The
Antisemitic Card
By
Finian Cunningham
November 27, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- It is a ludicrous situation when anyone
criticizing Israeli state violations against
Palestinians or neighboring countries is
then instantly discredited as being “antisemitic”.
We
see this in Britain and the United States
all the time. Congresswomen like Ilhan Omar
and Rashida Tlaib have been denounced for
being “anti-Jewish”, including by President
Trump, simply because they protested
Israeli policy of occupying Palestinian
lands
or for having a malign influence on US
foreign policy.
In
Britain, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his
party have once again this week been
vilified as “antisemitic” in prominent news
media.
The
reality is that
Corbyn is neither racist or anti-Jewish.
The specious allegation stems from him and
sections of Labour being vehemently critical
of Israel and its conduct towards
Palestinians.
If
elected in the general election next month,
Labour says it will cut military trade with
Israel and move to officially recognize a
Palestinian state.
This conflation of valid criticism of the
Israeli state with being “anti-Jew” is a
cynical distortion which is wielded to give
Israel impunity from international law. It
plays on moral blackmail of critics by
equating
the historical persecution of Jews
and in particular the Nazi holocaust with
the sanctity of the modern Israeli state.
That distortion is exposed by many Jews
themselves who have spoken out in the US and
in Britain to defend the right of people to
criticize Israeli policies. They understand
the vital distinction between the Israeli
state and the much wider existence of
Jewishness. They understand that to be
opposed to Israeli state practices is in no
way to mean animus towards Jews in general.
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Only in the past week, Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his
government intends to expand annexation of
Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The
land occupied by Israeli forces since the
1967 Six Day War
is illegally occupied,
according to multiple UN resolutions under
international law. Now Netanyahu wants to
increase the violations. And with the
support of the Trump administration which
also announced it was no longer viewing
Israeli settlements on Palestinian land as
illegitimate.
Over the past month, the Israeli military
has stepped up airstrikes on the Gaza Strip
where nearly two million Palestinians
subsist in abject poverty largely because of
an Israeli blockade. One family of nine,
including children, was killed by an
airstrike on their home on November 14. As
always the death toll among Palestinian
civilians is grotesquely disproportionate to
Israeli victims of rockets fired from Gaza.
Israeli forces have also been carrying out
hundreds of airstrikes in Syria, including
the capital Damascus, over the past year.
Russia, among others, has condemned those
attacks as “unlawful aggression”. Arguably,
war crimes.
When Jeremy Corbyn and
Britain’s Labour Party
and a handful of American politicians speak
out to denounce Israeli violations they are
doing so to uphold international law and
voice support for victims of state violence.
That is a principled and honourable
position.
Shamefully, the US and British governments
and much of the corporate news media never
do speak out. They shield Israeli leaders
from international accountability by vetoing
UN resolutions or by turning a blind eye.
Pro-Israeli lobbies funnel massive donations
to politicians in Washington on both sides
of the aisle, and to the British
Conservative Party. Their silence is bought.
Not only silence but outright distortion,
such as when people criticize Israeli
malfeasance – and there is much of that –
then they are absurdly
character-assassinated as “antisemites”.
Admittedly, many British Jews phoned into
radio stations this week to complain that
they feel unwelcome in Britain due to what
they perceive
as growth in antisemitism under the Labour
Party.
To be fair though, their claims were not
backed up by hard evidence of specifically
anti-Jewish behaviour. They were eliding
their Jewishness with Labour’s criticism of
Israel.
The
claims made against Corbyn this week by the
British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirviz of being
“unfit for office” because of an alleged
complacent attitude towards antisemitism in
his party should be put in context.
Corbyn has apologized several times for a
tiny fraction (less than 0.1 per cent) of
party members accused of antisemitism. Why
should he be obliged to keep on apologizing,
as BBC interviewer Andrew Neil imperiously
demanded again this week?
Chief
Rabbi Mirviz is a self-declared friend of
Conservative leader Boris Johnson and an
ardent, uncritical supporter of the Israeli
state.
Mirviz
does not represent all British Jews, as many
other Jewish groups came out voicing their
support for Corbyn and his valid right of
free speech to criticize Israel.
Mirviz
got prominent media coverage for his views
this week in the London Times and Daily
Mail, among others. Britain’s rightwing
media are owned by billionaire oligarchs who
despise Labour’s manifesto for progressive
wealth redistribution.
