[DEBATE] : The misuses of "anti-semitism"

[Peter Mahlangu]

Counterpunch, May 8, 2006

Gag and Smear
The Misuses of "Anti-Semitism"

By NORMAN SOLOMON

The extended controversy over a paper by two
professors, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy," is prying the lid off a debate that has been
bottled up for decades.

Routinely, the American news media have ignored or
pilloried any strong criticism of Washington's massive
support for Israel. But the paper and an article based
on it by respected academics John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, academic dean
of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, first published March 23 in the London
Review of Books, are catalysts for some healthy public
discussion of key issues.

The first mainstream media reactions to the
paper--often with the customary name-calling--were
mostly efforts to shut down debate before it could
begin. Early venues for vituperative attacks on the
paper included the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles
Times ("nutty"), the Boston Herald (headline:
"Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard") and The Washington
Post (headline: "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic").

But other voices have emerged, on the airwaves and in
print, to bypass the facile attacks and address
crucial issues. If this keeps up, the uproar over what
Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt had to say could
invigorate public discourse about Washington's
policies toward a country that consistently has
received a bigger U.S. aid package for a longer period
than any other nation.

In April, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins put her
astute finger on a vital point. "In the United States,
we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate
about Israel," she wrote. "In Israel, they have it as
a matter of course, but the truth is that the
accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in
this country against anyone who criticizes the
government of Israel. ... I don't know that I've ever
felt intimidated by the knee-jerk 'you're
anti-Semitic' charge leveled at anyone who criticizes
Israel, but I do know I have certainly heard it often
enough to become tired of it. And I wonder if that
doesn't produce the same result: giving up on the
discussion."

The point rings true, and it's one of the central
themes emphasized by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.

If the barriers to democratic discourse can be
overcome, the paper's authors say, the results could
be highly beneficial: "Open debate will expose the
limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided
U.S. support and could move the U.S. to a position
more consistent with its own national interest, with
the interests of the other states in the region, and
with Israel's long-term interests as well."

Outsized support for Israel has been "the centerpiece
of U.S. Middle Eastern policy," the professors contend
- and the Israel lobby makes that support possible.
"Other special-interest groups have managed to skew
America's foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to
divert it as far from what the national interest would
suggest," the paper says. One of the consequences is
that "the United States has become the de facto
enabler of Israeli expansion in the occupied
territories, making it complicit in the crimes
perpetrated against the Palestinians."

In the United States, "the lobby's campaign to quash
debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy," Mr.
Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt assert. They point to grave
effects on the body politic: "The inability of
Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these
important issues paralyzes the entire process of
democratic deliberation."

While their paper overstates the extent to which
pro-Israel pressures determine U.S. foreign policy in
the Middle East, a very powerful lobby for Israel
clearly has enormous leverage in Washington. And the
professors make a convincing case that the U.S.
government has been much too closely aligned with
Israel - to the detriment of human rights, democracy
and other principles that are supposed to constitute
American values.

The failure to make a distinction between
anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel routinely
stifles public debate. When convenient, pro-Israel
groups in the United States will concede that it's
possible to oppose Israeli policies without being
anti-Semitic. Yet many of Israel's boosters
reflexively pull out the heavy artillery of charging
anti-Semitism when their position is challenged.

Numerous American Jewish groups dedicated to
supporting Israel are eager to equate Israel with
Judaism. Sometimes they have the arrogance to depict
the country and the religion as inseparable. For
example, in April 2000, a full-page United Jewish
Appeal ad in The New York Times proclaimed: "The seeds
of Jewish life and Jewish communities everywhere begin
in Israel."

Like many other American Jews who grew up in the 1950s
and '60s, I went door to door with blue-and-white UJA
cans to raise money for planting trees in Israel. I
heard about relatives who had died in concentration
camps during the Holocaust two decades earlier and
about relatives who had survived and went to Israel.
In 1959, my family visited some of them, on a kibbutz
and in Tel Aviv.

The 1960 blockbuster movie Exodus dramatized the birth
of Israel a dozen years earlier. As I remember, Arabs
were portrayed in the picture as cold-blooded killers
while the Jews who killed Arabs were presented as
heroic fighters engaged in self-defense.

The film was in sync with frequent media messages that
lauded Jews for risking the perilous journey to
Palestine and making the desert bloom, as though no
one of consequence had been living there before.

The Six-Day War in June 1967 enabled Israel to expand
the territory it controlled several times over, in the
process suppressing huge numbers of Palestinians in
the West Bank and Gaza. Their plights and legitimate
grievances got little space in the U.S. media.

In 1969, the independent American journalist I. F.
Stone expressed hope for "a reconstructed Palestine of
Jewish and Arab states in peaceful coexistence." He
contended that "to bring it about, Israel and the
Jewish communities of the world must be willing to
look some unpleasant truths squarely in the face. ...
One is to recognize that the Arab guerrillas are doing
to us what our terrorists and saboteurs of the Irgun,
Stern and Haganah did to the British. Another is to be
willing to admit that their motives are as honorable
as were ours. As a Jew, even as I felt revulsion
against the terrorism, I felt it justified by the
homelessness of the surviving Jews from the Nazi camps
and the bitter scenes when refugee ships sank, or sank
themselves, when refused admission to Palestine.

"The best of Arab youth feels the same way; they
cannot forget the atrocities committed by us against
villages like Deir Yassin, nor the uprooting of the
Palestinian Arabs from their ancient homeland, for
which they feel the same deep ties of sentiment as do
so many Jews, however assimilated elsewhere."

When I crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan into the
West Bank 15 years ago, I spoke with a 19-year-old
border guard who was carrying a machine gun. He told
me that he'd emigrated from Brooklyn, N.Y., a few
months earlier. He said the Palestinians should get
out of his country.

In East Jerusalem, I saw Israeli soldiers brandishing
rifle butts at elderly women in a queue. Some in the
line reminded me of my grandmothers, only these women
were Arab.

Today, visitors to the Web site of the Israeli
human-rights group B'Tselem can find profuse
documentation about systematic denial of Palestinian
rights and ongoing violence in all directions. Since
autumn 2000, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza,
according to the latest figures posted, the number of
Israelis killed by Palestinians has totaled 998 and
the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis has
totaled 3,466.

Overall, in the American news media, the horrible
killings of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers
get front-page and prime-time coverage while the
horrible killings of Palestinians by Israelis get
relatively scant and dispassionate coverage.

If the U.S. news media were to become committed to a
single standard of human rights, the shift would
transform public discourse about basic Israeli
policies - and jeopardize the U.S. government's
support for them. It is against just such a single
standard that the epithet of "anti-Semitism" is
commonly wielded. From the viewpoint of Israel and its
supporters, the ongoing threat of using the label
helps to prevent U.S. media coverage from getting out
of hand. Journalists understand critical words about
Israel to be hazardous to their careers.

In the real world, bigotry toward Jews and support for
Israel have long been independent variables. For
instance, as Oval Office tapes attest, President
Richard M. Nixon was anti-Semitic and did not restrain
himself from expressing that virulent prejudice in
private. Yet he was a big admirer of the Israeli
military and a consistent backer of Israel's
government.

Now, the neoconservative agenda for the Middle East
maintains the U.S. embrace of Israel with great
enthusiasm. And defenders of that agenda often resort
to timeworn tactics for squelching debate.

Last fall, when I met with editors at a newspaper in
the Pacific Northwest, a member of the editorial board
responded to my reference to neocons by declaring
flatly that "neocon" is an "anti-Semitic" term. The
absurd claim would probably amuse the most powerful
neocons in the U.S. government's executive branch
today, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, neither of whom is
Jewish.

Over the past couple of decades, a growing number of
American Jews have seen their way clear to oppose
Israeli actions. Yet their voices continue to be
nearly drowned out in major U.S. media outlets by
Israel-right-or-wrong outfits such as the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation
League and the American Jewish Committee.

As with all forms of bigotry, anti-Semitism should be
condemned. At the same time, these days, America's
biggest anti-Semitism problem has to do with the
misuse of the label as a manipulative tactic to
short-circuit debate about Washington's alliance with
Israel.

Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His
e-mail is: mediabeat at igc.org.

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon05082006.html