[lbo-talk] The collective jew?

[Bill Bartlett]

The last para of this opinion piece seems way over the top. To refer 
to Israel as the "Collective jew" is akin to referring to apartheid 
South Africa as the "Collective dutchman". In other words, a slur. 
Most jews don't live in Israel, they choose to live elsewhere. Most 
jews bear no responsibility for the crimes of the israeli state.

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