Eamonn McDonaugh responds to my post:
….I find it hard to understand why he might take seriously the weird notion that any but the most mealy-mouthed critique of Israel risks being tarred with the brush of antisemitism. No one who thinks seriously about the issues involved can possibly believe this. Some criticisms of Israel are indeed antisemitic in nature and some aren’t; each instance has to be judged on its merits and, sometimes, reasonable people can come to different conclusions.
Not only is it not all criticism of Israel antisemitic, sharp and searching criticism of its policies and actions is essential….
This being the case, I’d even argue that the recent waves of anti-Israel protests arising from events in Gaza, deeply stained and profoundly distorted by antisemitism though they were, served some good purpose in that they placed the actions of Israel under such a level of scrutiny that it had to take great care about how it used its military power.
The problem isn’t really that people take to the streets of London, Paris and Barcelona in a bid to place limits on the exercise of military power by Israel; it’s that they generally fail to do so when other states behave in comparable ways. It’s not that every single alleged violation of human rights ought to get everyone equally worked up all the time. That would, obviously, be impossible; no one could keep up with all the horrors being committed throughout the world on a daily basis.
However, if those who recently made the effort to protest about Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza were primarily motivated by an interest in human rights, that is to say, the rights of all human beings to live free from oppression, violence and the like, then we would expect to see a very great deal more of protests about the deaths of civilians in armed conflicts in other parts of the world.
Generally speaking, one sees no remotely comparable level of concern for humans whose rights are being violated by people who are not Israeli Jews. It’s therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that many of the anti-Israel protestors of recent weeks may have been motivated by less noble sentiments than a desire to defend human rights.
I’ll have more to say on this later, but I thought it was worth flagging.
What “other states behave in comparable ways” and also 1) claim to be democracies, and have that claim taken at face value by Euro-American governments 2) owe their very existence to Euro-American intervention and support and 3) are heavily subsidized by Euro-American aid? Moreover, what other states only exist because they act in such a way? If there were no racist oppression, there could by definition be no Israel as its current constitution defines it.
So the problem with Israel is not how it behaves, but how Euro-Americans treat it? I certainly believe that the exercise of military power is at best a necessary evil, and generally an UNnecessary evil; I don’t take the view of 1, 2 and 3 (which, incidentally, could all be applied to Pakistan — particularly during the Cold War, when India, though claiming “non-alignment,” was socialist and connected with the USSR) are inherently bad.
I tend to agree with this guy, I thought that your original post was veering a bit too close to a position of “any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic” line. I agree that the Israel/Palestine issue gets more attention world-wide than other similar issues, but I tend to think that anti-Semitism plays a fairly small part in that. As Jake says, Israel is closely tied to the West, in terms of the funing it receives, its economy and its identity, so it’s not surprising that Westerners feel they have more a right to criticise it, as they do when the US and UK violate human rights.
Then there’s the fact that people have a greater (but still not necessarily accurate) knowledge of Israeli history than they do of the tangled histories of, say, the Balkans or Sudan. Finally, there’s the fact that the large numbers of Jews and Christians in Western countries means that people feel historical and religious ties to the region.
So while I’m sure anti-Semitism colours our collective perceptions of Israel to some degree, I think it’s less of a factor in most cases than other, valid reasons.