SOAS’s New Israel Studies Posts: Promoting Academic Excellence or Israel Advocacy?

Posted on 12/04/2011 by Antony Lerman

Two new academic posts in Israel studies are to be created at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, funded with a grant of £485,000 over 4 years from the Pears Foundation, which describes itself as a ‘British family foundation rooted in Jewish values’. At the same time, a European Association of Israel Studies is being set up, also supported by Pears, with the Professor of Israel Studies at SOAS, Colin Shindler, as its chair. The Guardian report gives Shindler’s rationale for the expansion of the subject area at SOAS:

Shindler . . . says the decision to expand Israel studies is a response to growing demand from students to know more about the political, cultural, social and economic background to events in the Middle East and is an attempt to offer an academic alternative to what he terms ‘the megaphone war’.

‘The Middle East conflict is always a hot subject that people want to understand because it’s so convoluted,’ he says. ‘People want rational responses. They are fed-up with slogans and one-sided approaches.’

The same emphasis on this development as being purely motivated by a desire to provide information, knowledge and understanding was evident from remarks made by the Director of the Pears Foundation, Charles Keidan:

[He] stresses that the aim is to meet demand for better scholarship in the area rather than to promote a cause.

‘We have been very conscious not to be involved in this as any form of Israel advocacy,’ he says. ‘This is advocacy for Israel studies, not for Israel.’

Expanding the objective academic study of Israel’s history, politics, foreign policy, society and culture at such an important institution can only be a good thing. As Keidan acknowledges, however, there is sensitivity surrounding gifts to universities in the area of Middle East studies, heightened recently following the opprobrium the London School of Economics brought upon itself for accepting a controversial £1.5 million donation from Saif Gaddafi. But Pears is already involved in funding what could have been a controversial academic initiative at London University – the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck – and have shown that they can keep their political inclinations to themselves by appointing Professor David Feldman whose approach to the subject is fiercely independent and goes against the grain of some very prominent figures in the field, with whom Pears may well be in sympathy.

Nevertheless, despite the gloss put on this development by Shindler and Keidan, all is not what it seems. While interest in the subject among students has no doubt increased and Shindler will strongly, and with some justification, claim that he teaches and researches the subject from as academically objective a position as possible, it’s quite obvious that this move is meant to counter, at least partly, the proliferation of Middle East studies funded by Arab sources at various universities up and down the country. The notion that work done at these institutions is politically biased against Israel is common in some Jewish circles in which I am sure that members of the Pears family mix.

Keidan may well be entirely sincere in saying that the foundation is not involved in this initiative ‘as any form of Israel advocacy’, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Pears itself funds Israel advocacy both directly and indirectly. It’s true that Pears’s involvement in advocacy is rather more enlightened than the path followed by those who more or less base what they do on the belief that Israel can do no wrong. The foundation supports the New Israel Fund, for example, which provides grants to Israeli and Israeli-Arab human rights organizations. And it also began a major initiative to raise awareness in the UK Jewish community of the severely disadvantaged position of Israel’s Arab – or Palestinian, as most now call themselves–citizens. However, a book it produced celebrating Israel’s scientific achievements – Israel in the World – was a classic hasbara (propaganda) exercise, based on the view that the problem facing Israel is simply that the country’s good news stories are not being disseminated sufficiently widely and intensively and that negative developments are exaggerated out of all proportion. (A devastating critique of this approach by the Israeli Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy was published on 10 April.) Just how much money it devotes to Israel advocacy is impossible to know because, contrary to many other grant making foundations that are registered charities, Pears does not itemise all its individual grants in its annual accounts.

This raises the question of whether Pears can draw a clear line between its different forms of engagement with Israel. Where does advocacy stop and completely disinterested academic sponsorship begin? I have no doubt that SOAS will not allow anything other than the highest standards of independence and objectivity to guide the procedures they will follow to appoint the two new academics. However, more subtle, self-imposed constraints on the decisions that SOAS as an institution will have to make in relation to Israel studies may well come into play. And with Pears following what one might call a soft advocacy philosophy, one that incorporates a degree of critical scrutiny of Israel’s past and present, the foundation may judge that what transpires in the Israel studies field at SOAS suits their pro-Israel agenda.

And for all Professor Shindler’s wish to get away from the ‘megaphone war’, the fact is that he, like so many other academics in this field, engages in public debate and controversy on the politics of the conflict – he from from a pro-Israel angle. This is inevitable. Academics must be free agents in terms of expressing their political views and if they do so it’s very likely that it will be in relation to the academic subject matter with which they are dealing.

I’m sure that these additional academic posts will expand the choices open to students at SOAS who are interested in exploring Israel studies and it is to be hoped that some first rate, critical research work will ultimately be one of the products of this expansion. But it’s rather silly to pretend that there is some kind of Chinese wall between the Pears Foundation’s Israel advocacy ambitions and its motives for funding these appointments at SOAS. Pears and SOAS, like so many other bodies funding Middle East studies and the universities gratefully taking their funds, are treading a very thin, fragile and dangerous line.

Posted in British Jews, Middle East | Leave a comment

Celebrating the Jewish Renaissance in Poland: A European Story

Posted on 08/04/2011 by Antony Lerman

It seems rare these days that good news stories about Jewish life in Europe make it into the mainstream media. And if such news comes out of Poland it’s as likely as not to be diluted by the usual stress on the depth and ubiquity of Polish antisemitism. So Jeevan Vasagar and Julian Borger’s 7 April article in the Guardian on ‘A Jewish renaissance in Poland’, which also provides evidence of the decline of antisemitism in the country, is doubly welcome.

Focused principally on Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter in Krakow, the home of a remarkable annual festival of Jewish culture that was first staged in 1988, before the collapse of communism, the article describes how what was primarily an interest among non-Jewish Poles in Jewish culture now has the added dimension of an awakening of Jewish identity among young Jewish Poles whose parents hid their Jewishness during the communist years. This is a process which Poland’s enlightened and far-sighted New York-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich has done so much to encourage. But it has also come about because a handful of Polish Jewish leaders who were active in the Solidarity movement dedicated themselves to work for the revival of Jewish life in Poland and for Jewish-Polish and Jewish-Catholic reconciliation.

The article brushes nothing under the carpet. It acknowledges that difficulties remain in confronting some of the very troubling examples of Polish antisemitism during and after the war. But it rightly praises the late Pope John Paul II who, Schudrich says, ‘did more to fight antisemitism than anyone else in the last 2,000 years’. He made indifference to antisemitism ‘less acceptable in the Catholic mainstream’.

The authors also refer to the ersatz nature of some aspects of the Jewish cultural revival: Jewish-themed restaurants, kitschy figurines of black-hatted, long-bearded orthodox Jews that border on ‘racist caricature’ and the throwing together of the Krakow Jewish cultural highlights and the nearby Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps into the one tourist pot. And yet, as even local Jews acknowledge, some dodgy stuff at the edges is a small price to pay for the positive affirmation of the Polish-Jewish past and the possibility of a Polish-Jewish future.

What the article doesn’t perhaps sufficiently convey is the fact that the process of renewal and rediscovery of the Jewish past has been going on for more than two decades and actually predates the collapse of communism. It too often seems to be the case that articles of this kind, which are rare, purport to be discovering the Polish-Jewish renaissance for the first time; as if it’s a new phenomenon that the intrepid journalists have now brought to public attention. The Borger-Vasagar article doesn’t do this, but given the relentless stress on antisemitism in Europe and anti-Israel sentiment that is branded antisemitic, it’s not surprising that a narrative based on a sense of the continuity of the Jewish revival has not taken hold.

One key development the authors omit is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews now being built on the site of the Warsaw ghetto. The history of this multi-million dollar project, which was first proposed in the early 1990s, reflects the path that the Polish Jewish renaissance has taken: firmly upwards, but with hiccups along the way. A very substantial part of the costs of building the museum are being covered by the Polish government and the site was donated free by the Warsaw municipality. There have been many nay-sayers among Polish politicians and other sectors of Polish society, but a remarkable consensus at the highest political levels has been crucial in finally helping to bring the hugely ambitious project to fruition. Both the former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and the serving president who died in the 2010 Smolensk-North airport plane crash, Lech Kaczynski, who hailed from very different ends of the political spectrum, backed the museum. And the large sums raised by groups of Jewish supporters mostly in America and mostly of Polish-Jewish origin, which involved them becoming more closely engaged with contemporary Polish society, has contributed further to the general Polish-Jewish rapprochement.

The Jewish renaissance is a European story, not just a Polish one. It’s probably too much to hope that the full significance of this for Jewish life in Europe might now be given more consistent attention than is afforded to threats to Jews. There are threats, but the true danger they represent is often grossly exaggerated. What is happening in Poland does not cancel out antisemitism, but it shows that the Jewish reality today is complex, dynamic, diverse and inspiring and is more than likely to remain so.

Posted in Europe, Religion | Leave a comment

Pessimism Has its Place, But it Doesn’t Define the Jewish Condition

Posted on 01/04/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret where it was published on 31 March 2011.

The great Jewish writer Shalom Aleichem (1859-1916) said: ‘April Fool is a joke—repeated 365 times a year.’ Does this encapsulate the uniqueness of Jewish pessimism? History has been so awful, so often, it’s like a cruel joke being continually visited upon us. It makes you realise why Shalom Aleichem also reportedly said: ‘God, I know we are your chosen people, but couldn’t you choose somebody else for a change?’

Perhaps I wasn’t brought up right. As a child and then a teenager, I very rarely associated being Jewish with pessimism. The closest I came to it was despairing that Sunday morning’s cheder Torah translation session or musaf (the additional service) on Shabbat would never end. Most of the time I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have been born Jewish, to live in the Golders Green area of London, the best city in the world, in England, the best country in the world. Most of what was on offer to me as a Jew was enticing. Yes, there were restrictions, but they seemed a small price to pay for the pleasures and advantages of being a Jew.

Today, weighed down by the warnings of impending disaster and apocalypse about to befall the Jewish people, by a mood of deep pessimism about the future, I wonder whether, as a panglossian youth, I simply ignored the long and intense history of persecution I was also being taught. Or did our teachers and parents simply keep this from us in the post-war world to protect us from the traumatised state world Jewry found itself in after the Holocaust?

I was recently in debate with a prominent right-wing Jewish columnist who specialises in delivering icily coherent apocalyptic rants about Jews in Europe being overrun by fanatical, antisemitic Muslim hordes and Jews in Israel, ill-served by pusillanimous, appeasing leaders, on the verge of extinction by perfidious Arabs. But what bothered me more than her naked prejudice and unmediated pessimism was that most of the Jewish audience lapped it up, seemingly delighted by the idea that they were soon to be consumed by some imminent conflagration. It was as if they were finally having everything they had been taught about the ‘lachrymose’ nature of Jewish history validated by this latter-day prophet. Reflecting on this afterwards, as I tried to work out what I should have said in response, I soon concluded that her entire outlook was fundamentally un-Jewish, that apocalypse was alien to Jewish thought, that the Jewish masses—well, at least the majority of the 200 in the hall—were being led astray by a false messiah.

But it seems that there is ample evidence of pessimism being a beloved Jewish tradition. Morning prayers begin by praising God ‘who has not made me a gentile . . . a slave . . . a woman’. That is: things could have been worse. And they might very well be. ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow’, the Talmud says, ‘who knows what will befall you today?’ As Barbara Gitenstein writes in Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry: ‘the apocalyptic, associated from its inception with times of spiritual crisis of the Jewish people, has appeared most significantly at the periods of catastrophe for the Jewish people.’ Even in America, in an increasingly secular age, where the Jewish community was essentially protected from the Holocaust, ‘the contemporary literature of Jewish-Americans returns to apocalyptic patterns, theories, and devices.’

Here, though, we might take comfort from the fact that pessimism and notions of the apocalyptic are either necessary correctives to an overly-permissive, laissez-faire attitude to morality or a literary device employed largely by poets. In Jewish teaching, if Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks in his book Future Tense is to be believed, Judaism is all about having a sense of hope and purpose about the future. Yes, there is good reason to be pessimistic. Jews lost many battles. But they have never accepted defeat: ‘our story, our heritage, our task, [is] to be a source of hope against a world of despair.’

I may be miles apart from Lord Sacks on some issues, but this is a Judaism I recognize. And I suppose it makes perfect sense since in Judaism the future belongs to God and God will ultimately achieve his purposes. But whether you believe in God or not, maintaining Jewish identity by stressing everything terrible that Jews have experienced over the centuries and will experience in the years to come may appeal to a few, but most Jews will be put off—and rightly so.

When gloom is justified there’s no point in pretending that everything is hunky-dory. But even with all that plagues us today, there is still much to fortify the spirit. To be realistic about danger is not to abandon any vision of the future. On the contrary, our vision of what can be is surely made more realisable when a sober appreciation of risk is taken into account. A bit of pessimism will always have its place, as long as it’s tinged with irony. Einstein set a good example in this respect. ‘If my theory of relativity is proven successful’, he said, ‘Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.’

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Moussa Koussa May Be a Criminal But He Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried. Will He Ever Be Prosecuted?

Posted on 01/04/2011 by Antony Lerman

The defection of the Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa adds some spice and immediacy to current arguments over universal jurisdiction. There’s probably good prima facie evidence that he was involved in criminal acts in Libya, Britain and other countries contrary to international law, so securing a warrant for his arrest would, in theory, seem like a natural step to take. At the moment, of course, it would be entirely unnatural given that his arrival in this country was clearly facilitated by the British authorities in whose hands he securely remains. Certainly, while he is presumably being interviewed, debriefed or interrogated – take your pick on the basis of your understanding of the status of his relationship with the British – no private individual or group will get anywhere near him. For now, at least, politics, national interest and the interests of the international, UN-mandated coalition enforcing Security Council Resolution 1973, trump the immediate application of the principles of international humanitarian law. Nevertheless, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has stated that Moussa Koussa has not been granted immunity, therefore leaving open the possibility that, in the fullness of time, he could be prosecuted. But if the remarkably well-informed comments from senior politicians like Jack Straw and the former MI6 man interviewed by Eddie Mair on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme today (31 March), which paint a picture of what was probably a long and fruitful relationship with the British security service, are anything to go by, I for one would definitely not be putting any money on Koussa ever coming before a court.

Taking politics out of the process of apprehending people suspected of having committed war crimes, however, is what a clause (152) in the police reform and social responsibility bill now going through parliament is meant to achieve. The British government is proposing to introduce a change in the law on arrest warrants requested by private individuals in international cases to prevent what they claim to be bogus and politically motivated applications. The issue arose because a magistrate agreed in December 2009 to the issuing of an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, who was Israel’s Foreign Minister at the time of Cast Lead, the 2008-9 military attack on Gaza in which up to 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis lost their lives. The warrant was withdrawn when it was pointed out that Livni had not actually come to the UK. Nevertheless, some politicians and pro-Israel activists were outraged that a democratically elected politician of another country could be treated in this way and that it would make it impossible for Britain to play any role as an honest broker in securing peace in the Middle East because senior Israeli figures would avoid entering the country.

The new law would mean that judges could only issue arrest warrants requested by private individuals after the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, had examined the application and agreed that it could go forward. The supporters of Clause 152 claim that it is intended to ensure that only those cases where there is a realistic chance of securing conviction would be prosecuted. The DPP is best placed to make this judgement, the argument goes, and he would do it entirely independently: ‘At the end of the day, the decision is mine, it is independent and it is reviewable’, Starmer told the Committee examining the Bill on 20 January.

No one doubts the independence and absolute integrity of the current DPP, so on the face of it, it might look as if his decision to allow the application for an arrest warrant to proceed would be based entirely on his assessment of the evidence. But behind the DPP stands the Attorney General, a political appointee, with whom the DPP would be obliged to consult since one of the grounds on which he would need to assess whether the case should go forward is whether it is in the public interest. And we can see quite clearly from the Moussa Koussa situation that the government’s interpretation of what is in the public interest would be the determining factor. It has been broadly accepted, without any proper discussion, that it’s in the public interest to refrain from prosecuting him, at least for now.

Political factors undoubtedly come into play, even if the DPP is not the one to be considering them. It would surely be very difficult for him to ignore the advice of the Attorney General on the public interest test. If he did so it might look as if he was indeed making a political judgement.

What strengthens worries on this point is the very manner in which the new clause came into being. It arose directly out of the Livni case and the very vocal objections by the Israeli government and its supporters. Therefore it hardly bodes well for the operation of Clause 152, which is supposed to keep politics out of the frame, if direct public political pressure from a foreign government appears to have been the main reason for the introduction of the clause.

This could lead to further fears that, when William Hague says (as he did in parliament on 24 March) ‘It makes this country rather ridiculous if people can get an arrest warrant for people from other countries where there is no realistic chance of prosecution …’, he is making political judgements about countries with which the government, for one reason or another, feels it needs to tread carefully. For in the case of Livni, the fact that the Goldstone Report concluded that there was strong evidence to suggest that war crimes were committed by both sides in the 2008-9 attack by Israel on Gaza is surely sufficient grounds for investigating whether the foreign minister of one of the parties held some responsibility for what was done. What does it say for the robustness and quality of our justice system if it’s feared that judges can’t decide whether the threshold of evidence has been met? In fact there have been only 10 applications for arrest warrants in 10 years and only 2 have been successful, so judges don’t seem to be exactly running riot. Indeed, it has been pointed out by a number of people that the issue of the arrest warrant for a war crime is decided only by specialist legally qualified magistrates.

In practice, if Clause 152 is passed, given that so few arrest warrants have actually been issued, little may change. But it would seriously tilt the justice system towards giving greater consideration to foreign policy priorities, which can be rather fickle, and away from the fundamental principles of justice.

What ultimately happens to Moussa Koussa may well throw light on whether universal jurisdiction for particularly heinous crimes means very much in the UK. Although David Cameron has now said that the police should be free to follow through with any enquiries they wish and that no deal has been done with the now former Foreign Minister, who is to say that the Libyan won’t be able to secure immunity if he is able to convince the British authorities that the quality of the intelligence he knows is so good, but that he will only release it to them in exchange for a deal that in effect protects him from prosecution. Or am I being too cynical?

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In Praise of Altruism: The Antidote to a Morally Bankrupt Ethnocentrism

Posted on 24/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret where it was published today.

It’s been fashionable in recent decades to be sniffy about altruism. Self-interest, we are told, is the most important instinct that leads to action in support of people who are destitute, infirm, the victims of natural disasters, targets of racial hatred or oppressed by brutal regimes. If I look after no. 1, I’ll be better equipped and more able to look after others.

Jewish communities have been fertile ground for those who are keen to sow the seeds of this approach. For historical and some would say religious reasons, the virtues of self-help, the entrepreneurial spirit and private philanthropy have been central to the sustenance of Jewish life. There’s no shame in making money as long as a proportion of it is put to good social use. In the UK, both the current and the former Chief Rabbis of the United Synagogue, the mainstream orthodox denomination, have appeared to lend their spiritual authority to the ideas of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher. The Jewish philanthropic stars of Europe today hail from the former Soviet Union. They’re men who made billions in the cowboy capitalism years after the collapse of communism, seem to live high on the hog (as it were) and are now feted by any Jewish charity that can get anywhere near them. The thriving market in European Jewish revival is the product of the free market and neo-liberal economics.

But Jewish reality is more complex than this picture and these arguments allow. In most of Europe, and particularly in two of the largest three Jewish communities, France and Germany, the traditions of private philanthropy remain very weak in comparison to the UK, and even more so to the United States. State funding for Jewish communities, which was the means by which post-war governments tried to make some amends for the destruction of Jewish life during the Holocaust, has played a crucial role in underpinning the basis of communal life.

Even more important is the fact that so many of the activists behind the organizations and voluntary associations that focus on social and humanitarian needs are clearly motivated by their understanding of Jewish teachings, by what they believe to be the Jewish values they learnt from their parents, their extended families and the communities in which they grew up. By and large, they are not self-made millionaires. They haven’t felt it necessary to feather their own nests first before engaging in social action.

And the truth is that we don’t fully recognize the crucial importance that the Jewish social action movement, which has crystallised so significantly in recent years as a result of the persistence of altruism and the tenacity of those who put tikkun olam, repairing the world, above everything else, now plays in keeping alight the flame of the Jewish pursuit of justice. Among the voices and forces that dominate in the great controversies that are tearing the Jewish world apart—the Israel-Palestine conflict, the bitter religious divisions, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the degree to which most of the world does or does not hate us—I struggle to find anyone paying much attention to their Jewish moral compass. But look—in the UK, for example—at the leaders and activists in the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, ‘a Jewish voice on race and asylum’, in Tzedek, ‘Jewish action for a just world’, in René Cassin, ‘the Jewish voice for human rights’, in the Big Green Jewish Website, ‘connecting Judaism to the environment’—to name but a few—and there you see a passion for social justice that may guide us through these dark times and into a brighter future.

This is a worldwide Jewish movement of which the Israeli civil and human rights NGOs, so severely under siege at this time, are an integral part. And it’s also one in which private philanthropists play a very important role, so don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for those who start from the perspective of self-interest. But without those who are motivated first and foremost by what they believe to be good, right, enlightened and just, and who apply such values equally to everyone, no matter what their religion, colour, ethnic origin, social class or mental and physical ability, the social action movement wouldn’t exist.

A cautionary word is necessary here, however. I think I’ve mentioned the phrase ‘Darfur chic’ before in these letters. I heard it first from a key Jewish educationalist and social activist who was drawing attention to the fact that there is a tendency among some in this movement to congratulate themselves on how wonderful Jewish humanitarian engagement is in developing African countries, in the aftermath of floods and earthquakes, when famine strikes. And yet, when it comes to the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians they are silent, inactive and sometimes positively hostile. The ultimate test of the Jewish social action movement is precisely how and when it will face up to this challenge.

Fortunately, there are groups doing precisely this, but by no means enough to alter the image of Jews today as characterised by the unsightly battles of raucous political ideologues and propagandists. It’s not more self-interest that’s going to change that. Altruism may not be a fashionable motive any more, but without it, we’ll never escape from out morally bankrupt ethnocentrism.

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Israel’s Cynical Exploitation of the Murder of Jewish Settlers in Itamar on the West Bank

Posted on 22/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

The horrific murder of three children and their parents in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Itamar on 11 March was a shocking and sickening event. Even in a long-running conflict which has seen the bloodiest of murders and the most devastating of military attacks, an incident like this can still shake people to the core. Nothing can justify it, no matter what view you take of settlements, the occupation, the situation of the Palestinians. This was simply a heinous criminal act.

Sadly, however, given the nature of the conflict and the extreme views held by some on all sides, it was inevitable that what happened would be utilised for propaganda purposes. In Rafah in the Gaza Strip there were scenes of rejoicing. In Israel, right-wingers and settlers blamed the murders on ‘left-wing incitement’.

But perhaps the worst exploitation of the incident was the decision by Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli Propaganda Minister, to release to the international media the graphic pictures of the murdered Fogel family as they lay in their own blood. Not only was this beyond the pale by any standards, its purpose – to ‘change the narrative’ of international coverage that is seen as relentlessly blaming Israel for the occupation, building illegal settlements and blocking peace moves – was not achieved. In fact releasing this pornography failed dramatically. As Anshel Pfeffer wrote, ‘no serious news organization even considered publishing the photographs.’

Fortunately, some commentators wrote sensibly and sensitively about the affair. On the admirable bitterlemons.org website, Ghassan Khatib, one of the two editors, rightly emphasised that the murders were ‘condemned in the strongest possible language by many Palestinian officials, opposition and opinion leaders and journalists.’ Responding to Israeli government charges of Palestinian incitement Khatib wrote: ‘The Palestinian Authority has shown a firm and long-standing commitment to non-violence. It has achieved a sustained period of stability, one acknowledged by the international community and, in many cases, by Israeli officials themselves.’

Khatib’s fellow editor Yossi Alpher afirmed this: ‘The local context is one of ongoing settlement expansion and increasingly lawless behavior by extremist settlers, some of them from Itamar and the “illegal” outposts it has spawned, who attack their Palestinian neighbors. This, even as the overall security situation in the West Bank has improved immensely in the last few years thanks to the success of Palestinian security forces and close cooperation between them and Israel and the international community.’

Both agreed that part of the problem was the absence of a credible peace process. Khatib argued that this effectively ‘legitimiz[es] the illegal and violent activities of the settlers, which will definitely contribute to further deepening the hostilities between the two sides and encourage both Israelis and Palestinians to pursue illegal and violent activities, attitudes and expressions.’ Alpher said that a key aspect of the context is the ‘total absence of a peace process: it is almost axiomatic that the status quo of relative peace and quiet in the West Bank cannot long be maintained in the absence of some sort of movement toward peace (although it must be acknowledged that progress toward peace also produces acts of terrorism on both sides).’ He continued:

And all the while, Israel’s right-wing government is rife with its own brand of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian incitement, disseminated mainly by supposedly respectable and even esteemed religious figures like Shas leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and rabblerousing jingoists like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his associates.

In many ways the Netanyahu government responded to the murders as if the region and the world had nothing else to think about. Protests, demonstrations, brutal suppression of democracy activists, troops and militias firing on their own people – Israel had already shown itself to be incapable of comprehending the wider significance of what was going on in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Egypt; now it expected to command international attention for its domestic concerns and responded with the usual accusations of prejudice and bad faith when it wasn’t forthcoming.

Anshel Pfeffer so clearly demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli government when he juxtaposed the way it sought to gain political and ideological advantage from the murder of the Fogels with the remarks made at the funeral by Motti Fogel, the brother of the dead father Udi:

All the slogans about Torah and settling the land, about Eretz Yisrael and Am Yisrael, are trying to obscure the simple fact that you are dead and nothing can make that go away. You are dead and no slogan can bring you back. You are not a symbol or a national event, your life had a meaning of its own and your terrible death cannot become a meaning to whatever end.

And for me, if anyone needed any evidence of the utter sham of the settler ideology, which claims that settling ‘Judea and Samaria’ is fulfilling God’s purpose and the moral destiny of the Jewish people, Defence Minister Ehud Barak provided the killer fact 48 hours after the murders when he announced, in response to the crime, that 4-500 new housing units would now be built in the large settlement blocs. This was an undisguised act of punishment, a retaliation that revealed far more about Israel’s disdain for the Palestinians and complete lack of interest in serious peace negotiations than any operation that security or military forces might have carried out. Netanyahu said it all before the grieving family at the house of mourning: the terrorists shoot, we build. In other words, the Palestinians bear collective guilt, so we, the Israelis, will determine the physical and human fate of the West Bank.

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Shami Chakrabarti’s Comments on Antisemitism Distorted in Jewish Chronicle Headline

Posted on 19/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

I greatly admire Shami Chakrabarti, the head of Liberty. Britain would have been a much more repressive society without her having taken such strong, consistent and brave stands on justice, freedom of expression and civil and human rights generally over recent years. So when she speaks publicly about prejudice her voice needs to be heard. And I’m sure that she gives careful thought to what she says and has good grounds for the judgements she makes.

Her comments in the Jewish Chronicle on 17 March, quoted by the paper’s political editor Martin Bright in the report of an interview he conducted with her, should therefore be taken very seriously. I was alerted to her views when Martin Bright tweeted: ‘Shami tells it as it is: “Casual antisemitism now so prevalent it turns my stomach”: Shami Chakrabarti in @jewishchron http://bit.ly/hojYGN’. The words in double quote marks above comprise the heading of the piece online. The main title is ‘Interview: Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti’.

But when I then went to the piece online, I discovered that she makes no such statement. In the third paragraph she says:

‘I have witnessed the prevalence of a casual antisemitism that troubles me and it is probably greater today than it even was at times in my youth’.

Then two paragraphs further on Bright quotes her again:

she had witnessed a worrying trend in recent years, especially on Israel. ‘I do think that sometimes it is because people are eliding, or think it is acceptable to elide, the criticism of Israeli government policy with peoples’ race. And I have heard it done, and it turns my stomach.’

Now it may be that she would agree that the statement ‘Casual antisemitism is so prevalent it turns my stomach’ represents her view, but judging by what she said, or at least by Bright’s recording and reporting of what she said, it was ‘the criticism of Israeli government policy [being elided] with people’s race’ that turns her stomach.

There is no doubt that Chakrabarti takes current antisemitism very seriously, and this is all to the good. But why did Bright or the sub-editor feel it necessary to manufacture a quote by putting together parts of two separate comments? Set against the rest of the interview, it gives the impression that the paper wanted to extract as strong a statement about antisemitism from her words as they possibly could, even if it meant going so far as to distort what she actually said.

Why Martin Bright had to do this, or acquiesce in it if it wasn’t his formulation, seems, on one level, very odd. Shami is unequivocal in her condemnation of antisemitism and clearly very concerned about what she sees as its current manifestations – why hype up her already strong words about the issue? Interestingly, she questions Martin’s assertion about Jewish suspicions of the London School of Economics (she is a member of the LSE Council) because of anti-Israel activism on the LSE campus: ‘If I had any credible evidence that Jewish students were unhappy or feeling oppressed at the LSE, I would be acting on it.’ This comment, which runs counter to received wisdom about the experience of Jewish students on campus, doesn’t get foregrounded, but a manufactured quote does.

Regrettably, this kind of hype is not unusual. Especially not in the Jewish Chronicle and especially not from Martin Bright. A report he wrote last year for the Jewish Chronicle about antisemitism in Scotland caused considerable controversy because of its exaggeration of the problem. I wrote about it for the Guardian‘s Comment is Free blog and my piece was cross-posted to the blog of the Glasgow Jewish Educational Forum, together with some responses I gave to talkback on my piece.

We need to have rational, objective and evidence-based discussion about current antisemitism, how it manifests itself and what to do about it. Manipulating the words of an important contributor like Shami Chakrabarti to such a discussion is counterproductive.

Posted in Antisemitism | Leave a comment

Israel Doesn’t Reciprocate Devotion of Diaspora Jews

Posted on 18/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret, where it was published today.

Clear signs of changing attitudes towards Israel among British Jews have been emerging in recent years. And yet old thinking dies hard. Whereas a very significant proportion of British Jews who want to declare their attachment to Israel also want to be able to voice their criticism of Israeli government policies in public, among other Jews the knee-jerk response to defend Israel come what may remains strong.

Five or six years ago, even relatively mild criticism of Israel during panel discussions at the yearly Jewish Book Week would be greeted by wild shouts of anger from the audience, and I recall the words ‘traitor’ and ‘fifth columnist’ being used on one occasion. This year 600 people sat and listened attentively and very broadly sympathetically to Gideon Levy in conversation with a columnist on a national daily newspaper, Johann Hari, who has been accused of antisemitism by Israel’s ultra-loyalists. Nevertheless, in advance of the event, the community’s newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, attacked the Book Week organizers for giving a platform to two such ‘Israel-bashers’. Other staunch Zionists went much further and advocated boycotting the yearly festival.

There have always been different groups within the community expressing conflicting views about Israel, but what we are now witnessing is something quite different from the old debates between Labour Zionists, General Zionists and Revisionists. The differences today are so sharp that it becomes hard to see how the views held can exist within the same moral universe, how the people who hold these views can see themselves as part of the same community. But the issue is more complicated than that because it’s not unusual to find quite contradictory views being expressed by the same person.

I had been wondering for some time about why this is now happening and how the situation is being sustained, when it occurred to me that two recent developments throw some light on the issue.

The first is the coming into being (I use this phrase advisedly) of what has been called the UK ‘J Street’. In 2010 rumours abounded that a group of pro-peace, pro-Israel activists were discussing with one or two Jewish journalists, some progressive funders and a few dovish communal leaders how to set up a liberal pro-Israel lobby appropriate for the British political scene. The possibility of such a group being created was widely welcomed among individuals and organizations opposed to the occupation and in favour of a human rights-based solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And it seemed more feasible than ever judging by the results of the JPR survey of British Jewish attitudes to Israel released in the summer.

But towards the end of 2010 it became clear that the British group was going to be a very different animal from J Street. Rejecting the pattern of a broadly based progressive coalition, those leading the UK effort were looking for safe figureheads from the communal mainstream to be part of a carefully chosen core group that would exclude so-called ‘extreme’ critics of Israel, or critics they regarded as ‘beyond the pale’. It was to be called ‘Yachad’, ‘Together’, a fine name no doubt, but clearly indicating that this was not going to be a group advocating for a just Israel to politicians and opinion-formers, but rather aiming to influence communal opinion. And there would be no formal launch. Its existence would gradually become known.

Why anyone would think that this pantomime horse could tap into the same sentiments that gave J Street such an encouraging start was beyond me. Among the ‘extreme’ critics they were shunning were veteran peaceniks who cared deeply for Israel but who were being demonised by the Jewish and Zionist establishment. ‘Yachad’ was therefore conniving in the perpetuation of that demonisation while proclaiming that they were mounting the barricades to overcome it.

The second development is the announcement by the community’s ‘independent’ organization that aims to generate support for Israel, BICOM—Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre—of an ‘advocacy conference’ in May ‘with leading world experts in advocacy and persuasion as the keynote speakers. It will empower and motivate friends of Israel, creating a grassroots network of positive champions. The conference will give you the tools to turn back the negative tide that seeks to delegitimise the State of Israel.’ But with Israel’s image what it is today, anyone who believes such an aim is achievable through what is essentially ‘hasbara’ is living in cloud-cuckoo land. And I don’t believe that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Israeli government really believes it either, since they’re convinced that hostility is due to prejudice, not to lack of awareness of Israel’s scientific achievements.

What strikes me about these two examples is how utterly divorced they both are from how Jewish Israelis are currently confronting—or avoiding confronting—the current situation. These are fundamentally diasporic initiatives seemingly aimed at the object of devotion. But the essential truth is that the loved one doesn’t reciprocate. The traditional Israel-Diaspora ‘relationship’, to which both of these initiatives belong, no longer comprises an Israel that ‘needs’ the Jewish diaspora in the way it once did. The care that ‘Yachad’ Jews or BICOM Jews demonstrate for Israel is not matched by any collective care directed towards them on the Israeli side, and there’s no reason why there should be any. Israel is a state that is pursuing its national interests just like any other state and the great majority of its Jewish citizens see the world with the same mindset. The Jews who would identify with Yachad or BICOM are fulfilling their unique need to express their Jewish identity largely through their identification with Israel. So the reason why polarised views seem to be able to coexist within a fractured community is because both sympathetic critic and diehard loyalist are fulfilling fundamentally similar needs: to maintain and express a key part of their diasporic identities—not an act in which any Israeli Jew could indulge.

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Pro-Israel Jewish Organizations Are Likely to Have a Negative Impact on the Object of Their Affection

Posted on 18/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

Apart from running down the battery on my BlackBerry at a phenomenal rate, the Twitter feed I activated recently does have its positive side. Tweets about breaking developments in Egypt and Libya gave me a sense of immediate and uncanny connection to what was going on. Not everything tweeted was necessarily accurate, but the sense of a rapidly changing scene was conveyed brilliantly.

Twitter also brings you news of things you had no idea were happening. Two nights ago I began to get tweets from people who were apparently participating in a public meeting of some kind with the leadership of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. What seemed like a youngish audience was questioning Vivian Wineman, the President of the Board, and Jonathan Arkush, the senior Vice-President, about the Board’s failure to issue a statement supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, whether it could really be said to represent the community, how it could be reformed and so on.

The tenor of the tweets was one of some excitement, as if the exchange going on was unprecedented and presaged some fundamental sea-change in the Board’s relationship with the wider community. But at the time, where the meeting was taking place and in what format were a mystery to me.

The following day a tweet directed me to the personal blog of Hannah Weisfeld, who had written about the meeting and was clearly one of the key people involved. The meeting was held at the London Jewish Cultural Centre and attended by more than 100 people. Over the last 6-9 months Hannah has been one of the leading lights in the attempt to set up what was initially and informally being called the UK J Street, a ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ lobby group modelled on the very successful American organization aiming to counter the hugely powerful right-wing Zionist, pro-Israel lobby organization AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). So it was no wonder that the principal aim of the meeting was to question the Board’s leaders as to why the Board failed to pass the resolution below when it discussed its policy on Middle East peace:

… the Board of Deputies of British Jews … supports Israel’s efforts to seek a lasting negotiated peace with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution ensuring Israel’s security and respect for the welfare of all of the people in the region

despite the fact that 78 per cent of those Jews who responded to a UK survey conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) supported a two-state solution. At the time, an open letter was circulated on the internet to be sent to Vivian Wineman asking the Board to reconsider its decision, and it attracted more than 1,000 signatories. Those attending the meeting at the LJCC were from among those signatories.

The confused and contradictory reasons given by Wineman and Arkush for the Board’s decision, as reported by Weisfeld, show just why the Board utterly fails to act in any other than a retrogressive fashion in its attempts to represent a view of the Jewish community on Israel. The British government may pay lip service to the formal notion that the Board ‘represents’ British Jews, but for very many years now other institutions and powerful individuals have been sought out by governments when they have wanted to convey policy messages to the Jewish community or to seek an understanding of what the community ‘thinks’. And those self-same institutions and individuals have far better and more regular access to government ministers than the Board.

The meeting at the LJCC was clearly intended to explore whether the Board could be brought to convey strong support for a two-state solution to the conflict. Hannah Weisfeld’s conclusion was very clear:

Most of all I take heart from the following: There was an impassioned plea from the floor for an organisation that could represent a strong pro-Israel pro-peace voice on the basis that the Board of Deputies was clearly not the place to do this. If we had any doubts (which we didn’t) we were on right track, the energy, enthusiasm and frustration displayed last night confirms that there are large numbers of people in our community desperate for their voice to be represented by an organisation with a vision for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, living in safety and security alongside a Palestinian state.

Those at the meeting who believed that the Board might fulfil such a role were suffering from touching naivety. Anyone who knows and understands the history of the Jewish community over the last 50 years would have realised that, in terms of achieving any practical change, such a discussion with the Board’s leaders was a waste of time. It’s always good to talk, of course, and Wineman is known to hold views more dovish Israel-Palestine than those held by the deputies as a body. But Hannah Weisfeld’s attempt to get a body off the ground that somehow mirrors the ethos of the US J Street – and it’s clear that this meeting was a stage in that process – would have been better served by holding discussions with groups and individuals who have long been advocating two states for two peoples and an end to the occupation of Palestinian land.

In my view, this meeting and Hannah Weisfeld’s conclusions reveal just how solipsistic and unreal are the efforts she and her colleagues are making to set up this putative ‘organization’. Both this initiative and the Board’s dimwitted efforts are being completely bypassed by what’s actually happening today in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, both in terms of events on the ground and political debate, such as it is. Neither of them is addressing the fact that the two-state solution is all but dead or that airy talk about ‘a vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’ simply fails to convey any sense of urgency about the damaging erosion of democratic values in Israel, a process that has been ongoing for decades because of the cancer of the occupation, but has gained frightening pace with the slew of bills and legislative and administrative proposals dreamt up by the right wing forces in the Knesset over the last few years.

What is emerging more clearly than ever is that this kind of Jewish activity relating to Israel has nothing to do with any reciprocal relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Any such reciprocal relationship died decades ago. What the UK J Street people and the Board are doing is expressing their diasporic identities and needs and they are more likely to have a negative than a positive impact on the object of devotion, Israel. Israel has no time for the needs of the Jewish diaspora and takes from the diaspora’s tangled and angst-ridden attitudes to Israel whatever it needs to strengthen Israel’s hold on the status quo.

Posted in British Jews | 2 Comments

Libya: Arab League Supports No-Fly Zone. Now What About Egyptian Military Help for the Rebels?

Posted on 13/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

On 23 February I doubted whether the West would agree to intervene militarily in the Libyan crisis. It still looks that way and there are good reasons why the West shouldn’t. But the discussion about outside help for the rebels has taken a decisive new turn with the Arab League agreeing unanimously to the imposition of a no-fly zone at its meeting on 12 March. Surely this opens the way for immediate consideration of the next step: authorisation by the Arab League of joint Arab military assistance for the rebels to be provided on the League’s behalf by Egypt.

We know that any direct military intervention on the part of Nato or any combination of Western powers, even if sanctioned by the UN Security Council, may well create more problems than it solves. Whether we like it or not, Iraq casts a long shadow over any discussion of such an option. The motives behind anything the US, Britain, France, the EU as a whole might do will quite rightly be questioned. It is inconceivable that Western action would ever be seen as entirely altruistic. But if military assistance were to be provided by Egypt’s current military rulers, with the backing of the Arab League, it would be much harder to object on the grounds of Western imperialism, Western determination to control oil supplies and so on. Indeed, it could be seen as deliberately preventing intervention by the West.

Egypt’s military is the 10th largest in the world, is highly respected in the Arab world and has the men and materiel to transform the power balance in the internal conflict, which as I write appears to be worryingly swinging very much in Gaddafi’s favour. We’ve heard so much about the links between the US and Egyptian military leaderships that the Egyptians would presumably not be wanting in strategic and tactical advice, if they needed it. And no doubt the Americans could help in other clandestine ways, short of anything that involved actually deploying troops.

Although there are still huge question marks over the commitment of the Egyptian military leaders to the principles and aims of the recent revolution, nevertheless, they earned considerable respect for the role they played in it and, as I understand it, many of the democracy activists are still ready to put their trust in the army, while doing what they can to hold the army’s feet to the fire. This would presumably add to the regional and international legitimacy of the military decisively intervening in Libya.

But there are major problems with the scenario of Egypt playing the role of liberator. If the form of intervention chosen does not bring a swift end to the conflict, a protracted engagement could get very messy. Then it’s one thing to protect the East of the country and the gains made there by the rebels. It’s quite another to dislodge Gaddafi and his forces from Tripoli.

While Egypt, with the backing of the Arab League and other regional and international bodies, could not be credibly accused of acting in support of perceived Western interests, nonetheless, what would happen to the control of Libya’s oil assets would be an obvious concern.

Doubts notwithstanding, the possibility that the world will just sit back and watch watch Gaddafi wreak vengeance on hundreds and thousands of his own people who simply want freedom from tyranny, a just share in the country’s wealth, a good education, jobs, freedom of thought and expression, is an almost unbearable thought. I seem to have read dozens of brilliantly argued pieces telling us that this is the business of the Libyan people themselves, but all I can think of is Srebrenica and the shame that Europe will always bear for allowing that massacre to occur when it could certainly have been prevented. There is no risk free option, but surely politics is the art of the possible, not the art of being universally loved and admired and having every action one might take given permission by the highest authority.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the horrendous death toll they have caused have revived age-old discussions about the nature of evil and what kind of god–if god exists–could allow such devastation to occur. But on one thing everyone is agreed: no matter how well prepared, we are powerless to prevent some people from dying when natural disasters occur. But the Libyan crisis is not a natural disaster and it is perfectly possible for action to be taken which would prevent a huge loss of life, not to mention the repression and torture that would certainly follow any restoration of Gaddafi’s control of the entire country.

The Egyptian option offers a way forward. Let the plan be taken apart and found wanting of you like, but if it withstands criticism, it should be implemented before it’s too late.

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