On March 30, 2011, join the international campaign to Stop the Jewish National Fund. A key pillar of the colonization of Palestine – from the founding of the State of Israel to the present – has been the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (KKL), commonly known in English as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF enjoys charity status in over 50 countries. This is despite its role in the on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land, the theft of their property, the funding of historic and present-day colonies, and the destruction of the natural environment.
Jewish World
Once you are labeled and stereotyped – especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite – you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, and even beyond explanation.
New letter signed by rabbis’ wives appeals to women urging them to stay away from Arabs. ‘As soon as they have in you in their grasp – everything becomes different. Attention will be replaced with curses, physical abuse and humiliation,’ letter states.
Ali Abunimah, speaking at the University of New Mexico, asks the Jewish Federation of New Mexico to apologize for publishing a Dry Bones cartoon which compared BDS supporters with Hitler.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to justify Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, Israel’s apologists — whether based in Israel or at pseudo-academic centers such as the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism — resort to another line of defense: namely, they accuse Israel’s critics of being anti-Semitic. Not the sort of classic anti-Semitism found for example in Hamas’s Charter, but instead the anti-Semitism of an anti-Israel double standard.
Appendix to Anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict – assessing the claim of double standards, by Stephen R. Shalom, Israeli Occupation Archive – IOA (19 Nov 2010).
When I envision Israel ending settlement expansion and living in equality with the Palestinians – while Netanyahu’s government confiscates more Palestinian land and builds more settlements every single day – I wonder who is misguided?
Matan Cohen, Israeli who disrupted PM’s speech: We were raised on human rights. Youngster who heckled Netanyahu during GA address in New Orleans says US Jews distancing themselves from community due to “expectation of blind loyalty to Israel.”
IOA Editor: “Raised on human rights” is well intentioned, and an understandable comment when facing the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman, but it is misleading. Although plenty of individual Israeli (Jewish) families raised their children “on human rights,” Labor Zionism was racist from the very start but, unlike today, mostly below the surface: instituting land laws designed to deprive Arab citizens of most natural and national resources; putting activists under administrative detention without trial, and much more.
Now things are far more out in the open: raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night and putting them away — via trials without the standard rules of evidence that would be required in the West (e.g., most recently, Ameer Makhoul); the ability to legally exclude any Arab citizen from living in much of Israel that is, in effect, designated as Jewish-only; and an “informal,” but well organized and sanctioned by “Higher Authority,” terror campaign against renting to Palestinians when they venture into Jewish towns (even when those had been mostly-Arab towns before 1948), lest their sort mix with our precious daughters (see Jonathan Cook’s Rabbis’ edict bars renting to Arabs). Today’s conditions are far more blatant, and outright scary, but they evolved over a long period of time, starting from the political foundation put in place by Labor Zionism.
ADL’s Foxman: “These groups are not promoting peace, they are spreading propaganda to assault Israel’s legitimacy. We want to Americans to know who these groups are and what it is they really stand for, which is to delegitimize the Jewish state.”
IOA Editor: From one of Israel’s propaganda chiefs, himself. We’d be honored to join the list.
Over 100 people demonstrated against loyalty oath in Tel Aviv; warn ‘Israel is becoming a fascist state.’
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.”
Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.
[Schumer’s] talk covered several foreign policy issues, including Iran and Israel/Palestine. When the topic turned to the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla Schumer began by explaining that the “Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution”. But that is not all, he continued: “They don’t believe in the Torah, in David.”
IOA Editor: In a more-or-less decent society, free of racism, where basic concepts of justice form the foundation of thought and public speech of political leaders – none of this could happen without public apologies and resignation. Not so in the US, guardian of the “Free World” and champion of “Democracy.”
What to make of the rush of Jewish leaders — from AIPAC to a Los Angeles city councilman — coming forward in the past few weeks to divulge their role in genocide denial? … How to account for these sudden confessions? A pang of remorse? A cleansing of the soul? I’m afraid not. These aren’t confessions, at all. Rather, they are reminders of the debt Turkey owes Israel — and they come with teeth bared.
MORE: US Jewish groups skip meet with Turkish officials
Fifty five percent of Jewish Israelis said they believe a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essential to the survival of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. However, 49 percent disagreed that settlements pose a threat to Israel and “feed the delegitimization process” that Israel currently faces.
If a people who so recently experienced such unspeakable inhumanities cannot understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions are inflicting, what hope is there for the rest of us?
IOA Editor: While Israel’s morality (inherent, past, other?) is a figment of Siegman’s imagination, this is an important article in that it makes a powerful connection between the Holocaust and Israel’s Occupation and Gaza crimes.
One of this country’s most important and courageous journalists said something terribly wrong, was massively criticized, apologized for it, and was forced into retirement. Exactly the way it should be, right? Wrong. It’s hard to even chart out the hypocrisy of the whole affair.
The main source of Jewish hatred and bigotry against Arabs today comes from the orthodox, and especially the modern orthodox… The Israeli religious Zionism that has produced the settler movement is unaffected by universal moral values…
IOA Editor: Despite the sentimentalist views on historical Orthodox Judaism, important criticism of the US Orthodox Jewish community, pointing to it as the source of Arab hate. Surprisingly, the writer doesn’t mention that this is not an ‘argument’ but an outright attack on a Palestinian woman whose Sheikh-Jarrah house has been occupied by Jewish settlers.
[F]rom a military and intelligence-sharing perspective, the Obama administration is the best U.S. administration Israel has ever had. Administration critics were trying to distort that, he said, and Obama and his Jewish supporters in Congress needed to set the record straight.
IOA Editor: The more things change, the more they remain the same. So much for “Hope,” so much for “Change”.
A well-known American Jewish attorney who worked to deport former Nazis from the US is urging American officials to bar former judge Richard Goldstone from entering the country over his rulings during South Africa’s apartheid regime.
IOA Editor: Revenge… He was allowed to attend his grandson’s Bar-Mitzva, but we’ll block his entry to the US.
Dershowitz accused anarchist Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky of creating a hostile atmosphere among many groups in the United States and in its academic campuses. They are creating a narrative which always presents Israel as a Nazi occupier, he said, while shutting their eyes to facts contradicting those same claims, like the ties between Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during World War II.
IOA Editor: At no time did Noam Chomsky refer to Israel as a “Nazi occupier.” As the record amply shows, “Israeli occupier” is sufficiently cruel. Linking the Jerusalem Mufti to Hitler does not logically contradict any characterization of the Israeli occupation. On the Mufti-Hitler issue, see Gilbert Achcar: Israel’s Propaganda War – Blame the Grand Mufti.
Dershowitz’ desperately warped arguments are interesting: “legal terror,” for example. As a prominent lawyer, one would expect him to appreciate that “terrorism” is generally understood to mean “violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal… and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians)” (Wikipedia). This definition is sufficiently broad to cover both the bombing of Gaza residential neighborhoods and the blowing up of Tel Aviv buses. On the other hand, legal challenges, unpleasant as they might be to the receiving party, are designed to be countered and resolved, in a civilized manner, in a court of law – something which an army of Israeli lawyers, and international supporters like Dershowitz, are working hard to block.
On “Delegitimization:” Conveniently, Israel’s ‘supporters’ equate criticism of Israeli actions — mostly, directly connected to the Occupation, and the Occupation itself — with denial of its right to exist. This is an old Hasbara trick: You criticize us, you’re really saying Israel has no right to exist. Left out of the discussion is “The right to exist as what?” As an occupying state? An Apartheid state? The term “delegitimization” is actually turned on its head: It is the Israelis who are attempting to delegitimize their critics by calling them “delegitimizers,” trying to blur the distinctions between “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites, consistent with old Israeli propaganda practices: If you criticize us, you’re either an anti-Semite — and Dershowitz’ reference to Nazism is designed to do just that — or you’re a sick, “self-hating” Jew. Chomsky, Finkelstein, and this writer, born to Jewish mothers, must be the latter.
For more on the important question of legitimacy of the state, and how it applies to Israel and other nation-states, see Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar: On the Legitimacy of the State. More on “Delegitimization“
[W]ork has recently begun for the construction of 14 housing units in an old Israel Police station in East Jerusalem, where plans are in the works for the largest Jewish neighborhood in that part of the city… When the two neighborhoods are completed and linked, a Jewish settlement of more than 1,000 people will be situated in the heart of Ras al-Amud, a neighborhood comprising 14,000 Palestinians.
There are not many Jews like Wiesel, to whom the White House door is open and the president lends an ear. And what does Wiesel do with this golden opportunity? He talks to Obama about postponing discussions on Jerusalem. Not about the need for an end to the occupation, not about the opportunity to establish a just peace (and a just Israel ), not about the outrageous injustice to the Palestinians. Only perpetuating the occupation.
A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions… The letter calls occupation and settlements “morally and politically wrong,” noting that they “feed the unacceptable delegitimization process that Israel currently faces abroad.”
