But can Pamela Bone seriously not figure out why Israel is singled out for disproportionate criticism? Not the least because Israel acts disproportionately. The plan to imprison virtually the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza in a huge concentration camp is the kind of plan that may even have startled the Nazis for its audactity.
Speaking of the nazis and disproportionate criticism, there is something sinister about the suggestion that the emnity of the Arab states to Israel somehow justifies the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel. ("One can hate the destruction of Palestinian homes (I do) but could at least recognise the reason for the destruction is arms-smuggling tunnels underneath them.")
Were the crippling sanctions against Germany imposed after WW1 unfair, yes. But does that justify the Germans waging total war against the rest of Europe in "self defense"? I don't think so.
But the real cause of world-wide hostility to the Jewish state is not the war crimes perpetrated to defend Israel, though that is bad enough. What angers people most is the nature of what is being defended. Israel Is constituted as a repulsive apartheid state. Its population is composed of first class citizens, second class citizens and, at the bottom of the heap, non-citizens. Who have no rights at all. (not even the right to life.)
Only Jews are permitted to become first class citizens and those who are not first class citizens are systematically discriminated against in all aspects of their life. Non-citizens are subject to collective punishment, arbitrary political executions, imprisonment without trial, legalised torture, not to mention day to day economic deprivation.
The defense of such a repulsive regime is, naturally enough, a very low priority for civilised people around the world. The unbearable humiliation of the subject peoples in the occupied territories does not of course justify the crimes of those minority who are inevitably tipped over the edge of sanity and commit unspeakable crimes of vengeance. But the object - destruction of the Israeli state as it is currently constituted - is plainly an entirely reasonable objective.
Yes, the means employed by Palestinian terrorists is just as repulsive as the means employed by the wealthy and powerful Israeli state. Both deserve to be condemned in proportion to each other. But What Ms Bone fails to realise, the reason they are not condemned "proportionately", lies in the relative merits of the objectives of the warring terrorists. The israeli state uses terrorism to defend an indefensible apartheid regime, their opponents use terrorism in an attempt to destroy the evil regime.
It is very difficult to be even-handed in one's criticism of the respective parties in such a war. Both use repulsive methods, but one uses repulsive methods in pursuit of openly repulsive ends. The permanent domination (or ethnic cleansing) of the other side. If the world is forced to take sides, then there is only one moral choice. Nothing anti-semitic about that.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2004/07/30/1091080436525.html
Anti-Semitism: the old hatred returns
Date: July 31 2004
It is not only Jews who should be worried by this global phenomenon, writes Pamela Bone.
Something good, at least: a friend, in Paris a few weeks ago, was handed a pamphlet in the street. Reading it as she walked on, she saw it was an advertisement for a march against anti-Semitism: Contre l'antisemitisme je marche!. She went back to the young woman who had given it to her, and said in French: "Thank you. I am Jewish." The woman answered: "I am Muslim."
France has the highest population of both Jews and Muslims in Europe. They have a shared interest in fighting racism, because both groups have suffered an increase of it. (Indeed, since Arabs are also Semites, "anti-Semitism" should apply to discrimination against them, too.) But while according to a European Union report most of the anti-Semitism in France - the burning of Jewish schools, defacing of graves and attacks on individuals - is coming from young Muslim immigrants, the anti-Muslim feeling is not coming from France's Jewish community, which is old and established and has better things to do than deface mosques.
In the Arab world hatred of Jews pours out of television, newspapers and mosques: Israel is to blame for every wrong that besets Arab countries; the Holocaust is either a lie or didn't go far enough; the ancient Christian "blood libel", that Jews kill children and use their blood to make Passover bread, is repeated in mainstream newspapers. It's common wisdom that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks, and that Jews persuaded the Americans to invade Iraq (this last is fairly widely accepted in some Western circles, too).
And in the West, suddenly a new anti-Semitism has become widespread, acceptable, even politically correct, it is argued in a new book of essays (Those Who Forget the Past, edited by Ron Rosenbaum). Anti-Israel violence erupts on American campuses, there are calls by academics in the US, Britain and Australia to boycott Israeli academics, in letters pages of respectable newspapers there are comparisons between Israelis and Nazis. See, the Jews do what was done to them.
"It's back," writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. "Something's changed," writes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. "Since September 11 anti-Semitism has become respectable at London dinner tables," writes Barbara Amiel. Jewish paranoia? "It (anti-Semitism) is a big dark shadow on the world," writes Harold Evans, former editor of London's The Sunday Times, who is not Jewish, as far as I know.
In Australia, swastikas on mosques and graffiti on a Sydney freeway saying "Jews make good lampshades". On the website of a respected journalist, the allegation that "the fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia". Strange that I've been in the media in Australia for 25 years and no one from this lobby has tried to control what I write.
In the West, anti-Semitism has migrated from the right to the left (which doesn't mean it has gone from the right).
How does one define the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?
It is of course possible to be pro-Palestinian without being anti-Semitic. It is absolutely possible to criticise the state of Israel without being anti-Jewish; Jews do it all the time. It's the one-sidedness that raises suspicions.
Yes, what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is terrible. But what the Palestinians are doing to the Israelis is also terrible. One can hate the destruction of Palestinian homes (I do) but could at least recognise the reason for the destruction is arms-smuggling tunnels underneath them.
Deplore the security wall, and especially its infringement on Palestinian territory, but acknowledge it is stopping suicide attacks - and that Israel is complying with an order from its Supreme Court to reroute some of the fence to lessen its impact on Palestinians' lives.
The situation of the Palestinians is intolerable; but there is not, on university campuses, equal condemnation of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon. It's a nice thing to side with the victim; but five million Jews in Israel, a country one-third the size of Tasmania, surrounded by 300 million Muslims whose governments have made clear their desire to eliminate the Jewish state, might also be seen as victims.
As Amos Oz writes, any decent person should support the Palestinians' freedom from occupation and their right to independent statehood. But "a second war is being waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause".
There are many people who would never discriminate against individuals because they are Jewish, who nevertheless feel entitled to hate the Jewish state. Israel can be criticised, as any state can be. But when the world's only Jewish state - the collective Jew - is criticised disproportionately and unreasonably, Jews cannot be blamed for fearing the old hatred is back; or that it never really went away.
Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age. pbone at theage.com.au