One of the demagogic clubs anti-Israel folks love to wave is the allegation that no journalist, academician or politician can criticize Israel about anything without being accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish community, the “Israel lobby,” or whomever.
They further allege that such accusations serve as a means to “silence” people who have legitimate criticisms to make of specific Israeli actions, of the policies of particular Israeli parties or governments, or of problematic traits of Israeli society and culture. (In reality, few people make as much noise as these “silenced” demagogues, and they clearly seek to silence Israel’s defenders; but such ironies are lost on them.)
Just how these contentions constitute demagoguery and camouflage for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bigotry is not always easy to see; that, of course, is the purpose of camouflage. But two pieces of journalistic writing may help disperse the smokescreen.
One is an opinion article by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. His column of Oct. 2, 2002, I have kept at my elbow ever since, because a brilliant observation he makes there is a caution to all journalists, especially those who are, as I sometimes am, professional critics.
To Friedman, “there are two kinds of critics in life: those who criticize you because they want you to fail and those who criticize you because they want you to succeed. And people can smell the difference a mile away. If you convey to people that you really want them to succeed, they will take any criticism you dish out. If you convey that you really hold them in contempt, you can tell them that the sun is shining and they won’t listen to you.”
It should be easy to apply Friedman’s principle to criticism of Israel, one might think. The reek of anti-Semitic criticism of Israel comes from people who hold the very idea of Israel in contempt, who want the Zionist project to fail, and who either desire or refuse to admit that such failure would result in the murder and suffering of millions of Israeli and other Jews.
Truly constructive criticism of Israel, however, comes from people who want to see Israel succeed, who understand what the Zionist project means to Israel’s citizens and world Jewry (survival, freedom, self-determination and dignity, among other things), and who know that the Arab cause is mostly about Islamic-Arab chauvinism, fascism and authentic anti-Jewish prejudice, and less about the injustices, real and imagined, Israel committed against the Palestinian Arabs.
Abusing Elmo
Yet the odors of legitimacy and illegitimacy aren’t always as easy to sniff as Friedman thinks they are, especially when Israel or, at least, some Israelis really do something that appears to be wrong. And that leads us to a more recent article found on the Jerusalem Post Web site.
On Sept. 25, the site published an opinion article titled “Small wrongs need correcting, too” by Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media of Al-Quds University in Ramallah. Kuttab, a Palestinian Arab, claims that “almost all my adult life I have tried to work for peace and justice,” and he asserts that his institute “produced the first-ever Palestinian version of [the PBS children’s television show] ‘Sesame Street’ with Israeli partners, tackling issues of tolerance and mutual respect.”
In April 2002, he writes, during Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, Israel Defense Force units seized the five-story building at Al-Quds University that housed, among other things, Kuttab’s institute. The IDF units held it for 19 days, prevented its occupants from entering, but promised that the “equipment, documents and furniture will be protected.”
However, when Kuttab and the others returned, they found that the IDF soldiers had stolen or destroyed equipment and generally had wrecked the place.
After documenting the damage on videotape, Kuttab and other occupants of the building tried to sue the IDF for damages. But on Sept. 21, 2006, a three-judge Israeli court rejected the suit, “despite the damning evidence on tape and the lack of any claim by the Israeli army that anyone from the building had done something before or during the Israeli army’s incursion.”
Now, if the situation is as Kuttab says it was, then the IDF units involved committed a gratuitous act of injustice to him and the other inhabitants of the building. Moreover, Israeli human rights organizations have documented plenty of other such acts against Palestinian and Israeli Arabs by individual Israelis or IDF units or Israeli bureaucrats; and these ought to stop.
But, there are problems here. First, the “if” clause in the above paragraph is a very big “if,” given the well-known and well-documented Palestinian tendency to lie about and exaggerate Israeli wrongdoings; and Kuttab certainly doesn’t present the IDF unit’s side of the story.
Second, Kuttab subtly slides into his account statements that go beyond the specific incident to challenging Israel’s right to defend itself. “I was not involved in any of the acts that forced Israelis to take revenge on Palestinians back in 2002. Just as I and all the Palestinians were not responsible for the reasons that made Israel occupy the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.”
Israel wasn’t out to “take revenge on Palestinians” in 2002. It was trying to halt a series of horrific terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.
Israel may have gone to war in 1967 in most direct response to threats from Egypt, Syria and Jordan. But the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was founded in 1964 as the representative of the Palestinian people, contributed to starting that war via terror attacks from Palestinian refugee camps and the rhetoric of Ahmed Shukeiri, the PLO’s first leader, who, according to Mark Tessler’s “A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” coined in May 1967 the infamous phrase that the Arabs would and should “throw the Jews into the sea.”
So hidden under the seeming reasonableness of what might be a “legitimate criticism of some Israeli behavior” lies the stink of anti-Israel and, yes, anti-Semitic lies and distortions, from someone who clearly holds Israel in contempt and wants it to fail, no matter what he did with the Palestinian “Sesame Street.”
And this is exactly the kind of doings that more than justify Jewish community suspicions whenever someone gets on a high horse about how “accusations of anti-Semitism are used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.”
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