By Johann Hari
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 — 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 important, 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 reported 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
documented 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 — including Honest Reporting and Camera —
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 Reporting” 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 — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a
checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” 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 Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.
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 — so last year he wrote
a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual
canter through the major human rights reports. 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 — who made it through
Maidenek and two slave-labour camps — 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 Reporting becoming
more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews
— the majority — 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 diaspora 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? Have you left no sense of decency?”
–Johann Hari
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