Antisemitism Real and Imagined (2010), Part 3, Chapter 3
This chapter offers an account of the rhetorical turns by means of which supporters of Israeli policies have sought to deflect criticisms of even the most flagrant crimes and illegalities, libeling human rights activists as antisemites and representing victimizers as victims. I begin by drawing upon the work of Norman Finkelstein for a quick outline of the principal means by which this libelous inversion is carried out—the ideology of the so-called “new antisemitism,” which I concur with him in recognizing as fraudulent.1
A related inversion of actuality is apparent in the CPCCA’s claims about the academic victimization of Jews. Stories of Jewish students being subjected to abuse and intimidation on Canadian campuses turn out to be seriously exaggerated: the reality is that critics of Israel in Canadian universities, and in American and Israeli universities as well, are the ones who most commonly have had to face slanders and vituperation—as well as the threat, and sometimes the actuality, of administrative sanctions, expulsion, or loss of employment.
But the CPCCA’s interventions may yet turn out—depending on how we respond to its explicit targeting of free speech and academic freedom, and depending on what the Canadian people make of the issues it has raised—to have been beneficial. This chapter concludes with some remarks about how we might, as a nation, take meaningful action against real—rather than imagined—antisemitism.
The “New Antisemitism”
As we have seen, the ideology of the “new antisemitism” rests on a rhetorical strategy that deals with criticisms of Israel by re-describing them as no more than [208] revivals of the traditional tropes of antisemitism. Reports of Israeli war crimes against Palestinian civilians, for example, are transformed into blood libels and denounced as vile and abusive. As in the example of the Community Security Trust’s smearing of Johann Hari, this rhetoric does away with the material evidence, slandering as antisemites those who report and analyze violations of human rights. Moreover, by identifying criticisms of Israel as evidence of a “new antisemitism,” it produces the illusion of a widespread resurgence of Jew-hatred, thereby legitimizing further aggressions as self-defense.
The pattern is one of a perverse feedback loop. Israel is treated as effectively indistinguishable from world Jewry—a point made forcefully when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was introduced at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Washington, DC in November 2009 as “the leader of Israel and the leader of the Jewish people,”2 and again when he himself declared in January 2010, at a ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz sixty-five years ago, that “From this place, I swear as the leader of the Jewish people, never again shall we allow evil to hurt our people.”3 (The many Israelis who voted against Netanyahu, and the many diaspora Jews who regard him as a violent and dangerous hypocrite, were not asked what they thought of these Mosaic pretensions.)
How is it possible, within this ideology, to interpret thoroughgoing criticism of the state led by such a politician as anything but antisemitic? Of course, the deeper that state plunges into apartheid policies, the more vocal become the criticisms of its behaviour—and the more persuasive therefore the evidence is that not just Israelis but Jews worldwide are beset by antisemites, whose evil desires “to hurt our people” must be combated by all means available.
Another complementary (and equally perverse) feedback loop is set in motion by this one—a loop in which the vile prejudices of a real if residual antisemitism find confirmation in the lawless violence of a state that the antisemite believes, because ideologues like Netanyahu tell him so, is acting on behalf of Jews worldwide. Of course, this second loop also amplifies the first one: any increase in real, and not just imagined antisemitism that may be prompted by the state of Israel’s words and deeds is grist to the “new antisemitism” propaganda mill.
* * * *
As Norman Finkelstein has remarked, “the allegation of a new anti-Semitism is neither new nor about anti-Semitism.”4 Over the past thirty-five years the term has been persistently advanced in books by national leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL): Arnold Forster’s and Benjamin Epstein’s The New Anti-Semitism (1974), Nathan and Ruth-Ann Perlmutter’s The Real Anti-Semitism in America (1982), and Abraham Foxman’s Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (2003); and their work has been supplemented by a chorus of [209] other writers, among them Phyllis Chesler and Gabriel Schoenfeld, authors, respectively, of The New Anti-Semitism (2003) and The Return of Anti-Semitism (2004).5
Where there is so much smoke, there must be fire—but lit by whom, and for what purposes? Finkelstein argues that the intention of these books, and of the “meticulously orchestrated media extravaganzas” that have accompanied them, “is not to fight anti-Semitism but rather to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism.”6
The principal target of Forster’s and Epstein’s polemic was not the New York Times or the Washington Post, which they castigated for going easy on antisemites; or Norman Jewison, whose film version of Jesus Christ Superstar they attacked. Rather, as Finkelstein shows through extensive quotation, it was “criticism directed at Israel after the October 1973 war, when new pressures were exerted on Israel to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai and to reach a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians.” Interpreting this criticism as “hostility” to Israel, Forster and Epstein defined it as “the heart of the new anti-Semitism.”7
In the Perlmutters’ book, the “real” antisemitism is similarly defined, Finkelstein observes, “as any challenge inimical to Jewish interests”:
“Essentially [the Perlmutters write], this book’s thesis is that today the interests of Jews are not so much threatened by their familiar nemesis, crude anti-Semitism, as by a-Semitic government policies, the proponents of which may be free of anti-Semitism and indeed may well—literally—count Jews among some of their best friends.” Practically, this meant pinning the epithet “anti-Semitic” on domestic challenges to Jewish class privilege and political power as well as on global challenges to Israeli hegemony. American Jewish elites were, in effect and in plain sight, cynically appropriating “anti-Semitism”—an historical phenomenon replete with suffering and martyrdom, on the one hand, and hatred and genocide, on the other—as an ideological weapon to defend and facilitate ethnic aggrandizement.8
It is telling that the Perlmutters allied themselves with the openly antisemitic, and yet pro-Israel, ideologues of the religious right, while regarding the liberal Protestants of the National Council of Churches, whose leadership in opposing antisemitism they acknowledged, as opponents because of their criticisms of Israeli violations of international law.9
In Abraham Foxman’s 2003 book, Finkelstein argues, the ideology of the new antisemitism arrived at its mature form and “reveal[ed] its true essence”—for in this book, despite chapters on “The Rift between American Blacks and Jews,” and on the racism of right-wing extremists, “all pretenses were dropped that it was about anything except Israel.” Finkelstein briskly outlines Foxman’s logic:
[210] [T]he reasoning is that, since Israel represents the “Jew among nations,” criticism of Israel springs from the same poisoned well as anti-Semitism and therefore is, by definition, anti-Semitic. And since the last major outbreak of anti-Semitism climaxed in The Holocaust, those currently criticizing Israel are fomenting a new Holocaust. “Very quickly,” Foxman portends in Never Again? “the actual survival of the Jewish people might once again be at risk.” The transparent motive behind these assertions is to taint any criticism of Israel as motivated by anti-Semitism and—inverting reality—to turn Israel (and Jews), not Palestinians, into the victims of the “current siege” (Chesler).10
As can be seen from other recent texts—among them Pierre-André Taguieff’s Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe (2004), a translation of his La nouvelle judéophobie (2002); Fiamma Nirenstein’s Terror: The New Anti-Semitism and the War Against the West (2005), translated from her L’Abbandono (2003) and Gli Antisemiti Progressisti (2004); some of the essays collected by David I. Kertzer in Old Demons, New Debates (2005); Alan Dershowitz’s The Case Against Israel’s Enemies (2008); and Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism (2009), by Denis MacShane, the Labour MP who chaired the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism—claims about a new antisemitism continue to be vigorously advanced.11 But though each of these texts adds new flourishes and new examples, the basic line of argument remains the one laid out by their ADL precursors.
Rhetorical Turns
The tropes of traditional antisemitism that we encountered in the preceding chapter—the conspiracy trope, the trope of dual loyalty, the trope of defilement, and the blood libel—have a degree of rhetorical complexity that may be worth reflecting on.
The conspiracy trope, with roots in New Testament fictions about the behaviour of Caiaphas the High Priest and his Sanhedrin in the trial of Jesus, took shape through the same passion for symmetry that seats an infant Antichrist in the lap of Satan, in direct imitation of the infant Jesus with the Virgin Mary, in the great 12th-century Last Judgment mosaic in the Italian cathedral of Torcello. Antisemites found it tempting to conceive of a demonic Jewish equivalent to the Pope and his College of Cardinals—and what could such a body concern itself with, if not a demonic parody of the papacy’s claim to universal spiritual regency? From here it’s not a great distance to the fantasies elaborated in that grotesque late-19th-century forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The same process of mimetic projection and inversion gave rise to that most revolting of antisemitic tropes, the blood libel, which evidently stemmed from reflection on the image of the Christ child, the future crucified Redeemer [211] whose blood would be shed to atone for human sins.12 The disbelief of Jews in this Messiah was generally thought to exclude them from the community for whom Christ’s blood was spilled; through a sick projection and inversion, this conviction prompted accusations of ritual murder involving the crucifixion of a Christian child in a demonic parody of the Christian narrative of redemption.13 Further extensions of the same process led to elaborations including a parodic kosher butchery of the victim, whose blood would then be incorporated into Passover matzohs in a blasphemous mockery of the Mass.14
The conspiracy trope and the blood libel represent the obviously dominant Christian community as victimized—and the blood libel was clearly aimed at inciting the ‘victims’ to take revenge, in the form of judicial and mob violence against Jews. The full pattern, then, is one in which mimetic projection and inversion produce an illusion of victimization and consequently an incitement to persecution and violence.
While these antisemitic tropes displace structures of Christian belief into forms that provoke persecutory social action, the rhetoric developed by the ideologues of the “new antisemitism” involves a further act of displacement—one in which the antisemitic tropes are used as an overlay or re-description that serves to occult or erase actual present-day social actions.
The material reality may be that AIPAC, with an estimated budget of $40 to $60 million, is indeed the most powerful and most effective lobby on Capitol Hill;15 and that, as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as written, “Under AIPAC pressure, there are few significant countervailing voices in the public arena, and any balanced debate is still practically nonexistent in the U.S. Congress or among presidential hopefuls.”16 But when such perceptions as Carter’s are re-described as mere revivals of the trope of a Jewish world conspiracy, the putative material reality becomes unspeakable—except by those willing to court being branded as antisemites.
Accusations, however well substantiated, of Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians, can similarly be re-described as no more than a renewal of the ancient and despicable blood libel. Thus in March 2009 Jonathan Kay of the National Post complained that “From the opening days of the Gaza campaign, the blood-libels of ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ have flown thick and fast”; and on the same day, his English counterpart in unwavering support for Israel, Melanie Phillips, went so far as to accuse the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of a blood libel for having reported the testimony of Israeli soldiers that they had witnessed and participated in war crimes against Gaza civilians.17 In August 2009 a Human Rights Watch report that documented the murder during Operation Cast Lead of eleven Palestinian civilians holding white flags was dismissed by an American pro-Israel blog as “a blood libel disguised as an investigative report.”18
But by mid-September 2009, when the Goldstone Report, Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, was released, with its meticulous and [212] scrupulous documenting of war crimes, the blood-libel tactic seemed to be losing its effectiveness.
Harvard law professor and Israel apologist Alan Dershowitz let out all the stops in denouncing Richard Goldstone, the principal author of the UN report, as “a full-fledged member of the international bash-Israel chorus” whose name “will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter. The so-called report commissioned by the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council and issued under his name is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists.” 19
In the extremity of his rage, Dershowitz is unwilling to concede even that the “so-called” report is a report.
There are multiple ironies here: Goldstone is, like Dershowitz, a very senior member of the legal profession, a Jew, and a lifelong Zionist. The difference between them would appear to reside in the fact that Goldstone’s personal and judicial integrity has led him to face up to realities—in the case of the attack on Gaza, appalling realities—of a kind that Dershowitz has spent most of his adult life concealing, distorting, or defending.
* * * *
One of the more influential voices among what I have called the ideologues of the new antisemitism is that of Irwin Cotler, Professor of Law at McGill University, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism, at whose February 2009 meeting the Canadian delegation of which Cotler was the co-leader decided to form a Canadian branch of this international body, and to follow the British example of conducting a parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism.
In the presentation he made to a conference in Jerusalem in 1999, Professor Cotler expressed his outrage over international condemnations of Israel for human rights violations. He identified some poignant ironies in this situation, writing that
there is a clear symbolic—if not symbiotic—relationship between Israel, the United Nations, and human rights. For if the commitment underpinning the Genocide Convention is “never again,” then Israel is a state born of that commitment; and if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was designed to be the Magna Carta of humankind, Israel was to be, in the words of its founders, “a light unto the nations”; if the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were to be commemorative of international humanitarian law, the genocide of European Jewry was the paradigmatic basis for the “grave breaches” of the laws of war as set forth in the Geneva Convention.20
[213] Cotler found it paradoxical, to say the least, that
a state which advocated fifty years ago for the establishment of an international criminal court to bring war criminals to justice—and pioneered in the development of international criminal law—now finds its settlement policy characterized as a serious war crime under the draft Treaty to establish an International Criminal Court; and a state committed to the pursuit of peace becomes the only state singled out for condemnation as a “non-peace loving nation” by two Emergency Sessions of the UN General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace Resolutions.21
One might expect some recourse to historical evidence on the part of a writer interested in challenging condemnations of Israel’s human rights record—but it is clear that Cotler is not interested in historical actualities. No responsible scholar approaching the issues on which he was touching could fail to have been aware that the myth of the untarnished, heroic birth of the state of Israel as “a light unto the nations” had been effectively demolished by historians like Michael Palumbo and Benny Morris, whose books documented the atrocities involved in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948.22 And the bland description of Israel as “a state committed to the pursuit of peace” appears more metaphysical than historical in character: for the period since 1971 especially, its falsity is quickly exposed by any honest recourse to the historical record.23
Cotler’s wording suggests, moreover, that this expert in human rights law does not recognize the international consensus according to which it is clear from Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, together with UN Security Council Resolutions 446, 452, 465, 471, and 476, that Israel’s settlements are indeed serious and flagrant violations of international law.24
Cotler takes it as axiomatic that criticisms of Israel must be false. On the basis of this dogma, his paper defines and distinguishes between old and new antisemitisms, analyzes the identifying features of the “New Anti-Jewishness,” and proceeds to a “case-study” of its operations in the UN, in the course of which he offers the striking image of Israel as being, in UN representations, the international “poisoner of the wells.” This is, by now, a familiar rhetorical turn: if we know a priori that UN condemnations of Israel’s behaviour are simply revivals of a disgraceful antisemitic trope, then there is no need to bother with any of the evidence on which they might be based.
Cotler is effectively extending the peculiar doctrine of American exceptionalism to cover the state of Israel as well. Most Americans have imbibed from childhood a mythic, religiously-inflected representation of their country as the culmination of a world-historical story of human liberation and material progress. And since to be the end-point, the goal or telos of a story of such grandeur is also in a sense to escape from the story—the New Jerusalem or [214] the City on a Hill is not a city like any other, merely historical one—they have found it easy to believe that their own uniquely virtuous country somehow stands outside the structures of socio-economic causality and grubby Realpolitik that motivate other nation-states.25
Not surprisingly, exceptionalism gives free play to hypocrisy and self-deception. As Lewis Lapham has put it, “The doctrines of American exceptionalism forbid American politicians to see any contradiction between what they practice and what they preach. America is always and everywhere innocent, a country so favored by fortune that its cause is always just.”26
Exceptionalism amounts to a form of American civic religion. And as Cotler made clear in a widely-cited version of this paper that he published in the Jerusalem Post in 2004, it is in similarly quasi-religious terms that he sees the conflict between Israel and the United Nations. One manifestation of political antisemitism, he says, is
discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the Jewish people’s right to self-determination […]. To the extent that Israel has emerged as the “civil religion” of world Jewry—the organizing idiom of Jewish self-determination—this new anti-Semitism is a per se assault, in contemporary terms, on the religious and national sensibility of the Jewish people.27
Cotler proposes that another manifestation of political antisemitism, “the ‘demonizing’ of Israel,” needs to be understood in relation to a different form of secularized religion:
This [“demonizing”] is the contemporary analogue to the medieval indictment of the Jew as the “poisoner of the wells.” In other words, in a world in which human rights has emerged as the new secular religion of our time, the portrayal of Israel as the metaphor for a human rights violator is an indictment of Israel as the “new anti-Christ”—as the “poisoner of the international wells” […].28
Two comments are called for here. First, the criticisms of Israel’s human rights record in UN forums have been based, not on metaphor, but on considerations of legality and of material evidence. It is Cotler, and not the UN, who wants to reconfigure this issue as a problem of rhetoric, rather than a matter of persistently illegal actions that have caused irreparable harm to large numbers of people.
Indeed, his evocation of “new-antisemitism” tropes of metaphorical well-poisoning and of Israel as a “new anti-Christ” looks uncommonly like shadow-boxing. Since it is Cotler, and no-one else, who produces these tropes, and since he gives no evidence that they have actually figured in UN deliberations, one may be tempted to conclude that any injury resulting from their use is self-inflicted.
[215] Secondly, Cotler’s framing of the matter in terms of a sacralized Israeli state facing off against a secular religion of human rights is in several respects unfortunate. If his remarks on Jewish self-determination are meant to imply that there exists any real threat to the continued existence of Israel as a state, they are a serious exaggeration.29 If, on the other hand, Cotler wishes to imply that a Jewish right to self-determination extinguishes, a priori and forever, the right of Palestinians to a parallel self-determination,30 then he is putting his own reputation as an upholder of human rights at risk.
And what of Cotler’s claims on behalf of “world Jewry”? Setting aside the fact that for some communities of orthodox Jews a concession of religious value to any state is blasphemous, many Jews worldwide regard a commitment to debate, vigorous dissent, and dissidence as a central feature of their culture and their spirituality: the very name of Israel was conferred upon the patriarch Jacob for wrestling with his God.
Large numbers of such people, while feeling a deep and abiding affection for the country, Israel, are vehemently opposed to the policies into which that nation’s ruling elites, aided and abetted by American Zionism,31 have led it. They would object to any even implicit sacralizing of those policies, and would resent any insinuation, however indirect, that their sensibility as Jews—whether religious, national, or bound up with ethical, familial, and ethnic-cultural traditions—could be “assaulted” by the universally binding principles of human rights, even if Professor Cotler wants to represent these as having become conflated with a “new antisemitism.”32
How Episodes of Academic Antisemitism Have Been Invented
During the early and mid-1990s, the North American news media were awash with scandalous stories about an alarming and systematic suppression of academic and intellectual freedoms in American and Canadian universities: sane and decent academics and students alike were being terrorized by radical “politically correct” literary scholars—feminists, Foucauldians, deconstructionists, new historicists, cultural materialists—and their student acolytes, who together made up a rampaging horde denounced by right-wing pundits as “cultural storm troopers,” “moral vigilantes,” “Red guards,” “academic Brownshirts,” “new puritans,” and “PC thought police.”
Scholarly analysis of the evidence revealed, however, that in the vast majority of cases, the abusive behaviour so noisily denounced in the media was either fabricated wholesale or else a product of grotesque and malicious exaggeration. The real problem was that a coalition of powerful forces in government, in right-wing corporate-funded think-tanks, and in the corporate media had discovered (somewhat belatedly) that wide-ranging forms of ethically oriented cultural criticism were gaining a foothold, not just in literary studies [216] but throughout the human sciences, with the result that academic disciplines which had formerly been reliable upholders of the status quo were becoming places where critical analyses based on issues of colonization, settlement, gender, race, and social class were widely approved.
The so-called “political correctness debates”—more accurately referred to as the “culture wars,” because they produced more vituperation than debate, more heat than light—were primarily an attempt by these powerful forces to tame and purge dissident elements within the academy. The rhetoric with which “anti-PC” polemicists sought to drum up public support for this project by creating a state of moral panic made heavy use of lurid narratives of victimization. Where such narratives were not available—and they very seldom were—polemicists simply made them up wholesale.33
There is good reason to think that contemporary accusations of a widespread “new antisemitism” within North American universities—which an article in the National Post devoted to recent events at York University suggested can only be cured by a systematic purging of “hateful elements”34—are an attempt to repeat this pattern.
In 2002 Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism at Columbia University, expressed dismay over an apparent return of the “rough beast” of antisemitism. His primary evidence was a widely-circulated email message from Laurie Zoloth, then-director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. Zoloth denounced her own university as “the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control”—the purported neo-Nazis being “an angry crowd of Palestinians,” an “out of control mob” who launched a “raw, physical assault” on “praying students, and the elderly women who are our college participants, who survived the Holocaust,” while the police looked on and did nothing.35
Had Gitlin taken the trouble to check his source (as he presumably teaches journalism students to do), he might have discovered, Norman Finkelstein writes, that
the consensus among Jewish spokespersons in the Bay Area, including Dr. Fred Astren, current director of Jewish Studies at SFSU (and a personal witness to the alleged incident), was that Zoloth had a penchant for “wild exaggeration,” born of a mindset nurtured in “Marxist-Leninist” politics—except that she’s in thrall not, as in bygone days, to the Soviet Union, but to “the Jewish State of Israel, a state that I cherish.” The police didn’t intervene because nothing happened warranting their intervention.36
Other similar stories—a claim in late 2003 that “A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke at Yale University” had been “attacked in his dormitory by a Palestinian,” and a report in 2004 that at the University of Chicago “a university-appointed preceptor told a Jewish student he would not read her BA paper because it focused on topics related to Judaism and Zionism”37—turned out to be groundless fictions.38
[217] Three recent episodes, one at UCLA and two at Toronto’s York University, invite more extended consideration. In all three cases distortions and falsifications can be traced, and all three were marked by interventions from member organizations of the very powerful Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), which gathers together thirty American pro-Israel organizations, among them AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), CAMERA, The David Project, Aish HaTorah/Hasbara Fellowships, Hillel/The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Media Watch International, StandWithUs, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), as well as five affiliate members, including Simon Wiesenthal Center Campus Outreach. At York University there have also been interventions from member organizations of a proportionately no less powerful Canadian umbrella organization, the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA),39 as well as from B’nai Brith Canada and, more disturbingly, from the terrorist-vigilante Jewish Defence League.
* * * *
Professors David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi have written at some length about the consequences of interventions on California university campuses of the Israel on Campus Coalition—most particularly in relation to a January 2009 panel discussion on “Human Rights and Gaza” hosted by UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies in which they took part, Makdisi as a panelist and Goldberg as a member of the audience.40 They describe an academic event marked throughout by civility, even by occasional applause and laughter from the audience, despite a somewhat “heated and contentious” question and discussion period.
However, on February 1, 2009 Roberta Seid, the research director of StandWithUs, published an article entitled “Reviving 1920’s Munich’s Beer Halls at UCLA” which was laced with malicious falsehoods,41 and which set off an ascending spiral of further distortions. Seid said that the four panelists “expressed hope that Israel would lose against Hamas,” and claimed that in response to one panelist’s answer to a question, “The audience roared with laughter and some began chanting ‘Zionism is racism’ and ‘Free Free Palestine’.”
Two days later, ardently pro-Israel UCLA professor Judea Pearl, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described the panel as “a Hamas recruitment rally” conducted by “terrorist sympathizers.”42 This motif was picked up by Tom Tugend, who wrote in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles on February 11 that “outraged critics across the country” were characterizing the symposium as an “‘academic lynching,’ a ‘one-sided witch hunt of Israel,’ a ‘Hamas recruiting rally’”; at the same time he inflated Seid’s account of the discussion period by saying that the panelist’s answer “was met by audience cheers and chants [218] of ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘Zionism is Nazism,’ ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and ‘F…, f… Israel’.”43
A week later Judea Pearl wrote in the same journal that “the panelists […] bashed Israel, her motives, her character, her birth and conception and led the excited audience into chanting ‘Zionism is Nazism,’ ‘F---, f--- Israel’ […].”44 In this article, Pearl expressed outrage that “the word ‘terror’ and the genocidal agenda of Hamas were conspicuously absent” from an account of the panel discussion, entitled “Scholars Say Attack on Gaza an Abuse of Human Rights,” that had been published by the campus newspaper, the UCLA Daily Bruin. One might wonder why a news report should focus on matters that appear to have been conspicuously absent from the event itself. But Pearl’s complaint is simply an extension of the slanders of his Wall Street Journal article: from the notion that “terrorist sympathizers” were taking part in “a Hamas recruitment rally,” he draws the insinuation that they must also have been engaged in incitements to genocide.45
Of course, neither Tugend nor Pearl had been present at the UCLA event. Goldberg and Makdisi, who were there, insist that there was no chanting, and no invective directed by audience members or panelists “at Israel or at any other state.” They invite readers to compare podcast recordings of the panel with the claims made by hostile interpreters—at the same time regretting that distortions and fabrications “have become the public record of note, the ‘truth’ of the matter.”46
By the time Pearl returned for a third time to the attack, writing in mid-March in the Los Angeles Times that the event was a “hate-fest” in which “the excited audience reportedly chanted ‘Zionism is Nazism’ and worse,”47 the subject had indeed been successfully changed. The questions of human rights law and human rights abuses analyzed by the panelists had largely disappeared from public discussion; the issue instead had become one of whether or not the panelists and their audience were guilty of disgraceful outbursts of antisemitism.
* * * *
As Dan Freeman-Maloy has shown in a carefully documented essay, somewhat less civil student-organized events at Toronto’s York University in February 2009 were subjected to a similarly cynical process of falsification.48 On February 11, 2009, the Jewish student organization Hillel and the Israel advocacy group Hasbara Fellowships (both of them well-funded members of the ICC) called a press conference to publicize their campaign to impeach the leadership of the York Federation of Students (YFS), which in January had passed a resolution condemning Israeli attacks on educational institutions in Gaza. There are competing accounts as to whether pro-YFS students were deliberately barred from the press conference or excluded because of the size of the room that had been booked. Believing the former to be the case, [219] supporters of YFS demonstrated noisily outside the press conference room, with chants including “Shame on Hillel,” “Zionism is racism,” and “Racists off campus”—“Not messaging everyone can get behind,” as Freeman-Maloy comments, “but hardly anti-Semitic.”
Accounts of this student confrontation were published by York’s student newspaper, the Excalibur, by an alternative left campus newspaper, the YU Free Press, and by the Globe and Mail, all of which had reporters on hand; another response by a Jewish student who had attended the press conference was published online by Jonathan Kay at the National Post. The sheer numbers of students outside the press-conference room (and subsequently the Hillel office) alarmed Hillel members, and the author of the National Post article records having been frightened by the stare of a pro-Palestinian student wearing a Kaffeiyah scarf over part of his face. But as Freeman-Maloy remarks, “No quotes from Hillel spokespeople are relayed in any of these stories alleging specifically anti-Semitic statements.”
On the next day, February 12, 2009, a demonstration of some 150 students condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza in York University’s Vari Hall was confronted by a Hillel counter-demonstration of equal or larger size—whose participants included Frank Dimant, the leader of B’nai Brith Canada, together with some of his colleagues, and reportedly also Bernie Farber, the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. If the aim of this counter-demonstration was to disrupt the pro-Palestinian event and drown out its would-be speakers with counter-chanting, it appears to have succeeded. Freeman-Maloy writes that he was present at this event, and is not aware “of one half-credible allegation of anti-Semitism relating to it.”
A viewing of the seven distinct videotapes of this demonstration and counter-demonstration listed by Independent Jewish Voices in the first of their contributions to this book is instructive.49 These videotapes show that two banner-carrying Jewish groups took part in the demonstration against Israel’s behaviour in Gaza, and that the participants in that demonstration apparently ignored provocative behaviour by some of the counter-demonstrators (no responses to their shouted taunts are audible, and the Jewish pro-Palestinian demonstrators turned their banners away from the counter-demonstration). The counter-demonstration included one potentially intimidating feature: a line of young men in black T-shirts with the slogan “Jews Need Not Fear Here” in large block letters on their chests. Decent people would agree that Jews should not suffer intimidation on campuses, or anywhere else, but the primary message projected by such uniforms in a confrontational demonstration might well be that people—including pro-Palestinian Jews—with views opposed to those of the counter-demonstrators should themselves be fearful, especially if, as seems possible, the men were members of the Jewish Defence League Canada, an extremist vigilante organization with a terrorist past and an ongoing commitment to violence.50
[220] On February 13, 2009 the National Post carried a story in which Hillel@York president Daniel Ferman claimed that demonstrators on February 11 had called him a “dirty Jew” and “f---ing Jew.” Though unsubstantiated, as well as politically convenient, the claim is not implausible. But on the same day, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), followed on February 15 by the Jerusalem Post, added “a new pair of alleged (and unattributed) quotes: ‘Die bitch, go back to Israel’; ‘Die Jew, get the hell off campus’.” As Freeman-Maloy notes, these death threats were not reported to the police who were on campus on February 11, nor witnessed by any of the reporters present, “nor accompanied by any effort to determine who said these things or to whom the threatening comments were directed.”51 They would appear to belong to the same category as the nasty chanting that never occurred at the UCLA panel discussion on “Human Rights and Gaza.”
The drift from a confrontational but non-violent pair of encounters between opposing groups of students on the York campus, during which no antisemitic statements or gestures were detected by any of the reporters in attendance, to a fiction that could be summed up on February 15 by a columnist in the Jerusalem Post as “violent anti-Jewish riots at York University in Toronto, Canada,”52 was rapid and seemingly effortless. By late February Frank Dimant of B’nai Brith had embellished the story further, claiming to the Ottawa Citizen that “People were banging on walls and screaming things like ‘death to the Jews’.”53
Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney weighed in as well, declaring on February 23, 2009 that “This stuff is getting out of control,” and blaming the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents graduate teaching assistants and contract faculty at Ontario universities and has been urging boycott action against Israel, for “creat[ing] an opinion environment which makes it acceptable to start shouting at Jewish kids who probably also happen to support Israel.”54 In September 2009, speaking in Thornhill, Ontario, Kenney charged that “Israel Apartheid Days on university campuses like York sometimes begin to resemble pogroms”—a remark that journalist Linda McQuaig has challenged, noting that to compare “intense debate” and “heated exchanges to pogroms—organized campaigns of slaughter and pillage of European Jews—is absurd.”55
* * * *
A more recent event at York University initially followed a similar trajectory, but then took a surprising turn. Tyler Golden, Co-President of Hasbara Fellowships at York University,56 informed the news website Shalom Life that when on February 1, 2010 he and other members of Hasbara were distributing information about the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and about their “Free Palestinians from Hamas” campaign from a table in Vari Hall, “several anti-Israel known faces on campus” came to question and debate with them—a [221] group that quickly swelled, in the Shalom Life journalist’s words, “into an angry mob of around 50 students, who surrounded [Golden’s] group and chanted anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs.” When Hasbara students began to videotape this behaviour, Golden said, some students on the other side “were upset that there were cameras in their faces, so they started yelling and screaming. As they were trying to push cameras out of the way, they actually hit two students.”57 Hasbara Fellowships Co-President Marlee Mozeson, who claimed to have been one of the victims of assault—she had been slapped and had her camera knocked out of her hand—declared that “The University’s steps to ensure a safe campus for all have been proven unsuccessful and ineffective. We call on the University to take immediate action to restore order and safety for all students on campus.”58
By February 3 Meir Weinstein, head of the JDL in Canada, had signaled his organization’s intention of taking vigilante action by offering a reward for information that would enable the JDL to track down the supposed perpetrators. Here is the text of his reward notice, in the form in which he posted it on February 5:
Two Jewish Students were the victims of hate crimes and assaults at York University Monday February 1
The Jewish Defence League of Canada is offering a $500.00 reward for the assailants identities, names, alias, phone numbers and addresses (work and home)
Contact the Jewish Defence League of Canada at 416-736-7000 or www.jdl-canada.com [….]
Meir Weinstein, Toronto (02/05/10)59
The story of Jewish students being assaulted at York quickly went international, with an account published by the news service JTA on February 7 that was reproduced in the Jerusalem Post the following day.60 But on February 8 the story unraveled: CCTV surveillance video from Vari Hall, the site of the incident, revealed that the Hasbara students’ claims to have been assaulted were false. As Elad Benari of Shalom Life wrote in a follow-up article,
At one point, it can be seen that an argument may have taken place; however, at no point during the video is there any evidence of a brawl, nor can a shouting match be evident from the students’ body language. At several points, cameras are being used by the students, and at one point a female student who obviously does not take well to being on camera tries to reach for the camera, but the male student holding it lifts it up so it is out of her reach. No evidence of students being physically assaulted can be found during the video.61
[222] The student newspaper Excalibur interviewed Jesse Zimmerman, a pro-Palestinian student activist who had been among the group that approached the Hasbara table:
“There was never a mob,” he said. “There were four of us, and they [Hasbara] were surrounding us and making personal attacks on us and yelling shit at me.”
Surveillance footage made available to Excalibur shows no evidence of a physical brawl. While the footage lacks audio, it does clearly show that no one physically touched another person or invaded anyone’s space in a threatening manner.
Body language is exuberant, at most, but never aggressive. No more than 20 to 30 people can be seen around the table in the video, including both parties and bystanders. Two visible handheld cameras can be seen on screen, none of which is smacked to the ground.62
Zimmerman’s account of the number of pro-Palestinian students involved in the incident is supported by the JTA report of February 7 (republished in the Jerusalem Post), which notes that the alleged assaults “occurred when about 20 Jewish members of the on-campus group Hasbara Fellowships at York University gathered, with permission from the university, to raise awareness of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and terrorist acts committed by Hamas.”63 The approach of Zimmerman and his three companions would bring the number of students present to about two dozen; add in some bystanders, and we have the full number visible in the CCTV videotape.
The claim that fifty or so activists “surrounded the Jewish students and began chanting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs” was, then, no less a fabrication than the assaults.
It appears that Jesse Zimmerman and his companions are the ones who were surrounded, and that Golden, having perhaps taken part in some less than civil behaviour, promptly inverted the reality to make himself and his friends into victims. Zimmerman, who evidently told the truth about the numbers involved in the tabling incident, also told the Excalibur reporter that his Palestinian activism “has made him the target of non-stop harassment by pro-Israel students. ‘They have harassed me online and in person […] I don’t feel safe on campus,’ said Zimmerman.”64
York University’s handling of these two episodes, in February 2009 and February 2010, seems oddly unbalanced. Students Against Israeli Apartheid, the group that organized the demonstration in Vari Hall on February 12, 2009, was fined $1,000 by the university for making noise that disturbed classes being held in the same building; an additional fine of $250 was levied on the leader of the group. No fine was imposed on Hillel.
[223] York University has to date made no public reference to the fact that the falsehoods disseminated by the campus leaders of Hasbara Fellowships in February 2010 were not just damaging to the university’s reputation, but also exposed other students to a serious risk of stalking, harassment, and violence at the hands of a dangerous extremist group, the JDL.
B’nai Brith’s weekly journal, the Jewish Tribune, published an article on February 10, 2010 praising York University for “taking complaints about anti-Semitism seriously during this school year […].” The article quotes from a press release issued by Hasbara Fellowships in which “the group ‘commends York University for their swift investigation into … [an] incident where [allegedly] two Jewish students were assaulted in Vari Hall on Feb. 1, 2010.’”65
Hasbara Fellowships makes no acknowledgment of or apology for the fact that its allegations had been exposed as fraudulent—even the bracketed word “allegedly” appears to have been supplied by the Jewish Tribune—but it now patronizingly commends security arrangements it had a week previously denounced as “unsuccessful and ineffective.” This press release seems an instance not so much of hasbara (the Hebrew word means “explanation” or, more accurately, “propaganda”), as of chutzpah (the primary meaning of which in Hebrew is “shamelessness”).66
The university, for its part, has avoided any hint of reproach. The Jewish Tribune quotes York’s director of media relations, Alex Bilyk, as saying, with some delicacy, “that although Hasbara did not wish to involve the police when filing its initial complaint, ‘we viewed [a tape of the incident] for our own peace of mind. If we had felt there was a physical safety issue, we would have filed a police report.’”67
What, then, of the JDL’s clear and very public threat of violence against members of the university community? Mr. Bilyk did not say whether he thought this raised a physical safety issue that might justify dropping a line to the Toronto police.
‘Academic Terror’
In the second of his three articles dealing, at greater or lesser length, with the UCLA panel on “Human Rights and Gaza,” Professor Judea Pearl denounced the “academic terror” to which he claimed pro-Israel academics in the U.S. are being subjected. Colleagues have told him, he says, “about lecturers whose appointments were terminated, professors whose promotion committees received ‘incriminating’ letters, and about the impossibility of revealing one’s pro-Israel convictions without losing grants, editorial board memberships, or invitations to panels or conferences.”
Should we find this all a bit vague, Pearl explains the absence of detail: “all, literally all” of his terrorized colleagues “swore [him] into strict secrecy”—a fact, for anyone gullible enough to accept it as such, that seems designed to reinforce Pearl’s claim that “we have entered the era of ‘the new Marranos.’”68 [224] But once we move beyond unsubstantiated rumours such as this, the available evidence indicates, on the contrary, that the academics whose reputations and careers have been placed at risk in the U.S. and Canada are those who have been bold enough to criticize the geopolitics of the American empire—and, in particular, the behaviour of the state of Israel toward the Palestinians of the occupied territories, as well as the comportment of Israel’s passionate and uncritical North American supporters.
Thus, for example, Dr. Joseph Massad of Columbia University’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) was the object of a three-year witch-hunt between 2002 and 2005. Massad’s persecution may have been prompted by his articles on Palestine, published in scholarly journals like Social Text, Middle East Journal, Critique, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, and perhaps also by the incisive and much more widely circulated essays he has contributed to Al Ahram Weekly.69 It was initiated by faculty members of Columbia’s medical school, who sought to co-opt students into working toward his dismissal; it was taken up by the Columbia Spectator, whose misquotations of Massad’s words, though quickly corrected, were maliciously reproduced by the pro-Israel propagandists Martin Kramer of Tel Aviv University and Daniel Pipes, originator of the neo-McCarthyite Campus Watch. The campaign was joined by New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, and amplified by the New York Sun and the New York Post; it was taken to a new height by The David Project, which circulated to university administrators and journalists a film, Columbia Unbecoming, in which students and non-students complained of supposed instances of antisemitic intimidation; and, finally, it was given added impetus by Columbia’s president Lee Bollinger, who in public statements shamefully accepted easily disproven allegations as facts.70
Despite the best efforts of the Anti-Defamation League, The David Project, the New York tabloid press, Columbia medical school colleagues who circulated racist and threatening emails, Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch (with the tag-team work of Pipes’ Tel Aviv friend Martin Kramer), as well as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who felt called upon to intervene,71 Massad remains a faculty member—now tenured—at Columbia. The reasons for his survival include an outstanding teaching record and obvious brilliance as a scholar,72 the international support he received from defenders of academic freedom, and the simple fact that, as a New York Times editorial observed, there was no evidence “that anyone’s grade suffered for challenging the pro-Palestinian views of any teacher or that [MEALAC] professors made anti-Semitic statements.” Indeed, the editorial acknowledged, “the professors who were targeted have legitimate complaints themselves. Their classes were infiltrated by hecklers and surreptitious monitors, and they received hate mail and death threats.”73
The New York Times was itself far from innocent in this affair: rather, as University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole noted, it “slammed” [225] the university committee that investigated Massad “for not being inquisitorial enough,” thereby lending its support to a “witch hunt” that Cole thought, in the spring of 2005, represented “the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades.”74
* * * *
Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist who came up for tenure at DePaul University in 2007, was less fortunate than Mossad, possibly because his major publications had in a more particular way exposed and embarrassed powerful pro-Zionist institutions and individuals.
Finkelstein first gained wide public notice, and some influential enemies, by revealing the fraudulence of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (1984), a best-seller that sought through demographic analysis to revive the Zionist myth of Palestine as a land without people awaiting the return of a people without land, and that had been acclaimed by Daniel Pipes, Martin Peretz, Lucy Dawidowicz, Barbara Tuchman, and Nobel Laureates Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel. In the wake of a devastating review by demographer Yehoshua Porath, and of Finkelstein’s analysis, published as a long essay and then as a chapter in his first book, From Time Immemorial has been recognized by historians as worthless.75
Finkelstein’s critique of another widely praised book, Daniel Goldhagen’s prize-winning Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), was first published as a review essay in New Left Review. But on this occasion plans to republish the analysis, together with another review essay by historian Ruth Bettina Birn that had appeared in the Cambridge Historical Journal, were met with a concerted campaign by mainstream Jewish organizations to strangle the project in its cradle.
Abraham Foxman of the ADL wrote to Finkelstein’s editor at Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Holt, calling his opinions “beyond the pale”; and Leon Weseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, denounced Finkelstein to Holt’s publisher, Michael Naumann, as “poison,” “a self-hating Jew, […] something you find under a rock.”76
The pressures against Birn were if anything more extreme. Goldhagen threatened her with legal action, and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) warned Birn, who was chief historian in the War Crimes section of Canada’s Ministry of Justice, to drop the book project: “‘Publish,’ sniff[ed] CJC spokesman Bernie Farber, ‘but don’t publish with someone who’s loathed and despised by the Jewish community.’” When Birn, in response, complained of intimidation, saying that “the real story for Canadians [….] is a question of the attempted suppression of fair comment through the exertion of political influence,”77 she was accused by CJC president Goldie Herson of “what some might consider an anti-Semitic canard,” and the Justice Department was pressured into launching an investigation. In the mean time, Mordecai Briemberg writes, “Irving Abella, [226] incoming president of the Canadian Historical Association and past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), pronounced Finkelstein ‘an enemy of the Jewish people’ and said that for Dr. Birn to publish with him is ‘like being published with someone from the Ku Klux Klan’.”78
This campaign struck a number of observers as outrageous: Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev described it as “bordering on cultural terrorism.”79 Equally peculiar was the asymmetry, no less marked in the case of Hitler’s Willing Executioners than in that of From Time Immemorial, between the reception of these books (and Finkelstein’s refutations of them) by the corporate media and mainstream Jewish organizations, and their reception by scholars and historians with expertise in the field.
The criticisms of Goldhagen by Finkelstein and by Birn in their book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), were endorsed by distinguished historians80—most devastatingly by Raul Hilberg, the leading Holocaust scholar, who has declared Goldhagen’s book to be “totally wrong about everything [….] I mean, totally off the wall, you know, and factually without any basis,”81 and by Yehuda Bauer, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who acidly remarked that “I have yet to read of a single historian who has publicly expressed agreement [with Goldhagen]. Not one, and that is a very rare unanimity. In my university, this book would never have passed as a Ph.D. dissertation.”82
Irving Abella stands out as an exception to the consensus claimed by Bauer—for unless his remarks about Finkelstein were intended as a gratuitous insult, they would seem to imply an endorsement of Goldhagen. But if Abella’s branding of Finkelstein as “an enemy of the Jewish people” invites questions about his own ethics as an historian, it also betrays an embarrassing degree of literary ignorance: the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play An Enemy of the People (1882) is a man of integrity and courage, who incurs the hatred of dishonest elites and a deluded public through his exposure of a threat to public health.
Finkelstein’s two best-known books, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2001, expanded second edition, 2003), and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005), exposed more serious and more damaging forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy within mainstream American institutions and discourses. As Ibsen might have predicted, they earned him honour (not unmixed, sometimes, with criticism) among those able to recognize their scholarly integrity and profoundly ethical orientation—and, from ideologues, an increased level of hatred.
The Holocaust Industry contains, in its third and perhaps most notable chapter, a powerful exposé of the diversion of funds provided by the German government, and more recently by the major Swiss Banks, as indemnifications for the crimes of the Holocaust and reparations to surviving victims.
[227] Finkelstein notes that $120 million (worth about a billion present-day dollars) was paid by the German government between 1952 and 1964 to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (or Claims Conference), an umbrella group of major Jewish organizations, for distribution to Holocaust survivors who had not otherwise received compensation for their sufferings under Nazi persecution. In what he calls a “flagrant breach” of the “letter and spirit” of the agreement, the Claims Conference diverted all but about 15 percent of the money from the victims who should have been the beneficiaries to its own constituent organizations, which used the money to finance projects such as Holocaust Museums, university chairs in Holocaust studies, Yad Vashem pensions to “righteous Gentiles,” subsidies to Jewish communities in Arab countries, projects to encourage immigration to Israel from eastern Europe, and payments to “outstanding Jewish leaders.”83
Finkelstein also documents what he calls the “double shake-down” of the Swiss banking system during the late 1990s by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and other U.S.-based Jewish organizations, purportedly on behalf of Holocaust survivors. What was supposedly being recovered, even though indemnities had been agreed on and paid by the early 1950s, was money from dormant bank accounts of Holocaust victims, the value of “Nazi gold” acquired by the Swiss banks during or after the Nazi period, and the estimated accumulated value of deposits earned from slave labour in the Nazi camps. But as Neve Gordon observed in a review of the book, Finkelstein demonstrated “how Jewish organizations […] consistently exaggerated numbers—of slave laborers or the amount of ‘victim gold’ purchased by the banks—in order to secure more money.”84
The sums amassed by the WJC through what Finkelstein terms “an extortion racket” come to a total of at least $1.25 billion.85 While the lawyers negotiated, Gordon remarks, “the Jewish lobby launched an extensive campaign” which “included the publication of studies—supported by the Simon Wiesenthal Center—that accused Switzerland of ‘knowingly profiting from blood money’ and committing ‘unprecedented theft,’ and claimed that ‘dishonesty was a cultural code that individual Swiss have mastered to protect the nation’s image and prosperity.’” Pressing these allegations in the House and Senate banking committees, the lobby simultaneously “convinced officials in a number of states, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois, to threaten the Swiss banks with economic boycott. Finally, the banks bent in response.” 86
As before, only a fraction of the money obtained was passed on to the heirs of Holocaust victims, or to Holocaust survivors and their families. Angelo Codevila concluded from his own study of the matter that a “coalition of powerful Americans” had used “the power and prestige of the United States government to funnel money into its own hands.”87
Finkelstein was firmly supported by Raul Hilberg, who declared him to be “one hundred percent correct” in his analysis of the WJC and the Swiss [228] banks: it “was not only coercive on the part of the Jews who mobilized, but also on the part of all the insurance commissioners, the Senate, the House, and the critical committees. [….] The claims lawyers, joined by the World Jewish Congress, made an incredible display of totally inappropriate behavior.”88 But in a defensive flourish of a kind that is by now familiar, Omar Bartov denounced The Holocaust Industry as “a novel variation on […] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; Alan Dershowitz, preferring what Shakespeare’s clown Touchstone called “the Lie Direct,” has smeared it as “a screed against Holocaust survivors.”89
Dershowitz, of course, has particular reasons for his hatred of Finkelstein. In 2005 Beyond Chutzpah (a book whose publication Dershowitz had frantically sought to obstruct) substantiated at length Finkelstein’s charge that Dershowitz had plagiarized extensively in The Case for Israel from Joan Peters’ discredited book; and in the course of a scrupulously scholarly and very thorough analysis of the state of Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ human rights, Beyond Chutzpah demolished with equal thoroughness Dershowitz’s claims to be regarded as in any serious sense a defender of human rights.90
Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul University was, as Amy Goodman wrote, “overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level,” but opposed by the dean of DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,91 and finally rejected by the university—thanks in large part to a campaign of vilification led by Dershowitz, who wrote to DePaul faculty members demanding Finkelstein’s dismissal, and denounced him in The Wall Street Journal as an antisemite who “does not do ‘scholarship’ in any meaningful sense.”92 StandWithUs and the Jewish Defense Organization (a successor to the JDL in the U.S.) took part in the campaign, and when the denial of tenure was announced, the Anti-Defamation League declared that “To the extent that DePaul’s decision […] is intended as a repudiation of his hateful and bigoted ideas, we applaud the University […].”93
We should perhaps give the last word on this case to Raul Hilberg, who in scholarship and Mentschlekhkeyt stands high above any of Finkelstein’s detractors: “I would say that [Finkelstein’s] place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.”94
* * * *
In both Canada and the United States there have been other vigorous, if perhaps less widely known, attempts to suppress academic criticism of Israel. Here are several instances.
In 2002, the distinguished sociologist Sherene Razack,95 who participated in a session on Israel’s military assault on Jenin at that year’s Canadian Critical Race Studies Conference, circulated a resolution agreed on at the conference [229] condemning Israel’s actions. She was subjected to sustained attacks by the National Post and B’nai Brith, which called on her university to discipline or dismiss her for having supposedly misused her university email account, and also to an organized campaign of hate mail and threats. Although the University of Toronto defended her academic freedom, Razack has recently remarked that “informal ‘sanctions’ against her continue to this day (with speaking invitations and grants disappearing without explanation) […].”96
Three years later another CanWest Global newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, joined B’nai Brith in smearing Michel Chossudovsky, a prominent economist, political analyst, and human rights advocate,97 as an antisemite, and in demanding that the University of Ottawa take action (as Anita Bromberg of B’nai Brith put it) “to hold him to a certain standard of acceptable civil discourse.”98 The pretext for this attack was B’nai Brith’s discovery that real antisemites had managed briefly to insert their noxious drivel into discussion threads hosted by Chossudovsky’s website, the Centre for Research on Globalization—but its evident motivation, as I observed at the time, was the fact that articles published on his website, his own among them, have offered well-researched critiques of a wide range of injustices, including “the state of Israel’s shameless violations of human rights, international law and common decency in its treatment of the Palestinians.”99
A related case is that of the University of Ottawa’s Denis Rancourt, a tenured full professor of physics and a highly regarded researcher, who in 2001, after he won a prestigious Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) research grant, was featured in full-page newspaper advertisements in which his university boasted of its prowess as a research institution. Rancourt was fired in March 2009, and his research laboratory (for which he had recently won ongoing funding) was unceremoniously shut down. The pretext for this action was his radical pedagogy—in particular, his assignment of A+ grades to all of the students who completed one of his courses in the Winter 2008 semester. But Rancourt has plausibly suggested that “the real reasons for the university’s attempts to discipline me since September 2005 and for recent more harsh actions against me […] might be the administration’s opposition to my political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict, which, starting in 2005, I have expressed in articles, on radio, in my blog postings, at public venues, and in my classes.”100
In 2005 a complaint from the Jewish Student Association against an invited speaker in Rancourt’s “Physics and the Environment” course—Professor Michel Chossudovsky, “who spoke about Middle East geopolitics”—gave rise to “a sustained but failed” attempt to discipline Rancourt. In the autumn of 2006, his invitation to two Canadian-Palestinian speakers to address his “Science in Society” course led to an editorial attack in the Ottawa Citizen and to his removal from this and other first-year courses he had developed. In 2007, Rancourt criticized the University of Ottawa’s official position on the [230] academic boycott of Israel on his blog, and was punished by being suspended without pay from his academic duties.101
Rancourt provides evidence that he was denied due process in the proceedings that led to his dismissal; more scandalous still is the copious documentation he has published in support of his allegation that from 2006 to 2008 the University of Ottawa hired an undergraduate student journalist, as an agent of the university’s legal counsel, to spy on and make covert recordings of him and of students with whom he associated. Even in “the dark period of McCarthyism in North America,” Rancourt comments, “one does not find abuses comparable to a university practicing covert surveillance of its own professors and students.”102
At much the same time as Professor Rancourt’s case was coming to a head, the University of California at Santa Barbara was in turmoil over accusations of antisemitism leveled against Professor William I. Robinson, a highly respected sociologist and political theorist, and one of the leading figures in critical globalization studies.103 In January 2009, Robinson had circulated internet material to the students in his course on global affairs which “included an article critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and a photo essay that juxtaposed graphic images of Nazi atrocities against Jews and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza.” Two students out of the eighty in the class withdrew from the course, and, with assistance from the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, lodged a grievance with the Academic Senate claiming that the material was antisemitic and unrelated to the course.104
The ADL pursued this matter very actively: its first letter to the UCSB administration demanding an investigation was received before the students’ complaints (which echoed its claims and rationales) had actually been made, and ADL National Director Abraham Foxman’s on-campus meeting with senior university officials was no doubt a factor in the launching of an investigation a fortnight later. Despite continued pressure from the ADL and a letter-writing campaign organized by StandWithUs, the investigation—which involved an uninterrupted sequence of procedural improprieties—collapsed. On June 4, 2009, the UCSB Academic Senate initiated a counter-investigation of the mismanagement of the student complaints; and when on June 25 UCSB officials rather belatedly announced that no charges would after all be laid against Robinson, the American Association of University Professors, which had already written “querying the initiation of potential disciplinary action,” promptly wrote again to UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang, urging him to “cooperate fully” with the Academic Senate in its inquiry into the matter.105
* * * *
Other cases could also be cited, ranging in seriousness from the threat of disciplinary action made by the senior administration of York University [231] against Professor David McNally, Chair of the Political Science Department, after he gave a speech in support of Palestinian human rights in May 2008, to the appalling treatment of Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian-American University of South Florida computer science professor, whose persecution since 2001 has involved not just smearing and dismissal, but a trial for terrorism, and, despite the embarrassing failure of the prosecution, continued imprisonment. (According to human rights lawyer Scott Horton, the recent convolutions of Al Arian’s case “should be studied as a textbook case of prosecutorial abuse.”)106
But more is involved than attacks upon individuals. Jason Kunin notes in his contribution to this book that in Ontario (as elsewhere) there have been sustained attempts by university administrations to suppress human rights discourse about the worsening plight of the Palestinians: among them McMaster University’s attempt in 2008 to ban the use of the term “Israeli apartheid,” University of Toronto President David Naylor’s maneuverings “to block the event Standing Against Israeli Apartheid in October 2008,” and in 2009 the banning of Israeli Apartheid Week posters “at Carleton, the University of Ottawa, Trent University, and Wilfrid Laurier University.”107
How strange: the term “apartheid” was applied with clinical accuracy by Marwan Bishara in 2001 to describe what Israel has done in the occupied territories from the early 1990s onward, “physically and demographically divid[ing] up the West Bank and Gaza into islands of poverty, or bantustans, while maintaining economic domination and direct control over Palestinian land and natural resources.”108 It was re-used by Jimmy Carter in 2006—a usage validated in 2007 by Israel Prize laureate and former Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni.109 And in January 2010, Henry Siegman, the former Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress and current President of the US/Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that Israel’s “relentless” construction of new settlements “seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that ‘achievement,’ one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the western world.” 110
There is, as Jason Kunin remarks, a pungent irony to the fact that while Canadian university administrators—not to mention politicians111—denounce as unacceptable any application of the term “apartheid” to the structures of land theft, cantonment, and racialized subjugation, separation, and oppression of a subject-population that characterize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, “South African legal scholars, who might be expected to have a more immediate understanding of the nature of apartheid, have not hesitated to describe the state of Israel’s behaviour in the occupied Palestinian territories as ‘a colonial system that implements a system of apartheid.’”112
Margaret Aziza Pappano asks, very pertinently, of the opposition to Israeli Apartheid Week: “What justification can be found to block an event in which [232] scholars and activists speak about the history of the region, with a focus on the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, information that is taught in history and political science classes and available in books published by university presses?” It is a sad fact, she suggests, that “A pattern of intolerance for speech about Palestinian human rights appears to have established itself in Canadian universities.”113
As Meron Benvenisti wrote in Haaretz in April 2009, “there is a growing realization” in Israel and internationally “that the chances of establishing an independent, viable Palestinian state no longer exist,” and that the two-state solution is now a “fictitious option.”114 It is all the more interesting, in this light, to reflect on the noisy campaign conducted in the spring of 2009 against an academic conference jointly organized by York University and Queen’s University, and scheduled for June 22-24, 2009, with the aim of mapping different models of statehood and corresponding paths to peace for Israel and Palestine.115
As Professor Dorit Naaman of Queen’s University has noted, B’nai Brith denounced the conference in a full-page ad in the National Post on June 11, 2009, and on the following day “issued a press release attacking conference presenters.” Other organizations joined in: the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, and the “avowedly racist and violent” Jewish Defence League.116 At the same time, Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear made an unprecedented attempt to intervene in the peer-review adjudication process of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council by asking the Council to re-examine its funding support for the conference—a request his office backed up with a threat of withholding federal budget funding for SSHRC.117
One of the complaints made against the conference was a supposed one-sidedness—though more than one-fifth of the conference’s nearly sixty presenters were Israeli scholars, and many more were North American or European Jews. The conference organizers also made attempts to encourage community participation—though when one of them spoke with officials of the Canadian Jewish Congress, she was advised, in all seriousness, to meet with the Jewish Defence League. The abusive attacks on this conference were, Naaman says, “an attempt to silence discussion of [a] critical debate, which—ironically—is already taking place within Israel,” and “a disgraceful act meant to prevent Israelis, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians and others from speaking with one another in a serious academic forum.”118
The War on Truth
In one example after another, we have observed a pattern of what David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi describe as “disproportionate and unbalanced intervention on campuses […] by a coalition of well-funded organizations, [233] who have no time for—and even less interest in—the niceties of intellectual exchange and academic process.” Their tactics are, to put it mildly, unpleasant: “Insinuation, accusation, and defamation have become the weapons of first resort to respond to argument and criticism directed at Israeli policies.”119
It is not just the decorum of intellectual exchange that apologists for the Israeli state and polemicists against its critics are attempting to subvert, but the very processes by which the academy structures itself. Joseph Massad has remarked in one of his essays that people like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes
are angry that the academy still allows democratic procedure in the expression of political views and has an institutionalized meritocratic system of judgment […] to evaluate its members. Their goal is to destroy any semblance of either in favour of subjecting democracy and academic life to an incendiary jingoism and to the exigencies of the national security state with the express aim of imploding freedom.120
Minister of State Gary Goodyear is likewise angry121 with another aspect of the academic merit system, the process of peer-reviewed research funding.
What is under attack in all of these instances is something quite fundamental. The first and highest value of academic life is the notion that truth—however differently we may construe it or understand it to be configured, however discordantly we may dispute over the appropriate means of access to it, however harshly we may debate with one another over the appropriate methods of separating it from dogma, delusion, or deception, and however pessimistic we might sometimes feel about its prospects of prevailing over even the most arid of established ideologies—truth remains, beyond all these doubts and differences, the professed goal of the human sciences, no less than of the mathematically based or natural sciences.
Yet as we have seen in one example after another, this central value of the academy is treated with open contempt by the apologists and polemicists whose tracks we have been following. The reason is simple enough: the truth about what they are defending puts them to shame.
In the preceding chapter, I showed that the claims made by the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism about a terrifying resurgence of antisemitism in Canada and elsewhere are not supported by the available evidence. Attempts to push Canadians into a state of moral panic over the issue should be rejected with indignation—as they have been, surprisingly enough, by the National Post. In a recent editorial criticizing B’nai Brith’s 2009 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, the Post declares that it “flies in the face of reality” to claim “that anti-Semitism in this country is a widespread and rising problem”: Canada “is probably the least anti-Semitic country in the entire world—including Israel—and it becomes more tolerant, not less, with [234] every passing year.”122 Setting aside the note of self-congratulation in this last sentence, and the comparison with Israel—why try to be more Catholic than the Pope?—the refusal to be panicked is well taken.
In this chapter, I have proposed that what the CPCCA would like us to believe about threats to civility on Canadian campuses is equally bogus. Where there have been such threats, they seem in most cases to have come not from faculty and students who are trying to make known the truth about the state of Israel’s treatment of the people of the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather from polemicists and apologists for Israel who are trying either to conceal these truths, or else, by invoking the rhetorical maneuvers of the “new antisemitism,” to change the subject, and thereby to transform themselves from allies of the victimizers into victims.
Opposition Is True Friendship
As we have seen, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a recurrent point of reference in contemporary discussions of antisemitism. In moving toward an assessment of the implications for Canada of these discussions, we need to have some understanding of the full horror of what Israel, with the eager support of Canada’s government and the governments of other western nations, is inflicting upon the people of the occupied territories.
The conclusions of Kathleen and Bill Christison, whose book Palestine in Pieces is a model of humane and respectful reportage, are worth listening to on this subject:
There are hardly words to describe the human suffering and degradation deliberately imposed on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation. The Israeli threat to Palestinian lives and livelihood, individually and collectively—indeed to Palestinian national existence—through theft of land and the sieges of towns and villages, through walls and roads and blockades that strangle, through the crippling of economic opportunity, through deliberate large-scale killing, together resemble a hunting expedition designed to cage and ultimately eliminate animals from a natural habitat. Israeli leaders, Israeli settlers, Israeli soldiers treat Palestinians not as a collective of human beings, but as trapped animals whose fate is of little or no concern.123
The Christisons quote legal scholar and U.N. Rapporteur Richard Falk’s wrestlings in 2007 with the question of whether it would be “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity”:
Answering his own question, he asserted, “I think not.” His attention was focused primarily on Gaza, struggling under an international [235] embargo, and he warned that Israel’s “abuse of the Palestinian people” there vividly expressed “a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty.”124
Writing more than a year later, the Christisons both endorse and supplement this judgment:
It takes but a few visits to towns and villages around the West Bank to conclude that, although Gaza’s suffering places it farther along the path toward a holocaust, conditions in the West Bank clearly constitute a “holocaust-in-the-making.”125
The judgments of these observers—a very distinguished legal scholar, author and co-author of some three dozen books, and two former CIA political analysts whose interest in and experience of Middle East affairs goes back forty years—are disturbingly supported by what seems a recent drift in Israel toward openly genocidal language. Racist references to Palestinians have long been commonplace in Israel, but took a stronger turn in 2003 when Avigdor Lieberman, now Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, said in a Knesset debate that Palestinian prisoners “should be drowned in the Dead Sea” and that he—one must presume in his capacity as Transport Minister, the post he then occupied—“would provide the buses to take them there.”126 In May 2004 Lieberman proposed deporting 90 percent of Israel’s 1.2 million Palestinian citizens (“They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost”)—a proposal extended in September 2006 by former cabinet minister Effi Eitam’s declaration that “The vast majority of West Bank Arabs must be deported […].”127 What had been a taboo on expressions of explicitly genocidal intentions was broken at the end of February 2008, when Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened Gaza in an IDF radio interview with “a bigger shoah” if Gaza militants continued to fire rockets into adjoining areas of Israel.128 The word he used, meaning literally “catastrophe,” has since World War II been used primarily to refer to the Holocaust (the word by which it is translated into English). Although Vilnai’s aides issued statements insisting that the minister was not referring to that Shoah, it is impossible not to hear a threat of genocide in his statement.129
Martin Kramer, a long-time faculty member at Tel Aviv University, the President-designate of the new right-wing Shalem College in Jerusalem, an associate both of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (AIPAC’s Washington think-tank) and of Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs—and also, as Juan Cole writes, “a notorious anti-intellectual opposed to the mainstream academic study of the Middle East”—made a more explicitly genocidal proposal in his presentation to the 10th annual Herzliya Conference in early February 2010.
[236] Starting with the claim that “Aging populations reject radical agendas” (a clear mark of ignorance, Cole observes, since the notion is amply refuted by historical evidence),130 Kramer argued that a decline in Palestinian radicalism
will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status. [….] Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim—undermine the Hamas regime—but they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth and there is some evidence that they have. That may begin to crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men. That is rising to the real challenge of radical indoctrination and treating it at its root.131
The genocidal implication of this is clear: Kramer informs us that Israel’s blockade of Gaza—thanks to which, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, 35 percent of pregnant women and 65 percent of children aged 9-12 months are anaemic, and more than 10 percent of children under five are stunted through chronic malnourishment132—has slowed down Gaza’s population growth. (How, one must ask, does he imagine this could have happened, unless through increased levels of miscarriages and of infant mortality?) And he has made clear, in responding to critics of his Herzliya speech,133 that what he means by “pro-natal subsidies” is, in his own words, the assurance of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) “that every child with ‘refugee’ status will be fed and schooled regardless of the parents’ own resources […].”134 Kramer is recommending, in short, that the population of Gaza be reduced to starvation through a withdrawal of support for UNRWA.
Significant mortality might indeed by produced by the means Kramer recommends. By 2007, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli blockade had produced a ten percent decline from the 2005 level of “food acquisition and energy consumption” in Gaza; in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that two-thirds of Gaza’s population was “deemed food insecure.”135 In January 2010 Akiva Eldar wrote in Haaretz that “Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry,” while “Israel’s ban on bringing in building materials” has made it impossible to repair or rebuild the “nearly 60,000 homes and factories” damaged or destroyed in Operation Cast Lead, leaving “10,000 people […] without running water, 40,000 without electricity.”136 It has likewise been impossible, as the World Health Organization noted in a fact sheet published in January 2010, to repair the damage caused to 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of its 110 primary health care clinics, or to alter the fact that Gaza’s children are at risk due to the “increasing salinity and high levels of nitrates in water supplies.”137
[237] The collective punishment being inflicted on Gaza is already a war crime, a flagrant violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.138 But as M. J. Rosenberg has noted, Kramer’s proposal directly contravenes the Geneva Convention on Genocide, signed by Israel and nearly every other country in the world, which bans
killing of members of any racial, ethnic, national or religious group because of their membership in that group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, inflicting on members of the group conditions of life intended to destroy them, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and taking members’ children away from them and giving them to members of another group.139
With every additional explanation of what precisely he meant, Kramer has succeeded only in making it clearer that Israel’s existing policies toward Gaza are as genocidal in their implications as the intensification of them he is arguing for:
I didn’t propose that Israel take a single additional measure beyond the sanctions it now imposes with the political aim of undermining Hamas. And I didn’t call on the West to “deliberately curb the births of Palestinians.” I called on it to desist from deliberately encouraging births through pro-natal subsidies for Palestinian “refugees,” which guarantee that Gazans will remain both radicalized and dependent.140
Whatever wriggle room he may think terms like “pro-natal subsidies” give him, Kramer is proposing to take food out of the mouths of women and children—whose communities are to a very large degree “dependent” upon external aid only because of the policies that Kramer and people like him support, and “radicalized” by their resistance to those policies.
* * * *
Canadians need to think deeply about the very disquieting implications of the Harper government’s withdrawal of funding from UNRWA, which was announced by Treasury Board Minister Vic Toews—in Jerusalem141—just over a week before Martin Kramer’s Herzliya speech. Speculations as to whether Toews or other members of the Harper government had been influenced by Kramer, or by the German, Gunnar Heinsohn, from whom Kramer derived his proposal, do not interest me.142 The unpleasant fact is that Canada was the first country in 2006 to join the Israeli blockade in Gaza—and now it has become the first country to participate in what is evidently designed (by Kramer at least) as an intensification, with genocidal intent, of the cruel effects of that blockade.
[238] Kathleen and Bill Christison inform us that “In early 2008, UNRWA Commissioner General Karen Koning AbuZayd harshly condemned the international embargo of Gaza. The territory, she said, ‘is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be internationally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and—some would say—encouragement of the international community.’”143
The situation in Gaza has now passed that threshold—and the Canadian government has been participating in the project with open eyes. It has made us complicit in the war crime of the embargo or blockade of Gaza, and, through its support for Operation Cast Lead, in further war crimes against Gaza’s people and their life-supporting infrastructures. It is now seeking to make us complicit in actions that, with Martin Kramer’s unwitting help, we can recognize as genocidal in intention.
The choice Canadians must make is one of whether we are willing to accept this complicity, or whether we will take a stand against these actions, and in solidarity with their victims.
* * * *
One of the ways we can take such a stand is by demanding Canada’s immediate withdrawal from the blockade of Gaza, and an immediate restoration of Canada’s financial support for UNRWA.
Another is by demanding that Canada participate in a measured and carefully calibrated program of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, until such time as Israel complies with international law and the universal principles of human rights.
As has been explained by Neve Gordon, Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the ten-point boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign formulated in 2008 in Bilbao, Spain by a coalition of organizations from around the world is designed “to pressure Israel in a ‘gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity.’ For example, the effort begins with sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner.”144
A program of this kind would involve an academic boycott—directed, one must emphasize, not against individual scholars, but rather against government-supported institutional contacts.145 It would involve a rejection of Israeli state involvement in events like the Toronto International Film Festival (which as the “Toronto Declaration” of September 2009 made clear would not affect the inclusion at such events of Israeli films and of individual Israeli filmmakers).146 It would involve careful consideration of whether fundraising in Canada that goes into support for programs of ethnic discrimination and property theft in Israel can continue to enjoy tax-exempt status as a “charitable” endeavour. It would involve an immediate revision of the Canada-Israel Free [239] Trade Agreement (CIFTA) to exclude all products emanating from Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and a withdrawal from all aspects of the Canada-Israel Industrial Research and Development Fund (CIIRDF) that involve support for the infrastructure of the occupation.
Many of the people who most strenuously oppose campaigns for boycott, divestment, and sanctions directed at Israel are not opposed on principle to such tactics. Professor (and former IDF paratrooper) Neve Gordon’s article calling for a boycott, on the grounds that “Putting massive external pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians—my two boys included—does not grow up in an apartheid regime,”147 evoked, as Gideon Levy remarks, a “mini-maelstrom” the timing of which “was somewhat grotesque”:
Hardly have the throats dried of those calling for his dismissal, for his citizenship to be revoked, for his expulsion and, if all else fails, his stoning, when another petition has surfaced on the Internet, this one calling for a boycott of Ikea. A bad article on the back page of a Swedish tabloid is enough to produce a call here for a consumer boycott to which thousands sign their names. Turkey has barely recovered from the boycott that our package tourers imposed on it because its prime minister had the gall to attack our president, and already we are cruising toward our next boycott target.148
On a similar note, the neo-McCarthyist Israeli watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are calling for potential donors to boycott universities that employ professors who, like Gordon, advocate a boycott of Israel.149 And in August 2009 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called for “crippling sanctions” against Iran—the kind of blockade, as Paul Craig Roberts commented, that “qualifies as an act of war.”150 As Levy writes, “A country that constantly demands boycott from the world and also imposes boycotts itself, cannot play the victim when the same weapon is turned against it. If the election of Hamas is cause for boycott, then occupation is a more potent cause.”151
* * * *
This issue is, most immediately, about protecting the lives of Palestinians, and doing what lies within our power to do in restoring to them their right to political self-determination, political independence, and full self-governance within the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.152 At the same time, it is about restoring to Israelis their lost honour as a nation, and doing what can be done with what remains of Canada’s tattered reputation as a peacemaker to help bring about a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbours, so as to lift from Israelis the burden of anxiety and fear that has afflicted them for at least two generations, and that has deformed and polluted their political discourse.
[240] In this regard, it must be insisted that what is at issue, in Canada at least, is not primarily, or to any significant degree, antisemitism. Exponents of the ideology of the “new antisemitism” will of course say otherwise, but they are mistaken. Their governing assumption appears to be that people will not make profound, serious and systematic criticisms of the state of Israel unless they are impelled, perhaps knowingly, or possibly at some deep level of a feral goyisch unconscious, by hatred of Jews. I believe that Canadians are, by and large, more complicated than this, and less hypocritical or evil. I believe we are perfectly capable of combining, without cognitive dissonance, an amicable sense of Israel as a place inhabited by interesting, attractive, creative people, and a lively curiosity about their spiritual traditions and their culture—and at the same time a sense of dismay and even horror at this people’s growing entanglement in a mesh of injustice and violence that to a very considerable degree is the creation of their own political leaders.
If there is hypocrisy here, or unconscious self-deception, I would suggest that it is to be found most often among the ideologues of the “new antisemitism.” We have seen good reason in this book to find their ethics dubious, and their explanations unsatisfactory. I would suggest substituting for those often laboured and usually libellous explanations an aphorism of the great English poet William Blake:
“Opposition is true friendship.”153
* * * *
But this issue is also, as we have seen recurrently from the beginning of this book, one of domestic Canadian politics. The questions of antisemitism and of the domestic relevance of the Israel-Palestine conflict have been foregrounded for us by the actions of our own political leaders. The questions raised by the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism are also, more distinctly, questions about the instrumental use of false charges of antisemitism as a means of delimiting political discourse and of making a whole domain of critical discourse literally unspeakable.
Judith Butler, one of the leading literary and cultural theorists in the U.S., has written with characteristic lucidity about how a distinction between Israel and Jews helps one to oppose “anti-Semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests,” and to begin “an intellectual discussion of both Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Having insisted that a “progressive Jewish stance” will “refuse to brand as anti-Semitic the critical impulse or to accept anti-Semitic discourse as an acceptable substitute for critique,” Butler turns to consider the problems that arise when the charge of antisemitism is used to stigmatize “those who voice opposition to Israeli policy or to its founding ideology,” to discredit their “point of view as hatred or, indeed, hate speech, and to put into question its permissibility as protected speech or, indeed, valued political commentary.” The charge of antisemitism, she says,
[241] works to circumscribe the publicly acceptable domain of speech. It also works to immunize Israeli violence against critique by refusing to countenance the integrity of the claims made against that violence. One is threatened with the label, “anti-Semitic,” in the same way that within the US, to oppose the most recent US wars earns one the label of “traitor,” or “terrorist sympathizer” or, indeed, “treasonous.” These are threats with profound psychological consequence. They seek to control political behavior by imposing unbearable, stigmatized modes of identification which most people will want more than anything to avoid identification with.154
Those who perform this labelling know very well how powerfully it can work, in Butler’s words, “to circumscribe what can and cannot be permissibly spoken out loud in the public sphere,” and to “decide the defining limits of the public sphere through setting limits on the speakable.” The consequences of a shrinkage of the public sphere through an exclusion of critical perspectives are potentially dire:
The exclusion of those criticisms will effectively establish the boundaries of the public itself, and the public will come to understand itself as one that does not speak out, critically, in the face of obvious and illegitimate violence—unless, of course, a certain collective courage takes hold.155
That collective courage exists in this country, as does a generously shared fund of common decency. This book goes out to the public in the hope that what it offers in the way of critical analysis may help to facilitate an increasingly full and well-articulated expression of that decency and courage.
NOTES
1 Some historians and sociologists have used the term “new antisemitism” in scholarly studies of the receptions and mutations of traditional Christian and European antisemitism in other parts of the world. My critique applies to their writings only to the degree that they deploy this same rhetoric, and thereby participate in this strategy of deception.
2 James D. Besser, “A Chill in the D.C. Air as Obama, Netanyahu Meet,” The Jewish Week (10 November 2009), http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c39_a17230/News/International.html.
3 “Survivors, liberators, leaders mark Auschwitz liberation,” Channelnewsasia.com (28 January 2010), http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/1033527/1/.html. By way of contrast, on a similar occasion four years previously, Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert described himself as “prime minister of the state of Israel and the leader of the Jewish people here” (my emphasis); see “Remarks by Ehud Olmert, Acting Prime Minister, State of Israel [speaking from Israel by video link] to the Anti-Defamation League Shana Amy Glass National Leadership Conference, April 25, 2006, Washington, DC,” http://www.adl.org/Israel/olmert_speech.asp.
4 Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 21.
5 Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth-Ann Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Arbor House, 1982); Abraham H. Foxman, Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (2003; rpt. New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003); Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004).
6 Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 22.
7 Ibid., p. 24; and Forster and Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism, pp. 323-24 (quoted by Finkelstein).
8 Ibid., p. 27 (quoting Nathan and Ruth-Ann Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America, p. 9).
9 Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 30-31.
10 Ibid., p. 33 (quoting Foxman, Never Again? p. 39; and Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism, p. 180).
11 Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2002), translated by Patrick Camiller as Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004)—and see also Taguieff’s more recent Prêcheurs de haine: Traversée de la judéophobie planétaire (Paris: Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2004); Fiamma Nirenstein, L’Abbandono: Come l’Occidente ha tradito gli ebrei (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003), Gli Antisemiti Progressisti: la forma nova di un odio antico (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004), translated together by Anne Milano Appel as Terror: The New Anti-Semitism and the War Against the West (Manchester, NH: Smith & Kraus, 2005); David I. Kertzer, ed., Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West (Aachen: Meyer & Meyer Verlag, 2005); Alan Dershowitz, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008); Denis MacShane, Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism (London: Orion Books, 2009).
12 So-called Infancy Gospels like the Protevangelium Jacobi, dating from the early centuries of the Common Era and designed to satisfy curiosity about the childhood of the Son of God, were widely circulated and commented on during the medieval period. The key elements of the medieval blood libel, as it emerged in the mid twelfth century, were the slaughter of a Christian child and a parody of some key element of Christian narrative or doctrine—initially, the crucifixion. (The inventors of this fantasy may have been aware of the accusation of Apion, refuted by the first-century C.E. Jewish historian Josephus in Against Apion, Book II, that the Jews made an annual sacrifice of a Greek man in their temple; or of claims by Roman writers of the early centuries C.E. that Christians drank the blood and ate the flesh of human victims. I regard these anticipations as related but separate phenomena.)
13 This is the form the blood libel took in the mid 13th-century episode of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The Prioress’s Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late 14th century) alludes to the Lincoln blood libel, but in the Prioress’s own blood-libel narrative the crucifixion motif is missing (the Christian boy is murdered because Satan and the Jews dislike his habit of singing the hymn “Alma Redemptoris Mater” in a piercing soprano while strolling through the Jewish quarter).
14 These blood-libel motifs appear in dispersed and ironic form in a less centrally canonical literary text, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). For details, see my essay “Violence and Extremity: Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller as an Anatomy of Abjection,” in Donald Beecher, ed., Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520-1640 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1998), pp. 183-218. The point of the host-matzoh blasphemy is that during the Roman Catholic Mass the host-bread blessed by the priest is supposedly converted in substance, by the miracle of transubstantiation, into the flesh of Christ (while remaining unaltered in ‘accidents’ such as appearance and taste). The murdered child’s blood would be concealed in the matzoh in a manner parodically analogous to the concealment of Christ’s flesh in the host.
15 For the estimate of AIPAC’s current budget, see Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, p. 119. On p. 117 of this book former Congressman Mervyn Dymally is quoted as calling AIPAC “without question the most important lobby in Congress,” and Lee Hamilton, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is quoted as having said in 1991 that “There’s no lobby group that matches it….” Nineteen articles assessing AIPAC are collected at “Perspectives on AIPAC & its Role in Helping to Shape U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” STOP AIPAC, http://www.stopaipac.org/perspectives.htm#aipacnorth.
16 Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 253-54.
17 Jonathan Kay, “Here is the difference between Israel and its Arab enemies,” National Post (22 March 2009), http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03-kay-here-is-the-difference-between-israel-and-its-arab-enemies.aspx; Melanie Phillips, “The Ha’aretz Blood Libel,” Spectator (22 March 2009), http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3464331/the-haaretz-blood-libel.thtml.
18 “A Blood libel disguised as an investigative report,” FresnoZionism.org (15 August 2009), http://fresnozionism.org/2009/08a-blood-libel-disguised-as-an-investigative-report. The report in question is White Flag Deaths: Killing of Palestinian Civilians during Operation Cast Lead (Human Rights Watch, 13 August 2009), http://www.hrw.org/node/85014.
19 Alan Dershowitz, “UN Investigation of Israel Discredits Itself and Undercuts Human Rights,” Hudson New York (16 September 2009), http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/09/un-investigation-of-israel-discredits-itself-and-undercuts-human-rights.php.
20 Irwin Cotler, “The United Nations, Israel, Human Rights, and the New Anti-Jewishness,” abstract of a paper delivered at the International Conference on The Dynamics of Antisemitism in the Second Half of the 20th Century (SICSA: The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 13-16 June 1999), http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/absdynam.html.
21 Ibid.
22 By 1999, Cotler could have read Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland (London: Faber & Faber, 1987); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); he could also have read Christopher Hitchens’ essay “Broadcasts,” in Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 73-83.
23 For the period to which Cotler’s 1999 statement would have been referring, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), pp. 64-88, 181-328, 333-75, 455-69, 515-32. Chomsky tellingly quotes the Israeli writer Amos Elon’s comment, published in Haaretz on November 13, 1981, that Anwar Sadat’s peace proposal in April 1971 had caused “panic and unease among our political leadership,” while the Israeli government’s reaction to the Saudi peace plan of August 1981 had been “emotional and angry”—a response Elon found “shocking, frightening, if not downright despair-producing” (quoted on p. 75).
24 A clear statement of that consensus is provided in Amnesty International’s recent report, Troubled Waters—Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water (27 October 2009), p. 81:
“International humanitarian law: While recognizing the de jure applicability of the Hague Regulations, which it has not signed, Israel has consistently rejected the applicability to the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories] of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which it is a party. Nevertheless, Israel maintains that, in practice, it applies what it has termed ‘humanitarian provisions’ of the Geneva Convention to the OPT, though without ever specifying what it deems the ‘humanitarian provisions’ of the Convention to comprise. Israel stands alone in contending that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which works to ensure the application of international humanitarian law (including as set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols), as well as the other states that are party to this treaty (known as High Contracting Parties), fundamentally reject the Israeli government’s view. The most recent Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention in December 2001 reaffirmed ‘the applicability of the [Fourth Geneva] Convention to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’ and reiterated the need for full respect of its provisions. This position of the ICRC and the High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions on the applicability of Israel’s obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention to the OPT has been supported by numerous resolutions of the UN Security Council [e.g. Resolutions 465, 681, 799].
“International human rights law: Israel has never recognized its obligation to abide by the international human rights treaties to which it is a state party in the OPT, and contends that under international law it is not required to apply these treaties to areas that are not part of its sovereign territory. It argues that limited provisions of humanitarian law should be applied in the OPT to the exclusion of international human rights law. However, all of the UN bodies entrusted with monitoring adherence by Israel to the treaties it has ratified have categorically rejected Israel’s contention that its human rights obligations do not apply in the OPT.”
25 I am borrowing here from the brief discussion of exceptionalism in my book Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars (Toronto: Anansi, 1996), pp. 14-16. For an approach to specifically Zionist exceptionalism, see Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
26 Lewis Lapham, “Déjà Vu,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1990), rpt. in Lapham, Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle (London: Verso, 1995), p. 30.
27 Irwin Cotler, “Human Rights and the New Anti-Jewishness,” Jerusalem Post (5 February 2004), available at SPME: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=128.
28 Ibid. For Cotler’s most recent re-working of these motifs, see his essay Global Antisemitism: Assault on Human Rights, Working Paper #3, The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (2009), http://www.yale.edu/yiisa/irwincotlerworkingpaper10209.pdf.
29 Iran has repeatedly been identified, by American and Israeli politicians and propagandists, as just such a threat. Setting aside the fact that Israel possesses an estimated 100-200 nuclear warheads, and multiple means of delivering them, as well as firm promises of diplomatic and military support from the US, there is strong evidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. In early 2006, when an American-Israeli aerial attack on Iran seemed imminent (despite the statement of the August 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was a full decade away from having the capacity to manufacture “the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon”), I analyzed some of this evidence in “Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding the Planned Assault on Iran,” Centre for Research on Globalization (10 February 2006), http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1936. While Iran has since moved closer to activating a civil nuclear electricity-generation program, claims that the country has a nuclear weapons program remain wholly unsubstantiated.
30 For an important argument against doctrines of ethnic (as opposed to civic) self-determination, see Michael Neumann, The Case Against Israel (Petrolia, CA and Oakland, CA: CounterPunch and AK Press, 2005), pp. 12-23. Neumann remarks that “The ideal known as ‘the self-determination of peoples’ is built on myths of unanimity” (p. 14); that in cases often perceived as legitimate exercises of a people’s right to self-determination (e.g. Vietnamese resistance to occupation, or the Cuban revolution), “their justifications rest on non-ethnic rights—the rights, for instance, of those who happened to inhabit those countries—not on a supposed right of a supposed ethnic or cultural entity to determine its destiny” (p. 19); and that the violation and attempted extinguishing of the civic rights of non-Jewish Palestinians has been an inescapable consequence of the Zionist project of implementing a Jewish “right to self-determination” (pp. 23-40).
31 Edward Said commented in 2001 on the “brazen arrogance, moral preachiness, and […] hypocrisy” with which Zionists like Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol instructed Israel to conform to their political dictates. “American Zionism,” he remarked, “has now reached the level of almost pure fantasy in which what is good for American Zionists in their fiefdom and their mostly fictional discourse is good for America and Israel […]. Anyone who defies or dares to challenge them (especially if he/she is either an Arab or a Jew critical of Zionism) is subject to the most awful abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and ideological.” Said, “American Zionism—The Real Problem (2),” Al-Ahram Weekly; reproduced online at Media Monitors Network (14 March 2001), http://www.mediamonitors.net/edward13.html.
32 See, for example, Marc H. Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (3rd ed., Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004), and Judaism Does Not Equal Israel (New York: New Press, 2009); Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), and The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007); Judith Butler, “No, it’s not anti-semitic,” London Review of Books 25.16 (21 August 2003): 19-21, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/judith-butler/no-its-not-anti-semitic, and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009); Naomi Klein, “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction,” The Nation (26 January 2009), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/klein, and “The Tel Aviv Party Stops Here,” The Nation (28 September 2009), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/klein/print; Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009); Philip Weiss, “At NYU, devilish Shlomo Sand predicts the Jewish past and pastes the Zionists,” Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East (17 October 2009), http://modoweiss.net/2009/10/at-nyu-devilish-shlomo-sand-predicts-the-jewish-past-and-pastes-the-zionists.html.
33 In my book Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars I offered an extended analysis of these matters; see especially pp. 2-17, 21-38, 67-86, 121-24, 135-40, 183-99. Earlier collections of essays on the same issues include Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992); Phyllis Artiss, ed., Political Correctness, special double issue of Philosophy and Social Action 19.1-2 (January-June 1993); Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); Jeffrey Williams, ed., PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); and Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir, eds., Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
34 Matt Gurney, “Anti-semitism at York University,” National Post (13 February 2009), http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/02/13/matt-gurney-anti-semitism-at-york-university.aspx.
35 See Todd Gitlin, “The Rough Beast Returns,” Mother Jones (May-June 2002), rpt. in Ron Rosenbaum, ed., Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 263-66; quoted by Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 67-68 (whose account I am paraphrasing).
36 Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 68.
37 Miriam Greenspan, “The New Anti-Semitism,” Tikkun (November-December 2003), http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Greenspan-the-new-antisemitism; Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism, p. 121; quoted by Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 68.
38 Of the first incident Norman Finkelstein writes that “no one at Yale’s Center for Jewish Life or the university administration had ever heard of such an assault”; the second incident (Schoenfeld’s source for which was Campus Watch, an organ of opinion specializing in rumour-mongering and campaigns of defamation) was never reported to the University of Chicago’s Center for Jewish Life, and was investigated by the university administration, which “found no evidence to substantiate it” (Beyond Chutzpah, p. 68).
39 The processes through which the CIJA was launched in 2002 have been studied in three linked articles by Dan Freeman-Maloy, “AIPAC North: ‘Israel Advocacy’ in Canada, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3” ZNet (26 June 2006), http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3659, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3660, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3661. In the second article, he writes that in late 2002, the United Israel Appeal Federations Canada (UIAFC) brought together “leading tycoons,” among them Israel Asper, CEO of CanWest Global; Gerry Schwartz, co-founder of CanWest Global and CEO of Onex Corporation; Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo/Chapters Books; and Sylvain Abitbol, CEO of NHC Communications, as “the Israel Emergency Cabinet.” This group planned “a new ‘functional framework’ for Jewish establishment advocacy and governance” centred on the CIJA. In the first article, Freeman-Maloy remarks that the CIJA has converted mainstream Canadian Jewish organizations into “a streamlined ‘Israel advocacy’ apparatus” whose principal aim is “to weaken solidarity with the Palestinian people and solidify Canadian rejection of basic Palestinian rights.” CIJA supported the invasion of Iraq, and has “help[ed] to lay the political groundwork for possible aggression against Iran, and oppos[ed] progressive social movements at the grassroots level (particularly on campuses).” See also Ben Saifer, “Shalom-Salaam? Campus Israel advocacy and the politics of ‘dialogue’,” Upping the Anti 9 (November 2009), pp. 73-90, especially pp. 79-82.
40 David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi, “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics,” Tikkun (September-October 2009), http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/sept_oct_09_goldberg_makdisi. It is relevant to note that David Theo Goldberg is a major figure in critical race studies, whose books include Racist Culture: Philosophy and The Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), and The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). Saree Makdisi’s publications include Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: Norton, 2008).
41 Roberta P. Seid, “Reviving 1920’s Munich’s Beer Halls at UCLA, Courtesy of California Taxpayers,” SPME: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (1 February 2009), http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=5054. Even if recordings and alternative accounts of the event were not available, Seid’s malicious falsehoods would be evident. Her own tendentious accounts of what each panelist said do not begin to justify her claims that “they seemed to be enacting a burlesque of the anti-Semitic rabble rousing in Munich’s 1920’s beer halls,” that “Israel was painted precisely as Nazis used to paint the Jews,” that the panelists “produc[ed] a cartoon image divorced from all reality of an unfettered, demonic Israel—not unlike the Nazi cartoons of Jews holding the globe and pulling all the strings of history,” and that “the speakers indulged in repeated blood libel.”
42 Judea Pearl, “Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil,” Wall Street Journal (3 February 2009), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362422088941893.html. Professor Pearl’s son Daniel was the journalist kidnapped and brutally murdered by extremists in Pakistan in 2002.
43 Tom Tugend, “UCLA Symposium on Gaza Ignites Strong Criticism,” JewishJournal.com (11 February 2009), http://www.jewishjournal.com/community/article/ucla_symposium_on_gaza_ignites_strong_criticism_20090211/.
44 Judea Pearl, “Dust Over Campus Life: UCLA at a Crossroad,” JewishJournal.com (18 February 2009), http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/dust_over_campus_life_ucla_at_a_crossroad_20090218/.
45 Pearl’s assertions about Hamas can be compared with an article by Bassem Naseem, Minister of Health and Information in the Hamas administration in Gaza, “Hamas condemns the Holocaust: We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a political struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression,” The Guardian (12 May 2008), http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/12/hamascondemnstheholocaust.
46 Goldberg and Makdisi, “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics.”
47 Judea Pearl, “Is anti-Zionism hate?” Los Angeles Times (15 March 2009), http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-pearl15-2009mar15,0,6323783.story.
48 Dan Freeman-Maloy, “The Israel advocacy push to ‘reclaim’ York University,” ZNet (2 March 2009), http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20755; reproduced online at The Bullet, E-Bulletin No. 191 (3 March 2009), http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet191.html.
49 See Independent Jewish Voices, “Submission to the CPCCA,” note 4, in Antisemitism Real and Imagined, p. 110.
50 The JDL has taken an active interest in events at York University; there have been recurrent student complaints during the past year about JDL intimidation on the York campus. If these men were JDL members, they were restrained by Hillel: the JDL of Canada’s “Parsha of The Week” for February 14, 2009 includes a complaint that “It is a shame that the Hillel Jewish Student leadership prevent proper aggressive counter measures to be taken” on the York campus (http://www.jdlcanada.ca/reference/Parsha-Feb_14_2009.htm. The Jewish Defense League was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, as was the political party Kach (also known since Kahane’s death in 1990 as Kahane Chai, meaning “Kahane lives”). In 1994 the Israeli government declared Kahane Chai a terrorist organization, and in October 2006 a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that the State Department was correct in labeling Kach and Kahane Chai as terrorist organizations (see Neil A. Lewis, “Appeal Court Upholds Terrorist Label for a Jewish Group,” New York Times [18 October 2006], http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/us/18kahane.html?_r=1). Meir Weinstein, the leader of the Canadian JDL since the late 1970s, has also concurrently been Canadian spokesperson for Kach. In the latter capacity, he refused to condemn Kach and JDL member Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 machine-gun attack on the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron (see “Meir Weinstein,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meir_Weinstein), in which Goldstein murdered at least 29 worshippers and wounded another 150. Giving proud emphasis to the fact that Goldstein was a “charter member,” the JDL’s website defends him “as a martyr in Judaism’s protracted struggle against Arab terrorism” (“About JDL: FAQs,” Jewish Defense League, http://www.jdl.org/index.php/about-jdl/faqs/). Another “martyr” is JDL Chairman Irving Rubin, who died in prison in 2002 after being arrested by the FBI for preparing bombing attacks on a California mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman. (See Terrorism 2000/2001 [FBI Publication #0308], http://www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terror2000_2001.htm, where the JDL is described as “a violent extremist Jewish organization.”)
51 Freeman-Maloy, “The Israel advocacy push.”
52 Isi Leibler, “Candidly Speaking: Zionism and the global anti-Semitic frenzy,” Jerusalem Post (15 February 2009), available online at SPME: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=5140; quoted by Freeman-Maloy, “The Israel advocacy push.”
53 Quoted by Freeman-Maloy, “The Israel advocacy push.”
54 Kenney’s statements were reported by the Canadian Press on February 23 and by the Belleville Intelligencer on February 24; see YFile: York’s Daily Bulletin (25 February 2009), http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?IssueDate=2/25/2009§ion=York%20in%20the%20Media.
55 Linda McQuaig, “Harper’s extremism is showing,” Rabble.ca (3 November 2009), http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2009/11/harpers-extremism-showing; McQuaig is quoting Kenney’s words reported by the Thornhill Liberal (11 September 2009).
56 Hasbara Fellowships was formed in 2001 by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and AishHaTorah, a right-wing fundamentalist organization associated with the Israeli settler movement.
57 Elad Benari, “Two Jewish Students Assaulted in York University,” Shalom Life (3 February 2010), http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/4737/Two_Jewish_Students_Assaulted_in_York_University/.
58 Benari, “Two Jewish Students Assaulted.” Mozeson’s claim to have been assaulted is reported by Yuni Kim, “Security footage debunks assault allegations,” Excalibur (10 February 2010), http://www.excal.on.ca/cms2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7979&Itemid=2.
59 Gil Ronen, “Toronto: Jewish Students Attacked,” Arutz Sheva: IsraelNationalNews.com (4 February 2010), http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135873, Talkback comment #7. Weinstein’s offer of a $500 reward was noted by Elad Benari in the February 3 Shalom Life article (whose text Ronen reproduces, with minor changes, as his own); this posting provides Weinstein’s own words.
60 “University investigating assault on Jewish students,” JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People (7 February 2010), http://jta.org/news/article/2010/02/07/1010495/university-investigating-assault-on-jewish-students; also published in the Jerusalem Post (8 February 2010), http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=168116.
61 Elad Benari, “‘York University is a Safe Place for Students,’” Shalom Life (8 February 2010), http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/5021/York_University_is_a_Safe_Place_for_Students/. See also Yuni Kim, “Security footage debunks assault allegations,” Excalibur (10 February 2010), http://www.excal.on.ca/cms2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7979&Itemid=2.
62 Kim, “Security footage debunks assault allegations.”
63 “University investigating assault on Jewish students,” JTA (7 February 2010), Jerusalem Post (8 February 2010).
64 Kim, “Security footage debunks assault allegations.”
65 “York, U of T act promptly on anti-Semitism complaints,” Jewish Tribune (10 February 2010), http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/201002102634/York-U-of-T-act-promptly-on-antisemitism-complaints.html.
66 In Yiddish and in English usage, this word carries a definite hint of admiration for boldness or audacity, an overtone that is apparently absent in Hebrew.
67 “York, U of T act promptly.”
68 Pearl, “Dust Over Campus Life.” “Marrano” was a derogatory term applied in late 15th and 16th century Spain to Jews who had (under compulsion) converted to Christianity, but who were suspected of continuing to practice Jewish rites in secret.
69 For a list of Massad’s publications to 2007, see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/massad/.
70 See Joseph Massad, “Response to the Ad Hoc Grievance Committee” (4 April 2005), and “Statement to the Ad Hoc Committee (14 March 2005), Columbia University Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/massad/.
71 Dershowitz published a St. Valentine’s Day essay attacking Massad, “At Columbia, fairness is job one,” New York Daily News (14 February 2005), http://www.alandershowitz.com/publications/docs/columbia.html. The piece includes a sentence that might be mistaken for an unwitting self-description: “I am told that he is a mediocre scholar whose main claim to fame is his vocal extremism.”
72 In 2000, Massad was one of two finalists for Columbia’s Van Doren teaching award; his publications include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (London: Routledge, 2006), and Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), which won Columbia University’s 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award.
73 “Intimidation at Columbia,” New York Times (7 April 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/opinion/07thu1.html?_r=1; see also Karen W. Arenson, “Columbia Panel Clears Professors of Anti-Semitism,” New York Times (31 March 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/education/31columbia.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1256680833-FB9PGOce/hv0Y/D0lo8+cA. The Columbia ad hoc committee reprimanded Massad for a single incident in which three students attested that he made a testy answer to a question from one of them; Massad’s Columbia University website reproduces a letter in which twenty other students deny that the alleged incident ever occurred.
74 Juan Cole, “The New McCarthyism: A witch hunt against a Columbia professor, and the New York Times’ disgraceful support for it, represent the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades,” Salon.com (22 April 2005), http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2005/04/22/mccarthy/index.html.
75 See Yehoshua Porath, “Mrs. Peters’s Palestine,” New York Review of Books 32: 21-22 (16 January 1986), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5249; and “Mrs. Peters’s Palestine: An Exchange” (letters by Daniel Pipes and Ronald Sanders, reply by Yehoshua Porath), New York Review of Books 33: 5 (27 March 1986), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5172. Finkelstein’s analysis of Peters’ book was first published as “Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial,” in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 33-69; it reappears as a chapter in Finkelstein’s Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995).
76 Adam Shatz, “Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners,” Slate (8 April 1998), http://www.slate.com/id/3143/. (See also Finkelstein’s response to Shatz’s essay, at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=2&ar=8.) The opinions of Foxman and Weseltier, and of Bernie Farber and Irving Abella (cited below), no doubt reflect an awareness of Finkelstein’s second book, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
77 Sean Fine, “Nazi-hunting scholar under fire for views: Link with anti-Zionist enrages CJC,” Globe and Mail (26 January 1998). See also Tim Cornwell, “Daniel in the lions’ den,” Times Higher Education Supplement (20 February 1998), http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=105936§ioncode=26.
78 Mordecai Briemberg, “Holocaust Scholarship, Zionism and Political Orthodoxy,” Outlook 36.3 (1 April-15 May 1998), available online at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=2&ar=6. Briemberg quotes Abella’s words from a report in the Canadian Jewish News (29 January 1998).
79 Tom Segev, Haaretz (15 May 1998), quoted by Dominique Vidal, “From ‘Mein Kampf’ to Auschwitz: Holocaust book sparks fresh controversy,” Le Monde diplomatique (October 1998), http://mondediplo.com/1998/10/14vidal; Segev’s article is reproduced online at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=2&ar=3.
80 Several statements by historians of international reputation are quoted by Shatz in “Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners.” Arno Mayer wrote that Finkelstein and Birn “raise hard questions about the political reasons for the inordinate promotion and reception of Goldhagen’s book. No serious student of history can afford to ignore these well-reasoned and withering reflections on the perils of pseudo-scholarship.” Eric Hobsbawm urged that “All readers of Goldhagen’s controversial book should take note of these much-needed studies, which, in line with serious historians, convincingly and authoritatively dismantle its arguments.” And according to Ian Kershaw, “Finkelstein and Birn provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my view, indispensable.”
81 “Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg,” Logos 6.1-2 (Winter-Spring 2007), http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.1-2/hilberg.htm.
82 Bauer is quoted by Mordecai Briemberg, “Holocaust Research and Intellectual Freedom,” Peace Magazine 14.3 (May-June 1998), http://cache.zoominfo.com/CachedPage/?archive_id=0&page_id=487983492&page_url=%2f%2fwww.peacemagazine.org%2ffulltext%2fall-vol14no3.html&page_last_updated=8%f22%2f2003+8%3a42%3a18+PM&firstName=Ruth&lateName=Birn.
83 Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2nd ed., London: Verso, 2003), pp. 86-87.
84 Neve Gordon, “Cloud After Auschwitz,” The Nation (13 November 2000): 28-34, available online at http://www.israelsoccupation.info/files/Cloud%20After%20Auschwitz.pdf.
85 Finkelstein quotes WJC president Edgar J.Bronfman as giving a total figure more than five times higher, but it is not clear than Bronfman can be trusted in this: Raul Hilberg remarked that this tycoon (who headed the WJC from 1979 until his resignation in 2007, amid a cloud of scandal over mismanagement and peculation in the WJC’s senior management) appeared “from his own autobiographical statements to be totally, not even average, but like a child almost” (“Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg”).
86 Ibid.
87 Angelo M. Codevilla, Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and Moral Blackmail Today (Washington DC: Regnery, 2000), p. 4.
88 “Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg.” See also Amy Goodman, “‘It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There’—World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure,” Democracy NOW! (9 May 2007), http://www.democracynow.org/2007/5/9/it_takes_an_enormous_amount_of#at. In this interview, Hilberg makes it clear that his endorsement was based on research into “the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering [….] rel[ying] upon the same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items.”
89 Alan Dershowitz, “Norman Finkelstein: the case against,” The Guardian (14 June 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/14/finkelsteinthecaseagainst. In this article, and in an earlier version of it published as “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” The Wall Street Journal (4 May 2007), Dershowitz quotes from Bartov’s New York Times review of The Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein's book is suffused with outrage over the postwar treatment of Holocaust survivors—among them his mother, who after six years of suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto, in two slave-labour camps, and in the Majdanek death camp, received $3,500 in compensation; Dershowitz’s offhand inversion of this is thus an instance of giving “the Lie Direct” (for which see Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 5, scene 4.)
90 For assessments of Finkelstein’s analysis and Dershowitz’s counter-claims, see Matthew Abraham, “The Case for Norman Finkelstein,” The Electronic Intifada 15 June 2007), http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7029.shtml; Michael C. Desch, “The Chutzpah of Alan Dershowitz,” The American Conservative (5 December 2005), 30-33, http://normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=98; and Frank Menetrez, “Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong?” CounterPunch (30 April 2007), http://www.counterpunch.org/menetrez04302007.html.
91 Amy Goodman, “‘It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage’.”
92 See note 89 above.
93 “ADL Reacts to DePaul’s Denial of Tenure to Prof. Norman Finkelstein,” Anti-Defamation League (11 June 2007), http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Mise_00/5071_00.htm. Links to the JDO and StandWithUs interventions can be found at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-tenure-denied-2/.
94 Amy Goodman, “It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage.” (Like the German “Menschlichkeit,” the Yiddish word used here means rectitude and nobility of character.)
95 Razack’s publications include Canadian Feminism and the Law (Toronto: Second Story, 1991), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), the edited collection Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), and Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
96 Justin Podur, “For Free Expression on Palestine,” The Bullet: Socialist Project, E-Bulletin No. 211 (28 April 2009), http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet211.html.
97 My article “Resisting the Post-National: Canadian Critiques of the Geo-Cultural Politics of Globalization,” in Gunilla Florby, Mark Shackleton, and Katri Suhonen, eds., Canada: Images of a Post/National Society (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 39-54, includes a brief assessment of Chossudovsky’s scholarly and political work; an earlier version of this essay is available as “Canada’s Thinker-Activists and Critics of Globalization,” Centre for Research on Globalization (27 December 2005), http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1595. Chossudovsky’s books include Capital Accumulation in Chile and Latin America (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977), Towards Capitalist Restoration? Chinese Socialism After Mao (London: Macmillan, 1986), Exporting Apartheid to Sub-Saharan Africa (New Delhi: Madhyam, 1997), The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2003), and America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ (Pincourt, Québec: Global Research, 2005).
98 See my article “Unspeakable Truths: CanWest Global Defines ‘Acceptable Civil Discourse’. In Defence of Michel Chossudovsky,” Peace, Earth and Justice News (11 September 2005), http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3274&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.
99 Ibid.
100 “Statement By Denis Rancourt Regarding His Dismissal By The University Of Ottawa,” available at “Canadian University Professor Fired for Criticising Israel,” Palestinian Mothers (24 April 2009), http://palestinian.ning.com/profiles/blogs/canadian-university-professor.
101 Ibid.
102 Denis Rancourt, “University of Ottawa’s Covert Surveillance of a Professor and Several Students (2006-2008),” January 2010, http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/Data/Documents/covertsurveillance/covert-surveillance=UofO=pbl-1.pdf, p. 3.
103 His books include Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism: Transnational Production, Transnational Capitalists, and the Transnational State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
104 “Santa Barbara News Press—Prof. Robinson’s Op-ed Letter—May 31, 2009,” Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, http://sb4af.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/santa-barbara-news-press-prof-robinsons-op-ed-letter-may-31-2009/.
105 The documents referred to in this paragraph are all available at the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB website, http://sb4af.wordpress.com/.
106 Scott Horton, “More Prosecutorial Misconduct in the Al-Arian Case,” Harper’s Magazine (11 March 2009), http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004539. For links to many further documents, see the website Free Sami Al-Arian: Political Prisoner Since Feb. 20, 2003, http://www.freesamialarian.com/.
107 Jason Kunin, “Freedom to Teach, Freedom of Speech: Israel-Palestine.” Naylor’s behaviour was revealed by Liisa Schofield, “Exposed: University of Toronto suppresses pro-Palestinian activism,” Rabble.ca (18 February 2009), http://www.rabble.ca/news/exposed-university-toronto-suppressed-pro-palestinian-activism. For a thorough discussion of the resources marshalled “to silence criticism of the Canadian government’s unwavering support for Israel,” see Rafeef Ziadah, “Freedom of Expression and Palestine Advocacy,” The Bullet: Socialist Project, E-Bulletin No. 219 (19 May 2009), http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet219.html.
108 Marwan Bishara, Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid (2001; 2nd ed., London and New York: Zed Books, 2002), p. 4.
109 Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006; rpt. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), and “Canada’s withholding funds from Palestinians ‘criminal’: Carter,” CBC News (9 December 2006), http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/12/08/carter-israel.html; Shulamit Aloni, “Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel,” CounterPunch (8 January 2007), http://www.counterpunch.org/aloni01082007.html. Aloni is also the author of Demokratia ba’azikim [Democracy or Ethnocracy] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010).
110 Henry Siegman, “Imposing Middle East Peace,” The Nation (7 January 2010), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/siegman. See also Siegman, “For Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy,” Financial Times (23 February 2010), http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/48a4a5e6-20b2-11df-9775-00144feab49a.html, in which he remarks that “The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.”
111 See Michael Ignatieff, “Israel Apartheid Week and CUPE Ontario’s anti-Israel posturing should be condemned,” National Post (5 March 2009), http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/05/michael-ignatieff-israel-apartheid-week-and-cupe-ontario-s-anti-israel-posturing-should-be-condemned.aspx. Ignatieff writes: “International law defines ‘apartheid’ as a crime against humanity. Labelling Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state is a deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself. Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Attempting to describe its very existence as a crime against humanity is not.” (The sophism is obvious: What is actually being objected to is the fact, not of Israel’s existence, but of its behaviour. South Africa did not cease to exist when it ceased to be an apartheid state; neither will Israel when it either returns to its pre-1967 borders or else offers recompense and full citizenship rights to the people of Palestine.) See also Robert Benzie, “MPPs unite to condemn ‘odious’ Israeli Apartheid Week,” Toronto Star (25 February 2010), http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/771524--mpps-unite-to-condemn-israeli-apartheid-week.
112 Kunin, note 2. Karin Brothers also draws attention to the same study: Virginia Tilley, ed., Occupation, colonialism, apartheid?: a reassessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law (Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, May 2009), http://www.hrsc.ac.za/Document-3227.phtml.
113 Margaret Aziza Pappano, “Academic Freedom Threatened in Ontario Universities,” The Bullet: Socialist Project, E-Bulletin No. 187 (18 February 2009), http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet187.html#continue.
114 Meron Benvenisti, “The binationalism vogue,” Haaretz (30 April 2009), http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081978.html. See also Benvenisti, “The Inevitable Bi-national Regime,” Haaretz (22 January 2010 [Hebrew]), English translation by Zalman Amit and Daphna Levitt available at Israeli Occupation Archive (26 January 2010), http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-01-26/meron-benvenisti-the-inevitable-bi-national-regime/.
115 For information about the conference, see Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace (June 22-24, 2009 / York University, Toronto), http://www.yorku.ca/ipconf/.
116 Dorit Naaman, “Coordinated Campaign Aimed to Stifle Academic Discussion about Israel Raises Critical Questions,” CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin 56.8 (October 2009), p. A4.
117 See “Minister’s Office Threatens SSHRC’s Federal Budget Funding: Internal Email,” CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin 56.8 (October 2009), pp. A1, 9; and “Gary Goodyear’s attempted blackmail,” Dawg’s Blawg (28 September 2009), http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2009/09/gary-goodyears-attempted-blackmail.html.
118 Naaman, “Coordinated Campaign.”
119 Goldberg and Makdisi, “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics.”
120 Massad, “Policing the academy,” Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 633 (10-16 April 2003), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/633/op2.htm.
121 Goodyear does in fact have a well-earned reputation for being foul-tempered; see “Researchers fear ‘stagnation’ under Tories,” The Globe and Mail (2 March 2009, updated 10 April 2009), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article975257ece; and “Maybe a ‘time out,’ Minister?” Dawg’s Blawg (2 March 2009), http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2009/03/maybe-time-out-minister.html.
122 “One size doesn’t fit all,” National Post (25 February 2010), http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2609507.
123 Kathleen and Bill Christison, Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (London: Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 136-37.
124 Ibid., p. 137, quoting Richard Falk, “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” ZNet (5 July 2007), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectonID=107&ItemID=134226.
125 Ibid., p. 137.
126 Gideon Alon, “Lieberman blasted for suggesting drowning Palestinian prisoners,” Haaretz (8 July 2003), http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=315541.
127 “LIEBERMAN, Avigdor—Israeli Politician and deputy prime minister,” Electronic Intifada, http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/people/658.shtml; Jonathan Cook, “Israel’s Dark Future,” Electronic Intifada (20 January 2007), http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6411.shtml.
128 Tim Butcher, “Israeli minister vows Palestinian ‘holocaust’,” The Telegraph (29 February 2008), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1580339/israeli-minister-vows-Palestinian-holocaust.html; “Israel warns Gaza of ‘shoah’,” Reuters (29 February 2008), http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2868601720080229; James Hider, “Israel threatens to unleash ‘holocaust’ in Gaza,” Times Online (1 March 2008), http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3459144.ece.
129 It does not seem likely that Vilnai thought of the preceding days’ events, in which one Israeli was killed by rocket fire, and thirty Palestinians by Israeli attacks, as a “shoah.” Perhaps he was using “shoah” to translate the Arab work “nakba,” which also means “catastrophe,” and also has a specific historical reference—to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which accompanied the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. But a “greater nakba” would also be a genocidal act.
130 Juan Cole, “Harvard Professor’s Modest Proposal: Starve the Gazans into Having Fewer Babies,” Informed Comment (24 February 2010), http://www.juancole.com/2010/02/harvard-professors-modest-proposal.html.
131 Martin Kramer, “Superfluous young men,” Sandbox (7 February 2010), http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2010/02/superfluous-young-men/.
132 “OPT: Signs of worsening malnutrition among children,” UNISPAL (21 April 2009), http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/CB9A27EF05BB52408525759F0061B366.
133 See, for example, M. J. Rosenberg, “Is Harvard Prof Advocating Palestinian Genocide?” The Huffington Post (22 February 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/harvard-prof-urges-popula_b_472191.html; and “Harvard center condemns, then defends, fellow’s pro-genocide statements,” Electronic Intifada (23 February 2010), http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11097.shtml.
134 Kramer, “Smear intifada,” Sandbox (22 February 2010), http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2010/02/smear-intifada/.
135 “OPT: Signs of worsening malnutrition.”
136 Akiva Eldar, “Israel’s compassion in Haiti can’t hide our ugly face in Gaza,” Haaretz (18 January 2010), http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1143313.html.
137 “Gaza Health Fact Sheet,” World Health Organization (20 January 2010), http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/80e8238d765e5fb7852576b1004ec498?OpenDocument.
138 See International Humanitarian Law—Treaties & Documents, ICRC, http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/INTRO/380?OpenDocument.
139 M. J. Rosenberg, “Yes, Kramer Did Advocate Palestinian Genocide,” The Huffington Post (24 February 2010), http://huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/yes-kramer-did-advocate-p_b_475350.html.
140 Kramer, “Smear intifada.”
141 Bahija Réghaï, “Canadian Policy: The Jerusalem Effect,” OpEd News (26 January 2010), http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Canadian-Policy-The-Jerus-by-Bahija-Reghai-100125-265.html.
142 In his “Smear Intifada” posting, Kramer protests that the ideas he presented were derived from Gunnar Heinsohn, “Ending the West’s Proxy War Against Israel,” Wall Street Journal Europe (12 January 2009), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123171179743471961.html. Heinsohn’s argument is just as de-historicized as Kramer’s—and also more grotesquely genocidal, because more detailed in its attack on UNRWA’s contribution to what Heinsohn calls “Gaza’s extreme demographic armament.” Heinsohn, who the Wall Street Journal tells us “heads the Raphael Lemkin Institute at the University of Bremen, Europe’s first institute devoted to comparative genocide research,” appears not to understand the difference between researching genocide and helping to provoke it. (His publications include extensive and disastrously incompetent attempts to revise ancient Near Eastern chronology, as well as equally incompetent applications of demographic analysis to contemporary situations.) Kramer might also have given some credit for his ideas to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who as Jonathan Cook notes boasted in January 2007, when he was leader of the opposition, “that child allowance cuts he imposed as finance minister in 2002 had had a ‘positive’ demographic effect by reducing the birth rate of Palestinian citizens.” See Cook, “Israel’s Dark Future.”
143 Kathleen and Bill Christison, Palestine in Pieces, p. 161; quoting from Care International UK, Oxfam, Trocaire, Save the Children UK, et al., The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion (March 2008), http://www.carewbg.org/Reports/Gaza-A-Humanitarian-Implosion.pdf.
144 Neve Gordon, “Boycott Israel: Stopping the Apartheid State,” CounterPunch (24 August 2009), http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon08242009.html#at.
145 See “PACBI Issues Guidelines for Applying Academic Boycott,” Global BDS Movement (6 October 2009), http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/566.
146 “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation. An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival” (9 September 2009), http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/2009/09/toronto-declaration-no-celebration-of.html; see also Ken Loach, Rebecca O’Brien and Paul Laverty, “Boycotts don’t equal censorship,” The Guardian (1 September 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/01/israel-palestine-boycott-film; and Eric Walberg, “The Battle in Canada: ‘Brand Israel’ Teflon v. Palestinian Reality,” CounterPunch (19 October 2009), http://www.counterpunch.org/walberg10192009html#at.
147 Gordon, “Boycott Israel.”
148 Gideon Levy, “The Last Refuge: Neve Gordon and the Boycott of Israel,” CounterPunch (27 August 2009), http://www.counterpunch.org/levy08272009.html#at.
149 Jonathan Cook, “Campus Watch Copycats Close In On Israeli Professors,” Countercurrents.org (16 November 2009), http://www.countercurrents.org/cook161109.htm.
150 Paul Craig Roberts, “Why Not Sanctions for Israel? Gross Violations of Human Rights,” CounterPunch (1 September 2009), http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09012009.html#at.
151 Levy, “The Last Refuge.”
152 I do not mean to dismiss other issues at stake, most importantly the right of return of people expelled from Israel in 1948. But diplomatic miracles cannot be expected to come all at once.
153 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, eds., Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 98.
154 Judith Butler, “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique,” in Precious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004; rpt. London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 126-27.
155 Ibid., p. 127.
