong, refute every criticism’ kind of approach – or their love for Israel can take a more mature and nuanced form, ‘hugging and wrestling’[11] with Israel, recognizing its complexities and shortcomings and being prepared to accept and voice criticisms of the country. Hasbara schemes, however, only promote the former kind of love.

Watching footage of ‘The Ambassador’ recently I was also troubled by the political undertones of some of its content. Early on, in a speech describing how bad anti-Israel activism on campus can be, one of the organizers of the competition, from Tribe[12], tells us that when he was a student, a Sabra and Shatilla scholarship was organized for a Palestinian student to study – ‘would you believe it?’ he says – ‘politics’. It is unclear why that should be considered either an obviously bad or surprising thing, though he implies it is both. (I suspect at that point in time most of us listening were in any case not altogether sure what Sabra and Shatilla were). In another instance, the same person from Tribe lists the things that we – ‘brought up in an environment of JFS or in youth movements or Israel tour... take for granted’, in the course of which he says: ‘and the Palestinians are this, that, and the next thing and they’re not really a people.’[13] A generous listener may put this down to an unfortunate slip of the tongue. But this line was not then edited out of the video that was subsequently broadcast in the school assembly. Thus in the course of the Israel education provided in JFS that year, the highly controversial claim that the Palestinians are ‘not really a people’ was knowingly presented to the whole of the upper sixth as something we ‘take for granted’ because of the ‘environment of JFS’.

To the extent that knowledge about Israel is taught in Israel education in schools and youth movements, it is rarely of an impartial nature. The maps of Israel that I recall seeing during most of my Israel education did not distinguish between Israel within the green line and the occupied territories. In JFS I was taught that Zionism was essentially opposed by three Jewish groups: the Reform, the Socialist Bund, and the Ultra-Orthodox. Yet in 1897, at the time of the First Zionist Congress, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, Herman Adler – a mainstream Orthodox figure – condemned the congress as an ‘egregious blunder’ and denounced the idea of a Jewish state as ‘contrary to Jewish principles’.[14] Twenty years later, the then president of the Board of Deputies, Lindo Alexander, wrote a letter to The Times objecting to Zionism.[15] Disagreement over Zionism was evidently far greater, anti-Zionism far more mainstream a position (at least within Anglo-Jewry) than was recognized in the Israel education I recall receiving. Most revealingly, the 1948 war is inevitably taught as ‘the war of independence’ without (or with minimal) recognition for other narratives of that war, known by Palestinians as the Naqba (catastrophe). This past summer I worked as a madrich (leader) on one of the youth movement Israel Tours described earlier. During the course of the month, Israel Experience[16] – who organized the trip – arranged for a number of speakers to talk to the teenagers on the Tour. One speaker taught the basics of Israeli history and politics, during which he discussed the 1948 war. He explained that the Palestinian refugee problem – the exodus of 700,000 Palestinians – was caused by Arab leaders telling Arab citizens to leave. He gave little recognition that actions by Israelis may have contributed to the flight of Arab citizens. This was a disingenuously one-sided presentation of the history of the refugee problem. As historian (and former Israeli Foreign Minister) Shlomo Ben-Ami notes:

“It is not at all clear, as maintained by a conventional Israeli myth, that the Palestinian exodus was encouraged by the Arab states and by local leaders... Indeed, [Benny] Morris found evidence to the effect that the local Arab leadership and militia commanders discouraged flight, and Arab radio stations issued calls to the Palestinians to stay put.”[17]

Moreover, there are some clear instances of Arab civilians being intentionally expelled or attacked during the war:

“A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs’ monument of grief and hatred, like those of Dir Yassin, Ein Zeitun, Ilabun and Lydda; of operational orders like those of Moshe Carmel, the commander of the Carmeli Brigrade in Operation Yiftah and Ben Ami, ‘to attack in order to conquer, to kill the men, to destroy and burn the villages of Al-Kubri, Umm al Faraj and An Nahar’ and by the mass expulsions during the Yoav operation.”[18]

“‘Drive them out!’ was Ben Gurion’s instruction to Yigal Allon, as recorded by Yitzchak Rabin... with regard to the Arabs of Lydda”[19]

The history of the 1948 war and the refugee problem in particular is undeniably complex and contested. My purpose here is not to enter into the historical debate myself, but simply to point out that this debate exists: that there are various narratives of the war, and that these ought to be acknowledged by those involved in Israel education wanting to teach in a way that is honest, rounded and balanced. At present, they rarely are.

The effect of current approaches to Israel education

Because of the centrality of Israel education to Jewish education, combined with its emphasis on loving and supporting or defending Israel, an implicit message is currently being conveyed to students: that to be a good Jew is to support Israel; that supporting Israel is an aspect of a full Jewish identity. If a central part of Jewish education is learning to love Israel, the implication is that a central part of being an educated Jew is having a love for Israel.

So what happens to Jewish students who feel unable to ‘support’ or ‘love’ Israel in the way they have been taught to, perhaps because they are anti-Zionist themselves or, more commonly, because their love for Israel is based on ‘hugging and wrestling’ with the country – they feel that one can and sometimes should publically criticize Israel while still wanting it to ‘not only survive but thrive?’[20]

An interesting example is the experience of Emma Clyne, a Jewish student from Sweden and former president of the Jewish Society at SOAS.[21] When she organized a discussion for the SOAS Jewish society entitled ‘The Impact of Nationalism on Jewish Identity’, to which she invited speakers from Independent Jewish Voices[22], fellow Jewish students accused her of ‘disloyalty to my Jewish community’. On another occasion, after saying she felt some sympathy for the views expressed at a talk of Jews against Zionism, a fellow Jewish Society member told her she sounded like a ‘self-hating Jewish antisemite’. When, upon becoming the Jewish Society President, she had explained to UJS that she would prefer for their Israel-related resources to go to the SOAS Israel Society and not the Jewish Society, because ‘the Jewish Society had decided to make a clear distinction between the Israel Society and itself’, she was told by one UJS officer that:

“That’s not what the Jewish Society does. You can’t separate Israeli politics from Jewish Identity. It is all the same, part of the same thing.”

Unfortunately, for some Jewish students in a similar position, uncomfortable with Israel but wanting to partake in Jewish student activities, they either switch off Israel or they switch off Judaism. One Jewish student (an American one, but the point could be well applied to the British context) put it this way:

“Columbia [University] made me a self-loathing Jew. Living here, I didn’t believe any less in my self-worth, the worth of Jewish people in general, or the right of Israel to exist as a nation. But I also didn’t believe in spitting on basic human rights—and that, I was told, made me a self-loathing Jew… On campus, those were my choices: right-wing hawk or progressive turncoat, hate myself or hate others. I disengaged… I ditched the American Jewish culture.”[23]

As the above examples illustrate, the effect of current approaches to Israel education has been to couple Jewish identity with a particular understanding of love for Israel. Consequently, Jewish students who openly oppose aspects of Israel or Israeli policies can sometimes find their Jewish identity being questioned – by fellow Jews and sometimes, as a result, eventually themselves as well. A Jewish student who in the opinion of other Jewish students delegitimizes Israel can risk having their own Jewish identity delegitimized in turn – being called ‘self-hating’, a ‘Jewish antisemite,’ ‘disloyal’ and so on. Assuming the aim of Jewish educators is to strengthen, not undermine, their students’ Jewish identities, this is clearly a problem.

A second problem with current approaches to Israel education is the effect it has on how people approach Israel/Palestine debates on campus. Hasbara schemes such as The Ambassador have encouraged people to passionately defend Israel without giving them the requisite knowledge base – with an awareness of the multiple narratives of the past – to do so. If the question of what happened in 1948 came up in a debate, and the respondent was to flatly deny that any action from Israelis contributed to the flight of the Palestinians, they would lose credibility in the eyes of audience members who had studied the period. Present hasbara education is too knowledge-light: it is creating confident but not credible advocates for Israel. It therefore fails to fulfil its own criteria for success.

Hasbara education such as ‘The Ambassador’ – with its focus on debates, opinion pieces, and set-piece speeches, also frames the experience of being a Jew on campus as a struggle to explain rather than to understand – an ‘us versus them’ approach. (As the blurb on the box for the video of ‘The Ambassador’ put it: ‘Every Jewish student is an ambassador for Israel’. At the end of the video one of those facilitating the competition explains: ‘you’re going to be going on to campus and this is going to be your life’). It therefore promotes confrontation rather than conversation, ‘explaining to’ rather than ‘conversing with’.

Thirdly, the emphasis on promoting Israel’s image influences students’ abilities to form moral judgements on Israel. This claim is supported by the research of Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin.[24] He studied the effect that teaching bible stories uncritically as our history had on student’s moral judgements. He did this by giving students bible passages describing Joshua’s conquests of Canaanite Cities, including the murder of both ‘man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass’. He then gave an analogous text to control groups but changed ‘Joshua’ to ‘Lim’, a Chinese leader, and presented the story in a Chinese context. He then asked both groups if they thought that those involved in the conquests had acted ‘rightly or not’, and found that many more students felt the actions were moral when committed by Joshua than did those responding to the actions committed by Lim. He claimed this demonstrates that our capacity to form critical judgements about the actions of particular countries or characters is influenced by the kind of education we receive about them. It is therefore reasonable to assume that present approaches to Israel education will have influenced and biased students’ judgements on Israeli policies.

Finally, because of the one-sided nature of most teaching about Israel, when Jewish students actually do study Israel of their own accord – perhaps taking a course on the subject at university – their confidence in their Jewish education can be thrown into doubt. A feeling of ‘why wasn’t I taught that?’ can emerge. ‘Why weren’t they more honest?’

The need for a new approach: moving from Hasbara to Hakshava

I have written this article as someone who wants Israel to survive and thrive. I also want Israel-education to continue, because of Israel’s unique place in Jewish history, literature, religious thought and culture. But in order to overcome the problems outlined above, Israel education has to change. A better approach is what I call the ‘hakshava approach,’ from the Hebrew word ‘to listen’ or ‘to pay attention to’. In this approach, the guiding aim is not to promote the image of Israel to students, and to then encourage them to do the same to others in turn; instead it is to help students form their own opinions about Israel, encouraging them to listen to and engage in dialogue with as many viewpoints as possible and to consider all opinions critically. This would foster a more reasoned, honest, and mature identification with Israel.

A hasbara kind of love for Israel, expressed by promoting Israel’s image to others, is legitimate (though I think still problematic) as an end point of an educational process; if that’s how students feel after seriously reflecting on a range of viewpoints on Israel, the educator has done no wrong. But as a guiding aim it risks compromising the honesty and breadth of the Israel education. Furthermore, because of the centrality of Israel education to Jewish education, a hasbara approach sends out the problematic message that to be a good Jew is to support Israel; for Jews who do not support Israel – or who support Israel in a different way to that encouraged by hasbara style schemes – their Jewish identity is then called into question. The hakshava approach I put forward would be less likely to foster such problems.

The table below, in an admittedly caricatured way, gives examples of how the graduates of the two approaches to Israel education – the current hasbara-inclined approach, and the alternative hakshava approach I have suggested – will respond to different Israel-related issues confronting them.

	*Hasbara* graduate	*Hakshava* graduate
How do they react to the Goldstone report?	First reads articles critiquing Goldstone on Jpost.	First reads the Goldstone report.
How do they react to criticism of Israel on campus?	Opens Alan Dershowitz’s ‘The Case for Israel’ to find a reply to the relevant criticism.	Will consider the validity of the criticism and read a variety of opinions before making a reply.
How do they deal with a fellow Jewish student who publically criticizes Israel?	Dismiss them as a self-hating Jew.	Discuss their views with them.

In this essay I have identified some of the problematic consequences of current approaches to Israel education, pointing in particular to its effects on students’ understandings of their own and other peoples’ Jewish identities; their relationships with Israel; and their approach on campus to the Israel/Palestine conflict. I have argued that Israel education has a place in Jewish education today, but that the content and nature of this education needs to change to make it more honest and balanced so as to overcome the problems discussed; I hope it does.

[1] http://www.jfs.brent.sch.uk/the-jewish-dimension/what-we-teach.aspx

[2] See references 6 and 7 for example.

[3] 2008 Annual review of the UJIA, p9. Accessible here: www.ujia.org/cms/file/747/

[4] Ibid, p13

[5] http://www.jfs.brent.sch.uk/the-jewish-dimension/what-we-teach.aspx

[6] http://www.roshpinahschool.org.uk/

[7] http://www.kshsonline.com/Departments/JS.asp, at 2:15 on the video

[8] See for example the websites of FZY (http://www.fzy.org.uk/aboutfzy/whoweare/) and Bnei Akiva, (http://bauk.org/bauk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=146&Itemid=165)

[9] ‘Hasbara’ is a Hebrew word meaning explanation. It also refers to efforts by Israel and its supporters to promote the country’s image outside of Israel.

[10] http://www.ujs.org.uk/events/trips/146/manhigut-leadership/

[11] See Gringras, Robbie, ‘Wrestling and Hugging: Alternative paradigms for the Diaspora-Israel relationship’ (2006) accessed here: http://www.makomisrael.net/NR/rdonlyres/05584E5A-ED59-45BF-8485-E5F5481B6496/57984/MAKOMWrestlingandHugging.pdf

[12] Tribe is a United Synagogue affiliated organization providing for Jewish youth and young adults

[13] From the Ambassador Video created for the competition, episode 1.

[14] Alderman, Geoffrey, ‘Modern British Jewry,’ paperback ed., (1998) p222

[15] Ibid, p247

[16] Israel Experience Educational Tourism Services Ltd. is a subsidiary of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI). The company specializes in providing organized trips to Israel for teens, university students and adults from all over the globe. See: http://www.israelexperience.org.il//pages/aboutus.asp

[17] Ben-Ami, Shlomo, ‘Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: the Israeli-Arab tragedy’, (2005) p43

[18] Ibid, p42

[19] Ibid, p44

[20] As advocated by columnist Jonathan Freedland: http://www.jonathanfreedland.com/articles/archives/000273.html

[21] This example, and the related quotes that follow, are taken from private correspondence and from her own account of events, detailed in ‘A time to Speak Out’, ed., Anne Karpf, Brian Klug et al. (2008)

[22] Independent Jewish Voices are ‘a network of Jews in Britain who share a commitment to certain principles, especially with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in mind: putting human rights first, rejecting all forms of racism, and giving equal priority to Palestinians and Israelis in their quest for a peaceful and secure future’.

[23] http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/11/30/positively-j-street

[24] Tamarin, Georges R, ‘The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State’, (1973) p183

Ethnically cleansing the Jews? Yes, I think you'll find that's antisemitic.

2010-05-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

Today I lost a little faith in the police.

Remember the story about Noor Rashid? He was the student accused of shouting 'slay the Jews' at the Oxford Union some months ago. (see here).

Well according to today's Oxford Student, after watching a video of his outburst the police had concluded that they 'could not find any evidence' of hate speech.

Strange really, since they - and he - agree that while he never actually said 'slay the Jews', what he did say was a remark in Arabic that translates as 'Khaybar Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammed will return'.

You're probably wondering what 'Khaybar' means. I'll tell you - and then you'll understand why what he said, on any reasonable account, qualifies as hate speech.

Khaybar was an oasis not far from medina that was inhabited by Jews before being conquered by Muhammed in the 7th century. It's Jewish inhabitants were later expelled by the Caliph Umar.

So the chant Noor Rashid shouted refers to the attacking, conquering, and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Jews. Anti-Semitic? I think so. I just wonder: why do the police seem to think otherwise?

When a Bar Mitzvah goes political

2010-04-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

I know I said I wouldn't be writing for a while, but this article pissed me off and I wanted a distraction from work.

The grandson of Judge Richard Goldstone - who wrote the Goldstone report on the recent Gaza conflict - is due to have his Bar Mitzvah soon. A Bar Mitzvah is meant to be a happy family event, but this one has become a political event, hijacked by the South-African Zionist Federation (SAZF).

According to reports cited in the article, the SAZF reached an agreement with the synagogue in which the Bar Mitzvah is due to take place whereby Goldsone would be banned from attending the Bar Mitzvah. The Rosh Bet Din (head of the religious court) in South Africa, Rabbi Moshe Kurtstag, was reported as saying he had heard the SAZF had also made plans to organize a protest at the shul to stop Goldstone from attending.

Clearly, the SAZF and many others feel that Goldstone delegitimized Israel. But to attack him by spoiling his grandson's Bar-Mitzvah is a disgrace. Politics and Bar-Mitzvahs just shouldn't mix - if you feel the same, why not tell the SAZF yourself: sazf@beyachad.co.za

Pappe @ Israel apartheid week

2010-03-03T00:31:00.000-08:00

The Israeli historian calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Ilan Pappe, spoke in Oxford yesterday on the 1967 war.

There were familiar faces in the audience, including the flag-waving protestor shown below accusing the Israeli deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, of war crimes in Gaza (despite the fact he was not actually in the government during the Gaza conflict).

Then, kicking off the night's proceedings was a short film promoting Israel Apartheid week. The student who put the film on, and then introduced the event, was the very same student who last year screamed at Shimon Peres, breaching Oxford's code of discipline in the process - though I've no idea if the university did anything about it - and having to be taken out by security.

Good company.

The talk itself, chaired by Avi Shlaim, was certainly thought-provoking. In it, Pappe argued that the 67 war was in fact a war of aggression, not defence, and essentially a war of choice. In arguing this, he explained, he took a longer historical view of events, looking beyond the immediate past of the war.

He gave a sketch suggesting that the military and political elite in Israel had always wanted to have the whole of Palestine, arguing that capturing the West Bank had been their aim for some time. This, coupled with the fact that some very military and administrative plans were organised before the war, and that Israel had been engaging in considerable low-level provocation (he said, for example, that Israeli pilots from that time told him in an interview that they were instructed to undertake flying exercizes over Syrian airspace) suggested to him that Israel wanted the 1967 war. Members of the military and political elite, he claimed, cynically conveyed th message of an existential threat - a 'second holocaust' - while in private being confident of Israel's success and strength.

But there's a problem. Since returning home I've looked into some of the evidence he provided, and it doesn't add up. Here are some examples:

(1)Misattributing the Dayan quote
He quoted Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader, as having said: Israel must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no — it must — invent dangers

It turns out Dayan never actually said that. The wikiquote entry on it explains:

This has been reported to be a direct quotation of Dayan in the diaries of Moshe Sharett, but is actually derived from an interpretive commentary by Livia Rokach in "Israel's Sacred Terrorism" (1980) upon statements of Dayan reported in Sharett's diaries, from accounts provided to him by Ya'acob Herzog and Gideon Raphael — in other words: a third-hand interpretation of Dayan's meaning, based on a second hand report of his arguments. Sharett's summation of Dayan's statements of 26 May 1955 read:

We do not need a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there....

Rokach's interpretive assessment of this diary entry by Sharett produces:

The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is nonexistent... It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no — it must — invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge.. . . And above all — let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.

(2) What was the basic zionist project?
Pappe spoke in his talk about "the basic zionist proect, which started in 1882, which was to de-Arabize and Judaize Palestine."

This really doesn't add up. Zionism was initially and primarily concerned with Jewish self-determination - the location of Israel/Palestine was one, preferred, possibility, but hardly the 'basic zionist project.'

The significance of referring to 1882, as Pappe does, is to refer to the publication of one of the first documents promoting zionism, Autoemancipation! by Leon Pinsker. You can read it here.

Note that it explicitly states that it wants a homeland wherever it can get one - Palestine is not the issue - so long as the land is fertile and habitable. It suggests as possibilities land in Turkey or a place in North America. See this passage from it below:

Therefore, the selection of a permanent, national land, meeting all requirements, must be made with every precaution and confided to one single body... This tract might form a small territory in North America, or a sovereign Pashalik in Asiatic Turkey recognized by the Porte and the other Powers as neutral. It would certainly be an important duty of the directorate to secure the assent of the Porte, and probably of the other European cabinets to this plan.

Sorry Pappe; there's nothing about 'de-arabizing' Palestine there.

Moreover, Pappe's contention about the basic nature of zionism cannot make sense of the famous Uganda plan of 1903. In 1903 the World Zionist Congress debated and voted in favour of establishing a Jewish state in East Africa, after Britain had proposed an autonomous Jewish colony be established there. Jewish self-determination was the essential aim, not de-arabizing Palestine. (Although, yes, the Uganda plan was seen as a temporary measure, with Palestine still being hoped for by many). The establishment of the Jewish territorialist Organization, associated with zionists such as Israel Zangwill, further gives the lie to Pappe's selective reading of zionist history: this was a case of zionists looking for land in America, Australia, Asia or Africa - anywhere - to establish a Jewish homeland. (They only disbanded after the Balfour declaration in 1917).

Finally, zionists such as Martin Buber who actually called for a bi-national state, clearly don't fit into Pappe's conception of zionism's basic project of 'de-arabizing' Palestine.

In short, zionism is not the hitorically monolithic anti-Arab movement Pappe paints it out to be, but is a movement with various and sometimes antagonistic strands, some of which historically had not interest in Palestine at all. .

(3) The occupy-the-West-Bank toy-game claim
Pappe claimed in his talk that there were toy games made for Israeli children before 1967 all about occupying the West Bank. "you roll the dice and move the pieces," he said. Well I'm skeptical - very skeptical. After 15 minutes googling, I've found nothing about it. If any readers know any different, please tell me. But the idea that such games would have been manufactured and yet there be no record on the internet of them having existed, strikes me as being pretty bizarre, given how much they would indicate, and how quick anti-Israel groups would be to seize on them as evidence of 'zionist expansionism'. So as I said, in the meantime, pending evidence, I'm unconvinced.

(4) The Mokked plan
One of Pappe's pieces of evidence that the Israelis wanted war so they could occupy the West Bank was the Mokked plan - a plan developed by Israel in 1965/66 to take out the airforces of the neighbouring Arab states.

How is this sufficient evidence? I'm not a military historian, but it would seem to me to be obviously common sense, when surrounded by hostile countries whom you have recently been at war with, to have military plans in place for future conflicts. The existence of this plan can certainly be used as evidence of preparation for war, but not as evidence of an Israeli desire for war.

This post is getting too long; nearly at the end.

Despite the problems listed above, much of what Pappe said challenged me. . In particular he spoke of how before 1967, academics at the Hebrew U organized a legal and administrative framework for ruling the West Bank. This seems like a strange exercize to undertake unless they had an expectation (or desire) that Israel will be occupying the West Bank in the near future. Also, he quoted from the diary of Uri Avnery, who wrote that he had meetings with the military leader El-Azar, who told him that he 'dreamed' there would be sufficient Arab armies mobilised in Egypt to justify an Israeli attack.

Well, I'll need to read more on the matter.

Israel apartheid week - a complete abuse of language

2010-03-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

If you go on the website for Israel Apartheid week, you'll discover that this year it takes place from the 1st to the 14th of March, meaning that it lasts for a fortnight, and not a week as claimed.

What a shocking abuse of language (;

Is Israel actually a nation?

2010-02-28T15:00:00.000-08:00

Does an Israeli nation exist? Strange as it sounds, that's the question Israel's supreme court will be answering this Wednesday.

Bernard Avishai explains why on his blog...

Back in 2005, in a piece for Harper's, I called attention to a curious petition, filed the year before with Israel's High Court of Justice. The petitioners were thirty-eight citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs: businesspeople, professors, entertainers, writers, jurists; a past minister of education, a past head of the air force. Their petition enjoined the court to order the Ministry of Interior to inscribe them as “Israeli” in the Registry of Population. Given how much else was being contested in the country, one would think a petition to recognize Israelis as “Israeli” was frivolous. It was anything but that.

He later quotes Israeli commentator and left wing activist Uri Avnery:

The Israeli Interior Ministry recognizes 126 nations, but not the Israeli nation. An Israeli citizen can be registered as belonging to the Assyrian, the Tatar or the Circassian nation. But the Israeli nation? Sorry, no such thing.

According to the official doctrine, the State of Israel cannot recognize an "Israeli" nation because it is the state of the "Jewish" nation. In other words, it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations. Messy? Indeed.

That 'official doctrine' Avnery talks about was evident some years ago in the judgement of the then head of the Supreme Court of Israel, Shimon Agranat, who explained (in response to a similar petition to recognise an Israeli nationality - see the third paragraph here for more info):

Therefore, if there is in the country today – just 23 years after the establishment of the state – a bunch of people or even more – who ask to separate themselves from the Jewish people and to achieve for themselves the status of a distinct Israeli nation, then such a separatist approach should not be seen as a legitimate approach. It is prohibited to acknowledge this approach, since the principle of the right for national self-determination could not provide any justification for it..

So there you have it: there's no such thing as an Israeli nation - well, at least not officially (though clearly an Israeli nationality exists for and is claimed by most of what we would call Israeli citizens, and that’s enough for me to say it’s real, whatever its legal status). Let's see if this changes on Wednesday...

The state of debate on the Jewish State on campus

2010-02-24T04:05:00.001-08:00

A Manchester University student paper has this report ofthe clashes between Israel and Palestine supporters over the invitation and subsequent cancellation of the visit of the deputy Israeli Ambassador to the UK. You can see pictures of the protests here

Dan Berkely, one of the students present at the clashes, gave this assessment of the experience:

“They were ridiculous protests and became not about politics, but about who could shout louder. That was the problem with the lack of debate in the first place. It was just aggressive people shouting. I’ve never been able to hear their views. All I’m told is, ‘I should be ashamed’ and ‘I’m scum’ and that ‘I’m a murderer’. They don’t know my views and frankly, I don’t know theirs. They never want to sit down and speak. They never want to debate. It’s not politics.”

"They don't no my views and frankly, I don't know theirs" - and there's the nub of the problem; something which no amount of shouting will change.

Yuli Edelstein - trivialising antisemitism

2010-02-22T15:30:00.000-08:00

Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli Minister of Information and Diaspora, spoke at a dinner hosted by the Zionist Federation on Sunday. According to the report on Haaretz, he told the audience that the Goldstone report represented a new 'kind' of anti-semitism.

Reading this reminded me of something the former head of Jewish Policy Research, Antony Lerman, had written:

Some Israel critics are no doubt classic anti-semites using anti-zionism as cover. But the anti-zionism equals antisemitism argument says something else. [Jonathan] Sacks summed it up when he told the Parliamentary Committee against Antisemitism that 'accusing Israel of racism, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity,' is itself antisemitic. Yet to exempt Israel from such allegations is to set the threshold of where legitimate criticism of Israel tips over into antisemitism impossibly low. If we say a British institution is racist, does this imply an ideological anti-Britishness... The anti-Zionism equals antisemitism argument drains the word antisemitism of any useful meaning.

To accuse the Goldstone Report of being antisemitic is to trivialise antisemitism.

Nothing in the Goldstone report corresponds with historical - 'old' - definitions of antisemitism, which focus on 'hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews are racially inferior' and so on. Watching this interview with Goldstone, and having read much of the report myself I found no evidence of any antisemitism in the report - at least understood in the normal way described above.

Some critics of Israel claim that the allegation of antisemitism is used to silence criticism of Israel. My impression is that this claim is more often asserted than it is demonstrated. (Indeed, sometimes people make it to try to excuse their own, actual antisemitism, and to silence those who draw attention to it). But the sad fact is, by calling the Goldstone report 'a new antisemitism,' Yuli Edelstein seems to have done just that: using the charge of anti-semitism to undermine Goldstone, so as to deflect or silence criticism of Israel.

Why you should cum to Israel

2010-02-22T01:33:00.000-08:00

It's often said that sex sells in advertising. Well the makers of this Israeli tourism promo certainly thought so...

'It's small'

'It's paradise'

h/t Tikkun Olam

Protests at Manchester University

2010-02-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

I wrote previously about the invitation to the deputy Israeli Ambassador to speak at Manchester University last week. In the end the embassy cancelled her speech, over fears for her security.

Here is footage of the protests that took place as a result of the whole event - from both Action Palestine members and from students supporting her right to speak in the student union.

Sacks says no to chicken soup

2010-02-18T03:23:00.000-08:00

It's true, it's official, it's amazing...

Britain's Chief Rabbi, Lord Professor (etc) Jonathan Sacks, is a vegetarian!

He says so in this interview with Cambridge University's VarsiTV, before adding:

I don't miss the Chicken soup, and life is short enough without my inflicting pain on innocent chickens.

As a sometime flexitarian, I'm excited.

Manchester's Action Palestine - yes to Hamas, no to Israel

2010-02-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow afternoon the deputy Israeli ambassador to the UK, Talya Lador-Fresher, is due to give a talk to Manchester University's politics society entitled: ‘Hopes and challenges in the Middle East’.

In response the Manchester student group 'Action Palestine' are busy organizing protests. On facebook they explain:

we are calling a Protest against Israeli War Crimes in Palestine at 2 pm outside the Students Union steps before the Pol Soc meeting on the 18th to show Mrs Talya Lador-Fresher that neither she or the state she represents are welcome on the premises of our democratically run Union that prides itself on being a student-run establishment which does not endorse nor fund apartheid regimes responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.

I'm not altogether sure what they mean when they say 'neither she or the state she represents' are welcome in the Manchester Union. What does it mean to say that 'the state of Israel' is not welcome? I understand saying 'the officials of the state' are not welcome, but the state itself? A citizen of a state is a part of that state. Are Israelis not to be welcome in Manchester Student Union anymore? That's what the message seems to be - even if it is, as I presume, the inadvertent result of a careless writing mistake.

But the really striking thing about all this is that only recently Manchester University was graced by Assam Tamimi, a Hamas supporter on record as having supported suicide bombing. Did Action Palestine kick up a fuss? No. Clearly they're not too bothered by article's 7 and 13 of the Hamas charter, which goes on about the day of judgement coming when muslims 'kill the Jews' (not 'Israelis') and expressly rejects 'peaceful solutions.'

Let's listen to the world

2010-02-16T03:25:00.000-08:00

Roi Ben-Yehuda has a well written piece in Haaretz today about why Israel should 'care what the rest of the world thinks' about it. Here's how it starts...

"First, let me tell you one thing: It's not important what the world says about Israel. It's not important what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that's important is that we can live here on the land of our ancestors. And if we don't show the Arabs that they have to pay a high price for killing Jews, we won't continue living."

These words, spoken to a young Ariel Sharon by David Ben-Gurion, exemplify the realist strand that dominated and still dominates the thinking and discourse of many Israelis. However, these days, in the wake of the Goldstone report and international efforts to delegitimize Israel, it has become increasingly apparent that in order to "live here on the land of our ancestors" Israel must also pay heed to the opinion of the international community.

And he goes on:

According to organizational psychologists, when there is a significant gap between what people expect and what they actually get, two types of learning can take place: single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning refers to efforts to reduce this gap by modifying the strategy originally employed - improving Hasbarah skills, for example. Double-loop learning, on the other hand, requires us to question the assumption, values and actions that brought us to this problem in the first place.

There are no shortcuts here. Double-loop learning means we need to radically transform our relationship with the Palestinians. This is not to say Israel deserves to be delegitimized, but when it chooses an overall course of action - yes, the occupation, blockade and settlements are choices - it significantly contributes to the problem. Of course peace also depends on the Palestinians undergoing some double-loop learning of their own.

'Double-loop learning.' I like the sound of that.

'why we protested'

2010-02-12T04:54:00.000-08:00

In it's cover story this week, The Cherwell, an Oxford student paper, has covered the protests at Danny Ayalon's visit. Reading through the defences offered by protestors for their behaviour, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or sigh - especially when reading Noor Rashid's claim that his Arabic outburst had 'no derogatory or secondary meanings'.

Two justifications in particular stood out for me.

The first was that of Hengemah Ziai, who interupted the evening for 10 minutes by refusing to wait until the question and answer session at the end of Ayalon's talk and instead shouted questions at him. Invariably, she didn't give him proper time to answer. She explained that she felt:

10 minutes was an insufficient amount of time to take Ayalon up on the lies he was feeding the audience

Oh please. Usually when a speaker lies or says something deplorable you catch them out at the end of their talk in the question and answer session. It's really not that hard. If 10 minutes - more than you would normally get with any other speaker - was not enough for Miss Ziai, that probably says more about her inability to coherently critique Ayalon than about the extent of his 'lies'.

The second individual whose explanation I took issue with was that of Nabeel Qureshi. He said:

If a holocaust denier came to the Union I would call him out on his lies rather than sit there treating him respectfully and letting him change history. Same principle.

Of course a holocaust denier has come to the Union. His name was David Irving, and I was in the chamber and challenged him when he spoke . Was Nabeel there? No - or at least if he was he was remarkably silent. So why didn't he 'call him out on his lies'? Why didn't he apply the 'same principle' he talks of?

And moreover, lets have some perspective here: at worst Ayalon's historical errors consisted of an idealized reading of Jewish history, a false description of the 48 war (that tired old claim that the Arab leaders told their people to leave) and possibly some dodgy stats when it comes to Lebanon. Now call me crazy, but I really don't think these historical errors are comparable with Holocaust denial as Nabeel seems to imply. I just wonder: does he?

The protestor makes an admission...

2010-02-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

As I discussed here, there have been different allegations over what the protestor at Ayalon's talk actually said in Arabic. Well the Oxford Student has an explanaton from the man himself:

Various media sources have reported that Noor Rashid, a second-year Teddy Hall student said an Arabic phrase, which the speaker, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon translated to the audience as “Kill the Jews”.

However, Rashid said that his actual remark was based on a classical Arabic chant concerning a seventh-century battle between Arabs and Jews at Khayber, in the Arabian Peninsula.

He said: “My version went: ‘Khaybar, O Jews, we will win’. This is in classical, Qur’anic Arabic and I doubt that apart from picking up on the word ‘Jew’, that even the Arabic speakers in the room would have understood the phrase.

“As you can see, I made no reference to killing Jews.” he said, adding that ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ were interchangeable terms. rn“It carries absolutely no derogatory or secondary meanings.”

His admission is astonishing. As I've already explained, the 'classical Arab chant' he claims to have said, about Khaybar, refers to a Jewish community in Khaybar being conquered by Muhammed in the 7th century, the Jews later being expelled by the Caliph Umar. So when he says he made 'no reference to killing Jews', he's being just a little disingenuous: by chanting about Khaybar he's referring to Jews being attacked, conquered, and expelled by Muslims.

Incitement? I think so.

On a completely separate issue, one of the other protestors at the evening has since claimed he was run over by an Israeli car after the event. But the police seem unconvinced that any motoring offence took place. See here:

Mr Inglis said he stood in the way an Israeli car to take a picture and he thought it would stop.

He added: “I was traumatised and left shaking after it happened.”

Det Chief Insp Colin Paine said he had seen CCTV footage of the incident and the driver would not be prosecuted for any motoring offence.

Asked if the driver had reported the collision immediately, he said not “initially”. Mr Paine said he would be looking into how quickly the driver had come forward.

He added: “A male protester moved in front of the car and appears to have made contact with it. The car was driving slowly and the man sustained minor bruising and grazes.

Shouting free speech away

2010-02-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

Below are two videos from the past week. One shows the abuse levelled at Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren when he spoke at UC Irvine in the States; the other shows some of the heckling at the Oxford Union on Monday, when the Israeli deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon spoke.

Both show a complete disrespect for the principle of free speech, as though because the speakers are Israeli officials, their voice is not to be heard but shouted over - even if there is a room full of people who have chosen to go and hear them.

Oxford demonstration from Jewish Chronicle on Vimeo.

‘Itbah Al-Yahud’ or ‘Khaybar ya Yahod’ – what was actually said?

2010-02-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I gave my account of the abuse levelled at Danny Ayalon, the Israeli deputy foreign minister, when he spoke at the Oxford Union. As has been widely reported, one student stormed out the room shouting in Arabic and, according to Ayalon, had said ‘itbah Al-Yahud’, meaning ‘Kill the Jews’.

Since then one person has commented on my post to contest the translation:

“The protester said that in Arabic which I know better than Ayalon, I guess (being Arabic, how surprising, we do exist in Oxford!!!)The guy didn’t say kill the Jews he said: Khybar khaybar ya yahod, and I will leave it to your common sense to search and find what it means”

So I did just that – and, if what I have gleaned about that Arabic phrase is correct, then what he said would still qualify as incitement to religious / racial hatred.

Khaybar was an Oasis not far from medina that was inhabited by Jews before being conquered by Muhammed in the 7^th Century. It's Jewish inhabitants were later expelled by the Caliph Umar. According to its Wikipedia entry, the phrase ‘Khybar khaybar ya yahod’, that the protestor allegedly said, is the start of a chant that translates as:

“Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return"

Well that still sounds like incitement to me - especially when shouted aggressively in a room with many Jews.

Now whether the protestor actually said ‘itbah al-yahud’ – ‘kill the Jews’ – as Ayalon heard and translated at the talk (without anyone challenging his translation at the time) or the protestor said ‘Khaybar ya-Yahud’, as has since been claimed, can only and will hopefully be established from the footage of the evening.

But in the meantime it should be obvious that whichever he said, his outburst was incendiary and anti-semitic. It should be treated as such by the Union.

The Oxford Union responds...

2010-02-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

see here

“Death to the Jews” - at the Oxford Union

2010-02-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

Earlier tonight Danny Ayalon, the Israeli deputy foreign minister, came to speak at the Oxford Union. I don’t like his politics, and went along half-expecting to leave frustrated and embarrassed, as an Israeli, by what he would say. And sure enough by the end of the evening that’s exactly how I felt – frustrated and embarrassed – but not so much by him as by the stupidity and racism of fellow students at Oxford.

To begin with the heckling was nothing out of the ordinary: a student stood up and read something out – extracts from the Goldstone report, I think – but spoke too quickly and too quietly for me to follow. Shortly after another student jumped up, shouting that she was a Lebanese Palestinian, before shouting some more while holding her passport and some photos in the air. She stayed standing for the remainder of his talk. So far, so usual; in the world of anti-Israel campus activism, this was nothing.

But then things got more heated. One audience member rose waving a Palestinian flag and left the room shouting that Ayalon was a war criminal who would be tried in court for his role in the Gaza war last year. Since Ayalon was not yet in the government at that time, I couldn't help but wonder: what crime was he to be be tried for?

Another student then took it upon herself to stand up and, in a shrill and impassioned voice, speak too quickly and too emotionally to make any sense. She then refused to stop talking, apparently misunderstanding the instructions at the start of the night that there would be time for questions at the end. She continued despite a rising chorus of ‘sit down’ being levelled against her. One student put it nicely when he said ‘stop being selfish, this is not a tutorial. It's a lecture!.’ She didn’t seem to get the message though, and rambled on. Ayalon, to his credit, took her seriously and attempted to engage with her comments. She didn't return the favour, and left soon after, no doubt with a great deal of self-righteous satisfaction.

The worst, however, was still to come. ‘Death to the Jews’, one student shouted in Arabic as he stormed out. (disclaimer: I don't speak Arabic, but that's what Ayalon claimed he said - and nobody in the audience challenged the translation) I’m no lawyer, but I’m fairly sure that comment constitutes incitement to racial and religious hatred under UK legislation – it will be interesting to see if anything is followed up by the Union. At the very least, I expect them to remove the Union-membership of the student in question, for breaking the law and calling for the slaughter of fellow members while at a Union event.

Outside the debating chamber, all the while, protestors were shouting ‘free free Palestine from the river to the sea’. When Ayalon argued that this chant amounted to a call for Israel’s destruction, and asked where Israeli Jews would have to go for Palestine to be free 'from the river to the sea', the woman sitting next to me said ‘back to where they came from!’ I couldn’t resist and had to ask her where exactly it was that she expected Jews to go ‘back to’, to which she replied, ‘well you’re in England, you appear to be doing fine’. I didn't think it worthwhile to point out that actually my grandparents 'came from' Poland and Czechoslovakia, and that the reason I am in England today is that in the 1930s they were not 'doing fine' in the countries they 'came from'.

In any case, I’m tired, and am heading to bed with the following thoughts:

What would happen if a student called out ‘death to the muslims’ in the Oxford Union? Would it get national publicity and receive widespread condemnation? I expect (and hope) it would. I’m waiting to see how the press deal with the ‘death to the Jews’ outburst, and how quickly the apologetic ‘yes but you have to understand...’ voices are to emerge.
By attacking him in the way they did, the protestors today handed Ayalon an undeserved victory. His politics and approach to diplomacy are deplorable; they could and should have been intelligently exposed. Instead, by the end of the night he seemed to be the calm victim of the aggressive onslaught of idiots. To judge from the opinions of the few non-partisan audience members whom I overheard talking as they left the chamber, he left looking more reasonable than his critics.
To the extent that we can generalize from the events at the Oxford Union tonight, it seems that no Israeli official can expect to receive a fair hearing or to give a speech freely at a British University anymore – even at Oxford’s self proclaimed ‘bastion of free speech’. That’s bad for debate but it’s also bad for the Palestinians; however much self-righteous satisfaction protestors may feel when they shout aggressively at Israeli officials, doing so only feeds the perception within Israel that foreign critics of Israel are unwilling to give Israel a fair hearing, that they’re simply Israel bashers, and that they are anti-Semitic - and that's never going to inspire Israel to change its policies.

An unusual broadcast from Haiti

2010-01-29T01:53:00.000-08:00

No one does satire quite like the Israelis... See this sketch on the PR element of Israel's Haiti efforts from Israeli show 'Eretz Nehederet' (a wonderful land).

H/t Shalom Rav

An Arab MK visits Auschwitz

2010-01-26T15:38:00.000-08:00

Call me naive, but I think it's a good thing.

Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab MK, is attending a commemoration at Aushwitz tomorrow as part of a delegation from Israel. (see here). He's received attacks for doing so from both Arabs and Jews.

The Lebanese Daily Star explains that some Arabs attack him, and those like him who commemerate the tragedy of the holocaust, for political reasons, along these lines:

why help the Israelis and Jews with such an issue when Palestinians and Arabs are being displaced and oppressed on a daily basis by the Israeli state?

Jewish attacks, meanwhile, have tended to focus on his intention to criticize Israel's policies towards the Palestinians while in Poland. To do so, they argue, is to exploit the memory of the suffering of the victims of the holocaust; and I would agree.

(This kind of exploitation, however, is nothing new; Israeli officials have done it too. Abba Eban, for example, spoke of Israel's borders as being 'auschwitz lines', while more recently Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, exploited the memory of the holocaust as a means to delegitimize the Goldstone report, as I discussed in the last paragraph of my post here.)

But the important question is whether the good of Barakeh's visit will outweigh the bad of his exploiting it by using the publicity it will generate to attack Israel. I'm going to go for a yes: by visiting Auschwitz he makes it easier for other Arabs to commemerate the holocaust without fearing vilification along the lines quoted above. Moreover, it should help to foster a climate of reducing the politicization of acknowledging the suffering experienced by 'the other side' in the Israel/Arab conflict, and that can only be a good thing for peace.

The Jewish vote in British Politics

2010-01-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

In his Jewish chronicle column this week, Geoffrey Alderman discusses the Jewish vote in British politics: where (and if) it matters, which MPs it may effect, and evidence that at least one MP takes it seriously. Given his history of research on the Jewish community in British Politics (from which I'll be drawing on later in this post) when Alderman writes on these subjects the chances are he's on to something.

The main points:

Of the ten constituencies with the highest Jewish population, no less than 7 are currntly held by Labour.

Jewish voters are unlikely to swing the vote either way in five of those constituencies, either because they are too marginal (too likely to swing Tory) or too safe.

That leaves Harrow East and Hendon. Both these seats would fall to the Conservatives on swings of between 3.0 and 3.8 per cent.

In both cases, a Jewish sympathy vote for the incumbent MP could — just conceivably — save the seats for Labour

Some thoughts...

I live in one of the two Jewish-vote-significant constituencies (Hendon). My MP, Andrew Dismore, has certainly tried to appeal to his Jewish constituents. (See the clip below for example, when he used Prime Minister's questions to ask the Prime Minister to wish the Jewish community a happy chanukah.)

But I wonder: how large a factor does the 'Jewishness' of a voter play in their voting decisions? Ignoring class, income, age and other factors, how much of a 'Jewish' effect is there on a Jewish voter's decisions? My guess is not a great deal.

Beyond a strong anti-Israel stance, a desire to ban kosher slaughter, and an opposition to faith schools, I can't think of any other position a parliamentary candidate could take that would be likely to swing many Jewish voters against them for specifically Jewish-related reasons (can you?) Given the fact that in Hendon both Labour and Tory candidate alike will almost certainly take the same positions on these issues, I can't see voters choosing one way or the other out of any specifically Jewish consideration.

The historical context
How have the Jews voted in the past and why? Could this offer any clues as to how they will vote? (I don't think so, by the way, but it's fun to write about anyway...)

In 1867 the Jewish chronicle editorial claimed:

"The Jew feels instinctively that, politically, he is nothing if not a liberal"

This is unsurprising: Jews had been allowed to take a seat in parliament for only since the previous decade, and it was thanks to the Liberal party that they could. The conservatives had opposed changing the rules to allow Jewish MPs to take their seats without swearing a Christian Oath. No wonder the Liberals were the party of the Jews.

Fast forward 25 years and the situation was altogether different. The Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, was politically Conservative. So too was D.W. Marks, Minister at West London Reform Synagogue. British Jews, it seemed, no longer were 'instinctively... liberal'.

The reason for the change is twofold.

First, memories are short. As time went on Jewish voters stopped caring about the fact that the Conservatives had previously blocked the entry of Jewish parliamentarians (indeed, very soon after Rothschild took his seat the Conservatives got a couple of Jewish MPs of their own).

Second, the anti-Jewish pograms in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where 4 milion Jews lived, changed the British-Jewish political landscape. Gladstone was largely silent on the issue of Russian persecution of Jews while the Conservatives were more vocal. Moreover, the persecution led to mass immigration to Britain. Between 1880 and 1914 150,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Britain, greatly enlarging the number of Jews in Britain, which had stood at 60,000 in 1880. The established Jewish population in Britain were nevous about the immigration. Most of the migrants were poor, spoke little English, and tended to be more Orthodox than the established, and largely sephardi, British Jewish community. How would their arrival change peoples' views on Jews? Would it lead to antisemitism? Conservative MPs supported legislation to restrict the flow of Jewish immigrants; because they feared the consequences of mass Jewish immigration, many British Jews were supportive of this approach, and therefore supportive of the Tories. (To dissuade Jewish immigrants from coming, the Jewish Board of Guardians, for example, put adverts in Jewish publications in Russia stating that life in Britain would be full of hardship).

In the 1906 election the Jewish Chronicle came out in support of the Liberals. There was some evidence that the Jewish immigrants had been responsible for turning the Jewish tide back to the Liberals. But this return to cordial relations between Britain's Jews and the Liberals was to be short lived.

In 1909 the Jewish politician Nathan Rothschild slammed the Liberal Party's 'People's Budget'. It was, he said, a 'robber's budget'. In response Lloyd George likened Rothschild to Pharoah. The Jews were not pleased... After a Liberal parliamentary candidate ran an anti-semitic campaign in Salford South, Alderman notes, 'the second honeymoon between Anglo Jewry and the Liberal party was well and truly over'.

Speed on to 1922 and a young(ish) party - Labour - was to have its electoral breakthrough in an election marred by antisemitism. (while not winning the election, Labour won 23% of the seats - up on the 8% won at the previous vote). The Morning Post and the Spectator argued that British politics was being dominated by Jews and Jewish considerations and the Labour party was branded as pro-Jewish in an effort to harness popular antisemitism against it. Whether or not Labour was pro-Jewish I'm not sure, but the Jews were becoming increasingly pro-labour. For example, all three of the seats for Whitechapel, then the most Jewish constituency, swung to Labour. The tendency for Jews to vote labour was to stay for some time.

The upward social mobility of Britain's Jews contributed to an increase in the numbe of Jews voting Conservative voting in the 80s. More recently, however, there appears to have been a swing back to Labour: in the 1997 election constituencies with large Jewish populations registered a swing to Labour greater than the national average.

As for the soon-to-come election, well, we'll have to wait and see.

An armchair supporter

2010-01-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

Just putting it out there..

It's called irony...

2010-01-20T02:02:00.000-08:00

Stephanie Gutmann has a nicely ironic piece on Israel's construction of a field hospital in Haiti here.

Unfortunately, not all the readers seem to realize the irony...

Helping Haiti

2010-01-18T03:22:00.001-08:00

Akiva Elder is a Haaretz journalist I usually admire. But I'm less sure of his op-ed today, which you can read here.

Entitled 'Israel's compassion in Haiti can't hide our ugly face in Gaza', the basic premise of his argument is that Israel's compassion in Haiti only underscores Israelis' indifference to suffering in Gaza.

True though this may be, it's the wrong - offensive, even - message to take from Israel's actions. Israel's efforts to alleviate suffering in Haiti have been impressive and commendable. They ought to be aplauded. Instead, Eldar has used them as an easy launchpad to criticize Israel.

Of course the form of Eldar's argument could be used every time Israel did anything good: I.e, 'Israel's good action here only underscores her bad action there'. Israel, like any country or individual, ought to be encouraged when they do something good and not attacked for having done wrong elsewhere. By all means criticize, but why embed that criticism within any praise for any action - however unrelated?

"Hitler was right" - the new thing to say to ashkenazi peace activists, apparently...

2010-01-15T03:59:00.000-08:00

The video below shows the abuse being levelled at ashkenzai (Jews of European origin) peace activists demonstrating against the deportation of Palestinians from Shaikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in December. Police had intimidated protestors on previous marches (see here).

What you see are two Mizrachi Jews shouting 'Hitler was right' to the peace activists. (Incidentally, such abuse would be considered anti-semitic if a non-Jew did it, so it meets the Telushkin test for who is a 'self-hating Jew')

It might just be a case of two loonies shouting, but still, pretty disturbing.

(Thanks to Jewdas for the h/t)

Defamation

2010-01-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

I've just finished watching Yoav Shamir's controversial documentary 'Defamation'. The film explores the question: 'what is anti-semitism?'. You can (and should!) watch it here.

He exposes the extent to which the subject of anti-semitism has become politicized - by both the supporters and detractors of Israel. Antony Lerman, who used to be the director of Jewish Policy Research offers this analysis of the film here.

Here's my summary of the films main points:

(1) The ADL - the world's largest organiztion combating anti-semitism - reflect and promote a disproportionate fear of anti-semitism. There's around 1,500 anti-semitic incidents reported each year in the US; a small figure for a Jewish community of over 5 million people. The ADL budget amounts to tens of millions of dollars and pays for numerous offices across America. Yet early on in the film, one of its employees explains that they have insufficient resources to deal with the widespread antisemitism in America. When Shamir tries to find a recent example of serious anti-semitism in America, he finds very few. (Incidentally, in Britain for the last few years there's been around 500 anti-semitic incidents reported; also a small figure given a community of around 280,000, yet the CST - Britain's main organization combating anti-semitism - has a budget approaching six million pounds).

(2) Israel has an unhealthy (though understandable) preoccupation with anti-semitism and the holocaust. Thus Israeli school children explain in the film that 'everyone knows the Jews are hated, we were raised that way'. An Israeli journalist at Yediot Achronot newspaper explains that England is anti-semitic; when asked if he is being objective about it he retorts 'why do I have to be objective? were they objective?' (I wonder: who does 'they' refer to?)

(3) Expressions of anti-Israelism and anti-semitism have sometimes been confused, and perhaps sometimes intentionally.

Anyway, definitely worth a watch.

Wes Streeting and the Israel / Palestine facebook wars

2010-01-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

A recent group on Facebook attacks the head of the NUS, Wes Streeting, for 'being a particularly Israel-friendly Laborite'.

I read posts on its wall, where a number of the group's members advocate outing their Jewish lecturers as being zionists. Take this gem:

So many people are scared about being labelled anti Semitic, and being accused of creating witch hunts, but by making sure every jewish lecturer is questioned on their views on Israel, (assuming they have views on Israel), its a great way to highlight the issue and do something on our campuses to make zionists feel really uncomfortable!

Problematic, isn't it?

Well yes, but not for the obvious reasons. Not because it advocates a McCarthyite witch hunt of Jewish academics and nor because it seeks to make all Zionists on campus uncomfortable - the problem with this quote is the person who wrote it. Because she's faking it; she's only pretending to be an Israel hater.

A cursory glance on her facebook page was revealing. I found a girl with happy holiday snaps from Israel who supported Alex Dwek's campaign to become president of the Union of Jewish Students. Her facebook friends include both a past and present UJS campaigns officer. Not the background of your average anti-zionist, is it? What we have here is an Israel-supporter masquerading as an Israel hater.

And she's not the only one. Another person posting similar sentiments on the website appeas to be doing the same: among his profile pictures is the one below. Not really convinced he's an anti-zionist either...

Now sure - they're taking the piss with the things they write, and most people will be clever enough to realize that. But not all will.

And because of this, to pretend as they do - as well as being dishonest - is a counter-productive means of combating those who, like one of those posting earlier on the group's wall, support 'find[ing]out just what their jewish lecturers stance is on Israel. In ALL universities.'

Just imagine the scenario: the JC sees the facebook group, gets shocked, and goes to write a story about it. They fail to take the necessary investigative steps undertaken by yours truly and mistake the author of the quote above to be a bone fide Israel-hater. They, along with Melanie Philips et al, go crazy in attacking such sentiments, citing them as 'evidence' of anti-Semitism and anti-zionism on campus today. What a scoop. Only then someone - an annoying blogger or whatever - goes and exposes the whole thing as having been a fake. The 'evidence' is found to be spurious, and in the process the credibility of real evidence of such problems is tarnished.

No, not the best way to campaign.

Exit rights - from states and communities

2010-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

While avoiding revision I came across this BBC article. It's about Israelis who turn secular after being raised in charedi (ultra-orthodox) families. The resulting hardship they experience raised questions for me about tensions between the responsibilities of states and the rights of communities existing within them.

Multicultural theorists have discussed the idea of 'exit rights' for minority communities living within a state. An exit right can be defined as:

'an exemption from some legally mandated practice, granted to a person or a group, the purpose of which is to protect the religious or moral integrity of that person or group' (Jeffrey Jordan)

Here is an example of an exit right: In Britain, male Sikh's are exempt from wearing helmuts while driving motorbikes - something which is a legal requirement for any other British Citizen - since this would intefere with their wearing of the turban.

Reading about the difficult experiences of those who left the world of ultra-orthodox Judaism, however, gets me thinking about another sense of having an exit right: one which would be protection not from the laws of the state, but from the laws or restrictive social mores of a community within a state.

Essentially, if the state has a responsibility to protect community rights - as many multicultural theorists argue it does - then to what extent does it have a responsibility to support individuals within those communities should they wish to exit them? While individuals may have a legally enshrined right to choose their own lifestyles this right is meaningless if as a result of their education and upbringing they have little capacity to do so. Does the state then have a responsibility to enable all its citizens to function within mainstream society? To provide its citizens with both the right and associated capacity to exit their communities should they wish to?

In the Israeli charedi context the question is a significant one. As Irit Paneth of the organization Hillel, which offers practical help to former charedim, explains:

"They often do not know how to open a bank account, use the internet, find work and rent an apartment, she explains, or how to operate socially in the secular world."

If we accept a principle justifying exemption and protection for minority groups from the effects of majority laws or conventions, then it seems to me that this principle must be applied lower down as well: protecting minorities within minority groups from the restrictive practises of their community (should the individuals desire such help). For this reason, the work of the organization Hillel, I would argue, ought to be supported by the state and not left to the voluntary sector.

Being bored makes things less boring

2010-01-10T11:46:00.000-08:00

While reading through political sociology notes I made over a year ago I came across this:

Boredom. Four walls, one rounded with a window.
A car passes the time as it drives in
And out of view. The chatter continues
On and on and on and on and…
Drifts into the sound of the background light.
Nothing is being said. Nothing at all.
Just words being thrown like carcassed thoughts.

It's funny, but expressing how bored I was in my notes back then has actually made reviewing them a less boring experience.

Maybe I should do it more often? (Or would that just get boring?)

Boycotting Britain, mark 2

2010-01-08T00:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote earlier on the proposed boycott of British goods and services by some Israeli parliamentarians. Richard Slverstein of Tikkun Olam blog has a post on the topic today in which he quotes the text of the letter they sent to the British speaker of the House of Commons:

…In light of this decision [to distinguish between Israeli and settlement products], we are recommending the citizens of Israel to reconsider using the services of companies that operate in Great Britain…

We hope it will not be necessary to take any further action to make it clear how seriously we view this recommendation that in effect promotes a boycott of Israeli produce.

Pretty funny; truly ridiculous. And all this as part of a campaign to limit the information given to consumers about the goods their buying...

Know thy self-haters - or be Jewishly illiterate

2010-01-07T00:51:00.000-08:00

I leafed through Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s book ‘Jewish Literacy’ yesterday. It’s subtitled ‘the most important things to know about the Jewish religion, its people, and its history’. Comprising 346 short chapters on all things Jewish, it functions as an introductory encyclopaedia of Judaism’s essentials.

Which is why I was surprised to find ‘self-hating Jews’ among its entries. The chapter begins by defining a self a hating Jew as a Jew ‘who thinks Jews are worse than other people, and who wants to cause them harm.’ Telushkin then goes on to inform his readers that Noam Chomsky is a self-hating a Jew.

I have three problems with the self-hating Jews entry having a place in this otherwise very good and useful book. The first is the suggestion that knowing about self-hating Jews is among ‘the most important things’ to know about Jews, and an essential part of ‘Jewish literacy’. Let’s focus on the positive, please. The second is the definition the chapter offers: I doubt Chomsky and most others branded as self-hating Jews actually believe Jews to be an inferior people deserving of harm. So the application of the term ‘self-hating Jews’ by Telushkin and others doesn’t match the definition of it he gives. Finally, and for the definitional problem highlighted above, I deny the claim that Chomsky is a self-hating Jew.

The two pieces of evidence on which Telushkin bases his assessment of Chomsky are (1) that Chomsky ‘has publically argued for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state’, and (2) that Chomsky also publically attacked a French University who fired a professor who was a holocaust revisionist and that he refused to answer whether or not he believed the holocaust occured. The first piece of evidence is not evidence at all: Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, a number of ultra Orthodox Jews, the former chief rabbi of England, Hermann Adler – all these were against the idea of the Jewish state, often publically. But they, surely, are not ‘self-hating’. The second piece of evidence, meanwhile, is misleading. His public condemnation of the University is reflective of an absolutist (and I would say extreme) commitment to free speech rather than being indicative of Chomsky holding suspect beliefs on the holocaust. As Chomsky said in an interview:

QUESTION:…It's been said that Noam Chomsky is somehow agnostic on the issue of whether the Holocaust occurred or not.
CHOMSKY: My "agnosticism" is in print. I described the Holocaust years ago as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history

After reading Telushkin’s entry, I’m still left with questions. Whar is a self-hating Jew and why does Telushkin consider familiarity with the concept to be an essential component of ‘Jewish Literacy’?

You’ll have to wait for another post for the answers…

The state of one-state arguments

2010-01-04T15:54:00.000-08:00

Normblog, one of my favourite blogs, has a recent piece questioning those who suport the one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. His piece is excellent and you can read it here.

People who argue for a one state solution must necessarily, he argues, fall into one of two categories, those who require the consent of both populations - Jewish and Arab - for the one state solution, and those who do not - only requiring the consent of one (or neither)of the populations.

Now if the one-state solution is based on majority consent of both populations then the whole problem of the Israel-Palestine conflict would not exist. Democratic decision making would lead to one state being produced. But short of manufacturing consent (dfficult to see how) this solution is impracticable.

For those who don't require consent and so envisage the one state-solution being imposed on the Jews of Israel, Normblog asks the following questions:

First, how could it be imposed if a reversal of the policy of the settlements could not be? Second, are the Jews to be denied their right of national self-determination while the Palestinians (assuming them to fall in with the proposed one-state solution) are granted theirs? Third, are the democratic one-state solution converts merely sponsoring in a more hand-wringing way what others put less tactfully in their rhetoric - namely, the forcible destruction of Israel?

It's true that Israel may be heading towards a de-facto one-state situation. The region's demography points to a future in which Jews will constitute a minority in the area controlled by Israel - something the international community are unlikely to tolerate - and given Israel's continued settlement building, there is likely to be an even greater reluctance to relinquish that territory in years to come. A one-state situation - not solution - is therefore not entirely improbable.

But there is no good reason for confusing the possibility of a one-state 'situation' with its desirability as a 'solution' - unless, of course, you like the idea of imposing a political setup characterised from the outset by a legitimacy deficit and vigorous and violent opposition. But I suspect few will...

Haaretz, apartheid, the ZF, and antisemitism...

2010-01-04T03:05:00.000-08:00

In his column in today's Haaretz, Akiva Eldar did what no British Jewish columnist could dare do in the Jewish Chronicle - he likened aspects of Israeli policy to those of apartheid South Africa.

Now lets be clear: Israel is not apartheid. Under apartheid a minority of whites deprived citizenship to a majority of Blacks. In Israel Jews constitute the majority and citizenship is granted to all people, Jews and Arabs alike.

But the point Eldar makes in his article is that within the occupied territories, comparing the experience of settler Jews to the Arabs living there who are not citizens - the situation may indeed be akin to that of apartheid. A minority ethnic group have power over a majority who are deprived citizenship.

Israel's usual response, Eldar notes, is to distinguish the two situations - apartheid and the setllements - by noting Israel's security concerns; it is these, so the argument goes, that necessitate Israel's policies in the territories. But as Eldar observes, the security claim was also used in the South African context, and, moreover, there have been cases in which the security argument would support Israel doing the opposite of what it in fact does. I think Eldar's argument needs to be developed further: the few examples he offers are not enough to show that Israel's policies are not, on the whole, based on security. Moreover, while never clearly stating it, the implication of Eldar's column is that Israel's policy in the territories is based on similar ideas to those of apartheid South Africa, and this too requires evidence which he fails to supply.

Meanwhile the Zionist federation in Britain maintains that any comparison between Israel and Apartheid South Africa is anti-semitic. And yet the former Prime Minster Ehud Olmert warned Israel was heading towards apartheid. Former Haaretz editor Danny Rubinstein said the same. Can it really be the case that Olmert, Eldar and Rubinstein are all anti-semitic?

The voices of Anglo-Jewry

2010-01-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

Keith Kahn-Harris has written in this week's JC of the need to transform the Board of Deputies. Rather than seeking to present a united front, one 'voice of Anglo-Jewry', as it currently tries to do, it should instead provide a space for multiple viewpoints, and then express that diversity of opinion:

The presence of substantial minorities to the right and left of the supposed consensus over Israel is proof — if proof were needed — that the community is divided over this crucial issue. Even the most exceptional communal leaders cannot pretend that Jewish institutions embody the voice of Anglo-Jewry. This being so, the time has come for the “emancipation” of currently marginalised voices on Israel. Bizarre though it may seem, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Likud-Herut UK have a common cause in the struggle for an Anglo-Jewish polity that recognises the community’s diversity.

The Board and other communal bodies need to find a way to ensure that voices from across the spectrum of opinions over Israel can enter into a dialogue. Rather than constantly seeking to present a united front that does not exist, the Board should transform itself into a space within which the full range of opinions about Israel can be heard and properly debated, rather than quashed.

If we phone them first then its all okay - an unfortunate response to the Goldstone report

2009-12-31T05:28:00.001-08:00

Rene Cassin gave a presentation at Limmud on the Goldstone report, on which I have written before. They showed this interview with Goldstone which I recommend viewing. In the discussion that followed one man argued that Israel can't be accused of war crimes because it phoned up Gazans and sent letters warning them before attacks. What other army does this? he asked. In doing this, he said, Israel had acted impeccably.

Now Goldstone himself acknowledges in his report the 'significant efforts' Israel took to protect civilian life in this way. But from the fact that Israel sent warnings it doesn't follow that Israel acted lawfully in the war. Firstly because it fails to address many of the war crimes identified by Goldstone. Israel's use of civilian human shields, for example, cannot be justified by the prior sending of letters warning of attack. Secondly, and as Goldstone points out in the interview, sending warnings is not sufficient (necessary though it may be) to justify an attack on a target in or near civilian areas. The target also has to constitute a military target, and according to the findings of the report, the bombings of certain sites had no identifiable military objective: it was the civilian infrastructure that was bombed - factories, utilities and so on - and not targets with any use by or connection to Hamas.

It also shouldn't be forgotten that at least one senior Israeli politician actually actively and explicitly advocated Israel committing actions that constitute war crimes. As Eli Yishai said at the time:

Even if they fire at an open area or into the sea, we must damage their infrastructures and destroy 100 houses.

As the Gaza conflict reaches its first anniversary it’s time - in fact it's long overdue - for Israel to deal with the uncomfortable findings of the report. And, as Jews in the Diaspora - in whose name Israel claims to act and speak - we have every right to encourage Israel to do so.

Bringing J-street to Britain

2009-12-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

In a session at Limmud today entitled 'Israel advocay in a time of urgent de-occupation', Daniel Levy, who was a special advisor in the Prime Minister's office during the Barak Government and has more recently been involved with the creation of J-street, America's left wing pro Israel lobby, discussed the role of pro-Israel lobby gropus.

He explained that most US congressmen find themselves in districts where Israel is not a winning or losing issue; in most districts not enough people care. And so when it comes to votes on Israel congressmen 'either vote with their conscience or their pocket...'

'Prior to the creation of J-street,' he observed, 'there was nothing on the pocket side' for those who were both supportive of Israel yet critical of its policies.

Levy outlined the thinking behind J-street's pro-Israel stance by saying that the diasporah should feel able to say to Israel "We will support you as much as we can but no further." Referring then to Israel's occupation and settlements in the West Bank he continued: "we cannot support a poliicy that is driving you off a cliff and will harm us too."

Unfortunately, the Zionist Federation in this country seem quite happy to see that policy continue; perhaps it's time for Britain to produce it's own J-street.

Limmud: where Jews go at Christmas time...

2009-12-26T15:02:00.000-08:00

Yay! It's Limmud tomorrow. A 2000 person conference on all things Jewish, it's Anglo-Jewry's premier educational event, and I'm looking forward to it.

Sadly Limmud's cross-communal ethos and open lectern policy is too much for some Jews. (the Chief Rabbi appears to be one of them). By allowing all types of Jews to come and teach, they argue, Limmud in practise excludes very Orthodox Jews like them. Why? Well as one limmud-rejecting friend explained to me, it would be intellectually dishonest for him to attend because rabbis whose authority he doesn't recognize are invited to teach.

Sound like intellectual cowardice to you? It does to me. Since when did you need to accept somebody's authority to be able to listen and (who knows?) maybe even learn from them?

Boycotting Britain

2009-12-24T05:16:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe, but Israeli parliamentarians are threatening to boycott British goods. Fourty two MKs - over a third of Israeli parliamentarians - have signed the 'Knesset says no to British products' petition calling for:

"a boycott of British goods in the wake of the [British] government's recommendation that Israeli products made beyond the Green Line be marked as such."

Apparently they plan to start the boycott with Marks and Spencers. (Going for the quality then).

The boycott envisaged is shortsighted for the following reasons:

(1) It makes a mockery of previous arguments used by those opposed to boycotts of Israel. Statements such as 'boycotts don't work' and 'boycotts undermine collaboration and dialogue' seem less persuasive when the people saying it are themselves engaged in boycotting others.

(2) Israel is engaged in huge amounts of trade with Israel. If they start boycotting companies like Marks and Spencers, this could end up hurting the Israeli suppliers of those companies.

(3) Britain's proposed action is simply to mark products made in the West Bank as being products made in the West Bank. Why is this so controversial? If Israel launches a boycott in response it will be perceived as a childish overreaction.

Railway teaching

2009-12-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has launched an unlikely educational scheme to bring academia to the general public - it's getting its professors to give free lectures on trains!

Sacks on the JFS case...

2009-12-21T03:36:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions policy of JFS, my old school, was discriminatory. In this week's JC the Chief Rabbi responded to their judgement. He wrote that the judges conclusion:

cannot be what the framers of that legislation [the 1976 race relations act] intended... nor did they intend to circumscribe the freedom of Jews in Britain to practise their religion and educate their children in their faith.

Come again? How does the judgement 'circumscribe the freedom of Jews to practice their religion'? How does the change in JFS's admissions policy - a change which, for the purporse of school admissions, focuses on the primacy and importance of Jewish faith and practise over other facets of Jewish identity - somehow inhibit the ability of Jews to practice and express their faith?

The answer is: it doesn't!

Moving JFS from a race school to a faith school

2009-12-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

This is a little dated now but...

The admissions policy of JFS, my old school, is currently being debated in the Supreme Court. JFS is an Orthodox Jewish state school. Until recently their admissions policy held that in order to be eligible for entry, you had to be Jewish according to the Orthodox Jewish law – and that means having a Jewish mother. What you believed in and practised was irrelevant. All that mattered was who your mother was.

The case began with disgruntled parents whose child was denied a place in the school on the grounds that their mother’s conversion (incidentally an Orthodox conversion) to Judaism was illegitimate. The family keep kosher and attend synagogue. They believe and practise pretty mainstream Judaism. The reason their child was denied a place in the school was not because the child did not adhere to the Jewish faith, but rather because the child was not deemed by the United Synagogue to be a Jew. A bacon munching practising Christian whose mother happened to be Jewish, by contrast, would be eligible for the school.

Now if someone adheres to the Christian faith then they are a Christian. But adhering to the Jewish faith is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for someone to be a Jew (according to the Orthodox). And from this stems the problem with the old admissions policy of JFS.

Let’s take a step back: what’s a faith? My dictionary offers ‘reliance, trust; a belief in religious doctrine’. So a faith is something you can believe in and express. A faith is not something you can ‘be’; it is not something you ‘are’. What’s a race? A Race is ‘a group of people with common ancestry... esp as grounds for discrimination or division’.

Moving from the definitions of these words, we can say that a faith-school concerns belief and expressions of that belief. A race-school concerns people’s ancestry. With its old admissions criteria, JFS came closer to the second category than the first. It was concerned with who you ‘are’ and not what you believed in. It had a race-based criterion of Judaism and not a faith-based criterion.

Now at this point a few objections may be raised.

First, people get very angry about suggesting that Judaism may be a race. After all, it isn’t: you can convert to Judaism; whereas (Michael Jackson notwithstanding) you can’t convert from one race to another. This is true, but it doesn’t change the fact that taking who someone’s mother is as a criterion for admission to a school has nothing to do with belief and practise and everything to do with their ancestry.

Second, some people object to the law courts ‘defining Judaism’. I find this objection absolutely bizarre. The judges aren’t defining Judaism. Rather they are rather assessing whether or not the Orthodox definition of Judaism, when applied to a school’s admissions policy, does or does not contravene the race relations act.

Some people at this point raise a third objection: that the judges are in effect branding Judaism as being racist. This is nonsense. It is true that the judges are acknowledging that the Orthodox definition of Judaism is not simply a concerned with faith. But then the Orthodox would accept that themselves. What the courts are saying is that a non-faith based definition of Jewishness, concerning as it does parenthood and not belief, is not justifiable criteria for a faith school. Faith schools are allowed to discriminate between applicants on the basis of faith. But not on the basis of parenthood and ancestry. Orthodox Judaism is perfectly entitled to a definition of Jewishness that is based on parenthood and ancestry. But a schools admissions policy is not.

A final objection – and this one really is the silliest – is that it should be up to every faith group (prior to any definition of what a faith is or is not) to decide for themselves what they mean by ‘faith’. Thus the Jews should be allowed to say that, even if he is an anti-religious atheist, a person with a Jewish mother is – astonishingly – a part of the Jewish faith. This approach is anti-semantic, abusing as it does the meaning of words. The logical conclusion of such an argument also commits its proponents to allowing any group to call itself a faith and apply any criteria they want. After all, who are the courts to say what a faith is?

Just imagine the Griffinist faith group. To be a Griffinist you have to be white. Griffinists also have some beliefs, like worshiping a guy called Nick. Now let’s imagine the Griffinists want a state-funded school for their faith. To be eligible for admissions you would have to be a Griffinist. The courts object, saying that their admissions policy is not based on faith and is therefore unjustifiably discriminatory. The Griffinists get irate: how dare the courts tell us what our faith is!

Now of course Judaism is nothing like Griffinism. But I use the analogy to show that the argument that it should be up to every faith group – without first defining what a faith group is – to decide for themselves what they mean by ‘faith’ is ludicrous. It strips the word ‘faith’ of any meaning. The courts must have some basic parameters for what they will allow the term ‘faith’ to include. You’re very welcome to argue that the definition should include ancestry and parenthood, but don’t be surprised if people turn back and say ‘that’s funny, I’ve never seen a dictionary understand ‘faith’ in such terms – you seem to be talking about something else, like ‘race’ or ‘peoplehood’, and I'm not sure we should be discriminating between people on these terms'.

2009-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

Open letters, the Goldstone Report, and the Zionist Federation

The Zionist Federation published a press release on Wednesday. Written in response to an open letter in the Times endorsing the Goldstone Report – that letter having been produced by Independent Jewish Voices and other Jewish organizations – the ZF’s press release informs readers that ‘most of the signatories [of the letter] have little connection with Jewish organizations’.

It should be noted that the ZF makes this claim without offering any supporting evidence. It’s also unclear what they mean by ‘Jewish organizations’. After all, the letter they attack was expressly supported by five Jewish organizations. Perhaps the Zionist Federation has chosen to adopt some hitherto unknown definition of ‘Jewish organizations’ so as to exclude those Jewish organizations that do not ‘stand squarely with Israel’.

Having signed the letter myself, along with around 600 others (seven of them Rabbis) I quite resent the suggestion that I and my co-signatories have ‘little connection with Jewish organizations’; ‘only self-identify for the sole purpose of public vilification of Israel’; and ‘represent a tiny idiosyncratic publicity-seeking fringe which takes its cue from Iran, Libya and Zimbabwe’. I mean really? Really? Is the ZF seriously suggesting that the 600 of us who signed the letter, as though incapable of independent thought, actually waited to see what Iran, Libya and Zimbabwe will do in order to ‘take our cue’?

Particularly contemptible is the ZF’s claim that the signatories ‘only self-identify’ as Jews ‘for the sole purpose of vilification of Israel’. Again, no evidence is provided to substantiate this claim. Does the ZF think that the Rabbis who signed the letter only self-identify as Jewish because they want to demonise Israel?

To suggest that those who signed the letter must be insincere about their Judaism – only self-identifying as Jews in order to attack Israel – is also deeply offensive. It attempts to cast doubt on the idea that a Jew may both self-identify as a Jew out of a love for their Jewish heritage and endorse the Goldstone Report; the insinuation being that to support the Goldstone report is evidence of someone’s not really being very Jewish. The ZF are, in effect, trying to propagate the idea that the Jewish identity of Jews who publically criticize Israel is in some sense illegitimate.

This idea, as well as being hurtful to those like me who are passionate about their Judaism while being openly critical of Israel, reveals an ignorance of British Jewish history. In 1897, at the time of the first World Zionist Congress, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, Hermann Adler, described the event as an ‘egregious blunder’, denouncing the idea of a Jewish State as ‘contrary to Jewish Principles’. Twenty years later, the then president of the Board of Deputies, Lindo Alexander, wrote an open letter in the Times (it must be a Jewish thing) rejecting Zionism. He was shortly after forced to resign, but not, as historian Geoffrey Aldermann notes, because of his anti-Zionism, but rather because his letter purported to represent the views of British Jewry, when in fact no discussions had first taken place to gage the views of the community. Alexander’s replacement, incidentally, was also not a Zionist. More recently, the previous Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovitz vocally opposed aspects of the Israeli occupation, eliciting a demand from Israel’s chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, for him to be excommunicated. None of these individuals self-identified as Jews for the sole purpose of publically vilifying Israel or Zionism. There is nothing illegitimate or inauthentic about their Jewish identity; the same is true for the signatories of the open letter in the Times.

I am a Zionist (albeit with some qualifications). Living as we do in a world of nation-states, in which the principle of national self-determination is generally upheld, it seems to me to be indefensible not to extend that principle to all peoples – and that includes the Jewish people. What the ZF have failed to appreciate, however, is that there is nothing incompatible about being a Zionist and a supporter of Israel on the one hand, and being prepared to condemn Israeli violations of international law on the other. (Richard Goldstone – author of the Goldstone report – is himself a Zionist). The ZF’s press release was entitled ‘British Jews stand squarely behind Israel’. This title is misleading. For a Zionist can stand squarely behind the existence of Israel without having to stand squarely behind Israeli violations of international law. That’s exactly what I intend to keep doing.

2009-11-20T10:03:00.000-08:00

Commenting on the recent channel 4 dispatches documentary on the Israel Lobby, Anshel Pfeffer writes:

Oborne used the classic follow-the-money tactic, but as he had to admit at the end of the program, he'd failed to discover any evidence of a conspiracy or illegality.

But the real problem with today's Israel lobby, in Britain and the United States, is not with its finances and their lack of transparency but with its entire mind-set. The basic fact is that by its actions, the lobby is now causing Israel more harm than good. That's the point Oborne almost totally missed. On every level - moral, political, diplomatic, economic, military and religious - this country is being rapidly corrupted and damaged by the continuing occupation of the West Bank. By granting blanket support to all policies of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power, and by branding critics of these policies as either self-hating Jews or anti-Semites, they're contributing to Israel's siege mentality and delaying the day when Israelis will finally realize that there's only one practical and ethical alternative.

So true.

Welcome to the blog!

2009-11-16T04:59:00.000-08:00

What began as a series of notes on Facebook has now morphed into a blog. At the moment this blog seems like a fun thing to do: if it stops being fun, it will soon after also stop being. So... make this experience fun for me by writing lots of comments beneath my blogposts. That will be great. yeah.

Actually reading the Goldstone report

2009-11-16T04:58:00.000-08:00

This is a note about the Goldstone report, which you can find here

For those who have different facebook friends to me, and so haven’t seen a flurry of articles, youtube links and the like, almost all of them slamming the report, I’ll explain what it is. Then I’ll explain why I think we need to take it seriously.

Richard Goldstone is a prominent South African judge with vast experience of investigating human rights abuses worldwide: including South Africa, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. He is Jewish; according to his daughter he is a Zionist; he is a trustee of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and by his own admission, has ‘supported Israel and the Jewish people all [his] life’.

He also authored a work that Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the US, claims is 'vitriol', and 'goes further than Ahmedinejad'. The work in question was the 575 page report of a UN commissioned investigation into violations of international law perpetrated during the Gaza conflict earlier this year. Goldstone led the investigation.

I’ve started reading his report. Are there problems with it? Probably. And sure – these should be discussed and acknowledged. For example, the mission’s remit was initially one-sided - it was only to examine Israeli violations of international law (not Hamas violations). According to NGO Moniter, the report therefore ‘erased Hamas culpability’. Reading the report myself, however, I don’t see evidence for that. In fact the report actually recognises the initial one-sidedness of their remit, and in para 11 states:

“the Mission determined that it was required to consider any actions by all parties that might have constituted violations of international human rights law or international humanitarian law.”

In other words, they expanded the scope of their investigation specifically to address violations committed by Hamas. And they did exactly that. In para 35 they note evidence of Hamas military attacks from civilian areas; in para 36 they write:

“Palestinian armed groups, where they launched attacks close to civilian or protected buildings, unnecessarily exposed the civilian population to damage.”

They go on in section XXIV to address the issue of Hamas rocket attacks, noting the 8,000 rockets that have been launched since 2001. Para 1680 notes that two thirds of Sderot residents have had an acquaintance injured by the rocket fire, while half have had shrapnel fall on their homes. The report is unequivocal in its denunciation of the rocket attacks as violations of international law.

What is more, the report acknowledges Israel’s ‘significant efforts… to issue warnings’ to Gazan civilian before attacks. (Para 37) And it explains that Israel’s use of white phosphorous was not (contrary to popular imagination) proscribed by international law (‘reckless’ though it may have been).

So to suggest that the report is some kind of entirely one-sided, poisonous anti-semitic diatribe – as Oren and others would have you believe – is simply absurd.

Some pro-Israel commentators are frustrated with the reports failure to acknowledge Hamas’s alleged strategy of using human shields. There is an obvious reason that could explain such a failure: Israel completely refused to cooperate with the report, submitting no evidence to the mission. They even refused permission for Goldstone and his team to visit Sderot to see the damage there. It’s like the little child in school who refuses to explain to the teacher why he got into a fight (or fought in a way that violates international law or whatever) and then complains that the teacher overlooked his side of the story.

Another criticism has been that the report relied on reports from anti-Israel organizations. There’s a fallacy committed by such a criticism; just because an organization is anti-Israel, it doesn’t follow that their submissions are dishonest. But more importantly, reading the report, I’m struck by paragraph 24, where Goldstone explains that in any case, the Mission relied primarily and whenever possible on information gathered first hand. “information produced by others… was used primarily as corroboration.”

In any case, while there may be some shortcomings, the report needs to be taken seriously. Goldstone’s team examined over 10,000 pages of documentation and testimony, conducted 188 interviews; saw 1,200 photographs, and 30 videos. Okay, some of the evidence may have been suspect. But let’s remember the law of big numbers – there’s a large enough pool of evidence for any reasonable person to accept that it can’t all just be rejected. And the evidence is pretty disturbing. Just one example - it cites four examples of Israelis using Palestinian human shields. (para 55) Incidentally, this evidence was supported by testimonies from Israeli soldiers. The use of human shields is a war crime. And we can’t just sweep it under the floor under talk of ‘these things happen in war’. These things only happen when someone decides they should happen.

The report cites numerous examples of Israeli violations of international law. It identified a few instances in which civilians were targeted without an identifiable military objective. Now it may just be the case that Israel knew of something that the report’s creators did not. But if so, the Israeli government only has itself to blame for failing to cooperate with the Mission, and failing to identify for them the military objectives in those attacks.

More disturbingly, some violations of international law were explicitly advocated by senior Israeli politicians. For example, Eli Yishai, currently one of the four deputy Prime Ministers, Minister for internal affairs, and chairman of the Shas party, said:

“Even if they fire at an open area or into the sea, we must damage their infrastructures and destroy 100 houses. That's when it will end,”

This note is getting too long, so I’ll end here with a recommendation for people to actually read (at least) the executive summary of the report before they reject it out of hand. The one thing I will reject, though, is Ambassador Oren's grotesque suggestion that Goldstone 'goes further than Ahmedinejad'; as though a report exposing Israeli and Hamas violations of international law is somehow (a) of the same nature as Ahmedinejad's holocaust denial, and (b) is in fact worse than it. Oren writes that: "Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report." And with this he does something even worse: he exploits the memory of the holocaust so as to discredit the findings of the Report.

Shimon Peres and the problem with stupid activists

2009-11-16T04:55:00.000-08:00

Shimon Peres and the problem with stupid activists
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 12:49am | Edit Note | Delete
If I lived in Tel-Aviv I would want to involve myself with anti-occupation politics. I would attend protests and demonstrations. I would write letters and sign petitions. I would visit the west bank with organizations such as 'Peace Now', to see what goes on there. If I lived in Tel-Aviv I would want to associate myself with the wider movement against the Israeli occupation.

But I live in Oxford, a city where – it seemed tonight, as I attended a talk by Israeli President Shimon Peres – that movement is dominated by activists who are happy to compare Shimon Peres to Adolf Hitler when they heckle, and what’s more, will be applauded for doing so by their supporters. I say this because when one of the evening's many hecklers was shushed by other audience members, she shouted, ‘if Hitler was talking you’d also be shouting’.

Now in principle I’m all for opposing the occupation from afar, here in Oxford. But I’m a Jew, the child of Israelis and the grandchild of holocaust survivors; there’s just no chance I'm ever going to feel comfortable working with the kind of activists I saw tonight; people willing to draw no moral distinction between Hitler and Peres. When someone fails to make such a distinction you have to worry about their capacity for making moral judgements at all.

What’s baffling is how these activists, who are so quick to attack Israel’s supporters for exploiting the memory of the holocaust for political gain, appear to have had no qualms about doing exactly the same themselves. If they can use (or misuse) the evocative power of the holocaust in order to add rhetorical value to their arguments, then it seems they’re willing to do so. They’re not really opposed to what has been called ‘the Holocaust industry’; they just want a piece of it.

What such activists need to realize is that their abrasive, disruptive, holocaust-invoking shouts simply aren’t persuasive. They’re not convincing or impressive. They don’t leave listeners feeling intrigued, thinking ‘you know what, they seem reasonable, maybe they’ve got a point’. What they do is piss people off. They alienate left-wing, anti-occupation Jews, turning them off any desire to associate with anti-occupation groups in the UK. They leave us feeling like even if we wanted to we couldn’t talk with them, and maybe couldn’t even talk to them, but can only be shouted at by them.

The talk that Shimon Peres gave was measured and calm; honest about the costs of peace, truthful about the need for compromise. He acknowledged the mistake that was the establishment and expansion of the settlements, and was supportive of the Palestinians desire for Statehood. There was nothing racist in his talk’s content; nothing Islamophobic in his words. The contrast between the nature of his speech and the vitriolic shouts from protesters both within and outside the Sheldonian Theatre was startling.

With a career full of negotiation, discussion, and peace-making attempts behind him, Peres obviously had a lot to say, but one of his best lines was said in response to a heckler: ‘You have eyes and you have ears as well as a mouth’, he said, ‘sometimes you should give the mouth a rest’.

If they don't want to push left-wing Jews towards the right, those activists who heckled tonight would do well to listen.

Note: Having read the report on Ynet news, I appear to have misheard the protestor. She actually said: ‘If Hitler were here now, he would remain silent as you are silent and listen to Peres’ speech.” Still, the substance of my point remains.

One Caryl Churchill

2009-11-16T04:49:00.000-08:00

Friday, February 20, 2009 at 12:19pm | Edit Note | Delete
One Caryl Churchill

Tell her the play’s anti-Semitic

Don’t tell her that

Tell her what she wants to hear

Tell her what she believes

Tell her they’re just trying to deflect criticism from Israel.

Tell her it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel

Don’t tell her that nobody claimed it was

Tell her she can say this to create a straw man

Tell her she can say this when she's attacked for her play

Tell her it’s possible to criticise the actions of Israel without being anti-Semitic

No but tell her she failed to do so.

Don’t tell her that.

Tell her the play was brave

Tell her she said what others think but are too scared to say

Tell her she shows us how Jewish children are bred to believe in the "otherness" of Palestinians

Tell her that’s what Michael Billington said in the Guardian.

Don’t tell her that’s not problematic

Don’t tell her that’s not anti-Semitic

Don’t tell her that’s not her problem

Tell her it’s Billington’s.

Tell her I’m Jewish and I wasn’t “bred” that way.

Don’t tell her the play lacks nuance

Don’t tell her the play’s simplistic

Don’t tell her the obvious.

Tell her it portrays Israeli parents as inhuman triumphalists who care little about anything except their children’s feelings, and who teach them that Arabs are sub-human and must be hated

Don’t tell her you really can’t believe everything you see on television (or on stage)

Don’t tell her the UN school was never actually bombed but no one seems to care

Tell her that as a playwright she should know that the silences speak volumes

Don’t tell her she was silent about so much

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t frighten her.

No but tell her about another play.

Tell her about ‘Seven Palestinian Children’.

Tell her the play starts with the Naqba and ends with Hamas.

No but tell her this play is not an attack on anyone, it is a cry of grief

Tell her at the end a man stands and speaks of Jewish Children covered in blood and smiles

Tell her he quotes from the elders of the protocols of Zion

Tell her he says that Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Tell her he says he’s a suicide bomber

Tell her he says he wants to kill children

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t frighten her.

Tell her such a play would be grossly unfair

Tell her such a play would misrepresent Palestinians

Tell her such a play would be racist.

Tell her the Guardian’s critics would slam such a play.

No but tell her the Guardian’s critics applauded hers.

Tell her the Royal Court would never stage such a play

No but tell her the Royal Court proudly staged hers.

No but don’t tell her her play was anti-Semitic

Tell her it was criticism of Israel

Don’t tell her the two are not always mutually exclusive.

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t frighten her.

Tell them you'll use Jewish actors so it's all okay

Facebook and the conflict in Gaza

2009-11-16T04:45:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 1:38pm

It’s bizarre. All over the Facebook pages of many of my friends, in their groups, in status updates and in the notes they’ve posted up, among the photos of late night escapades and embarrassing childhood snaps, is... the conflict in Gaza.

Take this facebook status for example:

“X thinks it ironic that the BBC is showing a film about the Jews being attacked in a ghetto while in real life the Jews are attacking a ghetto !! Funny old world.”

Hmmm. I fall under the category of ‘the Jews’ and (to the best of my knowledge) I’m not attacking any ghetto. Many Jews are indifferent to Israel, and, as for Israel itself, more than a fifth of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and its army includes many non-Jews, such as its Arab Druze soldiers. Simply put, Israel is not ‘the Jews’. It would be wrong to define ‘the Muslims’ by the actions of one Muslim state; why subsume the Jews and the Israeli army into one entity?

I also resent the subtle implication that there’s something wrong (‘ironic’) about showing a film about the holocaust while Israel is attacking Gaza. What happened in the holocaust and what’s going on in Gaza are two different things. The Jewish ghetto was not a hotbed for religious extremism, steered by a leadership that openly advocated the slaughter of another people’s civilians. There’s your difference between Gaza and the ghettoes. (For more info see the Hamas charter, article 7, and read http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/07/gaza-mahmoud-zahar-hamas).

The analogy between Gaza and the Jewish ghettoes in Europe seems to me to be motivated chiefly by a desire to invoke the rhetorical power of the holocaust. After all, ghettos are defined (by the dictionary) as a part of a city where a minority group are forced to live; Gaza is not a City, so its description as a ‘ghetto’ – while I’m not saying it’s anti-Semitic – is certainly anti-semantic.

Turning back to Facebook, many of my more Zionist friends have focused on the number of Qassam rockets fired, ‘donating’ their status to Qassam count. (http://apps.facebook.com/qassamcount/) Others have linked to an Aish sponsored video, called ‘15 seconds’, that highlights how short a time the residents of Sderot have to find shelter when Qassam rockets are headed their way.

I’ve been bothered by both.

When confronted with the gross disparity in numbers killed and weaponry available to each side of the conflict, the typical response you hear from Zionists – as was given, for example, by Israeli Ambassador Ron Prossor only last week at Limmud – is to dismiss the ‘numbers game’ as being an unhelpful distraction from the real issues. Prosser is right to stress that numbers, in terms of casualties incurred or weapons fired, are not the only morally relevant factors in a conflict. Intentions matter too, as do ‘long term’ considerations (i.e – numbers in the long term). But numbers retain their importance– and the fact that so many of Israel’s supporters have donated their status to ‘Qassam count’ suggests that actually, they agree.

What troubles me is that Israel supporters want it both ways. They want to stress the numbers of Qassam rockets fired, or the number of seconds those in Sderot have to find shelter before being hit by a rocket, while at the same time neglecting to acknowledge the undeniable fact that – if we are to play the numbers game – Israel’s has inflicted far more damage on Gaza than the other way around, and that Gazans have far less than 15 seconds to find shelter, since they have no missile warning system (as far as I can tell from searching through the internet). And for all the noise Israel makes about the rockets Hamas have launched into southern Israel prior to the conflict, the fact is that in the three years following the (disastrous) unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, only 11 Israeli civilians were killed by rocket attacks, while between 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

And I know, I know – there’s no moral equivalence between the intentional killing of civilians (what Hamas does) and the unintentional collateral damage caused by Israel’s targeting of the military infrastructure of Hamas. But for the civilians themselves, killed or else condemned to live with fear, whether Israeli or Palestinian, the differing intentions of those on their opposing side are of no comfort. And the short of it is that in this conflict, many more Gazans are experiencing that suffering.

For all the fighting taking place by proxy on Facebook, in the form of status updates and groups etc, one group offers a glimmer of hope. It’s called ‘Arguing on Facebook is the only way to solve the Israel / Palestine problem’. Well, lets hope its not the only way...