Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics
Independent.co.uk
Thursday, 8 May 2008
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries
to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to
intimidate and silence =96 and to a large degree, it works. There is
nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as
anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn't especially im****tant, but it illustrates how the
wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both
the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to
expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to
challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death
threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also re****ted from Gaza and the West Bank. Last
week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being
pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land,
contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been
do***ented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own
eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media
monitoring groups =96 including Honest Re****ting and Camera =96 said I an
anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people
in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came
flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is
met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian
land, "Honest Re****ting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth
of Jews "poisoning the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby
died in 2002 because she was detained =96 in labour =96 by Israeli
soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Re****ting" will
say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um,
2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David
Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism".
Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them
way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie
Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack
anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer,
Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic
cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: "Political solutions often
require the movement of people, and such movement is not always
voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to
some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American figure takes a
position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the
airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain.
Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established
with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the
right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry
and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews
For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where
does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial"
people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist
population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may
deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a
national project". Honest Re****ting quotes Phillips as a model of
reliable re****ting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that
by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic
tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the
elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz
poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their
government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by
giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace
deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants
to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it =96 so last year he
wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and
factual canter through the major human rights re****ts. There is
nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every
day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel)
to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the
interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the
Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human
rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the
racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US,
Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even
refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the
Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood
relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time
Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually
empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be
Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to
cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and
gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an
anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when
Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without
acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The
Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make
sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed
that Finkelstein's mother =96 who made it through Maidenek and two slave-
labour camps =96 had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked.
Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the
truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Re****ting becoming
more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument?
Liberal Jews =96 the majority =96 are now setting up rivals to the hard-
right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign
of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians,
because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the
Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile
path. And it damages dias****a Jews, because it makes real anti-
Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch
said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense
of decency, sir, at long last? H ave you left no sense of decency?"
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