Genocide Blog 19 -- Know the difference -- Anti-Semitic or Anti-Zionist or Critical of the State of Israel
16.12.2023
It is the 70th day of the Israeli army’s constant bombardment of the people of Palestine in Gaza, a people they keep both in military occupation and under total siege. We are living in times when the outcome of this particular act of Israeli-USA barbaric genocide, will define everything on planet earth in the future.
So, we need to understand what’s going on.
When ideology takes over from reality, we get a situation where debate can be ridiculous. Debate in the West, for example, was, for centuries, over “How Many Angels can Fit on the Tip of a Needle?” This neatly avoids the issue of whether angels exist. Or debate gets framed as, “She is a witch if she survives being plunged head-first under the river flowing by while being dangled by the feet from a bridge by a rope for 10 minutes. She must, therefore, be burnt at the stake!” This framing masks innocent women accused of being witches being routinely executed anyway. Some 60,000 people, mainly women were executed this way.
We live in such times today – when the powers-that-be frame debate in ways that are often ludicrous.
Well known journalist Masha Gessen, due to be awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for excellent writing, wrote an essay, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today” in The New Yorker on 9 December. What a fine way to frame a question. But soon the absurdity rushed in.
Masha Gessen then fell under the shadow of the essay’s very title. The Mayor of the German city organizing to award the Prize and the Foundation that runs the Prize, the previously esteemed Heinrich Boll Foundation, decided to annul the ceremony because of their article about how to see Israel and Gaza today, “In the shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today”!
Here is part of the essay, perhaps “the offending part”, very much worth reading as a whole:
“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
“The term ‘open-air prison’ seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister,” Masha Gassen goes on. “Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
So, Masha Gessen, because of these carefully chosen words, has fallen under the far-fetched definition of “anti-semitism” – precisely what the article was criticizing with so much perspicacity. The German government, 25 or so other Western governments as well as many States within the USA, have taken up, a bizarre definition invented in 2016 by something called the “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance” (IHRA). This definition does not see antisemitism for what it is: a pernicious form of racism, or what we would, in Mauritius, call “communalism”, with specific reference to Jewish people.
Anti-Semitism is defined by the IHRA as something in a category all of its own. This means it is not permissible to compare it to other historic events, in particular to Nazism. The definition actually gives as an example of anti-semitism, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The IHRA also confuses antisemitism with anti-Zionism. It even confuses anti-semitism with criticism of the Israeli State. Their definition includes as an example: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” This has meant many governments in the West have then gone on to declare as supposedly “antisemitic” the Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel!
In response to this IHRA definition, a large list of academics that study anti-semitism, came up with a more rational definition, following an initial conference held in Jerusalem and thus called the Jerusalem Definition, which includes the following wise statement:
“Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish). ... What is true of racism in general is true of antisemitism in particular.”
And it has included, as its final five examples, faced with such an outrageous IHRA definition, a list of things that are NOT antisemitic when referring to Israel and Palestine:
“11. Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.
“12. Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.
“13. Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.
“14. Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.
“15. Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.”
The IHRA list of “what is anti-semitic” is a bit like “how many angels, etc” or proposing finding a woman not-guilty by killing her. And, it has real consequences. In Germany, by 2019, only three years after the pushing of the bizarre IHRA definition began, there was a parliamentary Resolution that declares BDS antisemitic. Tellingly, this resolution was initially proposed by the extreme-right neo-fascist German party, the AfD. Then it was voted down, and another resolution almost the same quickly introduced and passed, passed on the basis that BDS was somehow linked to “the most terrible phase of German history”.
The effect, and indeed the initial, aim of this kind of definition of anti-semitism is nothing else but to shut critics up so that Israel can go ahead with a genocide. Masha Gessen was having none of it.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
