[rad-green] What Drives Anti-Semitism? The Authentic and the Spurious -- Professor Richard Falk

*https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2019/12/24/what-drives-anti-semitism-the-authentic-and-the-spurious/
<https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2019/12/24/what-drives-anti-semitism-the-authentic-and-the-spurious/>December
24, 2019                *



*What Drives Anti-Semitism? The Authentic and the SpuriousIt is an insult
to Jews and others to allow Zionists, Evangelicals, and Trumpsters to brand
solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, or even empathy with the
Palestinian people long enduring the denial of their most basic rights as a
new species of anti-Semitism.*

*By Richard Falk * *

*[Prefatory Note*: This is a modified version of an earlier text published
in TMS (Transnational Media Service) in the December 23-29, 2019 edition.
For the sake of discouraging anti-Semitism and restoring freedom of
expression in Western constitutional democracies denouncing the branding of
those in solidarity with struggles for justice and rights on behalf of the
Palestinian people should be high on the policy agenda of 2020, and yet we
have so far heard only the silence of the lambs in the debates of Democrats
seeking the presidential nomination.]

*What Drives Anti-Semitism? The Authentic and the Spurious *

Only the most regressive rendering of tribalist solidarity can explain
labeling those who oppose Israel’s abusive treatment of the Palestinian
people as ‘anti-Semites.’ We look upon Aung San Suu Kyi’s failure to
condemn the Myanmar abuse of the Rohingya as casting the darkest of clouds
over her Nobel Peace Prize. It is an insult to Jews and others to allow
Zionists, Evangelical, and Trumpsters to brand solidarity with the
Palestinian struggle, or even empathy with the Palestinian people long
enduring the denial of their most basic rights as a new species of
anti-Semitism.

There is little doubt that real anti-Semitism, in the sense of hatred of
Jews, has increased in Europe and North America in the last decade of so.
But the nature of why this is happening, and what is its true nature, are
especially obscure, and subject to manipulations. Part of this obscurity is
deliberate, arising from orchestrated efforts to label criticism of Israel
or Zionist tactics and ideology as anti-Semitic, or in some usages as
expressive of the ‘New Anti-Semitism.’ This extension of the scope of
anti-Semitism seems designed to inhibit responsible opposition to Israel’s
conduct in defiance of international law and, further, to make European
Jews feel insecure enough in their country of residence so that they would
consider emigrating to Israel, which in recent years has experienced a net
outflow of Jews.

The essence of the new anti-Semitism is rooted in the definition proposed
by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (or IHRA), which blends
strong criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews or the Jewish people.
President Donald Trump incorporated this IHRA definition into his Executive
Order issued on Dec. 11, 2019 that is coupled with lawfare assaults by the
US Government and right-wing Zionist organizations on respected American
campus initiatives that critically address the Israel/Palestine conflict,
including having students and faculty actively engaged in such nonviolent
solidarity initiatives in support of the Palestinian quest for basic rights
as the BDS Campaign. One recent example of this government pushback are
calls for an investigation of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at
Georgetown University because some of its members are BDS supporters.


The IHRA definition is elaborated in terms of signs of anti-Semitism as
supposedly manifested in criticism of Israel. One of these signs set forth
to illustrate the scope of the IHRA definition is singling out of Israel
for criticism or coercive acts when its behavior is not worse than that of
other human rights violators. This is the basis for the alleged link
between BDS and anti-Semitism. Yet in no other context is this kind of test
administered, nor is the severity of Israeli wrongdoing ever mentioned or
taken into account. Recalling the anti-apartheid campaign against South
Africa of 30 years ago, it should be remembered that apologists for
apartheid then similarly contended that conditions for black Africans in
South Africa were better than elsewhere in the sub-Saharan region. Such
contentions were argumentative, but were never used to stifle
anti-apartheid activism in foreign countries, including a robust
anti-apartheid BDS Campaign in North America and Europe, which many
observers believe contributed to the unexpected reversal of course by the
Afrikaner leadership in Pretoria that opened gates to achieving transition
to a peaceful post-apartheid South Africa, constitutionally premised on
racial equality and human dignity for all.

In my experience, the worst overall effects of this effort to stigmatize
anti-Israeli speech and activism as anti-Semitism is not its punitive
dimensions that target programs and individuals in unfair and harmful ways,
but the larger informal and mostly invisible atmosphere of intimidation and
silent discrimination that is produced. Already timid academic and
institutional administrators are alerted to avoid conference proposals,
speaker invitations, and faculty appointments if there exists a plausible
prospect of attack, or even criticism, by Zionist watchdog groups. I am
sure others have tales along these lines to tell, but in my own case, I
have experienced and heard about many such instances. Only a few attain
visibility, which can happen when a previously arranged meeting space is
cancelled due to backroom pressure or an event is called off because of
alleged security concerns. This happened to me in relation to a London
launch tour of my book on Israel/Palestine two years ago when stories were
circulated, and threats made, of planned disruptions as a way of inducing
cancellations, which did occur at two universities. Some of these planned
events did go forward, including a somewhat stormy session at the London
School of Economics where during the discussion period shouting and hostile
behavior by supporters and critics of Israel in the audience were viewed as
threatening public order, but the meeting went on to its end. I was told
that later on, LSE reacted by adopting stricter regulations to ensure
balance in presentations and an entirely neutral identity of the moderator,
which is an institutional signal designed to discourage controversial
subject-matter. This is bad enough, but I think the real effect of these
experiences is to make faculty and administrators think twice before
supporting events perceived as critical of Israel or in solidarity with the
Palestinian struggle. My impression is that the indirect effects of this
Zionist pushback is having a more significant inhibiting impact on academic
freedom and freedom of expression than the shockingly suppressive
initiatives being adopted by legislative bodies in such leading countries
as France, Germany, and soon Britain, as well as the United States.


One of the supposed anti-Semitic tropes has been the contention over the
centuries that Jews exercise disproportionate influence on public policy in
ways that are harmful to the general wellbeing of society. It hard to
interpret the success of concerted Zionist and Israeli efforts to adopt the
IHRA definition and approach as other than a confirmation of this charge,
validating grounds for public concern about the excessive influence wielded
by Jews. Two prominent centrist political scientists, John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt wrote a very academic study a decade ago to show how the
Israeli Lobby in the United States was influencing foreign policy
undertakings in ways inimical to national interests. (*The Israeli Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy* (2007)) Whether true or not, and I believe it was
true, the authors were unjustly vilified even in 2003 for daring to raise
such questions about the extent, character, and policy effects of Jewish
influence, and although leaders in their field, undoubtedly paid for ever
more, subtle hidden career prices. It should be noted that targeting
Muslims, which is more common and vicious in Europe and North America, than
what has been experienced by Jews, has produced no comparable official
condemnations of Islamophobia.

More to the point in any effort to penetrate the penumbra of confusion
surrounding this subject-matter is the near fanatical support of certain
right-wing political orientations for Israel, while simultaneously pursuing
an anti-Semitic agenda. This is the widely known case for many Christian
evangelical groups who read the Book of Revelations as promising a Second
Coming of Jesus once Israel is reestablished and Jews return, then being
given an option of converting or facing damnation. Actually, this seeming
tension, almost the opposite of the supposed fusion of anti-Israeli and
anti-Semitic attitudes in the IHRA approach, actually has deep roots in the
pre-Israeli experience of the Zionist Movement. From the start of the
British Mandate the Jewish minority in Palestine was under 10%, hardly the
basis for a feasible basis to establish a Jewish state in an essentially
Arab society in a historical period in which European colonialism was being
widely discredited, and starting to collapses. Zionists appreciated the
odds against realizing their goals, and resolved by all means to overcome
this disabling demographic inferiority, especially as national legitimacy
seemed connected in both their vision and wider international public
opinion with democratic procedures of governance, which in this instance,
presupposed a Jewish voting majority.

As a result, Zionists did everything in their power to induce diaspora Jews
to move to Palestine, even resorting to striking Faustian Bargains with
outrageously anti-Semitic regimes in Europe, including even the Nazi
government in Germany. This dynamic of coerced and induced population
transfer of Jews is documented on the basis of archival research in *The
State of Terror *(2016) by Thomas Suarez. Against this background the
anti-Semitic card has been played in contradictory ways by Zionist
hardliners, earlier useful to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel and
recently to inhibit criticism of Israel, with the common element being
opportunism, entailing a disregard of principle.


There is another reinforcing dimension of such policies that further
discredits the IHRA approach. Israeli foreign policy even in circumstances
where a Jewish state of Israel exists, and has been given constitutional
status by the 2018 Basic Law: “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish
People,” there continues to be an Israeli willingness to overlook overt
anti-Semitism in a foreign leader provided diplomatic friendship is
accorded to Israel, or economic gains can be achieved. Viktor Orban of
Hungary is the example most often cited, but the pattern seems to explain
the choice of Modi, Bolsonaro, and Trump as Israel’s preferred benefactors.
Netanyahu’s Israel reciprocates this friendship with arms deals and
military/policy training to governments on the far right, and its
ambassador to Myanmar recently went so far as to lend psychological support
to the Myanmar Government’s legal defense at the World Court against
overwhelming evidence of genocide against the Muslim minority, Rohingya.
While the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is justified as a check on
forgetting the Holocaust, when non-Jews are the victims of genocide a quite
different ethical calculus apparently applies. Forgetting genocides, while
remembering the Holocaust, seems the tangled message that Israel and
Zionist enforcers are sending to the world.

I think these various considerations make it plain that the current surge
of emphasis on anti-Semitism is being driven by a combination of many
crosscutting factors, some genuine, some fake. One of the more malignant
developments in recent years is centered on this attempt to extend the
scope of anti-Semitism beyond its core reference to hatred of and hostility
toward Jews. In this broad sense, by classifying supporters of the human
rights of the Palestinian peoples as anti-Semites there is both a loss of
focus on hatred of Jews, combined with a deliberately misleading insistence
that those who oppose Israeli apartheid and oppression are anti-Semitic. It
seems evident that such distortions of the anti-Semitic discourse reflect
the growth of civil society activism, critical of Israel, and reactive to
Israel’s expansionism and pointedly defiant posture toward criticisms by
the UN and human rights organizations. The disgraceful effort to brand
Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour Party as anti-Semitic inserted an
irrelevant toxic element into an electoral process in a leading democratic
country, and is suggestive of the radiating implications of this
irresponsible IHRA approach to anti-Semitism.

A final ground for suspicion about such tactics is the seemingly
unconditional disregard of Israel’s behavior. Without such an inquiry, to
brand opposition to Israel or solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as
anti-Semitic is to engage in a destructive form of anti-democratic polemics
that has the perverse secondary effect of encouraging real anti-Semitic
behavior that deserves condemnation. Even the notoriously cautious
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has just announced that an
investigation of criminal allegations relating to Israel’s settlement
activities on the West Bank and Gaza. Beyond this there is a growing
consensus among those informed about the overall relationship between
Israel and the Palestinian people (including those in refugee camps and
exile) is accurately understood as based on apartheid structures of
control. If this is a reasonable perception, then BDS and other solidarity
initiatives are justifiable responses that deserve and need support and
protection rather than being shamefully stigmatized as anti-Semitism, and
compensate for the inability and unwillingness of established institutions
to protect the basic rights of vulnerable people.
** Richard Falk is an American professor emeritus of international law at
Princeton University. He is the author or co-author of 20 books and the
editor or co-editor of another 20 volumes. In 2008, the United Nations
Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United
Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.*

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