The Alan Johnston Syndrome

As an anthropologist, I find the emerging social phenomenon of British anti-Semitism to be an interesting and ironic twist on one of the world's oldest irrational hatreds. Unlike past manifestations of this scourge, which emanated from religious myths surrounding the death of Christ and represented the lowest of the social classes, this is being lead by the well-educated British intellegentsia.

Here is a must read article by Bradley Burston on the decision yesterday by the British Academic Union to boycott Israeli academics.

"Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're a British academic. You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel's military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded to the point of immorality.

What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently, vigorously and courageously campaigned against the occupation since its inception.

Then attack them.

Single them out for professional ruin. Do your best to get as many of their colleagues around the world to shun them. Yes, just as if you were in seventh grade and had decided to alleviate your own feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, panic and lack of requisite cool by cutting another victim from the middle school herd and lobbying your equally insecure colleagues to abuse the chosen victim.

Choose your victim with care.

Select the one group in Israel which has taken substantive physical, professional, legal and personal risks, which has defied the spirit of Israeli nationalism and the letter of Israeli law, in order to seek out Palestinians to search for equitable solutions.

Select the one group which has, from the very beginning, spoken out eloquently for the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination, to freedom from Israeli domination, to freedom from disproportionate and often indiscriminate use of force, to freedom from social injustice.

Then denounce them. Decide that your moral vision fully empowers you to declare Israeli professors and other university and college faculty to be unworthy of practicing their calling.

All of them.

That is, perhaps, the real beauty of the British campaign to declare a quarantine over Israeli academics. You really must envy the U.K. far-left for its blindness. Its consummate inability to see more than one side, which is to say, its demonstrated refusal to see Jews as fellow human beings, is only exceeded by its exquisite sense of timing.

No matter that in the whole of the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein managed to
hit all of Israel with a total of 39 missiles, and that two weeks ago, Hamas sent 40 rockets into the Sderot area in the space of a single day.

No matter that Sapir College, Israel's largest public college, has for years been a primary target of Qassam crews.

No matter that in boycotting all Israeli academics on the basis of their being Israelis, the measure is patently racist, a grotesque reprise of the history of curbing academic freedom.

No matter that Israeli Arab academics who are staunchly opposed to the occupation are vehement opponents of the boycott as well.

No matter, even, that opposition to the boycott runs strong within the British University and College Union itself.

In fact, all the more reason to press on. For the genuine elitist, the unpopularity of an opinion is the best assurance of its real value.

Perhaps this is why the whole boycott campaign smacks of a uniquely far-left British brand of moral masturbation, a desperate, delusional, sterile, supremely self-contained form of non-activism that risks nothing even as it changes nothing.

There must be some reason why no one in this world does condescension better than the British far-left.

There must be some reason why the British far-left manages to satisfy itself with a uniquely public, uniquely self-congratulatory form of ideological self-abuse.

Leftists abroad would do well to respect their Israeli counterparts for defying societal norms to work for the rights of people with whom their nation is at war.

Perhaps the Israeli left deserves respect, as well, for having to do this while enduring the racist abuse of leftists abroad."

Read the original article and comments here.

The only thing I would add is that the British academics are taking one from the Palestinian playbook. Find someone (or a group) that unabashedly and openly supports your cause and then attack and alienate them because you are blinded by an essentialist racism. Can anyone say Alan Johnston?

Viva al Nakba!

Although this time of the year should arguably be a time of reflection for what the Palestinians call al Nakba or "The Catastrophe" (i.e. the day on which the State of Israel was created), the Palestinians have once again shown their political maturity by killing at least 40 of their compatriots in the last four days. In running street battles that would not be out of place in Baghdad or war-torn Beirut, Fatah and Hamas are squaring off for the second time in less than a year.

Once again we are witnessing the complete dissolution of law and order in the Gaza Strip. As I have pointed out in other posts, this has been going on for some time now, but has only been sparsely covered by the media because most reporters have shied away following Alan Johnson's abduction back in March. With the resignation of Hani Qawasmeh, the Interior Minister, one can be assured that this situation will only continue to deteriorate.

I find it is interesting then that one would never know that all this chaos was going judging by the websites of such perennial whistle blowers as the International Solidarity Movement for Palestine (ISM) or Human Rights Watch (HRW). Of course this is not to say that these organizations have forgotten Israel/Palestine, rather that their attention is clearly elsewhere.

For example, the ISM is an organization noted for its history of using "human shields" to prevent activities that they oppose. In the past this has meant concerted efforts to prevent the bombing of Iraq and the positioning of activists in the path of backhoes laying the groundwork for the Israeli security fence. In fact, it was this type of activism that led to the death of Rachel Corrie, the American martyr and patron saint of the anti-Israel leftist movement in the United States.

So I find it interesting that the ISM website sees fit to decry the situation at Bir Zeit University, which is suffering under "...the full weight of Israel’s occupation" which has:

"...brought down on it intermittent months-long closures and restrictions that still threaten its existence today. Other Palestinian universities also face continual punitive action from the Israeli military, all deliberately designed to create fear and uncertainty in the students and academics in order to undermine the universities themselves." (See here)

Apparently it is irrelevant that Bir Zeit has long been a stronghold for radicalism that counts Marwan Barghouti and the Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayash as graduates or that the list of Palestinian universities they are refering to includes An-Najah University. An-Najah, which claims to be "the largest, oldest, and most prestigious university in Palestine" famously distinguished itself as the place where students took time out of their busy class schedules to memorialize the horrific Sbarro restaurant bombing. But this is ancient history and does not address the charge that Israel is "deliberately" creating "fear and uncertainty" to "undermine the universities".

Of course what the ISM fails to mention is that on Sunday, the same day that they issued this repudiation of Israel, Ali Sharif, a religious studies professor from Gaza, was kidnapped from his home and beaten up by masked gunmen who took him and drove off. As he was a Hamas supporter, it is assumed that those kidnapping him were from the Fatah or PLO. In fact, the ISM also fails to mention that all the universities in the Gaza strip have been closed down since the fighting started.

Human Rights Watch, which also has a checkered history with regards to both Israel and Jews (see for example) has usually been quick to expose what it has called Israel's "war crimes" or to condemn it for being on the wrong side of international law. For example, when Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader and co-founder of the Hamas terrorist organization, was assassinated in 2004, HRW chose to focus on the bystanders (some of which were his bodyguards) that were killed rather than the fact that he was basically using the civilian population as human shields. At the time, the head of HRW, Kenneth Roth decried, "Israeli indifference to the same body of international human rights and humanitarian law that prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians."

Yet now that Gaza has unravelled and mortars are flying in civilian areas, there seems to be no outrage and certainly no expectation that either Hamas or Fatah show restraint. It used to be said that higher standards were expected of Israel because it controlled the Gaza Strip and was a government and thus bound by international agreements. Well, Israel is long gone from the streets of Gaza and both Hamas and Fatah are the government yet the double standard continues.

So I will wait to see if either the ISM or Human Rights Watch bother to mention the shooting of an ambulance today that led to the brain death of the paramedic. Will they send out action alerts to their members to serve as human shields between Fatah and Hamas? And will they campaign against the numerous checkpoints set up in Gaza by the opposing sides on the grounds that they limit the movement of the Palestinian public and thus amounts to collective punishment?

Unfortunately, condemning Palestinians for the widespread and systemic human rights abuses does little for your "street creds" in the liberal "progressive" movement. Even worse, it could cost you your friends and funding. No, it is much better to close an eye to the catastrophe that is Gaza and blame Israel for everything. Viva al Nakba!

Biladi, Biladi!

Clearly the exodus of reporters following Alan Johnston's kidnapping in Gaza has benefitted those who prefer to sow mischief away from the limelight. Here is an article from Haaretz that demonstrates that if it is not being reported for all intents and purposes it is not happening. In general, the fact that the media does not feel it necessary to relate this story conveys the casual racism that I have referred to previously - that Palestinians (or people of color) killing Palestinians is no more interesting than "dog bites man".

What is even more disturbing however, is that for some reason not even the human rights organizations seem particularly bothered by it. Could this be because it is bad for business?

Reporting this widely makes the Palestinians look violent and this means that they lose the mantle of victimhood and the cherished position of underdog. What bleeding heart will shell out money for a group that they see as aggressors?

Besides, shining a light on the tribal warfare that is going on at present risks being banned from the area. Since organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UNRWA are already heavily invested and plan campaigns around the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israelis, this is a non-starter. It effectively becomes an internal matter.

Of course, if one were to borrow the relativist logic that is so often yet selectively used by the Left, then one might ask what difference it makes if a Palestinian child is killed by a bullet fired from an M-16 or one fired from an Ak-47? Apparently it matters to some.

Here are some examples:

Several weeks now the Gaza Strip has been burning. This is not a matter of fighting between Hamas and Fatah activists or actions by the Israel Defense Forces, but battles between armed groups that for the most part are identified with large clans. Nearly every day for the past two weeks ,men, women and children have been killed in Gaza. Every day civilians are being wounded by deliberate or stray gunfire, the result of the unrestrained use of weapons. The number of armed men in the Gaza Strip, according to various estimates, is greater than 100,000. These men belong to security mechanisms, political organizations and above all to clans, and are trying to ensure the economic interests of their kinfolk. There is a tremendous amount of weaponry in the inhabitants' homes, the entire purpose of which is a potential quarrel with a neighbor, an acquaintance or a driver on the road.

In recent weeks attacks on Western and Christian targets in the West Bank have also become common. Members of terror cells identified with Al-Qaida-type organizations - compared to whom Hamas people look like boy scouts - are blowing up and destroying institutions linked to Western culture such as the American School, a church library and dozens of Internet cafes.

But the world is ignoring this. The media in Israel and the West, which reported on every person killed or wounded in the conflicts between Fatah and Hamas or because of "the Israeli occupation," are not taking any interest in Gaza. Even before the release of the Winograd report, the television news broadcasts and the major newspapers focused on trivial matters and chose not to deal with the danger to the lives of every Palestinian living in Gaza.

(For those who are unfamiliar with Haaretz or think that this is just self-serving Israeli propoganda, I would point out that this is the most left-wing of the mainstream Israeli newspapers and has a long track record of favorable reporting of the Palestinian cause.)