Criticizing Israel: An Obsession of Hatred Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on May 12th, 2017

There is no shortage of critics of Israel. Some are antisemites who conspire to destroy the Jewish state. Others have legitimate concerns about particular Israeli government policies. When does criticism or condemnation of Israel become antisemitic? At what point does the condemnation of Israel cross the boundary into antisemitism?

 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)

Omar Barghouti, founding member of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) that initiated BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and a graduate of Tel Aviv University, claims that “Israel and its lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.”1

After hearing Barghouthi speak at UCLA, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the long-time executive director of UCLA Hillel and a renowned left-wing activist, said “BDS is poison and Omar Barghouti [a co-founder of the BDS movement] is a classic anti-Semite.” He found “no articulated aspiration for peace, only a negative desire to destroy the very foundation of the State of Israel. This is just recycled Palestinian rhetoric about the pursuit of justice in the mouth of a sophisticated, smart, Israeli-educated and wily ideologue.” When he uses the term “Justice,” it is merely “a political code word for no compromise. And everyone knows that any peaceful outcome is contingent on mutual compromise.”

Seidler-Feller considered Barghouti’s denial of Jewish peoplehood particularly egregious.   Usurping the right of Jews to define who they are “is an aggressive act of denying Jews the fundamental right of self-definition. It constitutes a delegitimization of my being and of my identity as a Jew.” 2

 A Unique Challenge

Nathan Sharansky, once a dissident in the former Soviet Union, sees these new attacks against Israel as posing a special challenge. Traditional antisemitism threatened the Jewish people or the Jewish religion. Individual Jews were denied the right “to live as equal members in a society. The new anti-Jewishness denies the right of Jewish people to live as equal members in the family of nations…. All that has happened is that we’ve moved from discrimination against the Jews as individuals to the discrimination against the Jews as a people.” Antisemitism, directed at the Jewish state, hides behind a façade of legitimate criticism that is more difficult to expose. 3

Definition of Antisemitism

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel-Aviv University suggests several criteria to distinguish between reasonable condemnation of Israel and antisemitic assaults.

According to the Institute, the line is crossed when the character traits, expressions, and descriptions ascribed to Israel use antisemitic stereotypes; when Israelis and Jews are portrayed as “a cosmic evil,” are held accountable for global calamities, and are compared to the Nazis; when Israeli and Jewish supporters of Israel are targeted and attacked, and “are treated in a disproportionate manner in relationship to the issue at hand and in comparison to the actions of other nations”; when Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is “de-legitimized”; when the Holocaust is denied or distorted and made a political “weapon, allegedly misused by the Jews to extort financial support and to make political capital.”4

“Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but not all criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic,” asserts Edward Rothstein, the cultural critic-at-large for The New York Times. “When standards of justice are applied in profoundly distorted fashion, when those distortions put the literal survival of a society at stake and when murders are taking place and explicitly encouraged, declarations are being made that may even fit university standards for ‘hate speech.’”5

Rothstein adds “…Criticism of Israel need not be anti-Semitic, and accusations of anti-Semitism become devalued when they are used to describe all criticisms of Israel. But criticism is anti-Semitic when it demonizes Zionism, equates it with Nazism or justifies organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that have pledged themselves to the destruction of Israel. And the Nazi analogy is so avidly applied to Israel that it seems to offer a form of relief and absolution to the accuser while condemning the state to the lowest rung of hell. Soon enough, the indictment expands to encompass other Jews.”6

Describing Jews as Nazis is designed to defame Israelis and Israel. The mantra constantly repeated is “The victims have become perpetrators.”7

Historian Robert Wistrich explained that “’anti-Zionists’ who insist on comparing Zionism and the Jews with Hitler and the Third Reich appear unmistakably to be de facto anti-Semites, even if they vehemently deny the fact! This is largely because they knowingly exploit the reality that Nazism in the postwar world has become the defining metaphor of absolute evil. For if Zionists are ‘Nazis’ and if [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon really is Hitler, then it becomes a moral obligation to wage war against Israel. That is the bottom line of much contemporary anti-Zionism. In practice, this has become the most potent form of contemporary anti-Semitism.”8

Criticism of Israel also becomes antisemitic when Jews, Judaism and Israel are characterized as the treacherous enemy of Islam and when public calls are made for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere. These declarations can be found in Hamas and Palestine Liberation Organization covenants and in some Islamic legal rulings (fatawin) that declare that it is a religious obligation to destroy Israel and the Jews. 9

Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian Minister of Justice and Chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Commission for Combatting Antisemitism, noted that Israel is the only country and the Jews are the only people in the world that are the focus of enduring threats for destruction from governmental, religious, and terrorist bodies. What “is most disturbing is the silence, the indifference and sometimes even the indulgence, in the face of such genocidal antisemitism.”10

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, had no hesitation about labelling an ant-Zionist remark antisemitic. Not long before he was assassinated, Dr. King spoke in Boston, where he spoke to African-American students at Harvard University and those studying in the area. During the course of an hour and a half of cross-examination, a student made a remark against Zionists. Dr. King “snapped at him and said: ‘Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking about anti-Semitism.”11

To be sure, one can criticize Israel’s policies and decisions and not be antisemitic. Democratic states should not consider themselves immune to rebuke and Israel is a liberal democratic state. In ancient Israel the biblical prophets devised the art of self-criticism.12

American businessman and Jewish leader Mort Zuckerman finds that Israel is condemned for behaving in a way that others in similar situations are not singled out for reproach. If any other country were subjected to terrorism to the extent Israel is today, no one would question their right to self-defense. Where, among the myriad examples, is the equivalent criticism of Russian “anti-terrorist” action in Chechnya, a socio-political entity outside the standard definition of Russian cultural dominion? But Israel’s attempt to protect her citizens is “routinely portrayed as aggression.” Pictures in the media of an armed Israeli response imply that Israel is responsible for a disproportionate use of force.13

Zuckerman recognizes that not all “unfair and illogical” descriptions of Israel are antisemitic. Nevertheless, the criticism of Israel is “so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from reality that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the insidious political mask of anti-Zionism.” This “new” antisemitism transcends social systems, borders, ethnic groups and political affiliation. The focus of resentment and jealousy is directed at the Jews in Israel, the role it plays in the world and against some American Jews who support the Jewish state.14

Hans Mayer, eminent literary scholar and committed leftist wrote in 1975, “Whoever attacks Zionism, but by no means wishes to say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself and others. The State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants to destroy it, openly or through policies that can effect nothing else but such destruction, is practicing the Jew hatred of yesterday and time immemorial.”15

Israeli essayist Hillel Halkin is equally emphatic about critics of Israel. “One cannot be against Israel or Zionism, as opposed to this or that Israeli policy or Zionist position, without being anti-Semitic. Israel is the state of the Jews. Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a state. To defame Israel is to defame the Jews. To wish it never existed, is to wish to destroy the Jews….The new anti-Israelism is nothing but the old anti-Semitism in disguise.” 16

Halkin quoted Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative pundit and former Editor-in-Chief of Commentary magazine, who said “All criticisms of Israel based on a double standard …deserve to be stigmatized as anti-Semitic.” Whether there is a double standard determines whether a position toward Israel is prejudiced or not. 17

Though it is beneath one’s dignity in decorous western society to acknowledge you hate Jews, Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, claims that one can openly avow hatred of an Israeli prime minister or any other Israeli official with impunity. Is this an example of displacement, of transferring ones emotions from one object while actually directing your feelings toward another out of real or imagined fear of the power of the other individual, he asks. “Lashing out at an Israeli leader does not risk the raised eyebrows that demonizing his people, let alone Jews as such, would do in a post-racist age.” 18

Joffe suggests there are a number of ways to distinguish between legitimate criticism and baseless attacks on Israel. One method is language. When Israel is condemned for acting like Nazis, this attributes evil to an entire nation and imposes extreme harm on them. Criticism need not be antisemitic or anti- Israel, yet ascribing Nazi like behavior to Israelis who are alleged to indiscriminately kill women and children clearly is antisemitic.19

Another test is selectivity. Israel is constantly the focus of outrage or incrimination in the media, while China’s repression of Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims, the Congo’s widespread human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings and torture, the Sudan’s extensive human rights abuses and the conflict in Darfur, where 300,000 Darfuris have been killed and as many as four million displaced are rarely condemned or become front page news. Absolute aversion of Israeli leaders is pervasive, but condemnation of Palestinian terrorists is fleetingly denounced then justified in light of Israel’s alleged “occupation” and tyranny. This “obsessive need for moral denigration,” Joffe says, indicates that “Israel has assumed a special place in contemporary demonology.” Facts do not determine judgment; facts are selected based on prejudices.20

Sometimes anti-Zionists assert that they harbor no ill will towards Jews, but “only” against the Jewish state. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a well-known critic of Israel, noted that “Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction — out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East — is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”21

Per Ahlmark, former leader of the Swedish Liberal Party and deputy prime minister of Sweden, compares this approach to someone who says they are “only” against the existence of Great Britain, but are not anti-British. If someone told him they love Swedes, but Sweden should be eliminated, he would not believe them because “you cannot love or respect a people and hate their state.” Yet this does not preclude individuals from imagining they can separate the two feelings with regard to Israel.22

A question often posed to Daniel Taub, Israeli ambassador to Great Britain, is whether there is a real attempt to delegitimize Israel or simply criticisms of Israeli policies. He responds that one should not listen to what Israel’s enemies are saying, but what her friends or at least those who ostensibly claim to be her friends are saying.

He frequently hears “’I’m a friend of Israel and I support its right to exist’. And I wonder, can you image anyone saying that in relation to any other country? I support Australia’s right to exist or Guatemala’s right to exist – as though that somehow makes me a friend of Guatemala. In relation to what other country does a discussion or policy descend into a question mark over the very existence of that state?”23

Criticism of Israel at Universities

In an address at morning prayers in September 2002, then Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers added his concern about unfair criticism of Israel: “Certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged. But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

And some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.” 24

Judith Butler, professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and a supporter of BDS, took issue with Summers in the London Review of Books: “When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticize Israel … and to call on universities to divest from Israel are ‘actions that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not their intent’, he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being ‘debated freely and civilly’, his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called ‘effectively anti-semitic’ were European boycotts of Israel.25

British sociologist David Hirsh responded that “Butler clearly implies that it is necessary to demonstrate intent or bad faith in order legitimately to raise the issue of antisemitism. …Butler conflates attempts to mobilize an exclusion of Israeli scholars (and only Israeli scholars) from the academic community, the ‘boycott’, with free and civil debate. This is a conflation which Summers explicitly avoids when he makes the distinction between freedom of speech in debates around Israeli policy on the one hand, and other things, such as the ‘boycott’, on the other.

Having taken a strong position against the possibility of antisemitism ‘in effect but not in intent,’ and having implied that this formulation has a damaging and ‘chilling’ effect, she proceeds to take up this same ‘in effect but not intent’ position in relation to freedom of speech. Although she writes, Summers clearly ‘insisted’ that he is for freedom of speech, and he clearly makes a distinction between speech and boycott (which he thinks is antisemitic), she claims that his analysis is objectively anti-freedom of speech, in spite of his lack of intent and in spite of his insistent denial. Butler dismisses the possibility of antisemitism without intent but she allows the possibility of closing down the right to criticize, without intent.”26 Put in simpler terms, it is “my way or the highway.”

In an address to the Ottawa Conference on Combatting Anti-Semitism, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged that “Anti-Semitism has gained a place at our universities, where at times it is not the mob who are removed, but the Jewish students under attack. And, under the shadow of a hateful ideology with global ambitions, one which targets the Jewish homeland as a scapegoat, Jews are savagely attacked around the world, such as, most appallingly, in Mumbai in 2008….Harnessing disparate anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targeting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world, and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so.”27

“Israel, like any country, may be subjected to fair criticism,” Mr. Harper said. Criticism is part of any democratic debate, “But when Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand.” 28

He added that Canada supports Israel, “Not just because it is the right thing to do, which is it, but also because history shows us, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are ultimately a threat to all of us. Indeed, if you look at the terrorist threats Israel faces, they are of exactly the same ideological origins as those who threaten terrorism against Canada. The only difference between the threats against us and the threats against Israel, is that these threats are more numerous and closer to Israel.” 29

A Final Note

For British historian Norman Geras, the idea that antisemitism has become respectable not just among the “thugs”, but “pervasively also within polite society… and within the perimeters of a self-flattering liberal and left opinion…   is a moral scandal.” Should a new catastrophe befall world Jewry he is convinced there will once again be those who plan and orchestrate the calamity and those who “collaborate, collude,” and avert their eyes and justify their actions in writings. “Some of these, dismayingly, shamefully, will be of the left.” The state of “Israel has been made an alibi for a new climate of antisemitism on the left.” 30

There is no other conclusion, he says, which is why it is imperative to understand the nature of the threat.30 The daunting challenge we face is that the beliefs we are combating provide profound emotional gratification to those who embrace them, gratification that is not simple to surmount or to supplant, but no less dangerous for its liberal patina. 31

 

Footnotes

  1. Omar Barghouti, “Why Israel Fears the Boycott,” The New York Times (January 31, 2014); “BNC Responds to French Prime Minister: BDS promotes justice and universal rights,” (February 25, 2010) http://www.bdsmovement.net/2010/bnc-responds-to-french-prime-minister-bds-promotes-justice-and-universal-rights-645; Omar Barghouti, “Boycott, Academic Freedom, and the Moral Responsibility to Uphold Human Rights,” Journal of Academic Freedom Volume Four (2013); “BDS Co-Founder Omar Barghouti : Why Would It Be Bad Id The Right Of Return Ends Israel’s Supremacist Order,” The MEMRI Daily (May 9, 2017).
  2. Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, “Omar Barghouti at UCLA: No to BDS, no to occupation,” Jewish Journal (January 23, 2014); Omar Barghouti, “What Comes Next: A secular democratic state in historic Palestine – a promising land,” Mondoweiss (October 21, 2013).
  3. Nathan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards. Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs 16:3-4 (Fall 2004): 16:3-4; Jonathan Freedland, “Antisemitism doesn’t always come doing a Hitler salute,” The Guardian (October 4, 2013); Irwin Cotler, “Why Is Israel Singled Out?” The Jerusalem Post (January 16, 2002). Richard Baehr, “Is There a New Antisemitism?” American Thinker (April 3, 2011); Elliott A. Green, “How today’s anti-Zionism continues the old antisemitism,” The Coordination Forum For Countering Antisemitism (January 1, 2013).
  4. The Stephen Roth Institute for The Study of Antisemitism and Racism” (203); See also the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights definition of antisemitism http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf; Jonathan S. Tobin, “Hate Speech Illustrates True Face of BDS,” Commentary (March 25, 2014); David Hirsh, “Defining antisemitism down,” Fathom (September 13, 2012); Moishe Postone, History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism (Duke University Press, 2006); Karen Bodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising from the Muck: The New-Anti-Semitism in Europe (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2004), 4; Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left In Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008), 155-158; Alex Grobman, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Noble Oklahoma: Balfour Books, 2011).
  5. Edward Rothstein, CONNECTIONS “Hateful Name-Calling vs. Calling for Hateful Action,” The New York Times (November 23, 2002):B9.
  6. Edward Rothstein, “CONNECTIONS; Mutating Virus: Hatred of Jews,” The New York Times (May 17, 2003).
  7. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Holocaust Inversion: The Portraying of Israel and Jews as Nazis,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, (April 1, 2007); Robert S. Wistrich, Between Redemption and Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 225); Richard Falk, “Slouching Toward A Palestinian Holocaust,” Countercurrents.org (July 7, 2007); Linda Mamoun, “A Conversation With Richard Falk,” The Nation (June 17, 2008); Dave Rich, “ Holocaust Denial as an Anti-Zionist and Anti-Imperialist Tool for the European Far Left,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (January 9, 2008).
  8. Robert Wistrich, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review Jewish Center for Public Affairs Volume. 16:3-4 (Fall 2004); for an essay that debunks the myth that Hitler and the Nazi regime were supporters of Zionism, please see Jeffrey Herf, “Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism,” Fathom (Spring 2016); Efraim Karsh, “The war against the Jews,” Israel Affairs Middle East Forum (July 2012): 327-329; Jamie Palmer, “The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate,” The Tower Magazine Issue 37 (April 2016); For French-Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy “Hatred of Israel, denial or partial denial of the Holocaust, and the identification of Palestinians as the only legitimate victims form the basis of the anti-Zionist and anti- Semitic onslaught;” Jeremy Sharon, “Lévy: Jews of Diaspora and Israel are under attack,” The Jerusalem Post (October 31, 2012); see also Ralph Nader, “A Letter to Abraham Foxman: Criticizing Israel is Not Anti-Semitism,” Counterpunch (October 16-18), 2004); Phyllis Chesler, “Jews on the Precipice,” JewishPress.com (May 26, 2004); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2014).
  9. Irwin Cotler, “New Anti-Jewishness,” Alpert Papers The Jewish People Planning Institute (November 20002); Robert Wistrich, “Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger”(New York: The American Jewish Committee, 2001); Bassam Tawil, “Hamas: The New Charter That Isn’t,” Gatestone Institute (April 25, 2017); Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, “Fatah leader calls for Israel’s destruction,” Palestinian Media Watch (April 29, 2014); Khaled Abu Toameh, “Palestinians Dream of Destroying Israel, Peace Treaty or Not,” Gatestone Institute (March 25, 2014); Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, ”PA schools named after terrorists raise generation of terror-admiring youth,” Palestinian Media Watch (February 3, 2014).
  10. Cotler, “New Anti-Jewishness,” op.cit; Jonathan Sacks, “The hatred that won’t die. Why isn’t the left protesting against the growth of anti-semitism?” The Guardian (February 27, 2002).
  11. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Socialism of Fools”: The Left, the Jews & Israel,” in The New Left and The Jews, Mordecai S. Chertoff, Ed. (New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1971), 104.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, “Graffiti on History’s Walls,” U.S. News and World Report (November 3, 2003).
  14. Ibid.
  15. Arno Lustiger, “When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews, said Martin Luther King,” The Jerusalem Post (March 3, 2009).
  16. Hillel Halkin, “The Return of Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (February 2002):31.
  17. Ibid. 32-33.
  18. Josef Joffe, “The Demons of Europe,” Commentary (January 2004): 30.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Ibid.30-31; Diane Taylor and David Smith, “UK spent millions training security forces from oppressive regimes,” The Guardian (September 25, 2012).
  21. Thomas L. Friedman, “Campus Hypocrisy,” The New York Times (October 16, 2002); Yet in a New York Times editorial on December 13, 2011 entitled “Newt, Mitt Bibi and Vladimir,” Friedman went too far when he claimed that the standing ovation prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received in Congress in 2011 “was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby.”
  22. Per Ahlmark, “The Old in the New Anti-Semitism,” Project Syndicate (May 13, 2002).
  23. Jonathan Kalmus, “Israel ambassador leads speakers at Big Tent,” Jewish Chronicle (November 28, 2011); Frank Furedi, “Standing up to the new school of anti-Semitism: Hatred for Jews is now expressed in underhand ways” Spiked (December 13, 2016); David Hazony, “The Anti-Semitism We Never Talk About,” Issue 23 The Tower Magazine (February 2015); Howard Jacobson, “Pox Britannica,” New Republic (April 15, 2009).
  24. “Address at morning prayers Memorial Church Cambridge, Massachusetts,” The Harvard Crimson (September 17, 2002); David H. Gellis, “Summers Says Anti-Semitism Lurks Locally,” The Harvard Crimson (September 19, 2002); Karen W. Arenson, ‘Harvard President Sees rise in Anti-Semitism on Campus,” The New York Times (September 21, 2002);”Summers Stifles Israel Debate: The president had the right to speak on political issues but must do so responsibly,” The Harvard Crimson (September 23, 2002).
  25. Judith Butler, “No, it’s not anti-semitic,” London Review of Books Volume 25 Number 16 (August   21, 2003); see also Benjamin Weinthal, “Frankfurt to award US advocate of Israel boycott,” The Jerusalem Post (August 8, 2012); Judith Butler, “Judith Butler responds to attack: ‘I affirm a Judaism that is not associated with state violence,’” Mondoweiss (August 27, 2012); Undine Zimmer, Marie Heidingsfelder and Sharon Adler, “AVIVA-Interview with Judith Butler,” AVIVA (April 2013); Judith Butler and Udi Aloni discuss queerness, precariousness, binationalism, and BDS in a chapter from Udi Aloni, What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters   (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Gabriel Noah Brahm, “Judith Butler’s Mythologies: “Truthiness” in the Philosophy of BDS,” The Times of Israel (May 29, 2014; see also Alvin Rosenfeld, “’Progressive’” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” (New York: The American Jewish Committee, (2006); Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
  26. David Hirsh, “Accusations of malicious intent in debates about the Palestine-Israel conflict and about antisemitism: The Livingstone Formulation, ‘playing the antisemitism card’ and contesting the boundaries of antiracist discourse,” Transversal, the journal of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, (January 2010): 62-63.
  27. PM addresses the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism – Prime Minister of Canada (November 8, 2010) http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=2&featureId=6&pageId=46&id=3776).
  28. Ibid.
  29. PM addresses the 5th Action Party of the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) (March 11, 2011) http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp? category=2&featureId=6&pageId=46&id=4069.); Herb Keinon, “Delegitimization of Israel is new anti-Semitism,” The Jerusalem Post (July 31, 2012); so also, Phyllis Chesler’s extensive articles on the subject at https://phyllis-chesler.com/; Mitchell Bard’s articles http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/mitchell-bard/; Richard Landes, http://www.theaugeanstables.com/richard-landes-cv/Richard L. Cravatts, “On the Wrong Side of History Boycotting historians denounce blacklists just as they call for blacklisting Israeli academics,” Frontpagemag (February 3, 2017); Richard L. Cravatts, “The New Jacobins Campus fascists have been using their Gestapo tactics against pro-Israel speakers for years,” Frontpagemag (March 31, 2017); Richard L. Cravatts, Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews (Los Angeles: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2016); Richard L. Cravatts, “Perverting College Coursework to Conform to Ideology: The latest onslaught against reason in the university propaganda war on Israel” Frontpagemag (October 13, 2016); Richard L. Cravatts, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews (Los Angeles, California: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2012);.
  30. Norman Geras, “Alibi Antisemitism: Israel has been made an alibi for a new climate of antisemitism on the left,” Fathom (January 29, 2013); Philip Klein, “Anti-Israel liberals are normalizing anti-Semitism,” Washington Examiner (December 29, 2016); “‘The kosher conspiracy,’” The Washington Times (November 1, 2007); for some examples, see Günter Grass: ‘What Must Be Said’ Poem published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has created a heated debate in both Germany and Israel guardian.co.uk, (April 5, 2012); Antony Lerman “Günter Grass, antisemitism and the inflation of evil,” Eurozine (April 16, 2012); Cynthia Ozick, “The Modern ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’” The New York Observer (May 10, 2004); Jonathan Steele, “The Palestinians’ democratic choice must be respected,” The excuses given for refusing to deal with Hamas will not wash. This is a chance for Europe to have an independent role. The Guardian (January 26, 2006); Tom Gross, “Prejudice and Abuse Have the French and English learned nothing from the 20th century?” National Review (January 10, 2002).
  31. Eve Garrard, “The pleasures of antisemitism,” Fathom (Summer/ 2013).

 

Alex Grobman is a Hebrew University-trained historian, is a consultant to the America-Israel Friendship League and a member of the Council of Scholars for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)

Copyright © 2017 Alex Grobman All Rights Reserved.

=

Categorized under: ISRAEL.
Tagged with: no tags.

Comments are closed.