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Unlike
Henry McDonald, I consider the charge of anti-semitism
serious enough that it should not be tossed about
lightly, as a mere smear tactic. At various times
over the past half millennium-nearly always at the
instigation of government and Church authorities-anti-Jewish
bigotry has won a wide following in “civilized”,
Christian Europe, with devastating, almost unfathomable
consequences for those on the receiving end. Any socialist,
republican, anti-imperialist or human being worth
their salt would recognize in those who stood up to
fascism in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto or were
incinerated in the death camps across Europe a link
in the long chain of resistance to oppression. And
as I have written in The Blanket previously,
nowhere in the world today does the spirit of the
Warsaw resistance sparkle so brightly as in the streets
of Ramallah and Hebron, Jenin and Bethlehem. That
so few Israeli Jews recognize in the Palestinian resistance
the best of their own traditions is symptomatic of
the collective amnesia that the imposition of Zionism
as the exclusive expression of Jewish culture has
required.
McDonald
reluctantly concedes, after a long tirade against
Palestinian “anti-semitism” and a calculated,
malicious sneer at the “Irish groupies who flock
to the West Bank and Gaza in the hope of becoming
the Florence Nightingales of Third World Liberation,”
that there are “dark chauvinistic forces in Israel
dedicated to the so-called war of civilization”.
That is, in my view, a massive understatement. One
would be hard-pressed to identify in today’s
world a regime where the racialist logic and the dehumanization
so central to the Nazi genocide is as vividly reproduced
as in the inhuman, bone-crushing approach of the IDF
and its commanders in the Sharon government. The increasingly
open, official advocacy of “transfer” as
a solution to the Palestinian problem should send
a chill up the spine of anyone familiar with the evolution
of Nazi policy. The irony of an army which claims
to represent the legacy of Jewish survival sifting
through SS handbooks for strategic advice is an affront
to the memory of those who perished, and demands an
explanation.
In
a fundamental sense, the analogy between Hitler’s
final solution and the predicament of Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza today is inappropriate and
overdrawn: the Nazis attempted to carry out, and very
nearly accomplished, the systematic extermination
of European Jewry. While the rhetoric of a number
of prominent Israeli officials since the founding
of the state in 1948 and their activity over the past
two years suggests that there are high-ranking Zionists
who contemplate-perhaps even favour-a solution to
the Palestinian problem along similar lines, at present
there a range of brutal, if less extreme solutions
that they consider both effective and more palatable.
McDonald
warns, in the final paragraph of his recent article
that “those who [sympathize with Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza] should try to assemble
all the facts” before spouting off against Israeli
oppression, thereby avoiding the kind of simplistic
formulations that “foreigners “ (presumably
Irish Americans) put forward for resolving the squabble
on our own doorstep. But his own projection of naiveté
and historically-rooted Irish anti-semitism as the
sources for widespread sympathy for the Palestinians
in this country is dishonest, malicious and unoriginal.
It is but a local variant of an ongoing campaign among
conservatives and “friends of Israel” across
Europe to discredit anyone who speaks up against Israeli
oppression as an anti-semite. The left should have
none of it.
Coinciding
with renewed public outrage over Israeli brutality
against Palestinians there appeared a flurry of newspaper
editorials across western Europe and the United States
charging critics of Israel-and specifically left-wing
anti-Zionists-with being the instigators of a new
wave of anti-semitism. Britain’s chief rabbi
Jonathan Sacks several months ago equated criticism
of Israel with “calling into question the Jewish
people’s right to exist collectively.” A
prominent Italian liberal, in a book described by
the European Observatory on Racism as “explicitly
anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-immigrant,” denounced
Palestinian sympathizers as “anti-semites who
would sell their own mothers to a harem to see Jews
once again in the gas chambers.” The pro-Israeli
propagandist Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York
Times warned, absurdly, that “the anti-semitism
coming out of Europe today suggests that deep down
some Europeans want [Ariel Sharon] to commit a massacre
against Palestinians…so that they can finally
get the guilt of the Holocaust off their backs,”
and Sharon himself accused those demanding an investigation
of war crimes in Jenin of committing anti-semitic
“blood libel.”
McDonald’s
latest instalment is merely a shoddy attempt to foist
the same rubbish on the Irish left. But like so much
of his writing, it is a confused attempt to cobble
together bits of half-digested observation to uphold
the revisionist “big lie” about the inate savagery/backwardness/intolerance
of the Irish. As evidence of contemporary Irish anti-semitism
he informs us that callers to a recent talk show expressed
overwhelming sympathy for the Palestinians and little
for Israeli victims of a suicide bombing, but does
not present us with a transcript of the discussion,
or even with a single direct quote to support his
assertion: presumably it is enough that they voiced
overwhelming sympathy for the Palestinians living
under occupation. Perhaps it is true that individual
callers held anti-Jewish views. I don’t doubt
that there is some of that out there, as there is
in Britain, in France, virtually anywhere. But it
is more likely that callers are fed up with the one-sided
coverage they are subjected to in the press and have
made an informed choice that Israeli occupation and
not Arab bloodlust lies at the root of the problem.
To the extent that that is true, they see things more
clearly than McDonald does-consider for example his
cursory acknowledgment of the IDF’s “ham-fisted
approach to civil disturbances in Palestinian towns
and villages”. Civil disturbances? The IDF comes
in to put down “civil disturbances”? Called
in by whom? This is apologetics, sloppy apologetics,
nothing less.
“The
debate in Ireland…is coloured by an historic
anti-semitism embedded in the Irish psyche,”
McDonald asserts, citing a new, important study by
Bryan Fanning (not Fleming, Henry) on Racism and
Social Change in the Republic of Ireland. Fanning
has shown that the most reactionary elements in the
Irish establishment-namely the Catholic Church and
the southern state authorities-were steeped in anti-semitism
and did their best to bar Jewish migration into the
South. There are a number of things to say about this.
First, it is somewhat unsurprising that an insular,
right-wing, clerically-dominated establishment that
sympathized with fascism abroad would pursue such
a policy at home. Second, in that respect they were
little different from their counterparts in Britain
or, for that matter, the United States, where quotas
against “excessive” Jewish immigration were
also established. Third, their policy with regard
to Jewish refuges would have met with the hearty approval
of the architects of the Israeli state, whose priority
was not the rescue of European Jewry but the establishment
of a Zionist homeland: they lobbied these governments
to keep the quotas in place. But finally, and most
importantly, how in the world does the despicable
record of the most right wing elements in Irish
life support McDonald’s assertion that anti-semitism
is deeply embedded on the “Irish far left”?
If
it is true, as McDonald and his continental counterparts
assert, that there has been a palpable rise in anti-semitism
in recent months, then the left belongs in the front
lines of an urgent and forceful response. As Seamus
Milne argued recently, “the fate of the Jewish
people and the left have been closely intertwined”
throughout the history of capitalism. It was radical
democrats in the years after the French Revolution
who insisted on granting Jews full rights as equal
citizens--rights denied them under the old order.
And over a long period since, it has been the left
which has taken on fascists and anti-semites when
they attempt to move in from the margins and win a
mass audience. Socialists and communists paid a high
price for such efforts in Hitler’s Germany, being
murdered and sent off to the concentration camps alongside
Jews and others. It was the left in Britain which
defended the Jewish East End of London against fascists
in the 1930s, and again from the 1970s through to
the present socialists and activists in the Anti-Nazi
League have been key to thwarting attempts by the
BNP and others to win a following.
Reports
from across Europe confirm a growth in anti-semitism:
there has been an increase in physical attacks on
Jews in Britain and France, and a number of synagogues
have been attacked in recent months. But these are
part of a general intensification of racism, much
more often directed at immigrants and asylum seekers,
and especially Arabs and Muslims. The thrust of the
charge from Zionists, that public criticism of Israel
has fuelled such attacks, is ludicrous, and serves
to deflect attention from the real source of the violence.
All the evidence, Milne writes, “is that it is
the far right, the traditional fount of anti-semitic
poison, which has been overwhelmingly responsible
for attacks on both Muslim and Jewish targets in Europe.”
Israel
supporters have been completely silent about widespread
anti-Arab racism, and it is telling of McDonald’s
piece that it includes no denunciation of the anti-Arab
filth so prevalent in public discourse today. In the
US it is far more common to hear talk about “towelheads”
and ”sand niggers” than it is to hear even
the mildest public criticism of the Israeli state.
The rise of LePen in France and of the far-right in
Italy, Austria and the Netherlands has made racism
respectable in mainstream politics across Europe,
and traditional social democratic parties have been
falling over each other to prove their anti-immigrant
credentials. In this context it is hardly surprising
that racist thugs feel safe to crawl out and assault
immigrants and other vulnerable minorities, or that
Jews have also been targeted.
Despite
clear evidence that the far right is behind these
attacks, the recent campaign-now joined by McDonald-focuses
not on the right but on the “pro-Palestinian
left.” Zionists have in fact welcomed support
for their efforts from some of the worst bigots. A
full text translation of Italian journalist Oriana
Fallacci’s Anger and Pride, which described
Muslims as “vile creatures who urinate in baptisteries”
and “multiply like rats” was posted to pro-Israeli
web sites within days of publication. Prominent American
Zionist Martin Peretz, who has led the charge on “left”
anti-semitism, complained that television coverage
of the conflict in the Middle East has failed to “explain
that the Arab national character tends towards violence
and incitement…” In the U.S. the American
Israeli Political Action Committee gave a standing
ovation to right-wing Congressman Tom Delay when he
said recently that he supported Israeli annexation
of the West Bank, even though he had trumpeted Christianity
as the “only viable, reasonable and definitive
answer” to life’s key questions only a few
days earlier.
“Passionate
support for Israel combines readily with fervent anti-semitism”
among the Christian right, Noam Chomsky has written,
tracing the relationship back to the early 1980s,
when right wing American Christians set up the Temple
Mount Fund to “donate tens of millions of dollars
to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” More
than twenty years ago prominent Israel supporters
in the U. S. concluded that “right-wing reactionaries
are the natural allies of Zionism and not the liberals,”
and have in the years since carefully cultivated a
close relationship between what one American Jewish
writer calls “an ironic combination of overt
Jew-haters and pro-Israeli Jews.”
This
latest campaign by Israel supporters is a despicable
reminder of how cynically Zionists have deployed the
tragedy of the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel.
When Palestinian students and their supporters in
San Francisco demonstrated opposite a pro-Israel rally
in May of last year, university administrators threatened
to suspend and jail Palestine solidarity activists
on charges of anti-semitism. After initially claiming
to have video evidence, the administration was forced
to retreat after the General Union of Palestinian
Students (GUPS) produced their own video (available
at www.sfgups.cjb.net)
showing Zionists heaping racist insults at them-Arab
students were called “animals,” sand niggers,”
camel jockeys,” and “terrorists.” This
didn’t stop the media from running articles entitled
“The Shame of the pro-Palestinian Left,”
even after GUPS issued a statement saying it stood
“firmly against anti-semitism and all other forms
of racism.”
For
more than thirty years, every attempt to win solidarity
for Palestinians has come up against a concerted effort
on the part of Israel supporters to discredit anti-Zionists
as anti-semites. Jews in and outside of Israel who
have stood up have been denounced as “self-hating”
Jews, and Zionists have been adamant in insisting
that Zionism and Judaism are synonymous, suggesting
that one can’t be a “real” Jew and
critical of Israel at the same time. The left-with
a proud record of standing up to racism and anti-semitism-has
nothing to apologize for. Henry McDonald would have
us believe that the hundreds of working class people
in Belfast and throughout this country who have donated
generously anytime Palestinian solidarity activists
have taken to the streets are deluded, or worse, latent
anti-semites. But in reality it is the defenders of
Sharon and Bush and the assortment of right-wing bigots
who hover around them who give space for the real
anti-semites to win a hearing. To the extent that
Israel succeeds in its oppression of Palestine the
forces of militarism and bigotry are strengthened;
a concerted campaign to stop Sharon, involving Jews,
Arabs and solidarity activists from around the world
can put the bigots on the run, sow the seeds of real
unity, and bring real meaning to the anti-fascist
slogan “Never Again!”
Brian
Kelly is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party
in Belfast.
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