Dear Protester,
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a passer-by
who gave you the evil eye last week outside an Israeli-owned business in Rundle
Mall. I was on my way to a second-hand bookshop; you were banging your drum in
support of the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). A word
bubbled up inside of me, as I frowned in your direction, and that word was “anti-Semite”.
The National Socialists initiated the
dark art of targeting Jewish-owned stores back in April 1, 1933. Of course, you
would argue that targeting Israeli interests has nothing to do with an
irrational enmity towards Jews, and everything to do with the injustices
perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. You are not
some brown-shirted brute of yesteryear but a principled man of the Left who
seeks nothing more than fairness. Far from being an anti-Semite, you have
transcended all forms of ancient (and modern) bigotry. You oppose
discrimination, are offended by it, which is why you signed up for BDS in the
first place. I beg to differ. To put it bluntly, you are either a full-blown anti-Semite
in your own right, or a lack of knowledge has resulted in you being manipulated
by ideological bullyboys who are anti-Semitic.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter.
One BDS slander is that Israel has
always opposed the establishment of Arab self-governance in the territory
formerly known as Mandatory Palestine. Has it come to your attention that
Ben-Gurion, on behalf of his fellow Jewish settlers, accepted without demur the
decision of the United Nations on November 29, 1947, to partition British
Palestine very much in favour of the local Arab community? Furthermore, are you
aware that in January 2001 the Prime Minister of Israel agreed to the founding
of a Palestinian state, along with almost everything else the Palestine
Liberation Organization had demanded (at least when communicating through the
Western media) in the wake the 1993 Oslo Accord?
Alan Dershowitz, in The Case for
Israel (2003), notes that the Chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat,
personally selected Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia to assist him with the 2000
Camp David negotiations. After every contested detail had at last been locked
into place by the mediators and delegates from both sides, Bandar implored
Arafat to sign off on the agreement:
He,
like nearly everyone else, was surprised at Barak’s “remarkable” offer that
gave the Palestinian state about 97% of the occupied territories, the Old City
of Jerusalem other than the Jewish and Armenian Quarters, and $30 billion in
compensation for the refugees.
Though privately agreeing with Bandar
that Barak’s representatives were “doves”, Arafat abruptly rejected the Israeli
proposal. Bandar, according to Dershowitz’s account of proceedings, described Arafat’s
bewildering refusal to cut a deal with the State of Israel as a “crime” and a
“tragic mistake” for the Palestinian cause.
Arafat’s negative response flummoxed
Western journalists and political commentators. It should not have. What Arafat
was being offered could be categorized as the most generous version of the minimalist agenda – that is, the establishment of a
Palestinian state in the territories that had prior to the Six Day 1967 War
been occupied by Jordan (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) and Egypt (the Gaza
Strip). However, Arafat did not form Al-Fatah in 1958 to pressure Israel into
withdrawing behind its 1967 borders. That would make no sense. The founding
purpose of Al-Fatah was to destroy the State of Israel or, in the lyrics of a
Palestinian nationalist song, to expel the Jews from “the river to the sea”,
the river being the Jordan, the sea being the Mediterranean. This, dear BDS
activist, we shall call the maximalist agenda.
Yasser Arafat’s particular talent during
the seven years of the Oslo peace process (1993-2000) was to adopt the manner
of a minimalist while the entire time remaining true to his unreconstructed
maximalist self. With an avuncular grin and a calm demeanour, Arafat allowed
credulous Westerners to believe what they wanted to believe – namely, that
reconciliation in the Middle East was at hand.
A significant proportion of the local population, both Arab and Jew
alike, were also hoping that a permanent and non-violent solution might be
found. For Arafat, nevertheless, the destruction of the State of Israel
remained his heart’s desire and any outward show of good will was a ruse that
should not have fooled a child. How did this lifelong purveyor of violent
extremism maintain a straight face on being awarded (along with Shimon Peres
and Yitzhak Rabin) the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize?
Arafat’s subterfuge was eventually found
out thanks to an unlikely conjunction of circumstances. With his tenure in the
White House fast running out, President Clinton – between July and December
2000 – pressed Israel’s leftist Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to offer Arafat
every possible inducement to get on board the peace train. Barak complied with
Clinton’s command, partly as his own time in office was also coming to an end,
but also because he was imbued with the quaint Ben-Gurion-type notion that the
bloodlust of Arab extremists can be assuaged. When Arafat vetoed the best offer
the Palestinian Arabs could ever hope to receive within the framework of a
two-state solution, President Clinton turned apoplectic. “You are leading your
people and the region to a catastrophe,” he shouted, banging his fists on the
table. Clinton was more right than he could have known.
In the opinion of Arafat, it was a
“catastrophe” (nakba) that the State of Israel
came into existence in 1948, and it would take a “catastrophe” – at least in
the dictionary sense of “upheaval” and “cataclysm” – to see to its destruction.
Arafat never believed a genuine peace treaty was in the best interests of
Al-Fatah. Thus, he rebuffed Israel’s hand of friendship and initiated the
Second Intifada (2000-05), a blood-fest that resulted in the murder of some
1,100 Israeli citizens. There have been attempts to blame the origins of the
Second Intifada on Israeli provocation, but the Communications Minister for the
Palestinian Authority, Imad Faluji, gave the game away on October 11, 2001,
when he admitted that Arafat and Al-Fatah had initiated the whole terrible
episode. The Palestinian leadership achieved nothing for its people with the
Second Intifada, merely death and mayhem, greater unemployment, plus a security
wall that winds its way through the outskirts of Jerusalem and certain
neighbouring districts in the West Bank. That wall, by the way, prevents
terrorists taking pot shots at Israeli civilians, a regular occurrence during
the time of the Second Intifada.
What unites militant Arab nationalists
(Al-Fatah and the Syrian Baathists), Sunni Islamists (the Moslem Brotherhood,
Hamas, Al-Qaeda) and Shia Islamists (Hezbollah and the theocratic-fascist
regime in Tehran) is a virulent form of anti-Semitism that finds its
inspiration in twentieth century European Judeophobia, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. These latest trends in Arabic and Islamist anti-Semitism
are accessible at the site provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI). Translated into English from the
original Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish are everyday newspaper editorials,
television interviews and public addresses. The 2007 New Year’s message
delivered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Iranian television provides us
with a snapshot of the current state of Islamist anti-Semitism: “The Zionists
are the true manifestation of Satan.”
Unable to stomach the enduring presence
of “the Zionist Entity” in the Middle East, the mortal enemies of Israel have
only two options open to them, and neither includes a two-state solution.
Firstly, the anti-Zionists can attempt to wipe Israel off the map, as
Ahmadinejad with his emerging nuclear weapons program keeps promising.
Secondly, and not disconnected from the above, they can delegitimise the State
of Israel in the world’s eyes, and thus bring the day of its destruction that
much nearer.
BDS campaigners are not alone in
demonising Israel. In The Case for Israel,
Alan Dershowitz notes Nelson Mandela’s depiction of Israel as “white” in
contrast to Iraq being “black”. Considering that “white” Aryans slaughtered six
million Jews, and that the State of Israel served as a post-Nazi shelter for
tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors, Mandela’s remark is regrettable – and
also inaccurate. Over the past two decades 130,000 Ethiopian Jews having
emigrated to Israel, almost all of them with the assistance of the Israeli
government. What is more, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran around
30,000 Iranian Jews have sought refuge in “the Zionist Entity”. And what about
the 900,000 Jews from North Africa, Yemen, Egypt and, yes, Iraq, who have
either chosen or been forced by anti-Semitism to relocate to Israel? Finally,
let us not forget the more than 1,000,000 Russian Jews who moved to Israel in
order to escape Soviet-era discrimination. The collective Muslim world, in
contradistinction, has yet to resettle the 1948 West Bank refugees.
Modern-day Israel is, in reality, a
heterogeneous, multi-racial, go-ahead place. Much to the dismay of the
Palestinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank, many of the 1.5 million Arabs
who reside inside Israel proper refer to themselves as Israeli Arabs rather
than Palestinians. MEMRI, for
instance, provides examples of Arabs who have no desire to relinquish the
political, economic, educational and social welfare benefits accorded to every
citizen of Israel irrespective of colour, creed or ethnicity. Israel certainly
has the problems of a typical liberal-democracy, but perhaps Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is projecting when asserts that “the Zionists are a group of
blood-thirsty savages putting all other criminals to shame”.
The psychosis that has gripped militant
anti-Zionists is the belief that a Great Peace can only be achieved if the Jews
are purged from the landscape. Sir, we have been here before, seventy years ago
to be precise, so do please reconsider where you bang your drum.
This article first appeared in the Smarch 2012 edition of Spur Magazine
