Changing Jewish Perceptions of the Arabs and the Holocaust

Posted on 11/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret where it was published on 10 March 2011.

Spring is unfolding slowly this March. When I ventured out late last Thursday evening (3 March) to attend a session at the huge annual literary festival that is Jewish Book Week the air was sharp, the temperature close to freezing. For a moment, I hesitated, but the chance to hear Professor Gilbert Achcar in conversation with Tom Segev was too enticing a prospect to miss.

Professor Achcar is the author of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, a scholarly study of Arab attitudes to the Holocaust which argues that they have mainly been determined by the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Born in Lebanon, he has been Professor of Development and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies since 2007. Tom Segev’s most recent book is Simon Wiesenthal: Life and Legends, a biography of the famous Austrian-Jewish Nazi-hunter. Segev is seen as one of Israel’s ‘new historians’ whose books have helped radically revise understanding of the history of Israel. Both Achcar and Segev are in the business of demolishing myths.

I doubted whether many people would turn out at 8.30 on such a cold evening for this event. By 8.15 there were about 150 people in a hall that takes up to 600. A respectable number I thought. But by 8.35, the audience had swelled to at least three times that figure and more kept coming in as the discussion got underway. An impressive and surprising turnout certainly, but who were they, I wondered, and given that the topic of Achcar’s book is a very controversial one among Jews—coloured by the well-known popularity of Holocaust denial in the Arab world—were they here to listen with open minds or had they come, minds made up, to verbalise their perception that Achcar is somehow the enemy? In the past, Jewish Book Week audiences, which are mostly made up of Jews, have often contained sizeable segments of people willing to vent their anger at speakers regarded as less than totally loyal to Israel. But whether it was Professor Achcar’s calm, judicious, nuanced and reasoned answers to Segev’s rather provocative line of questioning, or whether the audience came already willing to empathise with Achcar’s thesis—no matter, the result was surprisingly civilized with only a few animus-laden, but rather silly, questions from the floor.

Gilbert Achcar explained that, contrary to popular perceptions in the West and in Israel, there was very little real sympathy for Nazism among Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, during the Second World War, despite the case of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose support for Hitler, while undeniable, has been accorded a historical significance that is not deserved, Arabs did not by any means demonstrate mass support for Hitler’s actions. The left and liberal Arab movements distrusted British colonial aims in the Middle East, but were even more suspicious of the Axis powers, and very critical of the Nazi regime. A very small number of Arabs fought for the Germans while many thousands fought with the Allies. Religious and nationalist Arabs were more ambivalent and Palestinians, who were understandably increasingly concerned with what Zionism was doing to Palestine, became more sympathetic to antisemitism.

Essentially, Achcar’s research debunks the notion that the Arabs are so riddled with Nazi-style antisemitism, they can never be trusted to make genuine peace with Israel; that behind every protestation of support for a two-state solution is the Palestinian aim to annihilate the Jews. Open expressions of antisemitism, like the popularity of Holocaust denial, are a reaction to perceived oppression, not a deeply-rooted exterminationist ideology destined to be implemented. Achcar made it perfectly clear that he believed any use of antisemitism was wrong and misguided. But the message he was trying to convey was that Arab opinion is complex and not monolithic. It can change in response to changing circumstances, and especially if there were fundamental changes in Israeli attitudes. He reminded the audience that there is very deep-rooted denial of Palestinian suffering on the Israeli side: the naqba, the tragedy Palestinians experienced in 1948, is widely dismissed as propaganda. Therefore both sides need to move towards a more realistic understanding of the inner fears and experiences of the other.

Segev seemed to adopt a very sceptical stance throughout, as if Achcar was merely manipulating historical reality to excuse the Arabs of their irredeemable antisemitic outlook. He kept expressing astonishment at Arab Holocaust denial and cited the fact that the Palestinian president, Mahmood Abbas, had written a Holocaust-denying PhD thesis as evidence that the problem was much worse than Achcar had acknowledged. But Achcar patiently and precisely laid out the evidence that proved the opposite, including using the transformation of Abbas into a peacemaker and supporter of a Palestine living side-by-side with Israel to show that Holocaust denial is not a permanent condition.

I heard Gilbert Achcar talk about his book at SOAS a few months ago when he was in conversation with the Palestinian historian Professor Nur Masalha and the Israeli historian Professor Idith Zertal. Then he was subjected to a sustained critique by Masalha for not acknowledging that it was the Palestinians who paid for the Holocaust not the Germans. But Achcar responded effectively and firmly and the resulting discussion, like the one last week at Jewish Book Week, was very enlightening.

It was still bitterly cold when I left the hotel where the event took place, but I felt somewhat warmer inside, and even a little hopeful that, if this very large and overwhelmingly Jewish audience could respond in such a positive way to the revisionist (in the best historical sense) treatment of a sensitive subject by an Arab historian, maybe there is a way forward out of the current Israeli-Palestinian morass after all.

Posted in Europe | Leave a comment

Celebrity Antisemitism Teaches Us Very Little About the Reality of Prejudice

Posted on 10/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

The piece is cross-posted from openDemocracy where it was published on 10 March 2011

The outbursts of alleged antisemitic sentiment by John Galliano, Charlie Sheen and Julian Assange have been roundly condemned. It shows that there is still widespread sensitivity to the public expression of antisemitic and racist views, especially when public figures are involved. And everyone concerned with combating such prejudice should surely find this encouraging.

But as is often the case when a cluster of such attention-grabbing incidents occur, commentators are instantly prompted to tell us what they think these events say about the state of antisemitism today. The instinct to ask the question is reasonable enough, but the tendency to jump so quickly to conclusions might not be. From the following short quotes, there seems to be considerable support for the view that the recent incidents have shown antisemitism to be continuous, enduring, pervasive, newly threatening: they ‘reinforced reports of an alarming increase in antisemitism’ (Andrew McCorkell, Independent), provided evidence that antisemitism is ‘the hatred that refuses to go away’ (Jonathan Freedland, Guardian), indicated that ‘our liberal, creative elite [has] rediscovered an ancient prejudice’ (Julian Kossoff, Daily Telegraph), demonstrated that it was ‘the week that antisemitism became really, properly zeitgeisty again’ (David Baddiel, Daily Telegraph) and confirmed ‘the increasing acceptability of antisemitic abuse so long [as] it is couched within an Israel-Palestine context’ (Norman Lebrecht, Arts Journal blog).

But while it’s possible to understand why these commentators reach such conclusions, a tad more circumspection might have been wise. A brief critique of the quotes shows that there are fundamental flaws in the pieces from which they are taken. Claims of an alarming increase in antisemitism don’t square with information announced in January by the Israeli government’s Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism that antisemitic incidents were down in 2010 from a high in 2009. The statement that antisemitism is ‘the hatred that refuses to go away’ implies that other hatreds have disappeared, but there is no evidence of this. To say that Galliano, Sheen and Assange are representative of ‘our liberal, creative elite’ is absurdly far-fetched. Antisemitism ‘zeitgeisty’?—how can it be the spirit of the time when there was such condemnation of the incidents? And finally, in the three cases under consideration, the abuse was ‘couched’ entirely outside an ‘Israel-Palestine context’.

It’s perhaps not surprising that these writers display such weaknesses. None of them are experts in the subject. Not that experts have all the answers or that they would all agree. But it’s surely not unreasonable to expect that editors seeking informed comment should search for scholars and researchers who, while able to communicate their views effectively and succinctly, have at least got serious credentials. Isn’t there something absurd, even paradoxical, about seeking the wisdom of celebrity writers commenting on the verbal inanities of celebrities?

Prejudice of all forms latches on to people, and through this process is constantly being renewed from generation to generation. While no amount of education or living together will ever eradicate it completely, the recent past has seen very great improvements. But such efforts must be supplemented by continuous research that examines, for each particular case of prejudice, what exactly it is, what motivates it, how it is being lived and transformed now, in this context. This careful examination of the particular is the only way we can hope to combat and confront prejudice in all its many changing manifestations.

This is certainly the case with antisemitism, which has been around in some form or other so long, unfortunately, that our ability to understand or combat its current manifestations will only be enhanced if we refrain from trying to come up with instant, all-encompassing explanations, but rather take a more reflective approach. (Linda Grant did this rather effectively in her assessment that for Galliano ‘antisemitism is only another taboo . . . by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock.’)

Antisemitism is a hot issue which demands cool and rational differentiated analysis. Making broad judgements about it in a climate of justified high indignation is probably unwise. Such a climate tends to develop when incidents occur that involve celebrities, government ministers, prominent businessmen and leading clergy. They rapidly become public controversies in which it’s soon difficult to separate out the incident from the response. Reactions and interpretations very quickly colour how we see the offending event, obscuring both its singularity and the social, cultural and political context in which it occurs.

It may be tempting to lump together consecutively-occurring incidents, but the connections between them may be more complex than at first appears. This seems to me to be the case with the events in question.

The insult may be compounded by three alleged expressions of anti-Jewish hostility emerging within days of each other, but it’s very dodgy to build a theory about the salience of current antisemitism on an incident in a Paris bar that may never have come to light, a television interview with an actor already notorious for volatile and abusive behaviour and a report of a conversation between two people to which no one else was a party and which the ‘guilty’ individual disputes.

One common feature is highly significant, however, and that’s the role of modern media. It’s inconceivable that that these events would have impinged so rapidly on public consciousness 20 years ago, which raises the question: Just because we can see more of everything and comment on it so much more quickly, does that mean antisemitism has ‘increased’ or rather that we’re made aware so much faster of the antisemitism that already exists?

Adopting a differentiated approach effectively means rejecting a theory of antisemitism, most fully realised in the work of Professor Robert Wistrich, that feeds much current comment: that antisemitism is a unique, continuous phenomenon, stretching back two millennia, that defies parallels and comparisons. Other leading historians of antisemitism, such as Professor David Feldman, who heads the newPears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London,Professor Tony Kushner at Southampton and Dr Adam Sutcliffe at Kings College London, have developed a body of work that sets antisemitism within a wider context of Jewish-non-Jewish relations and does not see attitudes to Jews exclusively through the prism of prejudice.

In my view this is crucial in illuminating what is happening today because it helps understand the coexistence of outbursts of antisemitic sentiment and intensely pro-Jewish attitudes, sometimes in the same person. The tendency of so much instant comment is to look one-dimensionally at anti-Jewish prejudice and ignore the wider context of countervailing forces, the degree to which Jews have played a part in shaping their relations with the wider society, general ignorance about Jews, the revival of Jewish life in countries where antisemitism has been rife and the strong commitment to combating antisemitism that exists among governments and senior politicians in democratic societies. All this calls into question whether we should attribute much significance to these celebrity outbursts.

None of this means that antisemitism is of no consequence today or that it does not represent a serious danger. Rather, it suggests that what tends to grab attention may not tell us very much about deeper trends and that our assumptions about antisemitism’s recent history are incorrect.

For example, in the writings of those who are most alarmist about current antisemitism, it is often baldly stated that antisemitism went away after the war because of revulsion at the Holocaust and has now come back with a vengeance. There was a post-war hope that the cultural objects of prejudice could be relatively easily eradicated by liberalism. This has not happened. The instinct, which intensified in the late 1960s, to move in that direction through human rights and anti-racial discrimination conventions and charters has had a very positive impact. The key innovation of this period has been to aim to eradicate prejudice on the grounds that it is a human right to be different and to preserve that difference.

For years, especially since the view that antisemitism had suddenly returned emerged so strongly post-9/11, I and other experienced researchers have been pointing out that the failure of the most naive post-war hopes imply that antisemitism never went away. Therefore whatever intensification has occurred builds on a pretty substantial base. In which case, we are not confronting such unprecedented phenomena as some like to claim.

Condemning hardcore antisemitic discourse and cartoons is the easy bit. More relevant to deeper understanding might be a relatively prosaic factor—because it’s seen perhaps as an old story—like the significance of the advance of far right, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic parties in Europe. Support for the BNP and the English Defence League show Britain is not immune, a fact further confirmed by the results of the recent Searchlight opinion poll which showed that almost half the country would vote for far-Right parties if they gave up violence.

Very little attention is given to the consequences of large scale migration from countries where education against prejudice, racism and antisemitism is inadequate and in some cases non-existent. (This is not an argument against a liberal immigration policy, with which I am in favour, but a call to develop special educational measures to deal with a specific problem – much as the human rights approach to prejudice has tried to do.) And while there is a hue and cry in some circles at the nasty expressions of antisemitism which tips up online in responses to blogposts on newspaper websites, violent language is common in such fora across the internet. What needs to be considered is whether this lends respectability to antisemitism and creates converts or whether it simply gives the existing cohorts of antisemites an opportunity to verbalise their hate anonymously in a form not available to them before. Unpleasant as it is, it may allow people to vent  hatred and so may actually limit destructive power.

Discussion should focus on the many other troubling manifestations of antisemitism and on the conceptual problems faced by analysts in determining what is and what is not antisemitic. (I’ve deliberately steered clear of the entire and highly controversial antisemitism-Israel-Palestine nexus, which is central to any assessment of antisemitism today. As far as I can see it played no part in the Galliano or Sheen cases, and while it may have figured in Assange’s thinking, his main apparent animus against some Jews emerged in a rather traditional form.) Paying too much attention to Galliano et al. is surely misplaced and is highly unlikely to reveal anything profound.

Posted in Antisemitism | Leave a comment

Is Galliano’s Antisemitism the Height of Fashion?

Posted on 07/03/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret where it was published on 3 March 2011

The flamboyant, bandana-wearing haute couture dress designer John Galliano can be seen abusing two women with antisemitic insults in a Paris bar in October last year in a YouTube clip. The internationally acclaimed creative director at Christian Dior was videoed saying ‘I love Hitler and people like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f****** gassed.’ This footage came to light after Galliano was arrested following an incident last week in the same bar, La Perle, in which he allegedly accosted a Jewish woman and her Asian boyfriend saying ‘Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead’ and ‘f****** Asian bastard’.

The fashion house suspended the designer (it says it has a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy towards any antisemitic or racist behaviour) who spent more than five hours on Monday at a Paris police station being questioned over the latest incident. The biannual Paris fashion trade show is on and Galliano, the Guardian reports, was due to present his autumn-winter collection for Dior this Friday and his own collection on Sunday. Late on Tuesday afternoon, Dior announced that it had sacked him.

The Galliano incident prompted a journalist on the Independent newspaper to write a piece titled ‘Galliano arrest spotlights rise in antisemitism’. Roping together the actor Charlie Sheen’s apparent antisemitic reference to the creator of the hit comedy tv show in which he stars, Mel Gibson’s previous antisemitic rants and a Wiesenthal Centre list of the 10 most high-profile antisemitic outbursts of 2010 published last week, the writer claims that the Galliano affair has ‘reinforced reports of an alarming increase in antisemitism’.

Galliano’s antisemitic ‘rant’, as it’s being called, rapidly grew into an incident of international proportions—attention was soon focused on which usually Dior-wearing movie stars had ditched their Galliano creations on Oscar night, and which hadn’t—and the reaction to it, as well as the nature of the incident itself, raises questions about whether we can look at such events in a rational perspective.

These days, there is an inevitability about the manner in which such incidents unfold. At first there is acute media sensitivity to public displays of antisemitic abuse, but the coverage then provokes alarm that antisemitism is increasing. Then there’s swift condemnation and institutional action, but also the individual is defended by friends and admirers—‘It’s so unlike him’, ‘It’s his designs we love, we don’t have to love his politics’, ‘He’s under a lot of pressure’—and by a lawyer who usually tries to make light of the charges and cast aspersions on the accusers. At the same time, major Jewish organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the European Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre issue strong condemnatory statements especially if there is some Israel connection. Meanwhile, bloggers pile in and armies of pseudonymous respondents fill up threads with every kind of comment, from the sensible to the totally outrageous.

The true nature of these kinds of events, and the context in which they occur, is often rapidly obscured as the process unfolds. In the Galliano case, we are told that the two women subjected to abuse in October last year were not Jewish. Galliano, an international celebrity, is sitting alone at a small table, clearly drunk and looking pathetic. The words are foul, but the delivery is slurred and weak. In other circumstances, one would probably move tables or complain to the management and have the drunk thrown out. With the latest case last week, there also seems to be some doubt as to whether the woman involved is Jewish. The bizarre character of both incidents is compounded by the fact that Galliano is gay and therefore himself likely to have been a candidate for Nazi ‘extermination’. And to complicate matters even further, La Perle is one of many fashionable bars in the chic Marais district, the traditional Jewish area of Paris, now home to a large gay community.

Given Galliano’s celebrity status, last week’s incident, which was reported to the police, was always likely to come to public attention. But there’s no doubt that the publication of an image of it on the internet, and the subsequent coming forward of the women who experienced Galliano’s racist insults in October, together with mobile phone video of him in full flow, helped give the incident an additional, rapidly expanding popular dimension that is now so important to maintaining such things in the public eye.

Even a modicum of calm reflection raises doubts as to whether, when analysing this series of events, it’s wise to leap to conclusions of rising antisemitism. In an opinion piece yesterday, the well-known novelist and journalist, Linda Grant, as sharp as anyone in identifying and condemning antisemitism, tried to understand what motivated Galliano. Without in any way excusing him, Grant wrote: ‘[Galliano’s] collections have always been about transgression, busting taboos. . . . If you are a breaker of taboos, antisemitism is only another taboo . . . Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock.’ A thoughtful speculation that rings true, certainly, especially since it comes from someone who knows the fashion industry well and whose Jewish identity emerges strongly and positively in her work. And yet, from the vast majority of those who responded to her piece on-line, you’d think Grant herself was an apologist for Hitler.

There is no justification for turning the Galliano affair into just one more item that proves antisemitism is an unbroken, eternal condition and ever on the rise. And yet this is the prevailing mindset, notwithstanding the fears of some who exemplify it that no one cares and they are whistling in the dark. As Dr Adam Sutcliffe, who teaches European and Jewish history at Kings College University of London, writes in the latest issue of the Jewish Quarterly, ‘Antisemitism is of course real and important, but it is inadequate to interpret Jewish/non-Jewish relations only through the prism of an all-pervasive antisemitism.’ There’s no question that Galliano made hurtful antisemitic statements, but saying that is only the beginning of understanding, not the end.

Posted in Antisemitism | Leave a comment

The Religion Question in the Census: ‘A Vital Tool of Communal Service Provision’

Posted on 28/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

This is an updated piece cross-posted from Eretz Acheret, with a new title.

This year’s decennial census of England and Wales may be the last of its kind, but if so, at a cost of $782 million, it will go out with a bang. For Britain’s Jews its loss could be very unfortunate. Data from a voluntary religion question, included for the first time in 2001, provided a fascinating and potentially invaluable snapshot of the Jewish population. The question is included again in the 27 March massive data gathering exercise and if Jews choose to answer in the same high proportion as last time, demographers will be able to identify trends and significant changes in the community’s profile which should be of immense value to those offering services to the Jewish population. And the same would be true for other religious groups.

The religion question is quite unique. It’s the only voluntary one in the entire census form. Completing all of the others is compulsory, a legal requirement. As far as I know, no other Western European country that conducts such a census includes a voluntary religion question. Some use alternative means to collect such data. For others, especially where there is a constitutional separation between church and state, asking such a question, even on a voluntary basis, would be seen as running counter to the country’s secular ethos.

Whether the government should be allowed to gather such information through a national census is always going to provoke controversy. Freedom of religion is a principle enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and should be a purely personal matter. One fear is that an unscrupulous government could use the data for discriminatory purposes of a negative kind. And this was one of the major objections raised by prominent Jewish figures and by strictly orthodox Jewish groups during the consultation that took place before the introduction of the question in 2001.

For those of us involved in promoting and undertaking social research on Jewish life in the UK and the rest of Europe, the objection of possible nefarious use was groundless. First, you weren’t obliged to answer the question. Second, the administrative safeguards against misuse were (and still are) watertight. Third, such a fear assumes a degree of fragility in Britain’s political system that simply doesn’t exist. Fortunately, most Jewish leaders and organizations welcomed the inclusion of the question and encouraged Jews to complete it. It is very unlikely that they would have adopted such a position in 1991, but a revolution in thinking about what the community needed to know about itself in order to survive and thrive, which occurred in the early 1990s, ushered in a golden period for survey-based data-gathering. And it was in the prevailing positive atmosphere that, excluding the strictly orthodox who largely avoided the question—and later came to regret what they did because it affected their entitlement to claim services from their local authorities—a far higher than anticipated proportion of the Jewish population completed it.

The most eye-catching piece of data from 2001 was clear evidence that the Jewish population in the UK was at least 10 per cent larger than current community-sponsored research had suggested—up to 330,000, rather than 280,000. Whether clear evidence of population trends will emerge from the 2011 data is by no means certain. While the major Jewish organizations are still encouraging Jews to answer the question, there is no longer such a positive attitude towards data-gathering on the part of Jewish leaders. Some question just how much use was really made of the data for serious and practical policy planning. But more important, a growing sense of insecurity has gripped some of the principal leaders and certain significant sectors of the Jewish population, fuelled by fears of antisemitism, Islamist terrorism and perceived hostility to Israel, such that there is probably less of an appetite to want to be open about Jewish identity. I may be—and I hope I am—wrong about this. And there is some evidence that the higher levels of Jewish assertiveness identified in social research from the 1990s and early 2000s have not dissipated to any great degree.

Another problem is that the community’s capacity to analyse the enormous amount of data that emerges from the census was significantly reduced in the mid-2000s, but steps to rebuild it have been taken over the last two years.

The truth is that the Jewish community needs accurate data about itself more than ever if it wishes to secure the continuity of Jewish life in Britain. Knowledge is power, especially so in the internet-based social-networking age, and permanent but flexible research expertise is fundamental, though this fact is not fully appreciated because of leadership short-termism and excessive preoccupation with external threats.

If the decennial national census is scrapped—and the main reason would be that the data are almost out of date by the time that the first analyses are produced; government and local authorities need much more current information to be able to plan vital services for the entire population—and Jewish leaders again lose interest in research, the task of planning social, educational and cultural provision will become that much harder.

But new ways of gathering data are being developed all the time, so in theory the loss of the national census and with it the data that would emerge from the voluntary religion question, could undoubtedly be very substantially mitigated. It all depends on how much the community’s leading researchers and research organizations assert themselves—Dr David Graham, head of social and demographic research at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, argued strongly in the Jewish Chronicle that the census is ‘a vital tool of communal service provision’—and how imaginative and far-sighted new generations of Jewish leaders will be.

Posted in Religion | Leave a comment

Revealed in the Arabian Gulf: the Values-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Cameron’s Government

Posted on 25/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

When I saw David Cameron defending his ‘passionate’ belief in the Big Society, I found myself giving him credit for his sincerity. My opinion of the policy, idea, concept, or whatever you want to call it, was damning—the Tories just stealing for themselves something which people and groups up and down the country have been doing and developing for decades—but there was something almost touching in Cameron’s apparent naïve faith in this as the guiding light of his government’s overall programme. It looked to me as if the hard-faced ideologues in his party were simply using this, and the budget deficit ‘crisis’, as a cover for shrinking the role of the state, strengthening the role of elites and the ‘deserving’ middle classes, privatising practically everything they could lay their hands on—yet Cameron maintained a seemingly genuine air of innocence, partly reinforced or engendered by what we know of his and his wife’s heart-rending experience with their late son. So, a good man—yes, immensely privileged, but aware of the responsibility he now carries as a result of the luck of his birth—struggling to keep a bunch of right-wing ideologues in their place.

I had become increasingly aware of the stupidity of this view and its glaring contradictions when that awareness was suddenly reinforced as I read a column by Mary Dejevsky in today’s Independent in which she slammed the prime minister for ‘quite breathtaking misjudgement’ in undertaking a Middle East tour, the obvious aim of which was to boost arms sales to dodgy regimes just as pro-democracy activists across the region were laying down their lives in the cause of the principles and values of the kind of free, caring, open society Cameron claims to be championing at home. I couldn’t agree more and had found images of him defending his tour on the grounds that the newly emerging democratic regimes will also need arms to defend their freedom utterly sickening. But much of Dejevsky’s article was a paean of praise to Cameron for his ‘boldness’ in launching the coalition and implementing policies of which she approved. And on his belief in the Big Society she wrote: ‘I have never really got to grips with the “Big Society”, largely because I do not think Mr Cameron realises how many people are ‘time-poor’, as well as lacking his family’s means, but for me his sincerity was never in doubt’ (my italics).

It was at that point that I realised that both she and I had been committing the ‘Blair fallacy’: wanting to excuse the mistakes, and possibly even crimes, of a politician on the grounds that, ‘aw shucks’, he or she is absolutely, completely and swooningly sincere. For a long while, this worked for Tony Blair—and for some people I think his ‘sincerity’, his ‘I did what I believed to be right’ mantra, still works. The sheer bankruptcy of this self-serving philosophy became crystal clear as the Iraq crisis developed and Britain was taken into a war on the grounds of a dodgy manifesto and hundreds of thousands of people died as a result. I feel foolish for once thinking myself into a mindset that seemed to support the notion that such self-belief counted for more than acts of justice and policies of principle. Looking back now on his period in government, while many good things were done, it’s now clear to me that there was very little in the way of principle backing it all up and very much in the way of a public relations-driven pragmatism carried forward on a wave of Blairite self-belief. There were many good men and women in his government, but ultimately, with Blair in charge, there was a values-shaped hole at its heart.

And this is close to what we have now under Cameron, a man who consciously modelled himself on Blair, and probably still does. After all, there is no doubt that Blair was a consummate tactical politician, streets ahead of anyone else in his generation and still able to make the current crop of leaders look cack-handed. But Cameron’s ‘sincerity’ will not wash for long. I’m sure people will see it as Blairism Mark II and realise they are being sold a pup. The con of noblesse oblige, the ability to appear to be floating above and disconnected from the ideological sharks he himself has brought into government and allowed to gobble up whatever they wish (save for a few small u-turns), the display of boyish charm—these are some of the elements that constitute his sincerity package. He doesn’t need to be the confrontational ideological politician because he was born to the views he holds. They’re part of his character. They come so easily to him that his store of simple words and phrases are enough to justify his views and sell them to the public. He seems to have come equipped with a built-in sanitiser. But how much longer will it work? As Dejevsky writes, the Middle East trip may be ‘a crass, clodhopping and potentially career-breaking mistake’.

Posted in British politics | Leave a comment

The Libyan Crisis: Western Complicity and Why Action is Unlikely to Follow UN Security Council Condemnation

Posted on 23/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

We might wish it was like the Egyptian revolution – and the fact that it isn’t may be making some people avert their gaze – but despite the fragmentary images of horror, the absence of a continuous Al Jazeera-type visual narrative, the dearth of reporters on the ground and the reliance on tweets, we must keep watching. We owe it to the Libyan people, whatever the outcome.

The sanitisation of Gaddafi and his regime by Tony Blair and others now looks like a sick joke. And there was no shortage of experts who knew the real score. In 2009 Professor Fred Halliday wrote that while Gaddafi did take ‘a strong rhetorical stand away from Libya’s earlier use and endorsement of state terrorism’, abandoned the WMD programme and ‘alter[ed] its foreign and defence policy course’, ‘at home, and the regime’s heart, the changes  are cosmetic’. He added:

The Jamahiriyah remains in 2009 one of the most dictatorial as well as opaque of Arab regimes. Its 6 million people enjoy no significant freedoms: the annual reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Libya offer a glimpse of the real situation, one of continued and systematic abuse of human rights. Those who oppose the ideology of the Gaddafi revolution may, under Law 71, be arrested and even executed. There is not even the flicker of diversity found in such neighbouring dictatorships as Egypt or Sudan.

No doubt there were many who wanted to be taken in by Gaddafi’s rhetoric, but Halliday is unequivocal: ‘The official response to the Lockerbie trial and al-Megrahi release reflects an attitude of mind that rejects real contrition or admission of responsibility.’ His judgement on the regime was damning:

al-Jamahiriyahremains a grotesque entity. In its way it resembles a protection-racket run by a family group and its associates who wrested control of a state and its people by force and then ruled for forty years with no attempt to secure popular legitimation.

The outside world may be compelled by considerations of security, energy and investment to deal with this state. But there is no reason to indulge the fantasies that are constantly promoted about its political and social character, within the country and abroad. Al-Jamahiriyah is not a ‘state of the masses’: it is a state of robbers, in formal terms a kleptocracy. The Libyan people have for far too long been denied the right to choose their own leaders and political system – and to benefit from their country’s wealth via oil-and-gas deals of the kind the west is now so keen to promote. The sooner the form of rule they endure is consigned to the past, the better.

Although it may still be too early to say, the signs are that Gaddafi’s form of rule is indeed being consigned to the past, but not without the most horrendous murder, bloody repression and state terror.

The obvious question is: Can the outside world help? Certainly not if all that can be mustered is an approach that says ‘We in the West must help ensure that these countries don’t fall into the arms of Islamic fundamentalists’. This has become the latest form of the Western reflex to control and direct, as if that reflex has been of much help in encouraging the peoples to embrace democracy. As Frederick Bowie writes, Western countries seem to be saying:

Without our help and guidance, the current upheaval in our Arab neighbours is likely to install regimes more oppressive for their citizens, and more dangerous for us than those which they have replaced.

The West’s record does not support this claim.

There is surely something faintly disgusting in David Cameron opportunistically preaching democracy to Arab regimes on his current tour when his

government has managed in the space of a few months to authorize sales of tear gas to Bahrain, crowd-control ammunition to Libya, combat helicopters to Algeria and armoured personnel carriers to Saudi Arabia.

As Simon Jenkins writes Britain can push democracy or weapons, but not both:

If we choose to make the Arabs’ path harder by arming their oppressors, fine, but we should not proclaim ‘liberal interventionism’. If we proclaim interventionism, we should not sell weapons. Meddling in other people’s business is rarely wise. Two-faced meddling is hypocrisy.

But it may well be the case, as Noam Chomsky has argued, that what western leaders are really afraid of is not an Islamist takeover in the Arab region, but the emergence of genuinely independent and democratic Arab states which will no longer kow-tow to Washington and do its bidding.

Interviewed on The World Tonight (BBC R4, 22 February), Louise Arbour of the ICG said it was difficult to tell whether the regime would respond to any international action. But the international community can’t stand by and do nothing. Every effort has to be made to mobilise, whether that means friends of Libya, neighbours and so on, and ‘bring some sense into this government’. Talk of military intervention is very premature, she said. Just before the invasion of Iraq international efforts were being made to introduce the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ – to come to the rescue of peoples under attack by their own governments – but ‘unfortunately the last decade has made this doctrine very difficult to take root because intervention has been given a very bad name’ by what happened in Iraq.

The International Crisis Group has issued a list of ‘Immediate International Steps Needed to Stop Atrocities in Libya’. It’s worth quoting in full:

[Brussels, 22 February 2011] With credible reports of concerted deadly attacks against civilians committed by Libyan security forces, including the use of military aircraft to indiscriminately attack demonstrators, the international community must respond immediately.

For members of the world community, many of whom long condoned authoritarian regimes in the Arab world and only fully backed the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings once the outcome had become clear, Libya presents a critical test. So far, the Libyan regime has offered its people no prospect beyond submission, civil war or a blood bath; its actions have condemned it in the eyes of its own people and of the world.

Many have already denounced the violent acts, but actions must now follow words. Crisis Group recommends the following urgent steps:

  • Imposing targeted sanctions against Muammar Qaddafi and family members as well as others involved in the repression, including an immediate assets freeze;
  • Offering safe haven to Libyan aircraft pilots and other security personnel who refuse to carry out illegal regime orders to attack civilians;
  • Cancelling all ongoing contracts and cooperation for the supply of military equipment and training to Libyan security forces;
  • Imposing an international embargo to prevent the sale and delivery of any military equipment or support to Libyan security forces while refraining from any commercial sanctions that could harm civilians;
  • In light of the intensity of the violence and its likely regional effects, the United Nations Security Council should:
    • strongly condemn Libya’s resort to state violence against civilians and call on the Libyan government and security forces to immediately halt all such attacks and restore access for humanitarian flights to Libyan air space;
    • call on member states to take the above-mentioned actions;
    • establish an international commission of inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity in Libya since 1 February 2011, tasking it to investigate the conduct of the Libyan government and all its varied security forces, as well as allegations concerning the involvement of foreign mercenaries. The body should provide recommendations on steps to be taken by national and international authorities to ensure accountability for any crime;
    • plan the establishment of a no-fly zone under Chapter VII if aircraft attacks against civilians continue.

Individual nations, particularly those with close ties to Libya, and international actors — such as the African Union, the Arab League, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference — should support these and other similar measures.

Moreover, Libya’s neighbours should open their borders to provide humanitarian aid and safe haven to the wounded and to those fleeing violence.

People throughout the region are claiming their rights. In several countries, their actions have led to relatively peaceful transitions or to renewed dialogue toward reform. Libya’s leaders have chosen a different path, with devastating consequences for their citizens.  How the international community responds could help determine whether others opt to heed their people’s demands or choose to cling to power at a high, and terrifying, cost.

The Libya Outreach Group has also produced a list of measures to be taken to show that ‘nations stand with the Libyan people’. These more or less overlap with those of the ICG.

Last night the UN Security Council discussed the Libyan crisis and issued a unanimous statement which condemned the violence and deplored the repression of peaceful demonstrators.

They called for an immediate end to the violence and for steps to address the legitimate demands of the population, including through national dialogue.

The members of the Security Council called on the Government of Libya to meet its responsibility to protect its population.  They called upon the Libyan authorities to act with restraint, to respect human rights and international humanitarian law, and to allow immediate access for international human rights monitors and humanitarian agencies.

The statement called for the immediate lifting of restrictions on all forms of media and for the safety of foreign nationals to be ensured. There was no mention of a ‘no-fly zone’, which has been demanded by many over the last couple of days, but the situation is so fluid and the procedures for agreeing and introducing a no-fly zone would take so much time that it’s perhaps understandable why it’s not mentioned in the statement.

The fact that the Security Council has discussed Libya when it did not meet to consider the upheavals in Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria and Yemen is partly a reflection of the direct impact that the crisis will have – and is having already – on Europe. Markets have been hit, there are fears that oil and gas supplies will be seriously affected – Italy is Libya’s single largest oil consumer and the rest of Europe gets most of what remains – and the numbers escaping Libya for Europe’s southern shores (especially Italy) could increase dramatically. We may well rightly bemoan the fact that only when national interests are at stake do countries think in terms of concrete action, but this is the reality. Nevertheless, the chances of any direct intervention on the ground, even if it could be justified, are extremely slim. It seems that the most that can be done at the moment is for international actors to threaten concrete sanctions and reprisals that would hit Gaddafi and his supporters hard, both if they continue the brutality and are defeated and if they somehow hang on to power. Forcing enough of the armed forces and the militia that remain loyal to Gaddafi to change sides, because they fear the consequences they will face if they don’t, is perhaps the best way of bringing the violence to an end and starting a transition to a new political future.

Western confusion and panic in the face of this arc of rebellion has become commonplace. And although some Western responses acknowledge that it is no longer possible to view events through the same decades old command-and-control spectacles, far too many Western leaders just haven’t go it. It’s not helpful to anyone that there be international disarray, but the interests of the peoples of the countries in the region must be paramount and, however uncertain the outcome of applying that principle, it means no going back to the condoning of authoritarian regimes.

Posted in Middle East | Leave a comment

Why I’m Not Doing a Lance Armstrong and Retiring from Running, Just Yet

Posted on 19/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

I’ve never tested positive for drugs and can still manage 7 miles across the Heath on a cold February morning, but, like Lance Armstrong—if you’ll excuse the comparison—perhaps, after 6 marathons in 10 years, it’s also time for me to retire from running.

I’ve made more comebacks than I care to remember. Lulled into thinking that the many months of continuous running I was just experiencing would go on for ever, eventually, some less than spectacular injury grounded me. Physio often helped and after a month or two I was back pounding the streets. But sometimes, whatever has kept me from lacing up my trainers hasn’t responded to treatment and I’ve been forced to let nature take its course. Yes, I would hope for the best—a good month or more of rest often worked. But dark thoughts that I would never run again jostled with the hope and sometimes gained the upper hand.

Such fears gripped me especially when I happened to be driving through Regents Park, one of my favourite running destinations. As I watched all the runners eating up the metres round the perimeter road, a wave of wistfulness and regret washed over me. Would I be one of them ever again?

So far, miraculously, every time I thought it was the end, I reached a point when I realised that the pain was no longer bothering me and I’d start running again, within a few weeks getting back up to 7-10 miles or more. And that was more or less what happened after my latest 4-month lay-off. After a few months resting what seemed to be a permanently twisted ankle, an appointment with Jane at the local NHS physiotherapy clinic came through. Since I could walk on it and it wasn’t sore all the time, she didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t at least test my ankle with some running. (And she referred me for some physio and an appointment with the podiatrist.) I took her advice and the ankle has been behaving itself, more or less. It was as if I simply needed the permission of a higher authority to do what I should have had the guts to do anyway. Within three weeks I was successfully tackling the run I know I always need to do to confirm yet another running rebirth: from low-lying Tufnell Park to Kenwood House and the heights of Hampstead Heath.

But maybe I spoke too soon. Now it’s the knee that’s playing up, the one on which I had an operation over two years ago to remove some torn cartilage—and just as I was preparing myself to register for my 4th Berlin Marathon in September.

And there’s nothing like another little setback to bring back the gloom. I begin to reflect on my inability to reconcile myself to the truth about my loss of speed (an entirely inappropriate word because my ‘speed’ has always been on the slow side—there should be another word for it, like ‘slowth’). Not too long ago, I could churn out 9-minute miles to my heart’s content and push up to 8:30 for half-marathons, and even faster for 10ks. Now I’m chugging along at 10:30, if I’m lucky, which puts me well into the 4 hrs 30 mins bracket for the marathon.

So I’m hanging fire on Berlin. Having disappointingly had to pull out from marathons on a few occasions I’ve learnt that there’s no point in allowing yourself to be consumed by such setbacks. And even if I was never able to run another marathon, that doesn’t mean an end to running altogether. I’ll just have to set less ambitious goals.

I guess I won’t be hanging up my Asics just yet Lance. In fact, maybe it’s time I thought about getting a new pair. I must have done more than 500 miles on these and there’s a new Sweatshop just opened nearby on the Holloway Road that I’ve been dying to browse . . .

Posted in Running | Leave a comment

A Sensitive Television Drama on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Posted on 17/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

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

British television viewers are currently being treated to a 4-part dramatised lesson in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And so far, there has been virtually none of the knee-jerk complaints of anti-Israeli and even anti-Jewish bias usually levelled at such programmes by over-sensitive elements in the Jewish community. After the first two almost two-hour long episodes of Channel 4’s ‘The Promise’, which has two interlinked story lines—a British soldier’s experience in Mandate Palestine between 1945 and 1948 and his granddaughter’s exploration of that experience when she visits Israel in 2005—television critics have largely been impressed. And this is a series that tackles head-on the most controversial aspects of the conflict.

No one could say that resentment against Israel and Jews because of the actions of the Jewish terrorist groups in the last years of the Mandate is a live issue in Britain today. In Israel—although I haven’t tested this recently—I suspect the reverse isn’t quite true. There are many close ties between the UK and Israel, many things that Israelis admire about British politics, culture and society, but scratch the surface and lingering anger and bitterness at what older Israelis in particular regard as Britain’s perfidy in preventing Jewish immigration into Palestine and reneging on its commitment to facilitate the building of a ‘national home for the Jews’ can soon surface.

Where anger, or at least very mixed emotions, may still prevail is among the dwindling number of British soldiers who served in Palestine. And it was one such soldier who wrote to the acclaimed television film director Peter Kosminsky telling him that no one remembers or talks about the 100,000 military personnel who were based in Palestine between 1945 and 1948. Kosminsky, whose grandfather was Jewish, has made films about British soldiers in Bosnia, the Falklands War and the conflict in Northern Ireland, so it was no surprise that he was prompted to investigate further and come up with a treatment that would draw parallels between those post-war years and modern times.

Erin, the granddaughter, travels to Israel with her best friend, a British-Israeli girl who is returning to undertake her army service. Pretty much an ingénue when it comes to the Middle East conflict, Erin takes her hospitalized grandfather Len’s Palestine diary with her, which she recently discovered among his papers. Her friend’s parents are wealthy Israeli liberals, but the son, who spent much of his army service in Hebron, has become a severe critic of Zionism and is a member of Combatants for Peace. Witnessing the family arguing over how to resolve the conflict, Erin gets a crash course in the rights and wrongs of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. This leads her to look more closely at Len’s diary in which she discovers that his initial strong sympathy for the aspirations of the Jews gradually dissipates as a result of the terrorist attacks on his fellow soldiers and his growing awareness of the feelings of the Arab population. Len’s army career ends in ignominy and as Erin sets out to discover why, she comes face to face with the fact that the past still lives in the present. She learns about the realities of Palestinian dispossession and Jewish resolve to have a secure home after the Holocaust.

Kosminsky cuts between past and present, sometimes implying equivalences with which not everyone would be happy. For example, the bombing of the King David Hotel is juxtaposed with a suicide bombing in an Israeli café. Yet Kosminsky has endeavoured to be as objective as possible and he presents the Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian narratives very fairly, while also seeking to show the complexity of the problems.

The action is rather clunky at times. Since most viewers will be as ignorant as Erin, Kosminsky has to impart a great deal of information and is sometimes reduced to having certain characters talk as if they are reading passages from a school history textbook. But this is a minor price to pay for what is undoubtedly a sensitive and gripping portrayal of a situation where, as Kosminsky says, there is ‘right and wrong on both sides’.

That such a major and challenging series—in which the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonization—appears on one of the country’s mass audience television channels and is positively received throws an interesting light on what I believe are grossly exaggerated claims that London is the hub of international efforts to delegitimize Israel and that British Jews are subject to a constant barrage of media-driven anti-Zionist propaganda that borders on, or overlaps with, antisemitism. The film shows that major figures in the arts, often seen (but not necessarily correctly) as very left-wing, can present the Israel-Palestine conflict in a balanced way; and that when this is done audiences respond in a fair-minded fashion. The fact is that a substantial majority of people in the UK know very little about the conflict, past or present, and Kosminsky accurately reflects this in the central character, Erin.

Sadly, it’s the propagandists and shrill voices on all sides who grab most public attention, and it’s in their interests to oversimplify the arguments, even while disingenuously paying lip-service to the complexity of the issues. But in the last year or so, partly influenced by the significant emergence of much more even-handed attitudes among some pro-Israel leaders of the Jewish community, a more nuanced tone has perhaps crept into the public debate about Israel-Palestine. Kosminsky’s series is a contribution to that more reflective atmosphere and this is something Britain’s Jews should warmly welcome.

 

Posted in Middle East | 1 Comment

A Few Things I Learnt From the Egyptian Revolution

Posted on 14/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

On Thursday and Friday I was glued to the internet and rolling news on the television. Along with millions around the world I was able to share in the frustration, pain and then euphoria of the Egyptian people as they claimed their birthright, their freedom. And when the vice-president, Omar Suleiman, at around 6 pm Cairo time, made his one sentence announcement that Mubarak had resigned, and the Al Jazeera live English feed simply showed the crowd in Tahrir Square exploding with joy and wisely added no commentary, the exhilarating, intoxicating, uplifting feeling was simply overwhelming. Whatever happens next – and it was always the case that the path from the overthrow of Mubarak to a functioning and stable democracy was going to be a difficult one to tread – no one will be able to take away from the Egyptian people their phenomenal achievement. And I don’t think it’ s wrong for anyone, wherever they live, to feel that they can share in the Egyptian joy and to be moved to tears by what has been achieved. The Egyptian revolution has spoken to the deepest desires of humanity for freedom, independence, peace and justice and shown that these values can be achieved without violence. We live at a time when it often looks like every day just brings another thousand random acts of brutality and evil. The Egyptians have proved that life can actually be made up of a thousand random acts of kindness every day.

We should all be allowed to savour our feelings and emotions at this time, none more so of course than the very people who brought about the revolution and the masses who, we all fervently hope, will benefit from it. But this is also a moment – for me at any rate – to try to capture a few things I think I have learnt over the past three weeks and that may be of relevance to others too.

Wrong assumptions about Arabs

I’m sure that I, along with so many other Westerners, have been influenced by the derogatory stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims that portray them as backward, untrustworthy, loving death over life, unable to appreciate the virtues of democracy, predisposed to violence and so on. All groundless. As I became increasingly aware of Middle East realities and understood more what lived multiculturalism meant about our shared humanity, I have always been on guard against inadvertently judging events and issues concerning Arabs and Muslims on the basis of false assumptions. How wonderfully encouraging then for the world at large to learn the lesson from the Egyptian people, the heart of the Arab world, that they are no different from the rest of us; that we share the same values and aspirations.

The nature of this revolution, the determinedly peaceful approach of the protesters and their youthful leaders, the self-discipline, the cleaning and tidying they have undertaken, especially since the protests have wound down following Friday’s momentous changes – the transmission of these images around the world, and particularly in the West, will have a far greater positive impact on changing attitudes to the Arab and Muslim worlds than any-number of Cairo-type speeches by President Obama. But it also necessitates a fundamental shift in assumptions about the possibility of positive, grassroots-led change in the region. And it shows just how misguided has been the Western policy of putting stability first and turning a blind eye to repression and the abuse of human rights.

The power and weakness of the media

I listened and watched intensively as events unfolded, but hardly in a systematic fashion. And I certainly wasn’t engaged in a media-monitoring research exercise. But the significance of Al Jazeera’s live English-language streaming from Egypt was unmistakable. They seemed to have so many more informed commentators and correspondents on the ground in Cairo and many other towns and cities than their closest rivals. The continuous coverage meant that it was impossible for the regime to prevent the world from seeing exactly what was going on. Any attempt by Mubarak and his henchmen to portray the actions of hired pro-regime thugs as legitimate and spontaneous not only failed completely, but hastened the regime’s downfall. And not even the targeting of journalists, especially those from Al Jazeera, or the burning down of Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Cairo, prevented the details of what was going on from being reported.

It may be possible to argue that Al Jazeera’s coverage was sometimes blatantly anti-Mubarak and pro-democracy protesters, rather than dispassionate and objective. But from what I could see, hardly any reporter from any news organization was immune from being swept up at some point in the passions and the emotions of the rapidly unfolding events. And frankly, any other kind of approach would have failed to communicate the essence of what was going on. Moreover, with Twitter, Facebook, SMS and live blogging, there were so many sources of news, information and comment, it’s clear that in such situations today, the media overall constitute a powerful force for change – not necessarily decisive, as the case of Iran and the response to the presidential election there in 2009 showed – that cannot remain above the fray.

And yet it seemed to me that there were also clear signs of weakness in the major news outlets. I thought that the BBC in particular struggled to find original angles on what was going on, such that they kept recycling the same reports, with at least one of their rather long-in-the-tooth correspondents decidedly off the pace for much of the time. As with other agencies, the BBC then leaned heavily on ‘expert commentators’, many of whom ended up with egg on their faces when events didn’t quite go the way they suggested they would. For me, this gave added force to the stream of instant news in tweets and live blogs on newspaper websites like the Guardian. This material was not always consistent and was pretty anarchic at times, but since it came from people who were actually in the thick of things, or just a short SMS or mobile phone call away from them, it gave you a very good sense of the gritty ebb and flow of events and of history being made.

The power of words

Much of the above, especially the social networking element of it, speaks to the enduring power of words, even when compressed into no more than 140 characters. But I was also struck by how certain words that enter our vocabulary from a foreign language because of some political upheaval that gains international attention carry menace in some contexts and hope and opportunity in another. I’m thinking here particularly of the word tahrir, which, as all the world now knows from seeing the almost three weeks of demonstrations in Tahrir Square in central Cairo, means ‘freedom’. I suspect that most people in Britain and in Western Europe more widely who know this word do so as a result of the media attention paid to Hizb ut Tahrir, the pan-Islamic political organization widely regarded as having an extremist ideology that is homophobic, antisemitic, opposed to other religious views and wanting to establish an Islamic caliphate of all Muslim countries. The group’s name simply means the ‘Party of Freedom’ or ‘Liberation’, and yet mention of their name outside of the group’s members and small band of sympathisers generally provokes instant images of intolerance, violence and the destruction of Western values.

And now, the same word will forever be associated with a struggle for a freedom that the West has decided is entirely compatible with Western values, with peace, non-violence, co-operation, liberty and so on. I’m not suggesting that this should make us look any more favourably on Hizb ut Tahrir, but rather that, as a result of the persistence of orientalism, we are too quick to want to fit such words into a convenient Western way of thinking, rather than examine more deeply what such words mean in the Arabic-speaking societies from which they come.

I wonder, for example, what would have happened had the English word that has often been used to describe the last three weeks’ activities of the pro-democracy movement in Egypt, ‘uprising’, entered usage in its Arabic form: intifada. As Yonatan Mendel has pointed out, use of the word in the Israeli Hebrew language context, untranslated, has given it enduring ‘intimidating, demonic and violent connotations’, when the Hebrew word for it, hitkomemut, has positive associations ‘as being an act of resistance against occupying forces’. Israeli spokespeople and pro-government commentators have successfully ensured that for many in the West the word intifada has demonic associations. Had the word been used locally by the Egyptian activists themselves to describe their uprising, I wonder what impact that would have had on Western perceptions. Would it have muddied the widespread support for the pro-democracy movement or would it have resulted in a revaluing of the word intifada with subsequent positive knock-on effects for the Palestinians?

Implications for the wider Middle East

The Middle East isn’t Eastern Europe. I don’t suppose that the autocratic regimes in the region will collapse one after the other over a period of two years as did the communist regimes. Nevertheless, the impact of the Tunisian revolution and now the even more momentous Egyptian revolution on other countries in the region has produced unprecedented scenes of public dissent and discontent. Leaders have moved rapidly to be seen to be making concessions. It’s certainly much too early to judge whether any other regimes will go the way of Tunisia and Egypt. The balls have been thrown in the air and will certainly not just come back to earth in the same formation as before.

One country certainly needs a peaceful political upheaval, should move immediately to rescind emergency laws, but whose government is likely to move to tighten internal and external security and do nothing to curb growing anti-democratic tendencies in its poodle-like parliament – and that’s Israel. Various commentators have pointed out how the events in Egypt should be seen as an urgent wake-up call for the Israelis, and none more perceptively than Daniel Levy. As he argues in Haaretz:

Maintaining the peace treaty has morphed over time into maintaining a peace process that has ultimately entrenched occupation and settlements and made a mockery of its Arab participants. Post-transition Egypt is unlikely to continue playing this game. . . . Israel’s strategic environment – notably the capacity it provides to avoid making choices and to disguise the status quo as progress – is about to change.

The two responses offered by Israeli establishment voices, Levy says, are either ‘digging in’ or an urgent return to the peace process. He rejects these and sketches the outline of a third alternative:

Broadly speaking, this option has three components. First, an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines almost without preconditions or exceptions (minor, equitable and agreed-upon land swaps and international security guarantees could fall into the latter category). Second, Israel should undertake an act of genuine acknowledgement of the dispossession and displacement visited on the Palestinian people, including compensating refugees where appropriate, and thus set in motion the possibility of reconciliation. Third, there needs to be a clear Israeli commitment to full equality for all of its citizens, notably including removal of the structural barriers to full civil rights for the Palestinian Arab minority.

Not that he holds out much hope of such a policy shift coming about (and many of us would probably argue that Levy’s scenario doesn’t go far enough). Which only emphasises in what a dangerous position the Netanyahu government is in the process of placing the country. And while some have argued that Israel will become even more important to the United States, because the Obama administration will now see it as its one reliable ally in the region, I see this as wishful thinking. If anything, the opposite is the case. A strategy based around virtually unlimited and unconditional support for Israel will become even more of a liability. The US will now have to continue along the path it chose in relation to Egypt and be sensitive to the democratic demands of the peoples of the region rather than rely on autocrats and authoritarian regimes to maintain stability.

Posted in Middle East | Leave a comment

Could 61-Year Old Rabbi Julia Neuberger Become Britain’s Foremost Jewish Leader?

Posted on 13/02/2011 by Antony Lerman

This piece is cross-posted from Eretz Acheret, where it was published under a different title.

Hard on the heels of the announcement that Jonathan Sacks is retiring as Chief Rabbi of Britain’s mainstream orthodox denomination comes news of a new and surprising rabbinic appointment. Julia Neuberger, Peer of the Realm (like Sacks) and former enfant terrible of Liberal Judaism, was confirmed last week as the new senior rabbi of West London synagogue, the flagship congregation of the Reform movement. This was the pulpit of the much-loved and late-lamented Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a young Holocaust survivor whose humanity, wisdom and humour did so much to define what Reform Judaism stood for in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Julia—I declare an interest; she’s a friend—is not lacking activities with which to fill her life and, at 61, I suspect that few would have predicted a return to the role of community rabbi after 22 years. She is one of British Jewry’s highest profile figures. A leading campaigner and expert on ageing and palliative care, Julia was Chief Executive of the country’s principal and most highly respected health think tank, the King’s Fund, from 1997 to 2004, which had a staff of more than 100 when she took up her post. Appointed to the House of Lords as a Liberal-Democrat Peer in 2004, Julia showed her ‘ecumenical’ side when she accepted an invitation from the then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown in 2007 to be the government’s ‘champion of volunteering’. From the autumn, she will no longer sit in the House of Lords as a Lib-Dem peer but will become an independent member. She plans to continue using the House as a platform to express her views. As she said in a Jewish Chronicle interview last week, ‘There would be issues “which it will be really important to have a religious voice on”, for example, asylum and assisted suicide.’

The appointment has wide significance for British Jewry for at least three reasons. First, Julia could well alter the public perception of what it is to be a Jew today in the UK. Like Jonathan Sacks, Julia is an experienced and attractive media performer. But whereas Sacks confines his appearances to the 2-minute ‘Thought for the Day’ slot on BBC Radio 4, one-on-one interviews and occasional one-off programmes in which he is the presenter, Julia appears on the most-watched and listened-to current affairs panel discussions and other news programmes, more than holding her own in what are often intense and difficult exchanges with other opinion-formers, politicians, star academics and celebrities. Until now, no other rabbinic figure has been able to match the orthodox Chief Rabbi’s media popularity and public standing—Sacks is often spoken of as a better chief rabbi to the non-Jews than the Jews—much to the chagrin of the progressive Jewish groups, which feel that their more modern religious message is thus harder to convey, both to Jews and the wider society.

Since Rabbi Gryn died in 1996, Reform Judaism has had no equivalent to Sacks, who is widely credited with having had a major influence on public debate and has been listened to with more than just respect by Tory and Labour leaders alike. With her more popular touch, media-friendly visual demeanour and willingness to engage in public debate, without losing her dignity, Julia is well-placed to challenge for the role of Britain’s leading Jewish figure, especially now that Sacks will no longer be spiritual head of the United Synagogue. While Julia would never publicly describe her role in this way, I’m sure that many progressive and secular Jews will be earnestly hoping that this is what she will strive for and achieve.

Second, although she will not be the formal head of Reform Judaism, she is well-placed to advance the appeal of progressive Judaism among Britian’s more than 300,000 Jews. Surveys show that a significant proportion of members of mainstream orthodox synagogues display Reform Jewish profiles when questioned about their identity, beliefs and practices. As senior rabbi at the movement’s spiritual home in central London, Julia is ideally placed to help give Reform Jews confidence in the independent validity of their brand of Judaism and not feel that they need to be looking over their shoulders all the time in the vain hope that they might get the blessing of the orthodox. This could make Reform more attractive to unaffiliated Jews looking for a spiritual home and United Synagogue members troubled by the rightward shift of orthodoxy in the last 20 years. Also, having been a Liberal congregational rabbi for 12 years and president of the Liberal Jewish movement since 2007, she might want to bring the two progressive groups much closer together making an even stronger alternative to orthodoxy.

Finally, in her new role, perhaps Julia might also have a significant impact on the status of women in the British Jewish community. Women rabbis are now commonplace in Reform and Liberal synagogues, but they are still treated as second class citizens when it comes to any roles they might play in the cross-community leadership bodies such as the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council. With her experience of public life, her broadly progressive political stance and her commitment to women’s equality she could do much to facilitate women taking positions of authority and responsibility and alter retrogressive attitudes in the process.

Julia was once something of a firebrand who would think nothing of cocking a snook at the establishment. She has mellowed considerably, but remains ready to speak out on matters she feels strongly about. In 2009 she signed a collective letter critical of Israel’s Cast Lead operation, which was published in the Observer newspaper. My impression is that she is now trusted by the powers that be. While some might regret that she no longer appears so radical, my guess is that she would still like to bring about important changes and that she understands how much more effective she can be working from a strong position inside the tent.

Whatever she achieves, one thing is for certain: the politics of the community has suddenly become much more interesting.

Posted in Religion | 1 Comment