Seeing "criticism" of Israel for what it really is

What a really excellent piece from Howard Jacobson. Curious that The Independent seems to have given Jacobson a special licence to be the voice of the Jews, in a newspaper which is otherwise unrelentingly anti-Jewish (or "anti-Israel").

The problem is that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism--a fact that many foreign supporters of Israel and Israelis themselves tend to ignore. It is very easy for these people to absolve the criticism of Israel because of some of its worst excesses towards the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs by saying the criticism is anti-Semitism.

Comment to Joe:

Just because critics of Israel aren't necessarily anti-semites (as the accepted wisdom would have it), of course it doesn't follow that they can't be anti-semites.

I am not sure what you mean, Joe, by 'worst excesses' - everyone in the world seems to think they know how Israel should conduct its affairs! - but as Jacobson suggests, those whose opposition to Israel takes the form of comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, or who liken the Palestinians to victims of the Holocaust, certainly may be reasonably suspected of outright anti-semitism.

Andrew. By worst excesses I mean indiscriminate firing on civilian targets. I mean racist graffiti on Palestinians' houses. I mean letting off soldiers who act violently towards Arab citizens. I mean support for the violent acts of settlers on the West Bank. I mean treating its own Arab citizens as second-class.
And just FYI, not everyone in the world thinks it knows how Israel should or should not conduct its affairs--although there are a lot of people who think Israel should be immune from criticism--but plenty do know injustice and discrimination when they see it.

Joe

ARE there "a lot of people who think Israel should be immune from criticism"?

Funny, I never meet them! I only run into a lot of people like you - who think Israel should be singled out for special criticism.

Joe, don't bother to have another rant... I won't be posting on this thread any more.

I don’t view evenhanded criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. But when critics single Israel out and invoke Holocaust imagery, it is not only offensive and inappropriate, it simply puts Israelis even more on the defensive. Everyone is against us no matter what we do, the thinking goes, so to hell with world opinion.

In terms of the way in which anti-Semitic statements are now creeping into all sorts of places, I thought this part of Howard Jacobson's essay was the most chilling:

"Take Michael Billington's somnolent review of [Caryl Chuchill's] play in the Guardian. I would imagine that any accusation of anti-Semitism would horrify Michael Billington. And I certainly don't make it. But if you wanted an example of how language itself can sleepwalk the most innocent towards racism, then here it is. "Churchill shows us," he writes, "how Jewish children are bred to believe in the 'otherness' of Palestinians…"

It is not just the adopted elision of Israeli children into Jewish children that is alarming, or the unquestioning acceptance of Caryl Churchill's offered insider knowledge of Israeli child-rearing, what's most chilling is that lazy use of the word "bred", so rich in eugenic and bestial connotations, but inadvertently slipped back into the conversation now, as truth. Fact: Jews breed children in order to deny Palestinians their humanity. Watching another play in the same week, Billington complains about its manipulation of racial stereotypes. He doesn't, you see, even notice the inconsistency"

A basic point - two wrongs don't make a right. Those who are genuinely appalled by Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians, who slip into hyperbolic, inaccurate and offensive analogies are wrong. On the other hand Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians, as summed up by Joe Millis above, is also wrong - and to be honest unleashing phosphorous bombs is a bit worse than unleashing bad analogies.

Of course Howard Jacobson would be much more convincing if he had a record of publicly opposing Israeli actions towards Palestinians. Anyone care to enlighten us when he has done so?

This seems to me to be the salient point in Jacobson's comment:

"It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday."

There are still too many people who believe that the Holocaust must have happened because of what Jews themselves did. This distortion of history gets in the way of a true understanding of the nature of "the war against the Jews" perpetrated by the Nazis.

To understand Israeli behavior towards Palestinians and Palestinians' behavior to Israel the facts should not be viewed through this distorting prism--that conflict must be seen in terms of its own history. It should not be instrumentalized to justify a revisionist (anti-Semitic) history of the Holocaust.