RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Congressional Israel Victory Caucus’ launch by Republicans reinforces support for Israel
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/27/congressional-israel-victory-caucus-launch-by-repu/
By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times – Thursday, April 27, 2017

Republicans fortified their growing bond with Israel by launching Thursday the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus, a coalition aimed at promoting widespread recognition of the Jewish state’s right to exist as a predicate to peace.

“We founded this caucus primarily on one single irrefutable principle, and that is first and foremost, Israel has a fundamental right to exist and defend herself. And that is not negotiable,” said Rep. Bill Johnson, Ohio Republican, who chairs the caucus with Rep. Ron DeSantis, Florida Republican.

No Democratic lawmaker spoke at the press conference to unveil the caucus, which comes with President Trump championing Israel after eight years of strained relations under the Obama administration.

Mr. DeSantis is the chairman of the House subcommittee on national security, which oversees U.S. embassies. He cited reports that Mr. Trump is in discussions to visit Israel on May 22, and predicted that the president at that time would announce the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Palestinians have claimed Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.)

Mr. DeSantis, who toured in March possible relocation sites for the U.S. Embassy in Israel, noted that such a trip would coincide with the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem Day, which marks the reunification of the city after the Six-Day War in 1967.

“I think it will send a powerful signal not only about the U.S.-Israel relationship — that we’re back and stronger than ever — but I think that will send a signal to other countries in the rest of the world that America is back, we’re going to stand by our allies, and that we’re not going to let folks cow us into not doing the right thing,” Mr. DeSantis said.

The United Nations publication The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988 (“Study”) has falsely misrepresented that the Mandate for Palestine was a class A Mandate – deceiving the International Court of Justice and many other reputable sources.

The Study has been published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

The Study falsely asserts without substantiation:

“All the mandates over Arab countries, including Palestine, were treated as class ‘A’ Mandates, applicable to territories whose independence had been provisionally recognized in the Covenant of the League of Nations”.

The Study then erroneously concludes:

“Only in the case of Palestine did the Mandate, with its inherent contradictions, lead not to the independence provisionally recognized in the Covenant, but towards conflict that was to continue six decades later.”

However the 1937 Peel Commission Report comprehensively debunks the Study’s concocted claims

“The Mandate [for Palestine] is of a different type from the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the draft Mandate for Iraq. These latter, which were called for convenience “A” Mandates, accorded with the fourth paragraph of Article 22. Thus the Syrian Mandate provided that the government should be based on an organic law which should take into account the rights, interests and wishes of all the inhabitants, and that measures should be enacted ‘to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent States.’ The corresponding sentences of the draft Mandate for Iraq were the same. In compliance with them National Legislatures were established in due course on an elective basis. Article 1 of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests ‘full powers of legislation and of administration,’ within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory.”

The Study for reasons unknown completely ignores this detailed Peel Commission rebuttal.

The Study’s unchallenged statements – seemingly authentic bearing United Nations imprimatur – appear on many websites including:

Spring is usually when the enemies of the Jewish state hold their hate fest known as “Israel Apartheid Week” on college campuses across America. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and their allies perform various acts that allege discrimination committed by the Jewish state against Arabs. The irony is that these performers of alleged “Apartheid” have not been to Israel, nor have they witnessed everyday life in Israel that this reporter has. Israel may not encompass human perfection, but it certainly exhibits freedom, opportunity and tolerance seen nowhere in this region of the Middle East and beyond.

On a sunny April afternoon, one among many such days throughout the year in Israel, I walked the Tel Aviv Boardwalk in what is known here as the “Namal” or “the Port of Tel Aviv.” In restaurants that abound on this shorefront of the Mediterranean Sea, families and couples were enjoying expensive meals, others were strolling along the boardwalk. In the restaurants, Arab women in head scarfs and their boyfriends were loudly conversing in Arabic. Passing by outside were Arab families with their children mingled with Israeli children, enjoying the playground. None of the Arab families appeared hesitant or uncomfortable in the setting…in fact they seemed totally nonchalant, as if saying “this belongs to me, too.”

In Israel, you won’t find the kind of “banilieues” you can encounter in France or Sweden, where local police won’t enter, and native citizens dare not set foot. There are however Arab, Druze, and Circassian villages in northern (The Galilee and Golan) Israel, and Bedouin-Arab villages in the Negev (southern Israel). In the cities, such as Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Arab-Israelis and Jews intermingle without distinction. Were it not for the occasional and specific head cover worn by Arab women, one would never know who is who or which is which.

Go to a Super-Pharm store in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Beth-Shemesh, and invariably you will find an Arab pharmacist helping you. At Rambam hospital in Haifa or Kaplan hospital in Rehovot, you are bound to find Arab doctors and nurses, not to mention the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Christian and Muslim Arabs are involved in virtually all trades and professions in Israel, including 13 members in the Israeli Knesset (Israeli Parliament), a Supreme Court Justice, military officers, teachers, etc.

This reporter had personally experienced the comfortable, if not perfect integration of Arabs in Israeli society. As the sun was setting, driving down from the Golan Heights, my friend Avi (a former paratrooper and currently a tour guide) and I stopped at a fish restaurant in Kibbutz Ein Gev on the Sea of Galilee. After dinner, as we set out to drive back to Beth-Shemesh, it did not take long to discover that our head-lights and brake-lights on our rental car were burnt out and inoperable. Passing drivers honked to alert us of the problem. We slowly made our way to a shopping strip in Tzemach, 12 kilometers from Tiberias. We called the 24 hour emergency road service, and a few hours later a service van appeared. George, an Arab-Israeli from a central Galilee village showed up to help us. He was truly a life saver. While waiting for him to show up, we had coffee at Aroma, a national chain of Israeli restaurants. Next to us were three young Arab couples, loudly laughing and conversing in Arabic. They were all dressed in chic styles, and clearly flaunting their identity.

“In short, stop wasting money on people who want to destroy the only vibrant, tolerant, open, democratic country in the region. Stop abusing history and language. Stop treating aggressors as victims. Stop enabling terrorism. And stop treating corrupt, unelected terrorist thugs like legitimate heads of state. We’ve tried seven decades of lies and empty talk; let’s see how truth and vigorous action work.”

Last week, between Stephen Colbert’s usual juvenile vulgarity and the House passing a bill to “repeal and reform” Obamacare, few noticed yet another performance of the long-running Middle East “two-state” Kabuki drama. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and leader of the terrorist PLO and its largest faction, Fatah, came to D.C. for a state visit with President Trump. And so the elaborate, stylized diplomatic farce of legitimizing terrorists dressed up as statesmen continues into its seventh decade. Maybe it’s time to bring down the curtain on this show and move on to a strategy that might actually work.

The whole affair should have embarrassed Donald Trump. The shrewd Abbas––a holocaust denier who financed the infamous 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and has called it a “heroic operation” ––adroitly flattered Trump’s “great negotiating ability,” along with his “courageous stewardship” and “wisdom.” Trump in turn said it was an “honor” to meet the terrorist. He later took down the tweet with the grotesque gaffe, but left it on his Facebook page.

Even more offensive was letting Abbas get away with claiming that the PLO, er, Palestinian Authority teaches their children “peace.” A golden opportunity was lost to publicly call out Abbas to his face on a blatant lie, instead of observing diplomatic niceties no terrorist deserves–– particularly one who is not the president of a nation, who hasn’t run for office in a free election since 2005, whose corruption has earned him a net worth of $100 million, and who doesn’t represent the nearly two million Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip, which is dominated by his rival, the genocidal terrorist gang Hamas.

Trump’s mixed signals and seeming ignorance of the conflict’s historical and religious roots do not bode well for the chances that the president will follow through on finally discarding the long, fruitless attempt to make the illusion of “two states living side-by-side in peace” into a reality.

Yes, Trump cautioned Abbas about rejecting the legitimacy of Israel and inciting terrorist violence by paying the families of murderers and demonizing Jews in grade school curricula. But absent a credible threat to cut off every U.S. dollar to Abbas’ corrupt PA, a terrorist cartel disguised as a government, Trump’s words will be dismissed as empty bluster. Yes, Trump is “giving serious consideration” to moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, as Vice President Mike Pence said, a seeming retreat from Trump’s definitive January statement, “We will move the American embassy.” Yes, all 100 Senators last week signed a letter calling on the UN to end its anti-Israel bias. A few days later, an unimpressed UNESCO passed, on Israel’s Independence Day, a resolution denying Israel’s historically factual link to Jewish religious and cultural sites in the region. No word on any punishment for this obvious insult to the Senate.