Is this anti-semitism?

xx-post, well yeah, but it still makes it more complicated than the quite simple quid-pro-quo I had gotten in my mind.

i finally finished that Yale paper i posted above and it's good. some parts are redundant as he clarifies points over + over, and it's long so i don't expect a lot of ppl to read it. here were some parts i thought were interesting/well argued:

Ilan Pappe (2006) argues that Israeli forces are committing genocide in Gaza. The charge that Israel commits genocide, in Gaza or the West Bank, or in Lebanon, is a charge commonly made by anti-Zionists. At first sight, such a characterization would appear to be entirely counter-productive, since while Israeli forces are regularly responsible for serious human rights abuses, they can easily show themselves to be not guilty of genocide. When there is no genocide in Gaza why do anti-Zionists like Pappe continue to assert that there is? These repeated allegations have the effect of demonizing Israel, of implanting and reinforcing the notion that Israel is a unique evil. It simplifies: Israel is the ‘oppressor’, Palestine is the ‘oppressed’ and anything more complicated only serves to confuse this central issue.

The genocide charge is a particular kind of demonization. Genocide has a particular relevance to Israel, which was created three years after the end of the Holocaust. The contemporary claim that there is a genocide in Gaza is related to the claim that Israel uses the Holocaust instrumentally to justify its violence. The charge that Israel is like Nazi Germany functions to neutralize this alleged instrumentalization of the Holocaust. In order to neutralize the Holocaust in this way, it is necessary to normalize it and to distort its reality.58 So anti-Zionists often push a number of myths: (a) what happens in Gaza today is, in some sense, the same as the Holocaust, which is the point of naming it ‘genocide’; (b) ‘Zionists’ collaborated with the Holocaust and so were partly responsible for it;59 (c) ‘Zionism’ is ideologically akin to nazism.60

Pappe (2006) writes: ‘Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycott and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.’ Perhaps his wish to advocate for this campaign is what has led him to make the over-blown claim of genocide; he does not use the term ‘genocide’ to describe events in 1948, which is his area of historical expertise. Yet his proposed remedy today does not seem to fit the alleged disease. If there was really genocide occurring in Gaza, surely a more urgent, powerful and desperate response would be appropriate than carrying on the long, slow campaign for sanctions, boycott and divestment. Pappe finishes by exhorting the world ‘not to allow the genocide of Gaza to continue’. He precedes this exhortation with the words: ‘in the name of the holocaust memory’. The irony is that so long as Pappe employs this kind of political rhetoric, then it is unlikely indeed that it should communicate successfully with the majority of Israelis and Jews. But perhaps he is not writing for Israelis. Perhaps he has given up on building a peace movement and he has given up on Israelis as potential agents for progressive change: ‘There is nothing we here in Israel can do against [the genocide in Gaza]’, writes Pappe. Shortly after writing this piece, Pappe accepted a job at Exeter University in England.

"We’ve received death threats for actually daring to discuss the idea of a boycott of a racist university system within Israel itself. And so in fact the rise in antisemitism is precisely because this equation of being Israeli and being Jewish. We don’t say that but the Israelis do."

Rose is clearly implying here that it is ‘the Israel Lobby’ that sends out death threats to him and his colleagues. And he is right. Because his understanding of the term ‘lobby’ includes everyone from AIPAC, the ADL, the AJC, Campus Watch, Melanie Phillips, to the UJS, the Board of Deputies, the All-party Parliamentary Committee, to Engage, Workers’ Liberty, Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Meretz USA - to loony late night green-ink letter-writers who send death threats. All those who stand against Rose’s characterization of Israel as apartheid and illegitimate speak, in his imagination, with one voice, say one thing, adopt one tactic, have one politics. In other words, the ‘lobby’, in the way that Rose uses the term, is a global Jewish conspiracy. Nearly all newspapers, TV stations, websites, publishing houses, Hollywood itself, oppose his focus on Israel as a uniquely racist centre of global imperialism. And Rose can not just be wrong; the fact that most people disagree with him needs to be explained; and it is explained with reference to the existence of a vast conspiracy.

The Liberal Democrats are the centre party in UK politics, generally understood to be politically to the left of the Conservatives and to the right of Labour. Notwithstanding the complexities of such a characterization, they are a mainstream party in British political life and could not be understood as either an extreme left wing or an extreme right wing party. Jenny Tonge was fired as a Liberal Democrat spokesperson in January 2004 after having said that if she had been a Palestinian, she would have considered becoming a suicide bomber.68

There are two senses in which these remarks are interesting. Firstly they demonstrate an ignorance of conditions in Palestine and of Palestinian politics and of Palestinian paramilitary capability. Palestinians respond to the world in which they live in a whole number of different ways; some respond politically, as nationalists, as socialists, as Islamists; some try to look after their communities, as doctors, as teachers, as leaders; some struggle to look after themselves and their families; some are involved in peace organizations and in groups which aim to bridge the divide; some argue for a boycott of Israel; some engage in forms of armed resistance. It is not empirically true that Palestinians have no choice other than to blow themselves up near Israelis. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians find other ways to live and other ways to respond.

Yet Tonge’s premise is that ‘if she were Palestinian’ then she would think differently from the way that she does, being British. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that at the bottom of such a sentiment is an ‘orientalist’ (Said 1978) othering of Palestinians. I am British, so I am a Member of Parliament, I think, I act politically, I speak. But if I were Palestinian then I would not think and reflect and act politically or ethically, but rather I would be driven by rage to the only course open to me, which would be suicide bombing. I would be forced to extinguish my life in a drama of anger and despair because no other form of expression would be open to me, if I was a Palestinian. But the truth is that most Palestinians do not act as though reading from the script of a twentieth century orientalist movie; they do not act the part of the irrational emotional anger-driven Arab, who has no choice and who cannot think beyond their fury. Tonge misrepresents, de-politicizes and essentializes Palestine.

The meeting at which Tonge made her ‘Lobby’ comments was organized by Chris Davies, who had been the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament until some months earlier, when he had also been forced to resign. On returning home from a trip to Gaza, Davies expressed his anger and his horror at conditions there on his website and in the press. One comment he made was:

I visited Auschwitz last year and it is very difficult to understand why those whose history is one of such terrible oppression appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors.70

This was a classic example of the ‘Jews should know better’ argument. The Jews ‘appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors’. He could only mean ‘the Jews’. He is talking about ‘those whose history is of such terrible oppression’, who came to his mind when he visited Auschwitz. Jews used to be oppressed; now they are oppressors, and they don’t even care (apparently).

This generalization, that the Jews have become oppressors, goes to the heart of that current of contemporary antisemitism which is connected to anger with Israel. Davies shifts focus from acts which he understands as oppressive to those people who he holds responsible for them and he calls them ‘oppressors’. And then he adds that they (apparently) don’t care. As though Jews spoke with one voice (or cared with a single conscience).

The overwhelming majority of the Jews who were at Auschwitz (where Davies visited as a tourist, or perhaps as a VIP) left that place through the chimney. Many of them, one may assume, did not have time to sit down and ponder the lessons that they were supposed, by this Member of the European Parliament, to have been learning there. What were the lessons being taught to at Auschwitz? What should ‘the Jews’ have learnt from the Shoah experience? It would seem that the lesson learned by many Jews from Auschwitz is ‘next time, have more tanks and fighter planes’; ‘Have more powerful friends’ perhaps, too. Many Jews learnt the central lesson that the twentieth century seemed to go to such lengths to teach so many people: ‘If you don’t have a nation state of your own, then you have no rights’. It is hardly a surprise or a sign of a moral deficiency if this lesson was taken on board. The corollary to this lesson is that ‘if you don’t look after ‘your own’ then nobody else will look after you’. Many Israelis seem to be more attached to these lessons than to the ‘Jews should know better than to oppress others’ lesson that we might think they ought to have learnt.

It was, of course not just ‘the Jews’ who learnt this lesson in the twentieth century but many others too. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires taught people across central and Eastern Europe, as well as across the Middle East, the same lesson. And so the fall of these two Empires in 1918 was followed by upsurges of ethnic nationalism and bloody struggles to carve out nation states in Czech and Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria Turkey and throughout the region. Following the Second World War, the big European Empires faced nationalist opposition throughout Africa and Asia, and were pushed out by people who also had learnt the lesson of the twentieth century, ‘If you don’t have a nation state of your own, then you have no rights’. Following the break-up of the Soviet Empire in 1989, many more people learnt the lesson that history had taught them. And so in Croatia, Serbia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czech and Slovakia, there were struggles for ‘national’ independence, often trampling on the rights of minorities who were held not to be part of the nation that was to be self-determined (Arendt 1975; Fine 2001).

Before Hitler came to power many Jews rejected this narrow politics of nationhood, ‘national liberation’ and ‘self-determination’. Most Jews chose, either through political commitment or through inertia, not to go to Palestine to build a Jewish state. Zionism was an eccentric, utopian, minority project amongst Jews. It was only during the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazi plan to sweep Europe clean of Jews came together that nationalist politics really began to take hold amongst Jews. The European labour movement and the European left had been defeated and the Jews who had put their faith in it were killed or were running for their lives. Jews from the great cosmopolitan cities of the Middle East were later pushed out of their homes by Arab nationalist regimes which had also been busy learning the ‘gotta have a state’ lesson. A million Russian Jews came in the 1990s after enduring decades of Soviet antisemitism, which had come packaged in the language of hostility to Zionist imperialism.

And of course many Palestinians have learnt the lesson of the twentieth century too: no state, no rights. Without a state of their own, they have been treated appallingly both by Israel and by a number of Arab states.None of this is to support the politics of nationalism. But analysis begins with the world as it is and this is a world structured by the fact that human rights, in the absence of a nation state to guarantee them, have often, under pressure, turned out to be worthless promises. So the cosmopolitan task, in Israel/Palestine and also further afield, is to find a politics that creates a different truth for the 21st century. (Hirsh 2003; Fine 2007)

When it is pointed out to anti-Zionists who use the Zionism-Nazi analogy that the analogy is not appropriate, they often respond with something like the following : “The Gazans, you tell us, are not facing genocide. Indeed. We must really give Israel high marks for not killing all of them? They are facing starvation, in plain and simple English - food, medicines, electricity and fuel are being stopped at the border, not to mention students who cannot leave to study. So all that is not important, as long as there is no genocide? I cannot believe that you are comfortable with this.... Are you really comfortable with Israel’s continued barbarities? If so, please tell us.” This was written a well known boycott supporter on the internal UCU activists list under the heading ‘Not yet enough hell in Gaza’. As well as giving readers a small taste of the quality of the boycott debate within the union, it is also an example of a standard anti- Zionist form of argument. It concedes that the Nazi analogy is inappropriate but then insists that the one can infer that the one who said it was inappropriate therefore thinks that there is no problem in Gaza. Either Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto or it is like North London – there can be no middle position. Anti- Zionism often sets up spurious binary oppositions and insists that we choose one or the other. Notice that in this case, it also presents a false picture of events (there is no starvation in Gaza), and, particularly since it is repeated again and again and with authority, many people accept that picture of events as true.

To me it seems obvious that there are a lot of forms of oppression short of genocide. Of course Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, and of course it's not genocide.

there's no fun in not making your point in the douchiest, most offensive way possible

well YMMV of course but if I were part of a movement Judith Butler is the last person I'd want as my "philosopher and political theorist." she couldn't philosophize or theorize her way out of paper bag.

― espring (amateurist)

quite an odd claim in light of her work on gender (I mean we're not talking about a joke like Zizek here) but hmmm ok.

i thought one of the most damning things in that piece about butler was how she jettisoned the entire cultural mediation argument she pioneered w/ gender when it came to israel

i don't think i've posted this anywhere on ilx yet? it's pretty lol imo:

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/11/professor-strips-thesis-of-judith-butler-sourcing-calls-for-rds-retractions-and-disavowals-in-scholarship-to-oppose-bds-interview/

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26855043

what the fuck is wrong w/ kansas?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/us/3-killed-in-shootings-at-jewish-center-and-retirement-home-in-kansas.html

the quotes from the mayor in this piece are basically "everyone knew his views, no one believed what he said about Jewish people, he didn't have many followers, yeah I'm not surprised he did this. I consider him a friend."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/16/justice/kansas-jewish-centers-shooting/index.html?c=us

http://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-93-of-palestinians-hold-anti-jewish-beliefs/
http://global100.adl.org

1 Jews are more loyal to Israel than to (this country/to the countries they live in)

Would you consider it indicative of anti-Semitism to answer yes to that first question?

Many of the others seem fairly straightforward & obvious anti-Semitic clichés about influence on finance, business, media, etc. but that one seems different. I'm not sure I would answer yes but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a Jewish person to feel such loyalty - like it may or may not be the case but so what if it is?

I think the problem isn't whether an individual Jew is more loyal to Israel than to his country, but the assertion that "Jews" as a group are. It calls to mind the charge against Catholics (and JFK) that they'd be more loyal to the pope than to the United States.

The problem is also the implication of that, i.e. what people "really mean" when they say it, i.e. not merely that Jews have more affection for Israel, but that they're some kind of disloyal, treacherous fifth column.

1 Jews are more loyal to Israel than to (this country/to the countries they live in)

just a sec, let me check with the Elders of Zion

Yes, I should have paid more attention to the wording, sorry.

xxp

just check the elders-of-zion magic 8 ball™.

I still never quite get the point of these surveys and feel like the results get hyped up a bit. What is the significance of people in a country with few or no Jews thinking that Jews have "too much power in business"? Isn't the question itself kind of planting or fostering the idea, for that matter? We're talking largely about people for whom Jews are an abstract concept.

I know you probably mean Tanzania more than Poland but the reason some of these countries have few or no Jews is not for innocuous reasons.

I would go out on a limb and suggest that as far as places Jews actually live, the world has rarely been safer for Jews.

I agree, but that's because half of world jewry is in Israel and the other half is (with some exceptions) in English-speaking countries.

Like let's not get too excited that the Jews finally figured out that it wasn't safe to live in 99% of the world. That's hardly something for humanity to congratulate themselves on.

Foxman described finding “incredibly low levels of anti-Semitic beliefs” in European Protestant-majority countries such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Sweden.

We win the competition

the other half is (with some exceptions) in English-speaking countries

I assume you mean the US, there's more Jews in France and in the UK (not checked the figures but pretty sure that's the case)

in France THAN the UK!!!!!

France is the big exception. The vast majority of diaspora Jews are in anglo countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa).

But yeah, you're right, the US is the biggest piece there.

I would go out on a limb and suggest that as far as places Jews actually live, the world has rarely been safer for Jews.

― Doritos Loco Parentis (Hurting 2), Tuesday, May 13, 2014

like others have said, generally speaking, this is probably true. but these are scary times for the (relatively small) jewish populations of eastern european countries, like ukraine.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-world-is-full-of-holocaust-deniers/370870/

as usual the ADL's notion of what constitutes anti-semitism is really fucked up. i wouldn't have trusted this study had they not outsourced it to a reputable 3rd party.

i think in general it speaks more to poor education than anti-semitism--though that's not as true in mideast to be sure.

also, i wonder how many americans know about the violence that accompanied the partition of india? (that cost possibly a million lives) 1%? .001%?

considering the findings of the study maybe the ADL (and Foxman) have legitimate reasons to be so on guard about anti-semitism.

only 57% of eastern europe believes the holocaust has been accurately described by history

lol, ok eastern europe

there is much reason to be on guard about anti-semitism, unfortunately the ADL are horrible people who appear to believe that any criticism of whatever regime is in power in israel constitutes unquestioned anti-seminism and get a lot of rhetorical mileage out of blurring these distinctions.

foxman is a complete asshole.

last three posts otm

only 57℅ of eastern europe believes the holocaust has been accurately described by history

Accepting the results at face value, it would be interesting to see this figure compared to the number of people in the region who think the number of Jewish deaths is greatly exaggerated, which seems to have been a separate question.

I also just wonder about some of these survey questions if they don't lead people who have barely given the issue a second thought in their lives to state a conclusion

this is such a bummer. my brother was just in brussels last week visiting his in-laws and i planned to go in the next year for a beer tour :/ oh belgium.

think we can fairly safely say 'yes' in this case tbh

have we talking about FN + ms le pen winning today anywhere? apparently 2 jews were attacked in paris today. bet both of these things speed along the french-jewish emigration

oh god le pen is still fucken at it

more popular than ever it seems

Lately in europe it seems like ww2 never happened

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/world/europe/suspect-arrested-in-jewish-museum-killings-in-belgium.html

Oldman continued. "I don’t blame him. So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, 'That f--king kraut' or 'F--k those Germans,' whatever it is?

yes because a Jew disparaging Germans is totally analogous to a Catholic disparaging Jews, yup, totally the same thing.

Man, remember when the Jews murdered all those Germans and Catholics, that was just awful.

I have never in my entire life heard a Jewish guy say "that fucking kraut" fwiw.

"imagine all the people racist like me"

I'm pretty sure I have made some disparaging remarks about Germans while watching something on TV about Nazis

"kraut" is something only WWII vets say ime