Communal Groups Mobilize Against ‘Delegitimizers’ of Jewish State: Forward
Targets See New Push as Effort To Discredit Legitimate Criticism
By Nathan Guttman
Published March 31, 2010,
Organizer: CODEPINK’s Nancy Kricorian says she does not aim to delegitimize Israel.
The term, used to describe a broad spectrum of anti-Israel protests, has become a major rallying point for the American Jewish community and is the up-and-coming cause for Jewish organizations.
In particular, supporters of this emerging advocacy effort point to the campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction — BDS — Israel as a primary marker distinguishing “delegitimizers” from genuine critics. It’s a campaign that has gained traction on the left in recent years. And in the past few months, pro-Israel advocates have begun to mobilize against what they perceive to be efforts to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state, whether via BDS or other means.
“The delegitimization and BDS movement is nationally coordinated, and it requires a national response,” said William Daroff, the Jewish Federations of North America’s vice president for public policy. “We need to move forward as a community to counter this cancerous growth.”
But while supporters of Israel see the fight against delegitimization of the Jewish state as a new frontier in the pro-Israel battle, critics believe that the term is used mostly to discredit opposition to Israeli policies.
“To be frank, the ‘de-legitimization’ issue is a fraud,” historian Tony Judt, director of New York University’s Remarque Institute, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward. Judt, a harsh critic of Israel, said: “I know no one in the professional world of political commentary, however angry about Israel’s behavior, who thinks that the country has no right to exist…. ‘De-legitimization’ is just another way to invoke antisemitism as a silencer, but sounds better because [it’s] less exploitative of emotional pain.”
Judt has written that he believes Israel’s settlement policies have made a binational one-state outcome to the Israel-Palestinian conflict all but inevitable — a stand that has led Israel advocates to label Judt himself a delegitimizer.
In the past year, JFNA and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs adopted resolutions calling for communitywide action against delegitimization. And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s executive director, Howard Kohr, outlined a plan to fight Israel’s delegitimization by demanding the state’s admission into international bodies, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
A March 10 meeting in New York marked the most significant attempt yet to formulate a communitywide response to this perception of delegitimization. Israeli officials and participants from major Jewish organizations and federations discussed the possibility of creating and funding a mechanism to track and respond to what they see as delegitimization efforts.
As a first order of business, participants raised the need to educate the Jewish community about the issue.
“Members of our community need to be knowledgeable and need to be able to answer to these allegations,” said Martin Raffel, JCPA’s senior vice president. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution. We will have to have tailored responses for each constituency.”
But seeking a response to delegitimization requires a clear definition of the problem. An in-depth study released in March by the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based think tank, identifies delegitimization as an organized movement and goes to great lengths to define the elusive term in a way that draws a line between what authors of the 92-page report see as legitimate criticism of Israel and forms of protest that fall under the delegitimization category.
“We are asking people to go into the nuances. We need to keep in mind that not everyone is an Israel hater, but not everything is Israel’s fault,” said Gidi Grinstein, Reut’s founder and president.
The think tank’s paper defines delegitimization as criticism that “exhibits blatant double standards, singles out Israel, denies its right to exist as the embodiment of the self-determination right of the Jewish people, or demonizes the state.”
But, as Grinstein pointed out, identifying Israel’s delegitimizers can be tricky, since most do not see themselves as denying Israel’s right to exist.
“The effectiveness of Israel’s de-legitimizers, who represent a relatively marginal political and societal force in Europe and North America, stems from their ability to engage and mobilize others by blurring the lines with Israel’s critics,” the Reut paper states.
Would the students who disrupted the February 9 speech of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at University of California, Irvine be delegitimizers? For most activists in the Jewish community, the answer is clear.
“They definitely are,” said Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of Chicago’s Jewish federation. “Instead of asking [Oren] about Israel’s policy, they are denying him the right to speak.”
Kotzin said that many of those pursuing the delegitimization agenda are naive and are exploited by activists who deny Israel’s right to exist.
According to Israel supporters dealing with the issue, the key is focusing not on the protesters’ actions but on their intentions, even if they do not acknowledge these intentions publicly.
“You need to dig under the surface and see what drives them,” Grinstein said. “Most of the students who protested Oren’s speech don’t understand the subtleties and believe they are not engaged in delegitimization, but those organizing them are.”
Nancy Kricorian of CODEPINK, a women’s anti-war group, might be seen as such an organizer. Kricorian coordinates CODEPINK’s boycott campaign against Ahava cosmetic products because the products are manufactured on a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. But she rejected the thought that she was seeking to delegitimize the state. “This is only a way of changing the subject,” said Kricorian. “All we want is [for] Israel to respect human rights and international law. I don’t see how that delegitimizes Israel.”
At the same time, the broad-based coalition of Palestinian civil society groups that launched the BDS movement in 2005 declares that one of its goals is to promote the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they lost — sometimes through mass expulsion — during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. A 1948 United Nations Security Council Resolution endorsed this right, but Israel rejects it on the grounds that the flood of returnees would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
Reut and advocates for Israel argue that singling out Israel and demanding that it adhere to higher human rights standards than its adversaries is another form of delegitimization.
Yet, a higher standard for Israel is something that Judt, for one, unapologetically upholds. “People will say, ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya, Yemen? Burma? China?’” he writes in the March 25 issue of the London Review of Books. “Fine. [But] Israel describes itself as a democracy, and so it should be compared with democracies, not with dictatorships.”
As a country in “a difficult relationship” with its neighbors, Israel should be allowed a “certain margin of behavior,” Judt acknowledged in his email. But Israel’s relative strength compared to other regional nations gives it “even less excuse for criminality, law-breaking or violence than they do,” he said.
Amos Guiora, a law professor and former Israeli army senior military counsel, objected that Israel is judged by double standards even when compared with other Western democracies. Guiora, noted that attacks by German and American forces in Afghanistan that caused heavy civilian deaths received less censure from the international community.
“By what standard does Israel want to be judged?” Guiora asked. His reply was, “By a standard in which you judge countries that are in a very, very special situation.”
Those seeking to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from delegitimization cite another criterion: the labeling of Israeli policies as “apartheid.”
Yet, in recent years mainstream Israeli leaders have used the word to describe the danger the country faces if it does not resolve its conflict with Palestinians.
Recently, Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister and Labor Party leader, said bluntly, “If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Grinstein warned that fighting delegitimization must not devolve into hasbara, or public relations. The struggle, he said, is both about confronting those who question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and making sure Israel pursues a path of seeking peace and an end to the occupation.
The Reut document states, “Clearly, an Israeli and Palestinian comprehensive Permanent Status Agreement that establishes a Palestinian state and brings about an ‘end of conflict’… would weaken the grounds of Israel’s de-legitimization.”
EDITOR: No More Rockets? Oy Vey…
Terrible news, this! If indeed there will be no rockets, it will be even more difficult to justify the next attack… but, not to worry, they will find seven different ways to do so. They always do.
Report: Islamic Jihad to stop rocket fire on Israel: Haaretz
Islamic Jihad on Sunday announced that it would cease firing rockets into Israel, Channel 10 news reported.
An Islamic Jihad spokesman, Daoud Shihab, made the announcement in an interview on Islamic Jihad radio, during which he reportedly said the militant group, “stopped the rocket fire into Israel for internal Palestinian purposes – first and foremost to help end the siege on the Gaza Strip.”
According to the Channel 10 report, Shihab went on to say that Islamic Jihad does not intend to reverse this decision, but clarified that “if Israel once again attacks Gaza, no one will be able to prevent the resistance operatives from responding to the attacks.”
An anonymous Islamic Jihad official later denied the attacks would stop, according to Israel Radio.
A senior Egyptian official involved in brokering past truces between Gaza militant groups and Israel said in a statement that the Egyptians had on Sunday stepped up diplomatic pressure on both parties to reduce tensions in the coastal strip.
“Egypt has conducted extensive calls at the highest level with both Israel and the Palestinian factions to contain the escalating tension in the Gaza Strip in order to prevent a deterioration of the situation,” the official said.
Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha on Friday told the BBC that Hamas is working to curb rocket attacks against Israel by Gaza militants.
“The government in Gaza is in charge of the situation, and it does know clearly who launches rockets,” Taha told the BBC. “It is working hard to deter any faction from acting individually.”
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal to stop militants in the Gaza Strip from firing rockets against Israel.
Lavrov made his request in a telephone conversation, which, according to Russian news agencies, covered a variety of issues regarding the Middle East.
The Russian foreign minister told Meshal that the recent increase in rocket fire was unacceptable.
Meshal responded by reiterating Hamas’ declared stance that it was not interested in an escalation of tensions with Israel and would continue to try to maintain calm in the area.
However, days later, on Saturday, Meshal said that all options against Israel remain open, including war, according to Channel 10 news.
“We will do everything to obtain the rights stolen from us, including confrontation with the enemy,” said.
EDITOR: The great apologists rides again
Jacobson, a hopeless case of apologism for Israel, is again speaking of the terrible antisemitism, which he has been hoping and pining for for some time now, and at last he seems to capture it in his gun-sight… When calling Israel arrogant and speaking of war crimes is supposedly antisemitic, then surely we should all sop speaking and writing altogether, and if possible, stop thinking. For some people, no amount of Israeli brutalities will ever make the slightest difference.
Howard Jacobson: Peace becomes possible now that Israel is being treated like a grown-up: The Independent
Anti-Zionism of the sort that peppers letters pages has much to answer for
Taking the long view, it’s been a good few weeks for Israel. It won’t look that way, of course, to those who view the country from an extreme position – whether zealots unwilling to believe Israel can ever do a thing wrong, or zealots unwilling to believe it can ever do a thing right.
Nothing will assuage the passions of these fevered men, or deflect them from their mutual fascination; they are locked in a lewd embrace, each needing the heat of the other’s body to keep his own alive. But to the rational and the fair, it’s been a few weeks full of promise.
Call nothing certain, but Obama’s strict line with Netanyahu over the resumption of building in Ramat Shlomo appears to have woken the latter to an awareness, if not yet the practice, of realpolitik – realpolitik, paradoxically, being an acceptance that a concessionary spirit as often as not trumps principle.
The argument has been advanced that the houses in Ramat Shlomo are not to be confused with settlements on disputed land, that they are the completion of a project that has been going on for years without complaint, and in a part of Jerusalem not covered by the settlement freeze – a municipal not an international matter, in other words, a bit like the holes in the roads of Boris Johnson’s rubbish-dump London. To which the answer, since this is a family newspaper in which we ought not to resort to swearing, is “Tough!”
Where peace is the prize – and it can’t be a good few weeks for any party in which peace is not brought a little closer – such topographical niceties are not only brutally irrelevant, they are counterproductive. Never mind the rights and wrongs of it, in politics you must sometimes swallow your conviction of rectitude, just as in human relations you must sometimes accept that what looks right to you looks wrong to someone else.
Fanatical and uninformed anti-Zionism of the sort that peppers the letters pages of serious newspapers has much to answer for morally and intellectually, but the most serious charge against it is that while it satisfies the self-righteousness of its propounders, it does little to help those it calls victims, and still less to persuade those it calls oppressors.
Weary of the one-sidedness of international condemnation, successive Israeli administrations have turned away and pursued their own course, confident at least that America will go on winking at the obduracy into which it has been backed. With every misattribution of motive, with every lazy libel, that obduracy has grown stronger. As an observer one can feel it hardening one’s own heart. Malign misrepresentation leaves no room for subtle dialogue. Thus, many who would have been critical of the occupation in their own terms – which does not mean seeing it as Hamas or Ahmadinejad see it – are deflected from the real conversation and must expend their energies confuting the prejudices of scoundrels.
The recent Biden/Netanyahu spat has broken the enchantment. Never mind that the poorly taught and easily led will go on twittering about apartheid and genocide even if Israel pulls down every house it has ever built and moves its population on to Dizengoff Beach tomorrow – the argument now is between grown-ups. This is how you talk to friends. This is how you treat enemies. To gain A you must forfeit B, no matter that you think you have the paperwork to prove it’s yours. He who would win a bit in the long run must lose a bit in the long run too.
It’s far better for Israel to be in an argument with a specific country over a specific issue than to have its actual, never mind its spiritual existence, forever undermined by ideologues hunting in packs with misquotations in their pockets. So I see the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat by our Foreign Secretary as more good news.
This, too, has been couched in the language of sanctimony, the inviolability of British passports blah blah, the crime of targeted assassinations, but that’s an allowable hypocrisy. A state must say one thing while its citizens believe another. We all love targeted assassinations in our hearts, so long as it’s the right target and it isn’t our passport that’s been purloined to do it – a sophisticated parley with our consciences which we don’t require our government to reflect. From a newspaper, though, we expect a tone which at least acknowledges that we face both ways in matters such as these. So I was surprised to see a Guardian editorial reading like a 19th-century Foreign Office reprimand to a recalcitrant colony that had forgotten it was of the wrong caste and colour to be getting uppity.
“Both events in London and Washington,” the editorial said, “are the marks of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself.”
Let’s leave aside what’s arrogant and what’s not. What we call arrogance is almost always a cover for fear. And Netanyahu struts like a man whose fears run deep. But how can the rift with the American and British administrations reflect in any way on Israel as a “nation”? Did Mrs Thatcher’s taking back the Falklands make us an arrogant “nation”? Does our being in Afghanistan say anything about us as a “nation” at all? Some of us are pleased we’re there, some aren’t, and some don’t give a damn either way. We are not, as a nation, of one mind or heart in very much, if anything, we do. To imply otherwise would be to charge us with a collective flaw, and we all know what the word is for doing that.
It’s precisely because they are free of slurs of this sort, without unsavoury ethnic or socio-religious overtones, that Washington and London’s arguments with Israel are to be welcomed. They address political differences. Obama and Miliband have squared up to a country not a “nation”, they have taken issue with decisions made by the government of Israel, and not that unvariegated figment of disordered imaginations, “the Israeli people”, and thus they have liberated the entire debate from the question of what Balfour intended, whether the Holocaust has been exploited, who is and who is not a Zionist, etc, etc. And give or take the odd misguided editorial, letters from the usual suspects, and the on-line vituperation that clings like a spider web to the coat-tails of other people’s articles, such has been the liberated spirit of public commentary ever since Biden kept Netanyahu waiting for dinner.
Allowing that tomorrow is a terrifying place, we can take some hope from this. An Israel treated like other countries, held accountable for its political, not its supposed aetiological or genetic failings, is a country from which much might be expected, including peace.