tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90090042024-03-07T00:46:25.037-08:00A Liberal Defence of IsraelA blog designed to correct the false impression that Israel is an illiberal, fascist, or apartheid state. Here, I shall present arguments to show that Israel actually embodies the best in democracy, anti-racism, religious freedom, and rights for women, gay people, and minorities of different kinds.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-90408099876054948382015-05-13T08:52:00.000-07:002015-05-13T08:52:01.576-07:00The threat to free speech<div id="print_content">
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The Erosion of Free Speech</h1>
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by <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Denis+MacEoin"><span itemprop="author">Denis MacEoin</span></a><br />
<time datetime="2015-05-03T05:00:00" itemprop="datePublished">May 3, 2015 at 5:00 am</time></b></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion">http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion</a></b></div>
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<li>"If PEN as a free speech
organization can't defend and celebrate people who have been murdered
for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the
name." — Salman Rushdie, former President of PEN.</li>
<li>Today, a genuine fear of retribution for a "blasphemous"
statement has subdued the will to stand up for one's own beliefs, values
and the right to speak out. This fear has made most of the West
submissive, just as Islam -- in both its name [Islam means "submission"]
and declarations -- openly wants.</li>
<li>This time, the condemnation had not come in a <i>fatwa</i> from
Iran's Supreme leader, but from a Western academic. If we do not reverse
this trend, censorship, blasphemy laws, and all the other encumbrances
of totalitarians, will return to our lives. The bullies will win.</li>
<li>If Geert Wilders and others are being accused of hate speech,
then why isn't the Koran -- with its calls for smiting necks and killing
infidels -- also being accused of hate speech?</li>
<li>The mere criticism of a religious belief shared by many people
mainly in the Third World has been linked, with no justification, to
their genuine prejudice against the inhabitants of the developed world.</li>
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Anyone who has had much to do with publishing, or anyone who cares
about books and free speech, will be familiar with the American Library
Association's <a href="http://www.ala.org/offices/oif">Office for Intellectual Freedom</a>,
an enduring champion of the First Amendment and the public's right to
read whatever they please -- without the interference and censorship of
self-appointed guardians of inoffensiveness and sexual purity.<br />
Every year, the ALA mounts <a href="http://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek">Banned Books Week</a>, a nationwide celebration of our freedom to read. And every year it issues an unnerving list of <a href="http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks">Frequently Challenged Books</a>.
Unnerving because of the pettiness and obsession betrayed by the people
who try to have books banned in local libraries, school boards, and
even bookshops. For years, most of the attempts to ban books have come
from fundamentalist Christian groups; the reasons have mainly been sex,
offensive language, or "controversial issues," whatever <i>they</i> are. God forbid that anyone in the United States be exposed to "controversial issues."<br />
This year <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/23/petition-tried-to-censor-banned-books-week-poster-for-being-islamophobic/">a new note has entered Banned Books Week</a>.
Elizabeth McKinstry, a graduate student at Georgia's Valdosta State
University (which earlier in April witnessed students trampling on the
American flag) launched a petition about ALA's <a href="http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=11404">anti-censorship poster</a>,
calling it "Islamophobic." There is nothing on the poster, however,
that relates in the slightest way to Islam. The poster shows the top of a
woman's head, then her clothed chest and arms. She is not wearing
Islamic dress on her head, and her arms and hands are bare. In front of
her face, she holds what looks like a book bearing the text
"Readstricted." Her eyes can be seen looking through the cover where it
bears the universal symbol for "Restricted" (a red circle with a white
bar). That is all.<br />
In her petition, McKinstry writes, "This poster uses undeniably
Islamophobic imagery of a woman in a niqab, appears to equate Islam with
censorship, and muslim (sic) women as victims." She goes on to demand
that the poster be "removed immediately from the ALA Graphics store, and
the ALA Graphics Store and Office of Intellectual Freedom should
apologize and explain how they will prevent using discriminatory imagery
in the future." To make matters worse, she goes on to write: "Whether
the poster was intentionally or accidentally a racist design, it is
still racist and alienating."<br />
Not only is this possibly an example of political correctness in
overdrive, but the greater irony lies in that McKinstry is studying for
an MA in library and information science; works as a library associate,
and is a member of the ALA. Here we see a distortion of thinking that is
grotesque: a person claiming to be "progressive," trying to ban an
anti-censorship poster in an organization that works to end censorship.<br />
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* * *</div>
<a href="http://www.pen-international.org/">PEN International</a> is
known worldwide as an association of writers. Together they work
tirelessly for the freedom of authors from imprisonment, torture, or
other restrictions on their freedom to write honestly and
controversially. This year, PEN's American Center plans to present its
annual Freedom of Expression Award during its May 5 gala to the French
satirical magazine <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>. The award will be handed to
Gerard Biart, the publication's editor-in-chief, and to Jean-Baptiste
Thorat, a staff member who arrived late on the day when Muslim radicals
slaughtered twelve of his colleagues. This is the sort of thing PEN does
well: upholding everyone's right to speak out even when offence is
taken.<br />
This year, however, six PEN members, almost predictably, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/nyregion/six-pen-members-decline-gala-after-award-for-charlie-hebdo.html">have already condemned</a> the decision to give the award to <i>Charlie Hebdo,</i>
and have refused to attend the gala. Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje,
Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have
exercised their right to double standards by blaming <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>
for its offensiveness. Kushner expressed her discomfort with the
magazine's "cultural intolerance." Does that mean that PEN should never
have supported Salman Rushdie for having offended millions of Muslims
just to express his feelings about Islam?<br />
Peter Carey expressed his support, not for the satirists, but for the
Muslim minority in France, speaking of "PEN's seeming blindness to the
cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its
moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their
population." We never heard him speaking out when Ilan Halimi was
tortured to death for weeks, or when Jews in Toulouse were shot. He
seems to be saying that the French government should shut up any writer
or artist who offends the extreme sensitivities of a small percent of
its population.<br />
Teju Cole remarked, in the wake of the killings, that <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>
claimed to offend all parties but had recently "gone specifically for
racist and Islamophobic provocations." But Islam is not a race, and the
magazine has never been racist, so why charge that in response to the
sort of free speech PEN has always worked hard to advance?<br />
A sensible and nuanced rebuttal of these charges came from Salman
Rushdie himself, a former president of PEN: "If PEN as a free speech
organization can't defend and celebrate people who have been murdered
for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the
name. What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I
hope nobody ever comes after them."<br />
Those six have now morphed into something like 145. By April 30,
Carey and they were joined by another 139 members who signed a protest
petition. Writers, some distinguished, some obscure, have taken up their
pens to defy the principle of free speech in an organization dedicated
to free speech, and many of whom live in a land that protects it
precisely for their benefit with a First Amendment.<br />
Another irony, at least as distasteful as the one just described,
took place on April 22, when Northern Ireland's leading academic
institution, Queen's University in Belfast, announced the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-32408673">cancellation of a conference</a>
planned for June. The conference, organized by the university's
Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, was about free
speech after the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attack in Paris. You could not
make this up. The reason given was that the institute had not prepared a
proper risk assessment. Risk? Risk to what? To free speech? What a
silly thought! No, it turned out to be risk of an Islamist attack in
Belfast, a city long weary from terrorism. Finally, on May 1, <a href="http://www.irishnews.com/news/queen-s-gives-go-ahead-to-charlie-hebdo-event-1444839">the university reversed its decision</a> and announced that the event will go ahead.<br />
The following day, the University of Maryland, many miles to the west, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/04/23/university-maryland-cancels-american-sniper-after-muslim-students-complain/">banned</a> a showing of the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/">American Sniper</a> after complaints from Muslim students. Whether the film was good or bad, free speech was snuffed.<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a><br />
The oddity is that today, newspaper headlines, news websites, radio
and television news bulletins are packed every day with stories about
the chaos in the Middle East, the threat of Iranian access to nuclear
weapons, the march of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Hezbollah, Hamas, the
Taliban, al-Shabaab, and dozens of other terrorist groups across the
region. This year's <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> and kosher supermarket
slayings, the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe (closely linked to
Islamism), demonstrations filling the streets with chants such as
"Hamas, Hamas Jews to the Gas," and all the other atrocities and social
disjunctions that arise from the revival of fundamentalist Islam.<br />
America and Britain have fought, with allies, wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and as of this writing, the United States is carrying out
air strikes against ISIS in Syria.<br />
Such news stories are not occasional, they are everyday. Stories of
this kind are seldom crowded out by anything but the most important news
items, such as a major airline crash or significant domestic political
events. Such stories are even more visible than Cold War geopolitical
new ever was, due to the immense proliferation of news outlets since the
1990s. The citizens of the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and (above
all) Israel do not face a remote threat from a distant country, but
daily threats of being blown up in their own streets almost every day.
The British security services announce almost daily the likelihood of a
terrorist event.<br />
But where are the novels? Where are the Le Carrés and Ludlums, the
Flemings and Clancys? The number of novels dealing with Islamist,
terrorist, or state-sponsored threats to the world's stability (and
hence to our own stability and safety) are so few in number, I cannot
remember even one. Back to the comfort zone.<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a><br />
This bears thinking about. Is it just a matter of fashion, or are
there deeper reasons for this apparent neglect of the most important
political and military issues of the present day? Is the literary issue a
canary in a coal mine of much greater extent?<br />
The answer is yes. Western culture, once built in part on the
principle of free speech -- a principle enshrined in the U.S.
Constitution's <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment">First Amendment</a>
and promoted in all liberal democracies -- has been weakened by attacks
on the right of everyone to right to speak openly about politics,
religion, sexuality, and a host of other things.<br />
The first blow to free speech came in 1989 with demonstrations and
riots over British author Salman Rushdie's controversial 1988 novel, <i>The Satanic Verses</i>; and fears grew when Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a <i>fatwa</i> calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie.<br />
Many people died in riots or were murdered because of association
with the book. Bookshops were firebombed in the U.S. and UK; publishers
were attacked; booksellers often refused to stock the novel; editors
wrote to authors like myself, asking us to decide whether some
forthcoming publications dealing with Islam could be safely published,
and free speech was under attack.<br />
The most harmful blow, however, came when some Western so-called
intellectuals and religious leaders condemned Rushdie and supported a
ban on his novel. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Jakobovits">Immanuel Jakobovits</a>, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, opposed the book's publication.<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a>
The Archbishop of Canterbury called for a law of blasphemy that would
cover other religions than just Christianity, opening up the spectre
that religions, even violent ones such as Islam, could be privileged
above other societal actors in a democracy.<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> Sadly, this pattern of betrayal by Western thinkers has been repeated ever since.<br />
What impact has this had? Here is a simple example: Early in 2012, a
controversy stormed up in church circles in the United States. Three
well-known Christian publishers, <a href="https://wycliffe.org.uk/">Wycliffe Bible Translators</a>, the <a href="http://www.sil.org/">Summer Institute of Linguistics</a> (SIL) and Frontiers were <a href="http://biblicalmissiology.org/2012/02/01/wycliffe-sil-frontiers-controversy-in-the-media/">accused</a>
of having pandered to Muslims in their new Arabic and Turkish
translations of the New Testament. The translators had replaced terms
such as Father (for God) and Son to conform to the Koranic doctrine that
God did not have a son and was not a father of anyone. In the <a href="http://pamelageller.com/2012/01/new-bible-versions-remove-father-and-son-of-god-because-it-offends-muslims.html/">Frontiers and SIL translation</a>
into Turkish, "guardian" replaces "Father" and "representative" or
"proxy" is used for "Son." Such considerations did not deter earlier
Bible translators into Islamic language from an honest statement of a
fundamental Christian doctrine. But today, a genuine fear of retribution
for a "blasphemous" statement has subdued the will to stand up for
one's own beliefs, values and the right to speak out. This fear has made
much of the West submissive, just as Islam -- in both its name [Islam
means "submission"] and declarations -- openly wants.<br />
Since then, the attacks from Islamists on this most basic of Western
principles -- the central plank in the platform of true democracy and
the feature that most distinguishes it from totalitarianism of all forms
-- have multiplied, culminating in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30708237">slaughter</a> carried out by Muslims extremists at the offices of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> in Paris on January 7, 2015.<br />
Beneath the sporadic physical assaults lies a deeper layer of
coercion: the fear lest anyone commit that apparently most unforgiveable
crime of all, "Islamophobia!" It now seems that almost anything
non-Muslims do may result in such accusations -- a bigotry that has also
become conflated with racism. The mere criticism of a religious belief
shared by people mainly in the Third World has been linked, with no
justification, to their genuine prejudice against the inhabitants of the
developed world. But since it is Muslims who have been allowed to
define "Islamophobia," often at whim, even the mildest remarks can lead
to serious accusations, lawsuits, and criminal attacks.<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a><br />
In the case of Sherry Jones's novel <i>The Jewel of Medina,</i>
historically "revised" to be sympathetic to Islam, Random House in 1988
cancelled the novel's publication. Its spokesperson stated that the
publishing house had been given "cautionary advice not only that the
publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim
community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small,
radical segment."<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a><br />
This time, the condemnation had not come in a <i>fatwa</i> from
Iran's Supreme Leader, but from a Western academic, whose identity is
not known to me. On September 28, 2008, British extremist Ali Beheshti
and two accomplices set fire to the house of the owner of the UK
publishing company that had bought <i>The Jewel of Medina</i>.
Fortunately, nobody was killed. But the vise of subjugation to Islamic
dictats was tightening round the neck of the free world.<br />
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* * *</div>
Rushdie knew he was being controversial; for those who protested, the
attacks on him, however reprehensible, had a bizarre justification.
Condemnation from Western academics, journalists, interfaith clerics,
and politicians shows not how successful intimidation has become, but
how timid and craven we have become. To surrender with such
spinelessness can only mean that we have entered the first stages of the
decline of the Enlightenment values that made the modern West the
greatest upholder of human rights and freedoms in history.<br />
Criticism of Islam and everything else will -- and should --
continue, produced by courageous writers and journalists. Certainly, we
know how many times politicians in the United States and Europe have
delusionally tried to persuade us that Islamist violence "has nothing to
do with Islam."<br />
There have been many attacks and murders already. Perhaps the best known of these -- until the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> murders -- was the murder of Dutch film-maker, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3974179.stm">Theo van Gogh</a>, on November 2, 2004. Van Gogh had directed a short film called <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432109/">Submission</a></i>, written by Muslim dissident <a href="http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/2635/ayaan_hirsi_ali.html">Ayaan Hirsi Ali</a>,
who had worked extensively in women's shelters in the Netherlands,
where she had observed that most of the women were Muslim. Van Gogh's
killer, a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, now serving
a life sentence, has described democracy as utterly abhorrent to Islam.
(This view, for anyone who cares about the continuation of the West, is
held by many Muslims. For them, democracy, made by man, is
illegitimate, compared to shari'a law, made by Allah, and therefore the
only form of government that is legitimate.) <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4716909.stm">In court, Bouyeri said</a> that 'the law [shari'a law] compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet."<br />
The threat of murder has become ever more real. It is no longer
possible to dismiss death threats from Muslims as the work of "lone
wolves," "deviant personalities," or attention seekers. It is the use of
death threats that has given radical Muslims the power to deter most
writers, film-makers, TV producers, and politicians from tackling
Islamic issues. The threat of calling people "racist" as a tool for
suppressing critical voices has cast a dark shadow over normal
democratic life. Some have died for free speech about Islam; others have
faced ostracism, imprisonment, flogging and the loss of a normal life. <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a><br />
Salman Rushdie lives under constant guard. <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/13/us/cartoonist-still-in-hiding/">Molly Norris</a>,
an American artist who drew a cartoon of Mohammed and proposed an
"Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," has lived in hiding since 2010. On advice
from the FBI, she changed her identity and cut off all links with
family and friends. The Dutch politician <a href="http://www.geertwilders.nl/">Geert Wilders</a> has been tried for "hate speech," barely acquitted, and is now being tried for "hate speech" again.<br />
These are just a few of the casualties who have paid a heavy price
for their willingness to treat Islam as any of us might treat other
subjects or other faiths. No Christian scholar will be tried for arguing
that the Gospels contain contradictions, no Reform Jew will be
arraigned for criticism of ultra-Orthodox beliefs, no politician will be
brought before the law for denouncing the ideologies of Communism or
Fascism. You can say that Karl Marx was misguided or that a U.S.
president is terrible, and on and on, without dreading for a moment an
assassin's footfall or being locked up for your remarks.<br />
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Theo
van Gogh (left) was murdered by an Islamist because he made a film
critical of Islam. Salman Rushdie (right) was lucky to stay alive,
spending many years in hiding, under police protection, after Iran's
Supreme Leader ordered his murder because he considered Rushdie's novel <i>The Satanic Verses</i> "blasphemous."</div>
</td>
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Incidents such as these or UK Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband's promise <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5665/uk-islamophobia-ban">to make Islamophobia a hate crime</a>
(without even defining Islamophobia) illustrate the most dangerous
result of Islamic agitation and asserted victimhood: it has caused us to
turn on ourselves, to abandon our commitment to free speech, open
academic enquiry, and the readiness to question everything -- the very
qualities that have made us strong in the past. When Western so-called
intellectuals such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2010/03/bonfire_of_the_intellectuals.html">condemn</a>
a Muslim apostate such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her criticisms of radical
Islamism, or when Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an
honorary degree for Ms. Ali when Muslim students object, we see our
intellectual foundations shake. <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a><br />
It is also necessary to ask, if Geert Wilders and others are being
accused of hate speech, then why isn't the Koran -- with its calls for
smiting necks and killing infidels -- also being accused of hate speech?<br />
If we do not reverse this trend of submission, censorship, blasphemy
laws and all the other encumbrances of totalitarianism will return to
our lives. The bullies will win, and the Enlightenment will fade and
pass away from mankind. Political correctness and shari'a law will rule.
How tragic if a senseless fear causes us to do this to ourselves.<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Denis MacEoin is a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic
Studies. He has an MA in Persian, Arabic and Islamic Studies from
Edinburgh University, a PhD in Persian Studies from Cambridge (King's
College) and an MA in English Language and Literature from Trinity
College, Dublin.</i><br />
</blockquote>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a>
If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, you will also recall
the remarkable outpouring of literary engagement with the issues it
provoked. Not just dissident narratives like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">Alexander Solzhenitsyn</a>'s <i>Gulag Archipelago</i> or novels such as his <i>One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch</i>,
but the many spy thrillers by mainly British authors like John Le
Carré, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond), and many
others, Trevor Dudley-Smith ('Adam Hall'), and Jack Higgins. Later,
several Americans came to match the popularity of their British
counterparts: Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Nelson DeMille, and others. But
with the collapse of the Soviet Union as a threat, Cold War themes
rapidly died out.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> There have been several films such as <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege">The Siege</a></i> or the more recent <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/">American Sniper</a></i>, and TV shows such as <i><a href="http://www.sho.com/sho/homeland/home">Homeland</a></i> and the BBC's award-winning drama <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z78nq">The Honourable Woman</a></i>. In 2014, a new drama appeared on BBC America and is due to play in the UK this April: <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28UK_TV_series%29">The Game</a></i> is set in the 1970s and tells a story of spies fighting the Cold War.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> <i>The Times</i>, 4 March 1989.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Michael Walzer, "The Sins of Salman," <i>The New Republic</i>, 10 April 1989.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a>
The most notorious of the many cases involving perceptions of blasphemy
started November 25, 2007, when an English kindergarten teacher at a
school in Sudan, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/09/world.schoolsworldwide">Gillian Gibbons</a>,
was arrested, interrogated and finally put in a cell at a local police
station. Her crime? She had allowed her class of six-year-olds to name
their teddy bear "Muhammad." From this innocent mistake, matters got
worse for Gibbons. On November 26, 2007, she was formally <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7117430.stm">charged</a>
under Section 125 of the Sudanese Criminal Act, for "insulting
religion, inciting hatred, sexual harassment, racism, prostitution and
showing contempt for religious beliefs." Sudan's top clerics called for
the full measure of the law [death] to be used against Mrs. Gibbons; and
labeled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.<br />
On November 29, she was found guilty of "insulting religion" and was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7119399.stm">sentenced</a>
to 15 days' imprisonment and deportation. The next day, approximately
10,000 protesters, some of them waving swords and machetes, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/africa/01sudan.html">took to the streets</a> in Khartoum, demanding Gibbons's execution.<br />
In the end, Gibbons was released from jail and allowed to return to
Britain. But her case put the fear of savagery in many people's hearts,
as they recognized that it take nothing more than a slip of tongue to
bring down death on oneself.<br />
In yet another irony, <a href="http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Sherry-Jones/80662359">Sherry Jones</a>, an American writer who said she wanted to bring people together, wrote a novel entitled <i>The Jewel of Medina</i>,
a story of the romance (if that is the word) between the Prophet
Muhammad and his child bride A'isha, who came to be his most beloved
wife. This was a noble project designed to show that Westerners are not
all "Islamophobes," and written in sentimental prose to reassure Muslims
of Jones's warm feelings towards their prophet. Random House bought the
story for a large fee. Influenced by the leading apologist for
Muhammad, the anti-historian, Karen Armstrong, Jones even bowdlerizes
the tale, delaying consummation of the marriage until A'isha had fully
attained puberty (despite what the Islamic historians tell us, which is
that marriage was apparently consummated when A'isha was nine).<br />
A publication date in 2008 was set and a nationwide tour planned – a
promotion few new authors get. But neither Jones nor one of America's
oldest and biggest publishing houses had reckoned with the fallout from <i>The Satanic Verses</i>.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Cited Nick Cohen, <i>You Can't Read this Book</i>, rev. ed., London, 2013, p. 72.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> Danish author <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8842941/i-may-be-killed-if-i-write-this/">Lars Hedegaard</a> has suffered an attack on his life and lives in a secret location. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/04/danish-cartoonist-axe-attack">Kurt Westergaard</a>,
a Danish cartoonist, has suffered an axe attack that failed, and is
under permanent protection the of intelligence services. In 2009,
Austrian, a politician, <a href="http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/susanne-winter-found-guilty.html">Susanne Winter</a>,
was found guilty of "anti-Muslim incitement," for saying, "In today's
system, the Prophet Mohammad would be considered child-molester," and
that Islam "should be thrown back where it came from, behind the
Mediterranean." She was fined 24,000 euros ($31,000) and given a
three-month suspended sentence. In 2011, <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2702/sabaditsch-wolff-appeal">Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff</a>,
a former Austrian diplomat and teacher, was put on trial for
"denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion,"
found guilty twice, and ordered to pay a fine or face 60 days in prison.
Some of her comments may have seemed extreme and fit for criticism, but
the court's failure to engage with her historically accurate charge
that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year-old girl and continued to have
sex with her until she turned eighteen, regarding her criticism of it as
somehow defamatory, and the judge's decision to punish her for saying
something that can be found in Islamic sources, illustrates the betrayal
of Western values of free speech in defense of something we would
normally penalize.<br />
<a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5676/free-speech-erosion#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a>
This backing away from our Enlightenment values has been documented and
criticized by many writers, notably Paul Berman in his 2010 <i>The Flight of the Intellectuals</i>, Britain's Douglas Murray in <i>Islamophilia</i> (2013), or Nick Cohen in <i>You can't read this book</i> (2012)<br />
</div>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-39792888710192700612015-05-13T08:49:00.003-07:002015-05-13T08:49:48.774-07:00Full article on SouthamptonHere's my full Gatestone piece about the Southampton conference.<br />
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The Academic War on Israel</h1>
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by <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Denis+MacEoin"><span itemprop="author">Denis MacEoin</span></a><br />
<time datetime="2015-04-23T05:00:00" itemprop="datePublished">April 23, 2015 at 5:00 am</time></b></div>
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<li>A generation of students is
growing up learning to tolerate -- and consider normal -- bias,
falsehood, prejudice, and the runaway politicization of teachers and
student thugs permitting only one-sided arguments.</li>
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America's President Barack Obama has declared war on Israel. The
animosity between Obama and his administration toward Israel and its
newly re-elected leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been
growing for years; it reached crisis point after Netanyahu's address to
the U.S. Congress and news of his resounding victory in the March
elections.<br />
This does not mean that the United States, as a whole, shares this
animosity or is bent on abandoning a vulnerable and beleaguered
democracy to its host of violent and uncompromising predators. Polls
show it does not.<br />
But wars against Israel are nothing new. In 1947, months before the
country was even declared independent, Arabs launched a war that led
uninterruptedly to a full-scale conflict in 1948. Since then, physical
violence -- wars and individual terrorist attacks -- against the State
of Israel has been a feature of everyday life for Israelis, with Jews as
the principal targets. No legally established, democratic country has
ever been faced with so great a lust for its destruction and so many
assaults on its people. It is singled out by a United Nations dominated
by Muslim states and their allies; and now, bewilderingly, by the
president of the one country on whom Israelis have always depended for
moral and material support.<br />
Of course, not even Obama is likely to wage war directly on Israel by
sending in armed forces, but he is making life easier for Israel's
sworn enemies, notably Iran, to think they can use their monstrous banks
of armaments to launch just such an attack without fearing U.S.
intervention.<br />
As the Middle East collapses all around Israel, as jihadi factions
grow bolder and more barbaric, and as Iran spreads its reach into Yemen,
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, Israel has become
the canary in the West's coal mine.<br />
In addition to that, there is now the subversion of Israel's very
right to exist through "lawfare," (the frivolous or malicious use of the
law for political manipulation); UN Human Rights Commission
distortions, and, in many ways the most chilling: the work of teachers
and students in Western universities to boycott, divest from and
sanction (BDS) Israel.<br />
Followers of <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/">Campus Watch</a> or <a href="http://www.iafi-israel.org/">International Academic Friends of Israel</a>, and readers of the essays in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Academic-Boycotts-Israel-ebook/dp/B00O81Z5AM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427333161&sr=1-1&keywords=the+case+against+academic+boycotts+of+israel">The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel</a> (Wayne University Press, 2015) will be only too painfully aware of the decidedly <i>un</i>academic
raw Jew-hatred, posing as anti-Zionism, that has spread across
university campuses throughout the United States, Europe and the West,
particularly in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. Hate speech,
disruption of lectures, demonstrations, expulsions and grotesquely
one-sided lectures, papers and books have replaced the free speech, open
debate, and academic neutrality that once characterized all
universities within the Western tradition.<br />
A generation of students is growing up learning to tolerate – and
consider normal -- bias, falsehood and the runaway politicization of
teachers and student thugs permitting only one-sided arguments. Many
members of the faculty, radical Muslim teachers, and student thugs
permit only one-sided arguments. It has become unpleasant, even a risk,
for pro-Israel and Jewish students, such as Daniel Mael at Brandeis
University, to lift their heads above the parapet.<br />
In the UK, anti-Israel agitation has been not as violent but just as
strong as in the US; and the BDS movement has been severe in many
universities. For several years, the Association of University Teachers
(AUT), the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher
Education (NATFHE) and the (later amalgamated) University and College
Union passed boycott resolutions against Israeli academic institutions
and individuals. The dominance of intolerantly "liberal" teachers in
British educational circles has ensured a hindrance to open and
civilized debate within the higher education sector as much as have the
students.<br />
Bias and intolerance have now moved in an even more alarming direction. From the 17<sup>th</sup> to the 19<sup>th</sup> of April this year, the Law School at Britain's Southampton University had planned to host a <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5534/israel-right-to-exist-conference">conference</a>
entitled, "International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy,
Responsibility and Exceptionalism." This was not an internal event, nor
was it restricted to academics from the UK. Southampton University is a
founding institution in Britain's Russell Group of elite universities
and regularly appears among the world's top 100 universities. It has
been ranked as fifth in the UK; academics working there include Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Its Law School enjoys a
worldwide reputation as one of the best in Britain. The conference was
intended to be noticed far beyond the shores of the UK.<br />
This global reach was indicated in the list of participants signed up
to deliver papers there. Of those listed to give fifty-three papers
over three days, eleven were Americans, one was from Singapore, two were
from Canada, eight were from Israel, seven were from the West Bank
(Judaea and Samaria), two were from Ireland, one was from Lebanon, one
was from Austria, one was from Australia, and one was from the
Netherlands. With an international roster such as this, you are looking
at a major event that had taken over a year to plan. It was clearly an
attempt to legitimize a gathering of the clan of the academic
anti-Israel fraternity.<br />
The university, after appeals from countless individuals and
organizations, stated that it had cancelled the conference. Its
organizers spent some £35,000 to ask for a judicial appeal in London's
High Court, but on April 14, just days before the conference was due to
start, Judge Alice Robinson <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/570531/Judges-Israel-existence-conference-Southampton-University">refused their appeal</a>
and upheld the decision to close down the event. The university had
argued (rather weakly, it must be said) that fears of violence by
demonstrators and their opponents made it necessary to cancel on the
grounds of security. Legally, this was probably the only option they
had, but it is more than likely that, once serious objections were made
and the real purpose of the conference disclosed, they decided that it
the conference might well stain their reputation. Unsurprisingly, BDS
supporters are already <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/univ-southampton-cancels-conference-after-government-israel-lobby-pressure">describing the cancellation</a>
as capitulation by the university to the "Israel Lobby." And the lawyer
acting for the conference organizers, Mark McDonald, has already <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/uk-high-court-backs-shutdown-israel-conference">stated</a> that they may now take their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.<br />
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Britain's
Southampton University this month cancelled a conference dedicated to
questioning the legitimacy of Israel, which had attracted Jew-haters and
anti-Zionists, and was described by a prominent member of parliament as
an "anti-Semitic hate-fest".</div>
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This will not be the last attempt to mount an anti-Israel conference
in a university, whether in the UK, Europe, or North America. On April
15, the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University (a
notoriously anti-Israel institution) announced an <a href="https://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cps/events/31oct2015-the-gaza-strip-history-future-and-new-directions-for-research-.html">October conference </a>entitled,
"The Gaza Strip: History, Future and New Directions for Research,"
supposedly as a response to Israeli "onslaughts" on the Strip. There was
no mention, of course, of the "onslaught" from Gaza on Israel of the
thousands of rockets that had invited Israel's response.<br />
It seems appropriate, however, to examine the real reasons why the
Southampton conference should never have gone ahead within an academic
context in the first place. To begin with, look closely at the
participants, at the titles of most of the proposed papers, and at the
deeply unbalanced Call for Papers that served to attract Jew-haters and
anti-Zionists, and to repel all but a few supporters of Israel and its
right to exist.<br />
David Collier has done thorough research on the positions held by the participants in the conference. His list is available <a href="http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/letter-to-southampton-university.html">here</a>.
To simplify matters, 45 of those listed to speak have records of active
involvement in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; some of
them had already been active in direct anti-Israel work. Four appear to
be neutral. The imbalance is stupendous and makes it hard to believe
this conference is simply an anti-Israel and, for some speakers, an
"anti-Semitic hate-fest" (as the Tory Chief Whip, Michael Gove, <a href="http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/133152/southampton-university-cancels-anti-israel-conference-over-safety-concerns">described it recently</a>
at London's "We Believe in Israel" conference). Some are leading
figures in the movement to defeat Israel and turn it into a Palestinian
state. The best known of these is <a href="http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/category/richard-falk/">Richard Falk</a>,
a professor emeritus at Princeton University and one of the most
notorious and outspoken enemies of Israel today. Falk has described the
9/11 atrocity as a conspiracy by the U.S. government; blamed the Boston
Marathon bombing on the United States, and condemned Israel non-stop
while working for the United Nations as the UN Special Rapporteur for
Palestinian Human Rights.<br />
Others stand out for their much-publicized anti-Israel (and, frankly, anti-Semitic) views. Who has not heard of <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books/magazine/85344/ilan-pappe-sloppy-dishonest-historian">Ilan Pappé</a>,
an Israeli who now holds a professorship in Arabic and Islamic Studies
at Exeter University, but who has been described as "one of the world's
sloppiest historians". His book, <i>The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,</i> has been widely <a href="http://www.meforum.org/1886/the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine">criticized</a>
as a biased and inaccurate work that squeezes data to fit the author's
narrative, rather than using it objectively to question existing
assumptions. His hatred for his own country motivates everything he
writes about it.<br />
Dr. <a href="http://www.karmi.org/">Ghada Karmi</a>, of the Institute
of Arab and Islamic Studies in the University of Exeter, is a
Palestinian medical doctor, an activist for the Palestinian cause, and a
serial hater of Israel who has called for the destruction of the Jewish
state. She has<a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Interview%3a+Ghada+Karmi%2c+a+voice+from+exile.-a0224775157"> written</a>
thus about the country: "...Israel, from its inception in 1948, has
been given the most wonderful opportunity to behave itself, and it
clearly has not done so. It's flouted every single law, it's behaved
outrageously, it's made a travesty of international and humanitarian
law. On what basis should this state continue to be a member of the
United Nations?" Apart from refusing to look at any combative behavior
from Palestinians, or the many refusals by Palestinians to reject
Israel's offer a Palestinian state, since when is a medical doctor an
authority on international law?<br />
One should look not just at the identities of the participants, but
also at the titles of many of the papers they were to present. Here are a
few. Do not forget to notice the strangled pseudo-academic language in
which some are dressed.<br />
<ul type="disc">
<li>"Maximum Land, Minimum Arabs: Zionist colonization strategies in Palestine" (Nur Masalha).</li>
<li>"Two Peoples, One Future?: Mutual Self-Determination After the Defeat of Actually Existing Zionism" (Brad Roth).</li>
<li>"Law, Race & Resistance: The State of Emergency as Apartheid Legality" (John Reynolds).</li>
<li>"Responsibilities for the Gross Human Rights Violations" (Anthony Löwstedt).</li>
<li>"Can the Configuration of a political community amount to an
International Crime?: reflections on Originary Apartheid, Legalism and
Ethical Reflection" (Oren Ben-Dor, the conference organizer).</li>
<li>"How Legitimate is Israeli Statehood? Factors and implications of the UN creation of Israel" (Ghada Karmi).</li>
<li>"The Israeli Legal System: The practice and ideology of eternalizing the occupation" (Lea Tsemel).</li>
<li>"The Legal Infrastructure of Domination and Dispossession: An
Appraisal of Israel's Contemporary Territorial Regime in Historic
Palestine" (Valentina Azarova).</li>
<li>"The Case of a State that Refuses the Responsibility Inherent in Statehood" (Yoella Har-Shefi).</li>
<li>"The Melting Pot of Hatred, or On the Lives of Zionist Practitioners" (Marcelo Svirsky).</li>
<li>"Israel's Settler Colonialism, Stolen Childhood, and the Creation of Death Zones" (Nader Shalhoub-Kevorkian).</li>
<li>"We Fight, Therefore We Are! A Muslim De-Colonial Critique of Zionist Epistemology" (Hatem Bazian).</li>
</ul>
These examples should be enough to identify the extraordinary bias
inherent in the conference. The language is typical, not of balanced
academic enquiry but of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and BDS propaganda.
The university's original refusal to respond to calls to cancel, or
move the conference to a more neutral venue, fell painfully short of any
recognition of how damaging such a farcical event would have been (and
actually has been). The administration ignored arguments that lacked
bias, and argued that the conference must be allowed to take place based
on considerations of free speech. And this is the argument that the
conference's supporters have been using ever since, even more since the
ban. But that is also false. Most of those who have appealed to the
administration have asked, not for an outright ban -- which would indeed
go against the principles of free speech -- but for relocation, which
is quite different.<br />
It is worth saying in passing that the Call for Papers is, in itself,
a very unacademic document. Rather than analyse it in any detail, let
me cite just one thing. In just three pages, the Call refers no fewer
than seven times to an entity they term "historic Palestine". But the
term is meaningless. There is certainly no legal definition of what is
meant by "historic Palestine." The region that covers today's West Bank,
Israel, Gaza, and Jordan was for centuries the southern half of the
Ottoman province of Syria. In 1920, the League of Nations established a
British Mandate for Palestine, and in 1922 approved a separate British
administration for Transjordan. Between 1923, when the Mandate came into
effect, and 1948, when the British withdrew, there was a territory
known as Palestine, in which everyone – Christian, Jew and Arab -- was
listed on his passport as Palestinian. Is this the "historic Palestine"
to which the Call refers? Or does this include the Mandate territory of
Transjordan, as the British Colonial Office suggested in 1921? Or is it a
fictitious Palestine stretching back to ancient times, as the term is <a href="http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early.php">used by the Palestinians</a> and their supporters themselves?<br />
To leave this point so poorly defined makes it hard for a historian
such as myself, or a legal scholar, to advance any arguments that might
relate to the identity of "historic" Palestine, a name invented in the
year 135 AD by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. This alone exposes the
conference to a charge of academic dishonesty.<br />
<a href="http://www.uklfi.com/">UK Lawyers for Israel</a>, a
collective of British lawyers who volunteer to use their legal skills to
defend and advocate for Israel, took up the matter of the conference
with the university, using arguments based on the Call for Papers. Its
secretary and treasurer, David Lewis, wrote a long letter to the Vice
Chancellor, in which he noted, among other things that:<br />
<blockquote>
It is clear from even the most cursory reading of the
Call for Papers that it has been written in a way that could almost have
been designed, and probably <i>was</i> designed, to deter supporters of
Israel from presenting papers at the conference. In fact we find it
mystifying that this inherent bias should have escaped the University
when it approved the conference. And if the University gave its approval
before even seeing the Call for Papers, then it certainly should not
have done so.<br />
...<br />
Analysis of the Call for Papers is difficult because large chunks of
it are almost incomprehensible. But it clearly states as
incontrovertible facts: that the State of Israel depended for its
"initial existence" on a "unilateral" declaration of independence; that
Arabs were expelled in 1947-49; that the <i>Jewish</i> nature of the
state has profoundly affected the lives of Israeli Arabs (described as
"non-Jewish Arabs who were allowed to stay"); that Jewish nationality
bestows vital privileges (i.e. "constitutionally entrenched, privileged
citizenship to Jews"); that there are two layers of Israeli citizenship;
that there is an inherent differential between Jews and non-Jews; that
Israeli settlements are illegal; that there is or was "apartheid
colonisation" of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza; that there are
"constitutional challenges of equal citizenship;" and that Israel
inflicts "structured suffering" on the "non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs."<br />
The three main "pillar-themes" which the conference is intended to
link repeat some of these statements. They further state or assume: that
there is such a thing or place as "Historic Palestine" and that Israel
exists in that place; that Israel has an "inbuilt non-egalitarian basis"
and that the State of Israel is an unjust regime; and (to provide a
little variety) that the United States and Australia were established as
a consequence [<i>sic</i>] of "extreme violence towards indigenous populations."<br />
</blockquote>
One letter sent to this author and cited here with permission, said:<br />
<blockquote>
We have to hope... that the academic and legal arguments
were the true factors that swayed the university authorities. It is a
pity they have not admitted this openly. They have used a face-saving
argument rather than confess that the conference was ill-conceived from
the beginning and that they had been careless to approve it....<br />
</blockquote>
A precedent has been set. Israel haters who try to use the mask of
academic enquiry to cover up an extreme political position must accept
that the cancellation of the Southampton conference has sent out a
message to universities everywhere. Ilan Pappé, Oren Ben Dor, Richard
Falk, Ghadi Karmi and hundreds of other academic anti-Israel fanatics
will not stop their efforts as a result. No doubt, they will intensify
them. But the writing is on the wall: keep your politics out of the
groves of academe.<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Dr. Denis MacEoin taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at
a British university, has written numerous books, articles, and major
encyclopedia entries in his field. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow
at the Gatestone Institute.</i></blockquote>
</div>
</div>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-10575848643448906822015-03-16T10:37:00.001-07:002015-05-13T08:48:10.370-07:00Letter to Southampton UniversitySome days ago, I sent a letter by e-mail to Professor Hazel Biggs, Head of the Law School in Southampton University, where an anti-Irael conference is due to take place next month. A copy was also sent to the university's Vice Chancellor. Neither has had the courtesy to acknowledge receipt.<br />
<br />
Here is a copy of the letter, accompanied by a detailed analysis of participants by David Collier. I have placed several phrases in bold type in order to emphasize the radical nature of those taking part and the clear purpose of the conference. This is not a free speech matter, but a concern about academic integrity and balance. That such a distorted mockery of academic scholarship should take place under the auspices of a modern British university is a disturbing sign of how far rational and unbiased debate in academia is being hijacked by politically radical individuals and groups.<br />
<br />
FAO Prof. Hazel Biggs<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;">
Head of the School of Law<br />
Southampton University<br />
<br />
Dear Professor Biggs,<br />
<br />
I hope you will not object to my writing to you out of the blue, but I do want to address you as Head of Southampton University’s prestigious Law School, with regard to the “International Law and the State of Israel : Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” conference (<<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.southampton.ac.uk/israelpalestinelaw/index.page">http://www.southampton.ac.uk/israelpalestinelaw/index.page</a></u></span>>) to be held over the weekend of 17-19th April. The conference is advertised as a project of Southampton University, where it will take place, it is co-organized by one of the professors in your school, Professor Oren Ben-Dor, and its Southampton organizing committee is made up of Professor Ben-Dor, a Professor Suleiman Sharkh from Southampton’s school of engineering, Ms Juman Asmail, a recent graduate of your school, a political activist, and co-founder of the Southampton Students for Palestine, and Ms Jo Hazell, who appears to be an administrator based at your school. <br />
<br />
My interest in and concern about this conference comes from my own academic background. I have two 4-year MAs from Trinity College, Dublin and Edinburgh University, and a PhD from Cambridge (1979). I have lectured at the University of Fez in Morocco and at Newcastle University, where I taught Arabic and Islamic Studies. Currently, I am a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the New York Gatestone Institute. My research involves Islamic issues, Iran, Shi’ite Islam, the development of Islamism, and issues relating to Israel and the Palestinians. Despite all this, I shall not attend the conference. My reason is simple: it is the most blatantly biased and unacademic event I have ever come across, certainly in this country. A conference in which all the participants represent one political view, where the conclusions are foregone, and from which anyone with even a mildly defensive position towards Israel would face ridicule or insult from the majority of those present is not, for me at least, something that any university school, let alone with an international reputation like yours, should consider endorsing or hosting. This is not a matter for polite debate: the egregious bias of the participants alone places this event well outside the norms of academic discourse.<br />
<br />
I have pasted in below my signature a long list of the participants (and I have placed many phrases in bold type). Someone called David Collier (whom I do not know personally) has taken considerable effort to check the activities and affiliations of those planning to take part in the conference. I was shocked when I read through the list with his annotations. I for one, as someone who supports Israel’s record, know I would not be welcome there. It does not read like a balanced list of academics, but like a roll-call of extremists and political activists. Not one speaker listed takes a pro-Israel or even middle-of-the-road stance. Almost every single name is recorded as participating in the deeply unacademic boycott of Israel, through which any form of dialogue or academic cooperation with Israeli academics and students is forbidden, with a minority of individuals dictating how their colleagues should behave. This is not by any stretch of the imagination an academic conference, but a joint gathering of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions movement. The participants represent a hardline group of academics who have never called for a boycott of countries like Iran, whose human rights record is abysmal and where young members of its largest religious minority are banned from entry to colleges and universities; or Saudi Arabia, where a liberal journalist was recently sentences to 1000 lashes, ten years in Prison and a huge fine for writing things we might see as utterly unexceptional, and who now faces retrial on a charge of apostasy, which may lead to a death sentence. Where are the academics calling for boycotts of these and numerous other places where there is no free speech and no freedom to debate issues in the university sector. There are no restrictions on free speech in Israel as a whole and certainly not in the universities, yet British academics boycott it and even work to destroy the country entirely.<br />
<br />
I do not want this to sound like a rant, and I trust I have not expressed myself in ranting terms. But as someone with a lifelong involvement in academic pursuits, I am concerned that modern British campuses have become much less open to honest speech and debate than they were when I was a student. Pro-Israel speakers have been hounded out of lecture theatres in more than one place, anti-Semitism has become common on many campuses, and frank discussion on Islamic issues is rare. These are general problems, not yours; but this proposed conference definitely falls within your remit, which is why I feel it proper to write to you in these terms. Having recently published a lengthy paper exploring the question of whether Israeli troops committed war crimes in 2014, and finding that they almost certainly did not, and did not do so overall, I would be interested to take part in a conference that deals in part with this matter. But I barely need say that I would be afraid to set foot in the hall and to deliver my paper there, knowing that I would face a storm of condemnation merely for expressing support for the despised ‘Zionist entity’. Rationality has taken flight in all public discussion of Israel, in the media, on university campuses, within political parties. Academia should be free from that, and no academic should be frightened of taking part in a university-hosted conference.<br />
<br />
I can only ask you, in the spirit of fairness and academic freedom, to confer with the appropriate people in your university in order to decide whether a conference as thoroughly biased and academically unsound as this has any part to play in the advancement of scholarly debate or whether you are prepared to host an exercise in hate speech, discrimination, and the politicizing of academia. A group of extremists has clearly hijacked your school and Southampton University. If there was ever a sound case for the banning or total restructuring of a conference, this is surely it. If you can respond to me (and to the many people I know who stand behind me) and let me know your thinking about this contentious issue, I shall be most grateful.<br />
<br />
Yours sincerely,<br />
<br />
<br />
Dr. Denis MacEoin<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>LIST OF PARTICIPANTS<br />
</b><br />
(I have tried wherever possible to ensure maximum accuracy in this listing. Given the size of the list and the nuances involved, it was a large undertaking. Language was also a barrier, with some academics producing little or no work in English – I apologize in advance if any errors have been made.) (David Collier)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
PANEL 1 – History(s) of Palestine and International Law<br />
<br />
Prof. Gabi Piterberg from the University of California at Los Angeles. Piterberg has called Israel’s system akin to Apartheid and <b>actively supports the boycott</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/jews-apartheid-israel">http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/jews-apartheid-israel</a></u></span>> More on his perspective here <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/10/gabriel-piterberg-erasing-the-palestinians">http://newleftreview.org/II/10/gabriel-piterberg-erasing-the-palestinians</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
Professor Nur Masalha, St. Mary’s College, University of Surrey. Frequently described as <b>a Palestinian activist </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur-eldeen_Masalha">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur-eldeen_Masalha</a></u></span>> online. <b>Supports the general divestment and the academic boycotts </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx012709.html">http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx012709.html</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
Professor. Ilan Pappe, Department of History, University of Exeter. Hardly needs an introduction <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9</a></u></span>> , also described as an activist. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). <b>Firmly believes Israel is racist, apartheid, an ethnically cleansing state and so on. Actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/ilan-pappe-boycott-work-israeli-perspective/</u></span>> <br />
<br />
Dr. Victor Kattan, Law Faculty, National University of Singapore. <b>Actively supports the Palestinian position</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/in/victorkattan">http://uk.linkedin.com/in/victorkattan</a></u></span>> Called for papers <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.victorkattan.com/news-and-eventsDetail.php?18">http://www.victorkattan.com/news-and-eventsDetail.php?18</a></u></span>> on BDS and <b>actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.maannews.com/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?id=437594">http://www.maannews.com/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?id=437594</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Professor Nadim N. Rouhana, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. <b>Spoken on the one state solution </b>(which would involve the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and lead to an Islamist state under Hamas). <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://newsclick.in/international/israeli-palestinian-conflict-one-state-solution">http://newsclick.in/international/israeli-palestinian-conflict-one-state-solution</a></u></span>> And <b>spoke during Israeli Apartheid week</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://stoprapingpalestine.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/boycott-products-of-apartheid.html">http://stoprapingpalestine.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/boycott-products-of-apartheid.html</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
After lunch speaker – Professor Richard Falk. Professor of International Law, Princeton University. Another one that needs little introduction, with his own personal wiki section <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk#Israeli-Palestinian_conflict">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk#Israeli-Palestinian_conflict</a></u></span>> on the conflict. <b>Has compared Israel’s policies to the Nazis </b>and wrote an article called “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/falk070707.htm">http://www.countercurrents.org/falk070707.htm</a></u></span>> ”. <b>Actively supports the boycott, </b>calling it a ‘civic duty’. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/2010/falk-state-responsibility-5056">http://www.bdsmovement.net/2010/falk-state-responsibility-5056</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
PANEL 2 – Political Philosophy and Political Zionism<br />
<br />
Professor Yosefa Loshitzky, School of Oriental and African Studies. Loshitzky is currently writing a book <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff63737.php</u></span>> called ‘Just Jews? Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Culture and Beyond’. Make of that what you will. <b>Talks about how Israelis enjoy</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-blonde-bombshells-and-real-bombs-gaza/7923">http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-blonde-bombshells-and-real-bombs-gaza/7923</a></u></span>> <b>the suffering of Palestinians, uses Nazi metaphors</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/10/letters-gaza-uk">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/10/letters-gaza-uk</a></u></span>> to describe the conflict and <b>actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/2009/academics-in-the-uk-call-for-bds-to-stop-gaza-massacres-270">http://www.bdsmovement.net/2009/academics-in-the-uk-call-for-bds-to-stop-gaza-massacres-270</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Professor Brad Roth <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_R._Roth">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_R._Roth</a></u></span>> , Wayne State University. Less writing available online, but <b>actively supported a boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/trayf/full-text-of-petition">http://www.slideshare.net/trayf/full-text-of-petition</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Dr. Sylvie Delacroix, University College, London. The first of the panellists who I could not place on any boycott list. Has spoken about <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE3phOMAPjk</u></span>> the Palestinian constitution (the YouTube title is misleading). An article she wrote on the subject was titled in deference <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://philpapers.org/archive/DELDAC.pdf">http://philpapers.org/archive/DELDAC.pdf</a></u></span>> to a Mahmoud Darwish quote. Her only reference to violence was to suggest the first Intifada <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada#Casualties">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada#Casualties</a></u></span>> which “may never have managed to be completely non-violent”. An interesting description of a 6 year fight that saw 200 Israelis killed, 3000 injured and an extraordinary 1000 Palestinian lives lost to intra-Palestinian violence. Having said that, credit where it is due, <b>Delacroix seems to take the most balanced academic approach of all those referenced to this point.<br />
</b><br />
Dr. Ronit Lentin, Retired Associate Professor Sociology, Trinity College, Dublin. Wiki states <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronit_Lentin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronit_Lentin</a></u></span>> Lentin “has published extensively on racism”, <b>described by BDS Sydney</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://sydneystaff4bds.org/?p=194">http://sydneystaff4bds.org/?p=194</a></u></span>> <b>as an ‘activist’</b>, Lentin has said “Israel is determined to eliminate the Palestinians <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgjzQ_iJ8yw</u></span>> ”, “a logic of genocide”. <b>Actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://twitter.com/ronitlentin</u></span>> <br />
<br />
PANEL 3: Apartheid as an International Crime – the legal implications for Palestine<br />
<br />
Dr. John Reynolds, Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway. Reynolds participation in a 2013 paper ‘Apartheid, International Law <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/john-reynolds</u></span>> , and the Occupied Palestinian Territory’. <b>States elsewhere that Israel is a colonial power</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://citizenpartridge.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/audio-john-reynolds-meeting-on-palestines-%E2%80%98un-statehood-bid%E2%80%99</u></span>> , <b>the resistance is understandable, the rockets are understandable and supports the boycott <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.ipsc.ie/category/bds/page/15">http://www.ipsc.ie/category/bds/page/15</a></u></span>> <br />
</b><br />
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, Webster University Vienna. Lowestedt <b>claims that 98% of “all gross human rights</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.inminds.co.uk/article.php?id=10024">http://www.inminds.co.uk/article.php?id=10024</a></u></span>> <b>violations so far committed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews, and talks of Israeli apartheid.</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://media.manila.at/gesellschaft/gems/Apartheid6.pdf">http://media.manila.at/gesellschaft/gems/Apartheid6.pdf</a></u></span>> In that piece Lowestedt claims that “the Israel lobby does not take it well that students are still to some extent being told and taught the truth about Israel and Palestine”. <b>He references “The Israeli state death squads”</b> and claims that ““In many cases, it is enough for a Palestinian to get killed if s/he even looks at a military installation or a soldier the wrong way”. <b>He claims “the supreme goal is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians</b> from <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=14585">http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=14585</a></u></span>> Palestine” although whilst in Israel he “did not get to discuss this matter in detail with Israelis”. <b>Riddled with inaccuracies such as “you must be a Jew to serve in the Israeli army and if you are not a Jew you cannot serve in the army”, distortions and statistical headstands,</b> these pieces show that Lowstedt’s opinion is driven fiercely by his internal clock rather than through some academic process of research.<br />
<br />
Professor George Bisharat, University of California. Bisharat is a Palestinian-American professor <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bisharat">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bisharat</a></u></span>> of law who clearly supports a one state solution <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/25/opinion/op-bisharat25/2">http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/25/opinion/op-bisharat25/2</a></u></span>> . <b>He believes Israel is committing war crimes</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123154826952369919">http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123154826952369919</a></u></span>> and <b>calls for a boycott of Israeli apartheid </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/35/">http://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/35/</a></u></span>> . Bisharat continually uses Nazi references <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/05/14/for-palestinians-memory-matters">http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/05/14/for-palestinians-memory-matters</a></u></span>> , <b>talks of massacres and master plans</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/9/24/conflicting-rallies-highlight-lebanon-pwith-two/">http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/9/24/conflicting-rallies-highlight-lebanon-pwith-two/</a></u></span>> and frequently addresses complex historic events with simple sound bites <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchW5oSzU6Y</u></span>> , <b>one sided propaganda, and outright distortions.<br />
</b><br />
Professor Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton. One of the organisers and ‘hosts’ for the event, he has claimed “Israeli Apartheid is the Core of the Crisis <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/06/23/israeli-apartheid-is-the-core-of-the-crisis/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/06/23/israeli-apartheid-is-the-core-of-the-crisis/</a></u></span>> ”, going on of course to claim “Only when this realization sinks in will it be possible to envision a stable political solution–a single state over all historic Palestine”. <b>Ben Dor actively supports the boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/academic-boycott-will-lead-israeli-self-examination/5602">http://electronicintifada.net/content/academic-boycott-will-lead-israeli-self-examination/5602</a></u></span>> and another piece against the silencing of Gilad Atzmon, <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Atzmon">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Atzmon</a></u></span>> provide a wonderful insight into the hypocrisy and double standards <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/15/the-silencing-of-gilad-atzmon/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/15/the-silencing-of-gilad-atzmon/</a></u></span>> of leading academics who promote the Israeli boycott.<br />
<br />
The panel is followed by ‘Unmade Film’ an exhibition by Uriel Orlow which parallels the Holocaust and Deir Yassin. <b>Orlow recently spent an evening with the Hackney Branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://hackneypsc.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/first-person-political-artists-respond</u></span>> and <b>has frequently signed up</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/07/statement-israeli-academics-july-2014">http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/07/statement-israeli-academics-july-2014</a></u></span>> <b> for anti-israeli petitions.</b> The closing act of the day is Elias Khoury <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Khoury">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Khoury</a></u></span>> , A Lebanese author. Khoury ‘spent years gathering from refugees their personal histories of the mass expulsions that attended the creation of Israel. He felt the stories should be given to an Arab Tolstoy <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jul/28/fiction.politics">http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jul/28/fiction.politics</a></u></span>> , and imagined himself in the role’<br />
<br />
PANEL 4: Legitimacy, Self-Determination and Political Zionism<br />
<br />
Professor John Strawson, University of East London. Strawson held a previous post at Birzeit University <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Strawson">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Strawson</a></u></span>> and <b>appears as a signee on anti-Israeli declarations</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/this-letter-of-attorneys-and-academics.html">http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/this-letter-of-attorneys-and-academics.html</a></u></span>> . Strawson is the first academic on the list who seems to reject the label Apartheid, which in turns raises the question – why wasn’t he on the Apartheid panel?<br />
<br />
Dr. Ghada Karmi, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies University of Exeter. Writes frequently on Palestinian issues in newspapers and magazines. According to the Wiki page <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghada_Karmi">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghada_Karmi</a></u></span>> , <b>Karmi clearly believes that “Israel does not deserve to continue as a state”</b>. <b>In favour of a one state solution</b> she notes “would be the end of a Jewish state in our region”. Karmi <b>openly calls herself an activist</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jnFhIkDSNo</u></span>> , <b>describing Zionism a “loathsome” ideology. </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2008/04/one-of-the-fasc">http://mondoweiss.net/2008/04/one-of-the-fasc</a></u></span>> Karmi incredibly declares in the same piece that the radicalization and extremism of Arab societies “can be traced back to Israel.” Apparently another academic with a mental block, she <b>declares there were no pogroms in Arab lands, and actively promotes the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/educators-waiting-governments">http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/educators-waiting-governments</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Dr. Blake Alcott, Unaffiliated Researcher, London. Alcott’s article <b> ‘a two-state solution is a Zionist solution’</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.deliberation.info/two-state-solution-is-a-zionist-solution/">http://www.deliberation.info/two-state-solution-is-a-zionist-solution/</a></u></span>> clearly states his position as he declares that the Zionist goal is for ‘eretz israel’ to be ‘Araberrein’, which again sees Nazi terminology used in descriptions of Zionism. Calls Noam Chomsky a ‘soft zionist’ and <b>actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://backtheboycott.com/">http://backtheboycott.com/</a></u></span>> . Hypocritically, Alcott finds bias uncomfortable <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/13/why-jonathan-freedland-isnt-fit-to-be-the-new-editor-in-chief-of-the-guardian/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/13/why-jonathan-freedland-isnt-fit-to-be-the-new-editor-in-chief-of-the-guardian/</a></u></span>> when it doesn’t suit him.<br />
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Ntina Tzouvala, Doctoral Researcher, Law School, University of Durham,UK. Still working towards a PHD <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.dur.ac.uk/law/staff/?id=10960</u></span>> and not much to find on Tzouvala in English<br />
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PANEL 5 Israel’s Domestic Law: Inbuilt Limits of Constitutional Reflection?<br />
Lea Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Tsemel">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Tsemel</a></u></span>> and leading human rights activist. <b>Described by the BBC</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3087051.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3087051.stm</a></u></span>> <b>as “the woman who defends suicide bombers”</b>. Has stated the country took a cue from Nazi Germany <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1988-04-27/news/vw-1836_1_lea-tsemel/2">http://articles.latimes.com/1988-04-27/news/vw-1836_1_lea-tsemel/2</a></u></span>> –“the same racism, the same hatred, the same ideology of super race. Tsemel <b>has supported the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/17/gaza-israelandthepalestinians1">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/17/gaza-israelandthepalestinians1</a></u></span>> <br />
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Sawsan Zaher, Senior Attorney at Adalah. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.adalah.org/en">http://www.adalah.org/en</a></u></span>> Stated that ‘discriminatory policies are one thing but when you have discriminatory laws, this is apartheid <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/apartheid-now-officially-the-law-in-israel</u></span>> ‘.<br />
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Dr. Valentina Azarov (Al-Quds University). Quite an academic backstory <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.nuigalway.ie/irish-centre-human-rights/academics/doctoralcandidateslistfromtabs/valentinaazarov">http://www.nuigalway.ie/irish-centre-human-rights/academics/doctoralcandidateslistfromtabs/valentinaazarov</a></u></span>> but hardly one that suggests academic even-handedness. <b>Actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/valentina-azarov/from-periphery-to-centre-israels-legitimacy-palestines-un-bid-and-icc</u></span>> and believes the solution to the issues <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2014/12/criminal-palestinian-independence.html">http://www.juancole.com/2014/12/criminal-palestinian-independence.html</a></u></span>> are to be found in the international criminal courts.<br />
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Dr. Mazen Masri, City University, London. Has served as legal advisor to the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Masri is <b>active in supporting the boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/needs-no-introduction/2009/12/toronto-declaration-celebration-solidarity">http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/needs-no-introduction/2009/12/toronto-declaration-celebration-solidarity</a></u></span>> and <b>uses parallels of apartheid</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/can-rights-be-won-israels-courts/11355">http://electronicintifada.net/content/can-rights-be-won-israels-courts/11355</a></u></span>> <b>to describe the israeli system.<br />
</b><br />
PANEL 6: Israeli Citizenship and Israeli Nationality.<br />
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Dr. Jeff Handmaker, the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.egs3h.eur.nl/people/j-d-handmaker">http://www.egs3h.eur.nl/people/j-d-handmaker</a></u></span>> . Suggests companies such as IKEA are complicit <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://twitter.com/drjdhandmaker</u></span>> in a serious human rights violation, lending support to the settlement enterprise. Apartheid, war crimes, cover-up’s, quite the collection. Handmaker <b>has argued that ‘true humanity’ </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/search-true-humanity/6333">http://electronicintifada.net/content/search-true-humanity/6333</a></u></span>> <b>will be found when “the Israeli regime is held accountable for decades of repression, dispossession and regional destabilisation.”<br />
</b><br />
Yoella Har-Sheffi (sp?). Har-Sheffi is apparently not a practising University Academic, so beyond understanding she is in the legal field, there is little to find on her in English. She did argue for the ban of Wagner to be lifted, <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Ring-Myths-Israelis-Wagner/dp/1845195744">http://www.amazon.com/The-Ring-Myths-Israelis-Wagner/dp/1845195744</a></u></span>> was ‘fired’ from her mainstream paper as a journalist for her beliefs and <b>openly deplored Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Governments-Lie-Times-Journalist/dp/1416556796">http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Governments-Lie-Times-Journalist/dp/1416556796</a></u></span>> . <b>Called on the UK government to recognise Palestine </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.atzuma.co.il/openletter">http://www.atzuma.co.il/openletter</a></u></span>> .<br />
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Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, writer, Journalist, member of Jaffa One State. Yeshua Lyth <b>says that a secular democratic state is actually a call for the annihilation of Israel</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/ofra-yeshua-israeli#sthash.WR6hKtsU.dpuf">http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/ofra-yeshua-israeli#sthash.WR6hKtsU.dpuf</a></u></span>> , a call she supports. <b>Claims Israel built an apartheid state on the basis of religion and ethnicity.</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://ofrayeshualyth.info/eli-aminov/">http://ofrayeshualyth.info/eli-aminov/</a></u></span>> <b>Actively supports the boycott.</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://boycottisrael.info/content/israeli-citizens-write-dr-gregor-gysi-and-die-linke">http://boycottisrael.info/content/israeli-citizens-write-dr-gregor-gysi-and-die-linke</a></u></span>> <br />
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Noura Erakat, Assistant Professor, George Mason University. Described as a <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noura_Erakat">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noura_Erakat</a></u></span>> Palestinian American legal scholar. <b>Goes beyond Apartheid</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/structural-roots-israeli-apartheid-20131028101932219688.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/structural-roots-israeli-apartheid-20131028101932219688.html</a></u></span>> <b>to declare Israeli policies are “ethnic cleansing”</b>. Erakat’s party pieces are <b>pure propaganda, full of distorted facts and out of context responses</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://m.thenation.com/article/180783-five-israeli-talking-points-gaza-debunked">http://m.thenation.com/article/180783-five-israeli-talking-points-gaza-debunked</a></u></span>> . Erakat <b>actively supports the boycott. </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15346/toward-an-ethic-of-legitimate-dissent_academic-boy">http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15346/toward-an-ethic-of-legitimate-dissent_academic-boy</a></u></span>> <br />
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PANEL 7: Israel’s Regime of Property Rights, Labour, Education and Housing<br />
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Dr Uri Davis, Al-Quds University, Jerusalem Abu Dis, and University of Exeter, UK. Although an academic, the wiki page <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Davis">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Davis</a></u></span>> , refers to him as <b>an activist</b>, who was the ‘<b>founding member of the Movement against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine</b>’. <b>Actively promotes the boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/davis-uri</u></span>> .<br />
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Mia Tamarin. Israeli who studied in the UK and applied for conscientious objecter status and became <b>an activist</b> on her return to Israel. Beyond doing the rounds, being held aloft by those on the other side of the great divide and clearly suited to the agenda <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.uwc.org/our_impact/alumni_profiles/clinton_global_initiative_profiles/mia_tamarin.aspx">http://www.uwc.org/our_impact/alumni_profiles/clinton_global_initiative_profiles/mia_tamarin.aspx</a></u></span>> , one can only ask academically, what she is doing there.<br />
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Dr. Haitam Suleiman, al-Quds University, Jerusalem, and Prof. Robert Home, Law School, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom. Have worked together on a paper <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://commission-on-legal-pluralism.com/volumes/59/suleimanhome-art.pdf">http://commission-on-legal-pluralism.com/volumes/59/suleimanhome-art.pdf</a></u></span>> that <b>suggests Israel’s story now lies ‘within a colonial and postcolonial narrative’ </b>and explains the article is the outcome of field research undertaken by a Palestinian Arab living in Israel (Suleiman).<br />
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Claris Harbon, Doctoral Researcher, McGill University. Specialises mainly on subjects concerning the subordination of subaltern minorities <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/files/_nea/174402_Claris-Harbon-Fullbio.pdf">http://www.mcgill.ca/files/_nea/174402_Claris-Harbon-Fullbio.pdf</a></u></span>> and disempowered groups such as Mizrahis (Jews of Arab/Muslim Descent), women, Arab- Israelis and children. Works on another aspect of a discriminatory Israel, specifically from an Asheknazi /Spharedi <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPabAVgfXQ8</u></span>> angle.<br />
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PANEL 8: Palestine in Comparative Re-thinking of International Law<br />
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Dr. Monika Halkot, Department of Communication Arts, American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Unable to locate via the English university website <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aub.edu.lb/main/Pages/index.aspx">http://www.aub.edu.lb/main/Pages/index.aspx</a></u></span>> , despite the comprehensive listings. Unable to locate on Google.<br />
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Dr. Marcelo Svirsky. Wollongong University, Australia. Only need to read this piece ‘From Auschwitz To Sderot: The Decline Of Our Humanity <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://newmatilda.com/2014/08/01/auschwitz-sderot-decline-our-humanity</u></span>> ‘ to understand his position. <b>Actively supports the boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://australiansforbds.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/from-sydney-to-canberra-svirsky.pdf</u></span>> .<br />
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Dr. Michael Kearney, School of Law, University of Sussex, UK. International Law speech that <b>deals with Israeli ‘apartheid’</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.mixcloud.com/RadioFreeBrighton/international-law-lecture-on-palestine-with-dr-michael-kearney/</u></span>> , <b>an article on Israeli ‘war crimes’ </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/what-would-happen-if-palestine-joined-international-criminal-court/13783">http://electronicintifada.net/content/what-would-happen-if-palestine-joined-international-criminal-court/13783</a></u></span>> .<br />
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Professor Ugo Mattei, Distinguished Professor of Law <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugo_Mattei">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugo_Mattei</a></u></span>> , and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law. <b>Signed the ‘One State Declaration’</b> <http: color="#0000FF" font=""><u><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/one-state-declaration/793">http://electronicintifada.net/content/one-state-declaration/793</a></u></http:></span></span>> (the end of Israel).<br />
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PANEL 9: Assumption of Responsibility for the Suffering in Palestine<br />
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Dr. Regina Rauxloh, Associate Professor in Law, University of Southampton. Israel does not <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/about/staff/rer1y12.page#publications">http://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/about/staff/rer1y12.page#publications</a></u></span>> appear to be Rauxloh’s field, so I assume if her associate, Professor Oren Ben-Dor was not holding this on this own home turf, Rauxloh wouldn’t be present.<br />
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Professor Kevin Jon Heller, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),London. Another academic from <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff86828.php</u></span>> SOAS, he states here he is “generally wary of academic boycotts <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://david-collier.com/generally%20wary%20of%20academic%20boycotts">http://david-collier.com/generally%20wary%20of%20academic%20boycotts</a></u></span>> “, so it would be interesting to know how he voted in the recent SOAS wide boycott vote that saw a 60-40% split <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://soasunion.org/news/article/6013/Students-Union-Statement-on-SOAS-wide-Referendum-on-Academic-Boycott/">http://soasunion.org/news/article/6013/Students-Union-Statement-on-SOAS-wide-Referendum-on-Academic-Boycott/</a></u></span>> amongst ‘SOAS staff’. Heller not as rabid as his colleagues, but still maintains a clear fascination <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://twitter.com/kevinjonheller</u></span>> with <b>tweets such as “Israel doesn’t need tunnels. It sows #terror through bombs, artillery, missiles, tanks, ground troops”.<br />
</b><br />
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Hebrew University, Jerusalem <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://gruber.yale.edu/womens-rights/nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian">http://gruber.yale.edu/womens-rights/nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian</a></u></span>> . Talks of policies of fear and colonialism, <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://david-collier.com/Surveillance,%20Fear%20and%20Israeli%20Colonialism">http://david-collier.com/Surveillance,%20Fear%20and%20Israeli%20Colonialism</a></u></span>> <b>politicises the internal violence against Palestinian women by suggesting “Colonialism is empowering killers</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9061/the-politics-of-killing-women-in-colonized-context">http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9061/the-politics-of-killing-women-in-colonized-context</a></u></span>> and sustaining internal crimes through bureaucratic and legal means”. <b>Is part of the pro-Palestinian speaking</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHue0S_k7Mk</u></span>> <b>circuit</b>, incredibly <b>suggests here that ‘ Rape and other forms of sexual violence against Palestinian women</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/human-rights/militarization-and-violence-against-women-conflict-zones-middle-east-palestinian-case-study">http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/human-rights/militarization-and-violence-against-women-conflict-zones-middle-east-palestinian-case-study</a></u></span>> <b>have always been an element of the settler colonial state’s attempts to destroy and eliminate indigenous Palestinians from their land’.<br />
</b><br />
Salma Karmi Ayyub, Criminal Barrister, UK. Is or has been an external consultant <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/salma-karmi-ayyoub">http://www.thenation.com/authors/salma-karmi-ayyoub</a></u></span>> for the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq. <b>Writes frequently about possible Israeli war crimes, </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://david-collier.com/Dutch%20probe%20sends%20warning%20to%20firms%20abetting%20Israel%E2%80%99s%20crimes">http://david-collier.com/Dutch%20probe%20sends%20warning%20to%20firms%20abetting%20Israel%E2%80%99s%20crimes</a></u></span>> taking Israel to the ICC <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/01/06/why-the-palestinian-authority-may-never-take-israel-to-court/">http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/01/06/why-the-palestinian-authority-may-never-take-israel-to-court/</a></u></span>> is described as <b>a leading Palestinian activist </b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/time-boycott-israel-20141116114716395219.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/time-boycott-israel-20141116114716395219.html</a></u></span>> who <b>discusses and defends BDS </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/time-boycott-israel-20141116114716395219.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/time-boycott-israel-20141116114716395219.html</a></u></span>> in this video.<br />
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PANEL 10: Responsibility for Return<br />
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Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta, Land Society Palestine. Abu-Sitta is a Palestinian researcher <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Abu_Sitta">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Abu_Sitta</a></u></span>> . He writes about Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian right of return. States “Palestine is the patrimony <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.plands.org/speechs/019.html">http://www.plands.org/speechs/019.html</a></u></span>> of Palestinians. No amount of spin, Hasbara, or Za’bara, myths, bombs, F16s, roadblocks, siege, walls, ethnic cleansing and Apartheid will change that. Remember that”. <b>Supports a boycott. </b><http: color="#0000FF" font=""><u><a href="http://www.usacbi.org/2013/12/call-to-boycott-the-oral-history-conference-at-the-hebrew-university-of-jerusalem-open-letter/">http://www.usacbi.org/2013/12/call-to-boycott-the-oral-history-conference-at-the-hebrew-university-of-jerusalem-open-letter/</a></u></http:><br />
> <br />
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Dr. Ruba Salih, Reader in Gender Studies, SOAS, London. Palestinian academic, has written and researched Palestinian issues, including this piece on the refugees <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18303/">http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18303/</a></u></span>> . <b>Opposes sanctions against Iran</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUa3ZcnbgLE</u></span>> as sanctions hurt the children and the weak, <b>supports boycott against Israel</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-scholars-and-librarians-call">http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-scholars-and-librarians-call</a></u></span>-> .<br />
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Dr. Catriona Drew, School of Law, SOAS. Unsure of her academic position as only has one article listed on the SOAS <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff30882.php</u></span>> site. Called on the UK to stop <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/14/gaza-israel-palestine-letters">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/14/gaza-israel-palestine-letters</a></u></span>> the violence in Gaza. Does not publicly appear to participate in BDS.<br />
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Dr. Mutaz Qafisheh, College of Law, Hebron University. Wrote on Palestine in the UN. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://david-collier.com/Palestine%20Membership%20in%20the%20United%20Nations">http://david-collier.com/Palestine%20Membership%20in%20the%20United%20Nations</a></u></span>> Was a Legal Advisor and Project Manager <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://elearning.hebron.edu/EPortfolio/user/view.php?id=103">http://elearning.hebron.edu/EPortfolio/user/view.php?id=103</a></u></span>> for the Palestinian Legislative Council.<br />
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PANEL 11: Responsibility and Belonging, Religion, Politics and Law.<br />
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Dr. Hatem Bazian, Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. <b>A Palestinian activist,</b> Bazian’s ‘reading list’ <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.academia.edu/9454390/Dr._Hatem_Bazians_Recommended_Reading_List_for_Palestine">http://www.academia.edu/9454390/Dr._Hatem_Bazians_Recommended_Reading_List_for_Palestine</a></u></span>> for Palestine highlights how he views balance and integrity in academic research. From an online search, Bazian <b>seems one of the most extreme of the ‘esteemed academics’ on display at the conference</b>. <b>Talks of Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, Murder and Oppression</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.lamppostproductions.com/gaza-the-murder-and-destruction-of-the-palestinians-dr-hatem-bazian/">http://www.lamppostproductions.com/gaza-the-murder-and-destruction-of-the-palestinians-dr-hatem-bazian/</a></u></span>> <b>Called for an international day of action for Palestine</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/palestine-teach-in">http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/palestine-teach-in</a></u></span>> , is an activist on Twitter <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://twitter.com/hatembazian/status/494637682572529664</u></span>> and Facebook <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.facebook.com/dr.bazian</u></span>> and <b>actively calls for a boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/power-people-extending-israel-boy-2014869508785171.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/power-people-extending-israel-boy-2014869508785171.html</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Professor Yakov Rabkin, Professor of History, University of Montréal. Author of a book A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_M._Rabkin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_M._Rabkin</a></u></span>> . <b>Claims Israel’s ‘turn to the right’</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/from-left-to-right-israels-repositioning-in-the-world/5429800">http://www.globalresearch.ca/from-left-to-right-israels-repositioning-in-the-world/5429800</a></u></span>> <b>is now termed fascist by ‘the mainstream’ and Israel has “become a beacon for right-wing movements around the world thanks to a gamut of ideological, political, economic and military values contained in political Zionism”</b>. <b>Active against Zionism, fights against the anti-Semitic label of the boycott and promotes the legitimacy of the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/on-anti-semitism-boycotts-and-the-case-of-hermann-dierkes-by-authors-many/</u></span>> , if not the boycott itself.<br />
<br />
Professor Haim Bresheeth, School of Oriental and African Studies. Another scholar who is <b>a self-described activist.</b> In a piece that I am sure even he may consider foolish <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.academia.edu/1488553/Israel_Stuck_in_the_collapsing_certainties_of_tyranny_and_corruption">http://www.academia.edu/1488553/Israel_Stuck_in_the_collapsing_certainties_of_tyranny_and_corruption</a></u></span>> today Bresheeth states that Israel can only be explained by the many decades of instrumental colonialism, a place where to be ‘pro Israeli’ is to be foolish. That Israel will only relent under the most intense political, financial and cultural pressure from the world community. That pressure is now developing swiftly, and is now more likely than ever to lead to the collapse of the apartheid state <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.academia.edu/1488553/Israel_Stuck_in_the_collapsing_certainties_of_tyranny_and_corruption">http://www.academia.edu/1488553/Israel_Stuck_in_the_collapsing_certainties_of_tyranny_and_corruption</a></u></span>> in the Middle East. <b>Actively supported the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.ipsc.ie/event/cork-prof-haim-bresheeth-the-tui-bds-motion-the-need-to-boycott-the-israeli-academicmilitaryoccupation-complex-academics-for-palestine">http://www.ipsc.ie/event/cork-prof-haim-bresheeth-the-tui-bds-motion-the-need-to-boycott-the-israeli-academicmilitaryoccupation-complex-academics-for-palestine</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Professor Gil Anidjar, Department of Religion, Columbia University. Another academic whose <b>name seems to be tied in with anything that is against Israel</b>. Saw the Geneva Accord <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Initiative_%282003%29">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Initiative_%282003%29</a></u></span>> as too bad a deal for Palestinians, agreed with a statement that calls the current situation apartheid <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/451">http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/451</a></u></span>> and <b>actively supports boycott</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-scholars-and-librarians-call">http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-scholars-and-librarians-call</a></u></span>-> <br />
<br />
PANEL 12: Responsibility and Belonging: Palestine as Political, Ecological and Legal Space<br />
<br />
Professor Joel Kovel, Unaffiliated Researcher. Another academic referred to as <b>a ‘political activist’</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kovel">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kovel</a></u></span>> . Kovel’s 2007 book Overcoming Zionism argues that “the creation of Israel was a mistake”. <b>Argues that Israel practices ‘state-sponsored racism’</b> <ttp: sept-20-2007-joel-kovel-zionism-and-its-discontents="" www.boycottisraeliapartheid.org=""> <b>fully as incorrigible as that of apartheid South Africa</b> and deserving of the same resolution. <b>Has been active in calling for a boycott of Israel</b>. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://peoplesgeography.com/2007/10/10/joel-kovel-overcoming-zionism">http://peoplesgeography.com/2007/10/10/joel-kovel-overcoming-zionism</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
Eitan Bronstein Aparicio. Described as a ‘de-colonizer’ <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuVRzc0CZao</u></span>> and in that video says the system meets the definition of Apartheid. One of the founders of Zochrot <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/expulsion-of-palestinians-from-ancestral-homeland-in-1948-remembered">http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/expulsion-of-palestinians-from-ancestral-homeland-in-1948-remembered</a></u></span>> . Bronstein Aparicio <b>Actively supports the boycott</b> <<span style="color: blue;"><u>https://www.change.org/p/american-studies-association-jews-of-conscience-salute-the-asa-for-boycotting-apartheid-israel</u></span>> .<br />
<br />
Mr. Walaa Sbeit, musician, Iqrit, Palestine / Mr. John Assi, Director of the UNESCO Chair on Human Rights and Democracy at al-Najah University. Sbeit is a Palestinian musician <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/06/20136811252772542.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/06/20136811252772542.html</a></u></span>> whilst Assi, from a University in Nablus, is active in calling for a ‘nuclear free Israel’. <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://uspeacecouncil.org/?p=2497">http://uspeacecouncil.org/?p=2497</a></u></span>> <br />
<br />
Professor Virginia Tilley, Department of Political Science, Southern Illinois University. Wrote a book called ‘the One State Solution’ <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tilley">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tilley</a></u></span>> and <b>led a research team that “found that Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are consistent with colonialism and apartheid </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/163291">http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/163291</a></u></span>> ”. This piece is a must read <<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/15/what-are-you-going-to-do-now-israel/%20">http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/15/what-are-you-going-to-do-now-israel/%20</a></u></span>> to understand Tilley’s mind-set and Tilley <b>actively supports boycott </b><<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.voltairenet.org/article161076.html">http://www.voltairenet.org/article161076.html</a></u></span>> .<br />
<br />
PANEL 13 / A round table is planned with new speakers expected to be added.</ttp:>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-9471995228979671902014-04-09T08:40:00.004-07:002014-04-09T08:40:40.601-07:00Here's a letter to the Editor of the Financial Times. It wasn't published. Grrrr<br />
<br />
Dear Sir,<br />
Your correspondent David Gardner may live in Beirut, but he dwells in
a very different world than mine. In his defamatory article on the
Israel-Palestionian peace talks (‘US plays the crooked lawyer in an
Israeli-Palestinian drama,’, April 4), he parades a host of assertions
that no sane observer of the situation would accept as factually
correct. But he makes things worse by his egregious complaint that
Benjamin Netanyahu is blocking the way to peace by refusing to release a
fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners currently serving life sentences
for committing brutal murders of innocent civilians, namely Jewish men,
women, and children.<br />
Over the years, Israel has released hundreds of murderers with blood
on their hands, and the Palestinians have welcomed them home with loud
applause, as heroes and heroines. Do David Gardner and I even live in
the same moral universe? The Palestinian prisoners may suffer for their
heinous crimes, but is that unjust? For that matter, there are hundreds
of Israeli families who still suffer daily from the loss of husbands,
wives, brothers, sisters, and much-loved children. Will the Palestinians
put that right? Do they even care? Do they want peace or another chance
to fulfill their ambition of 66 years: to drive the Jews into the sea
and establish a Palestinian state, as they say every day, ‘from the
river to the sea.’ No more Israel, no more Jews, and badges of honour
for every miserable murderer in sight.<br />
Yours sincerely,<br />
Dr. Denis MacEoin<br />
Senior Distinguished Scholar, the Gatestone Institute<br />
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-64764082630514118002013-11-28T09:01:00.000-08:002013-11-28T09:01:17.714-08:00The letter below was written to the Anglican Bishop of Wakefield a few months ago. I have had no reply from him.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;">FAO Rt Rev. Stephen Platten<br />
Lord Bishop of Wakefield<br />
<br />
Your Grace,<br />
<br />
I believe you have a special interest in Northumberland, so I hope you will not take amiss an e-mail letter from Newcastle upon Tyne. I am writing from home, which is within easy walking distance of St. George’s Church in Jesmond, perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the most beautiful in the North of England, and which you may have visited on trips to the region.<br />
<br />
I was for several years Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, and I have written at length on Islamic subjects, including articles for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam . As an Islamicist, I take on ongoing interest in modern aspects of the religion, including matters of Middle East politics. My specialisms are Iran (my PhD is in Persian Studies) and, for over a decade now, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, especially its religious features, which are too often neglected by the press and most commentators.<br />
<br />
Because of this, I found myself taken aback by a remark you made in a recent House of Lords debate on The Arab Spring. Inter alia, you remarked that ‘In Israel, Arab Christians are fleeing their ancestral land and homes. Many of your Lordships will know the statistics, and the numbers seem to increase as the weeks, months and years go by. Alongside the events in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, it is a human tragedy of historic proportions.’<br />
<br />
I wonder how you came by this conceit, for it is entirely untrue. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where, since 1948, Christian numbers have been growing, so that the Christian communities living there are now larger than they were before it became a Jewish state. In percentage terms, the Christian community of Israel, has increased by 1,000%. Christians are among the best-educated and prosperous sectors of the Israeli population. Nobody is fleeing. When Israel controlled the West Bank, the population of Bethlehem rise by 57%, but when the city was returned to Palestinian Authority control, a combination of death threats, acts of violence and desecration of holy places like the Churchy of the Nativity has seen the Christian community drop from 15% overall to 2%.<br />
<br />
The same story is true across the Middle East, where general prejudice and Islamist murders have combined to produce an exodus that may yet result in a total disappearance of Christians from the region – except in Israel. Yet you chose to singlew out Israel as, seemingly, the on ly country that has conditions that force Christians to flee.<br />
<br />
As regards conditions there, let me introduce something you may be unaware of. My particular academic contribution has been the study of the Baha’is and their predecessor sect, the Babis. As you may know, the Baha’is have been severely persecuted since the arrival of the Islamic Republic. Hundreds of leaders have been executed – including several women and a fifteen-year-old girl for the crime of teaching Sunday school). Young Baha’is are forbidden to enrol in university. Older Baha’is are denied their state pensions. They are not allowed to meet, to publish their scriptures, and more. Most shocking to me is the destruction (by which I mean bulldozing) of all their holy sites (most of which I have visited) and all their cemeteries (from which corpses have been exhumed) in acts of the purest spite.<br />
<br />
Why mention the Baha’is? Well, one of the most popular tourist sites (a UNESCO World Heritage site) in Israel is the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, a complex of white marble buildings and splendid gardens that may be the finest in the Mediterranean region. There is another Baha’i shrine (their holiest, and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site) across the bay, near Acre.<br />
<br />
There is nowhere in the Muslim world where the Baha’is can openly declare their faith. But Israel has laws that prescribe equal treatment for the followers of all religions and the protection of Holy Places. Thus, the Baha’is are protected from any interference in the practice of their faith. I have to ask if you believe that a country that treats so well a religion that is hated across much of the world would have policies that have led large numbers of Christians, especially Arab Christians, to flee. Arab Christians, rather than flee the Jewish state, prosper, are the best educated group in the country, serve in parliament, serve (voluntarily) in the army and for national service. Why would large numbers of them flee?<br />
<br />
Will you promise me that, when you have a chance, you will correct the statement you made? Israel suffers badly from the many outright lies that are told about it (‘A Nazi State’, ‘An Apartheid State’). It is, therefore, deeply disturbing to find an eminent, highly educated member of the clergy adding another falsehood, in blatant contradiction of what I know and expect from such a person. Perhaps this was just a slip of the tongue, and in that case, you have my apologies for having taken you so to task for a tiny error. But since the content of the error is greater than the slip, perhaps you will still honour Israel’s Christian population with an apology – and perhaps a visit sometime. A visit. Not to visit the anti-Semitic elements within the community, the supercessionist members of Sabeel or the supporters of the Kairos document, but just plain down-to-earth Christians who regard Israel as the best of homes, who have a sense of an ongoing relationship with the Israel of Jesus.<br />
<br />
If you ever visit Newcastle, I’ll be happy to meet. I wish you the best in your work<br />
<br />
<br />
Yours,<br />
<br />
<br />
Dr. Denis MacEoin</span></span>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-47934567952854456302013-11-28T08:54:00.002-08:002013-11-28T08:54:41.769-08:00The following piece was published on 24 November 2013 in Algemeiner. <br />
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A few days ago, I was sitting at home undergoing a multicultural
musical experience. I was, in fact, listening to a number of Qawwali
songs from Pakistan. For many years, singers like Aziz Mian and the
Sabri Brothers (all now deceased) have been favourites of mine. Qawwali
will never take the place of the Portuguese fado I have known and loved
for so long, or the traditional Irish music I have known all my life.
But it is a vibrant and energetic form of singing and musicianship that
carries in its heart the Sufi poetry of the region, of northern India,
parts of Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Look for it on YouTube, it will
surprise you.<br />
Although this is religious poetry from the Sufi tradition, it plays a
wider part in society. One excellent performance by Aziz Mian has an
audience made up of upper-class Pakistanis, including young women, some
of them extremely beautiful (go <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKQ--7giN9Y">here</a>). That in itself shows the complications of Pakistani society.<br />
Sufism is a spiritual tradition that has always stood in contrast to
the worldly concerns of the rich and powerful. In Qawwali concerts like
this, two realities are mixed. Not only that, but men and women are
sitting together, another contradiction and an affront to the religious
authorities who like to tell other Pakistanis how to live their lives.
There are Westerners in this audience, and even if the men and women
dress in traditional clothes, there are no veils. It’s hard to believe
an assembly like this would shut the door on non-Muslims who wanted to
watch and listen to a great figure of Pakistani culture.<br />
In the West, a better-known product of Pakistani culture is a
16-year-old schoolgirl from the Swat Valley. Just over a year ago,
Malala Youssefzai lay dangerously wounded after a Taliban assassin shot
her in the head at close range. Malala was already an advocate of
education for girls, but the Taliban condemned female education and shut
down as many schools as they could, threatening death to students and
teachers alike. The bullies won out, bombing and burning out schools
that would not bend to their hatred of women and knowledge. Malala spoke
out from her small village school until, in 2012, the Taliban decided
to take revenge and silence her voice forever. Except that their
ill-fated attempt did the opposite.<br />
In Birmingham, in the wicked West, doctors saved her life. In due
course, she recovered from her injuries. Since then she has gone on to
become a symbol of everything the Taliban hate, a symbol for peace,
co-existence, and, above all, education. She is known all over the
world. She is already one of the most famous Pakistanis, male or female,
to have lived. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the
youngest ever nominee, and she came very close indeed to receiving it.<br />
She has been given enough prestigious awards to last her several
lifetimes, and may well enter the Guinness Book of Records for their
sheer number. She has been received by the U.S. President and the Queen
of Great Britain, by Prime Ministers, and innumerable dignitaries
everywhere. She has spoken to the General Assembly of the United
Nations. No matter where she goes, people listen to her. She talks of
peace and education, and her message goes deep. Instead of silencing
her, the Taliban turned her into a megaphone to trumpet aloud the
emptiness of their philosophy.<br />
You would think the Pakistanis would love her to bits, and, of
course, large numbers of them do. She’s bigger than all the Qawwali
singers put together. Her name is everywhere. One day, she could stand
for the post of Prime Minister. And God help the Taliban if that day
ever dawns.<br />
But a week or two ago, I came across a news item that disturbed me
greatly. Two organizations representing private schools in Pakistan have
banned her book, I Am Malala from more than 40,000 schools across
Pakistan. The book, apparently, is an insult to Islam and shows Malala
herself to be nothing more than a tool of the West. So, the leaders of
an important sector of the Pakistani educational world has chosen to ban
Pakistan’s best-known and most loved proponent of education, not just
in Pakistan, but all around the world. It sounds like some sick joke,
but it’s true. This is happening in a country that can’t even provide
even primary education for half its children.<br />
Malala’s influence on young Pakistani girls and teenagers has been
and remains enormous. Pakistan (as I shall argue) needs educated men and
women to produce a better-educated workforce that will help the country
compete in the international marketplace. According to UNESCO,
Pakistan’s literacy rate places the country at 113 out of 120 countries
surveyed. In some places, the female literacy rate stands at 3 percent.
And two educational bodies are banning an innocuous book by the
country’s foremost advocate of female education. And Pakistanis almost
lead the world in their hatred of Jews and Israel.<br />
Why has this estimable book been banned? Simple: about a month before
the edict, the Pakistani Tehreek-e Taliban had issued the threat that
it would target any shop that tried to sell the book. They added that
they would kill Malala in the end.<br />
The problems with the book are essentially religious problems,
problems that show yet again how obstinate Islam is to the slightest
hint of change. For example, we are told that when Malala (or her
ghostwriter) wrote the name of the prophet, Muhammad, she did not add
the letters PBUH — Peace Be Upon Him — or SAW to stand for the Arabic
equivalent, Salla’llah ‘alayhi wa sallam. We are once more in the realm
of a neurosis that has put its grip on Muslims around the world. I
encountered this same problem in the 1970s in Iran: nothing has changed.<br />
Writing in English, it is not common usage much less obligatory to
place honorifics after names. You can call me Denis MacEoin MA, PhD if
you need to, but just the name will suffice in all but very formal
situations. Adding phrases like these (and they are used after more than
just the names of prophets) makes it very hard indeed for scholars of
religion or history to write in a neutral style.<br />
Malala’s next mistake was to pass on her father’s views on Salman
Rushdie’s infamous novel, The Satanic Verses, which had drawn down on
the author threats of murder and mayhem. ‘Malala says that her father
sees The Satanic Verses as “offensive to Islam but believes strongly in
the freedom of speech.” “First, let’s read the book and then why not
respond with our own book” the book quotes her father as saying. So it’s
not enough to find the book offensive, but we can’t even read it or
talk about it? And Pakistan is almost at the bottom of the heap when it
comes to education. Need we ask why?<br />
Another matter found offensive by these giants of Pakistani education
was Malala’s reference to the two million-strong Ahmadi community, a
religious group that has been declared non-Muslim by the Pakistani
government, and which suffers prolonged and severe persecution without
any attempt to protect them by the authorities. Malala simply calls for
some degree of tolerance and is castigated for it by the obscurantists
who control everything in a country determined to set its face against
the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.<br />
Despite the largely secularist policies and intentions of Jinnah,
Pakistan is still under the thumb of the holier-than-thou men in beards
and turbans, men who always know more than anyone else, even the best
educated, who are always closer to God than anyone else, and who reckon
they know how to put their fingers on apostasy and unbelief wherever
they rear their ugly heads. Even if they don’t raise their heads, the
mullas can always make them up.<br />
Fortunately, there are other voices in Pakistan. Perhaps the loudest
is Pervez Hoodbhoy, an openly-avowed supporter of Malala, the
remarkable Professor of Nuclear Physics at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam
University, a man who has won almost as many awards as she has. Active
in many fields, he has devoted much of his writing and debating to
education, and he has extolled the benefits of secularism and deplored
the harm done to his country by the religious leadership and their
insistence on hardline, unchanging traditionalism.<br />
‘No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world
for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development
is one important element—although by no means the only one—that
contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing
sense of injustice and victimhood.’ (<a href="http://physicstoday.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1">‘Science and the Islamic World – The quest for rapprochement’, Physics Today, August 2007</a>.)<br />
In a compelling and insightful article, he examines the roots of the
modern problem through four ‘metrics’: the quantity of scientific
output, the role played by science and technology in national economies,
the extent and quality of higher education, and the degree to which
science is present or absent in popular culture.<br />
He cites a study from the International Islamic University in
Malaysia, which shows that Muslim countries have a mere 8.5 scientists,
engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world
average of 40.7 and 139.3 for countries of the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD). Forty-six Muslim countries
together contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, yet 1.66%
came from India and 1.48% from Spain. Of the 28 lowest producers of
scientific articles in 2003, no fewer than half belonged to Muslim
countries. By another measure, he points out that his own country,
Pakistan, has produced a mere 8 patents in 43 years. More Israeli
(population 7.5 million) patents are registered in the United States
than from Russia, India and China combined (combined population 2.5
billion).<br />
He adds that “no Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed
Mohammad Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received
the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model
of particle physics.” The reason? Abdus Salam belonged to the deeply
unpopular and much persecuted Ahmadi sect (referred to by Malala), the
only Islamic denomination to forbid jihad. Imagine any of my old
universities (Dublin, Edinburgh, or Cambridge) refusing entry to a Nobel
Prize winner who happened to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Seventh-Day
Adventist.<br />
This inability to match up to the challenges of the modern world has
much to do with a reluctance to obtain knowledge from non-Muslim
sources. The UN Arab Human Development Report for 2003 makes this clear:<br />
<blockquote>
given that ‘English represents around 85 percent of the
total world knowledge balance,’ one might guess that ‘knowledge-hungry
countries,’ the Arab states included, would take heed of the sway of
English, or at the very least, would seek out the English language as a
major source of translation. Yet, from all source-languages combined,
the Arab world’s 330 million people translated a meager 330 books per
year; that is, ‘one fifth of the number [of books] translated in Greece
[home to 12 million Greeks].’ Indeed, from the times of the Caliph
al-Ma’mun (ca. 800 CE) to the beginnings of the twenty-first century,
the ‘Arab world’ had translated a paltry 10,000 books: the equivalent of
what Spain translates in a single year.</blockquote>
Now, surely you’ve been wondering when I would get back to Israel.
That was the real reason for my writing this piece. There is, of course,
an enormous disparity between the scientific, medical, and
technological work done in Israel, the Start-up Nation, and the near
total absence of such work in Pakistan, with its 8 patents in 43 years.
In part,it’s a failure of education for the population; but Hoodbhoy
says that isn’t the real cause of the backwardness. More than anything,
it’s a total failure of all Muslim societies to understand that proper
knowledge is obtained through hard questions, painful criticism, and a
lack of control over what may be asked or answered. When trivial
religious reasons are cited for the banning of a book, when certain
types of research are considered inappropriate or blasphemous, when
academics or journalists can lose their jobs for daring to point out
deficiencies in society or religion — obscurantism triumphs and whole
populations are forced to live in the Dark Ages.<br />
Critics of Malala say she has become a tool of the West, a Trojan
Horse whose books attempts to bring dangerous Western views into the
public arena. As usual, conspiracy theories abound, protecting Muslims
from even the mildest of criticism, the very whiff of dialogue. It is
this same obscurantism that has created in a majority of Muslims —
Deobandis and Barelwis alike — the false idea that the state of Israel
is inimical to Islam, that it wages war on innocent Muslims, that it is a
modern embodiment of the Jewish conspiracies of the time of Muhammad,
that Jews are bitter enemies of Muslims, and that it has been planted by
the West in the Arab world to serve as a modern colony.<br />
Sensible debate would have shown many years ago that Jews are not
enemies and that Israel prefers to help Muslims, not hurt them —
something it has demonstrated again and again yet never received much
gratitude for. The Taliban use violence or the threat to use it, while
other ‘ulama use other forms of threats to ensure their control over all
intellectual issues, pretending they know God’s will and offering a
wide range of social sanctions. In a country like Pakistan, where the
very thought of shame can prompt a man to murder his wife or daughters,
the mere suggestion of divine displeasure is more than enough to make
all but the most foolhardy to pull back from controversy or the very
breath of it. Apostates are killed.<br />
It’s like this across the Muslim world, but the religious fanaticism
is getting worse in country after country. Everywhere it is a way to
sign your own death warrant just to say you like some Jews or that you
visited Israel and found it a good place for a Muslim to be, or that you
think Riff Cohen is cool (and she is!) or you are turned on by the
laid-back voice of Ethiopian-Israeli singer Ester Rada or that hating
Jews is a no-no or that it’s time for the Palestinians to build their
state and to leave Israel alone. Or whatever. Palestinians have been
executed for selling land to Jews. Your life isn’t yours when the
self-appointed dictators of Islamic righteousness take over.<br />
The backwardness of the Islamic mentality manifests itself in
innumerable ways, but nowhere more than in hatred of the state of
Israel. Like the postmodernist thinking that has infected so much of the
Western left, this hatred rocks the known world from its moorings. Next
time there’s an earthquake or a tsunami in the Muslim world, the
governments concerned will help their people by refusing entry to the
highly trained and experienced Israeli aid workers who have already
helped the distressed in 140 countries. In 2004, following a major
earthquake in Iran, Israelis offered aid: they were told where to go.
Some years later, after a disaster in Pakistan, both Indian and Israeli
volunteers were turned back at the border.<br />
Left-wing activists call Israel a Nazi state and an apartheid state,
when the opposite is true. The Malala Youssefzai case is a pale
reflection of this, turning things round in accordance with the whims of
bigoted and uneducated shaykhs. There are educated Muslim clerics, but
few have more than a smattering of secular or Western knowledge. They
don’t know how to read a book like The Satanic Verses or I Am Malala,
and they can’t read a progressive, balanced country like Israel. Only
rare men like Pervez Hoodbhoy speak out about the challenges faced by
Pakistan, because they have had a secular education. Christians went
through the Enlightenment and came out better for it. Jews went through
the Haskalah and, to a large extent, became the kind of Jews who created
modern Israel. But the Muslim world has known no Enlightenment and no
Haskalah, hasn’t even had its own Reformation. It’s time politicians
recognized that this is the source of the impasse between Israel and its
neighbours. Politics are not, on the whole, the problem. The problem is
unenlightened men who treat a progressive schoolgirl like a pariah.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-14946740994521176962013-06-04T11:52:00.001-07:002013-06-04T11:52:22.728-07:00This is the second half of my long letter to Malcolm Levitt. You may have to go back to the previous post to start from the beginning.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Does permitting
non-Jews to serve in parliament seem like a veneer? Does granting university
places to Arab students in proportion to the Arab size in the general
population seem like a veneer? Or perhaps you think that, at some future date,
Arab graduates will have their brains sucked of everything they have learned?
Or that all the votes that have been cast by Arabs will be taken back as if in
a magic trick? What non-Jewish elements do you mean? Be precise, and
demonstrate whether the severe discrimination you speak of is state-ordained or
simply the sort of discrimination that one can find in any country.</span>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">No, it is in part
state-ordained (see the list above)</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I don’t disagree that there is a certain
amount of state-decreed discrimination. Some of that will wear thin before too
long, partly because the state has taken a lot of affirmative action projects
in education and elsewhere, partly because many Israelis hate discrimination
because they know how much damage it does to the society in which they live,
and partly because many Israeli Arabs demand better treatment and do so in
legal ways. But again, I have to ask why Israel’s state discrimination is seen
as egregious. Egyptian state discrimination against Coptic Christians (who have
been in the country longer than the Muslim Arabs) is obnoxious. Lebanese,
Syrian (in the old days), Egyptian, Iraqi and other state discrimination
against Palestinians has been and is deeply disabling. But Israel is always
held to blame. Britain is now a mix of conflicts between fascists (BNP, EDL),
the Left, and Muslims (of various stripes). Similar divisions exist in Hungary,
France, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Israel is somewhere in between. Make a
case of it by all means, but why do so many make it a special case?</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Is Israeli discrimination
more severe than that found in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Sudan, to give three
examples?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">See (1) above.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">And see my response to that.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">I think that
last comment – ‘for the time being’ – unnecessary and cynical. Israel has
consistently improved conditions for Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, since
1948, and I am unaware of any sense in which circumstances for non-Jewish
Israelis have gone into reverse in that period, in fact I know for a fact that
they have improved to the point where Israel’s Arabs enjoy better livelihoods,
working conditions, and general living conditions than their brethren in most
other Arab countries. Do you really think that the countries responsible for
the misnamed ‘Arab Spring’ or for the tyrannical regimes that preceded and
succeeded those upheavals have anything, the slightest thing, to teach Israel
about how to conduct its affairs and treat its citizens well? Egypt kills
Coptic Christians, persecutes them, burns down churches; Libya is full of
intolerance; Lebanon sees a widening rift between Christians, Sunnis, and
Shi’is, while refusing Palestinians the right to work in over seventy
professions; Syria piles intolerance upon intolerance. There is now a mass
exodus of Christians from the Middle East. But in Israel the Christian
community is still growing after 65 years. Can you really say that any of this
is evidence that Israel deserves to be criticized by you or anyone else, while
a country like Iran, that allows the demands of religious extremism make life a
misery for most of its citizens. In my earlier e-mail, most of which you have
ignored, I drew attention to a key fact, that Israel is the only country in the
Middle East (and as far afield as the Muslim world in its entirety) that not
only tolerates the Baha’i religion but encourages it to the point of running
its international affairs from Haifa and possessing beautiful buildings and
gardens, while all Baha’i properties in Iran were turned to rubble long ago.
Why would a country that stands out in so many ways be your choice to find
fault with? If you truly care about human rights, why on earth aren’t you
picketing the Iranian embassy, the Libyan embassy. The Egyptian embassy or
(some years ago) the Syrian embassy or the Saudi embassy. Those are countries
that really do make life impossible for their non-Muslim (and many of their
Muslim) citizens. Their breaches of human rights are egregious and well known.
Yet you bother about Israel, a country I for one would be more than happy to
live in, even though I’m not a Jew.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">See (1) above.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I really don’t think that is adequate.
You have not made out a case (nor has Ben White) for holding Israel more
greatly to task for imposing greater discrimination, let alone outright
persecution against anyone that begins to match the doings of so many Muslim
countries that are allowed free passage from the international human rights
lobbies. The UN Human Rights Council is a disgrace, and bodies like Human
Rights Watch, Amnesty and others fall severely short of balance in their
accusations. Hatred of Israel has reached extraordinary heights in the past two
decades, just as anti-Semitism has returned as a major plague in Europe and
elsewhere for the first time since the Second World War. The two are closely
linked, but just as Islamic calls for Israel to be expunged from the family of
nations reach a crescendo, we find international rights bodies turning their
faces from the truth that, if Israel were to vanish, it would only be a matter
of time before the world’s remaining Jews were led to their deaths along quiet
passages at the backs of our cities, by sad-eyed men dressed in black, armed
with tasers and wearing dark glasses that would blur the ugly scenes and
headphones that would play fine music to blot out the cries of anguish.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">But you speak of
Israeli government policy in the West Bank, and that it is this you find
severely discriminatory. No doubt there is much to be deplored. Life in the
West Bank cannot hope to be normal, given the very nature of the occupation and
the sort of society that has been created there by political and religious
leaders. But I think you miss something very basic in your portrayal of Israel
and the West Bank – context.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Ah context!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Indeed, context is very
important. And the most important context, in my opinion, is that Israel was
created by an act of ethnic cleansing, in which approx 700k Palestinians were
driven out of their homes, and shot if they tried to return to their homes or
harvest their crops. You are framing the issue as one of confrontation between
Israel and the neighbouring Arab states. But that is not the essential
conflict. The conflict is between Zionist jewish immigrants (mostly arrivals
during the 1900's) and the indigenous population, who have been there since
time immemorial (and probably in large part descendants of converted Jewish
populations in ancient times). Unsurprisingly, and entirely predictably, the
indigenous population have resisted, and will continue to resist, the robbery
of their land and resources. That is the context that needs addressing.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Let me start with your
outrageous statement that </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">‘Israel
was created by an act of ethnic cleansing, in which approx 700k Palestinians
were driven out of their homes, and shot if they tried to return to their homes
or harvest their crops.’ <span style="color: red;">This simply isn’t true. Israel
was created before any single Arab became a refugee. You’ll be aware that the
Israeli historian Benny Morris pushed the ethnic cleansing line in his early
work, but when he went back into the archives, he reached exactly the opposite
conclusions. There was, he argued, no overall military plan to ethnically
cleanse Israel of its Arab population. The Haganah’s Plan Dalet was a proposal
on the use of military force when Arab armies invaded (as they did) and
attempted to wipe out the Yishuv (as they tried). If a war was being fought,
some villagers would have to step out of harm’s way when battle commenced
(think of what would have happened in Britain if the Germans had invaded in
1940). In fact, this only happened in Lydda and Ramle. There is ample archival
evidence that, as I have said elsewhere, the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab
Liberation between them exhorted the Arabs to leave. Haifa is the outstanding
example of a town whose Jewish authorities pleaded with the Arabs to stay, but
where the Arabs, seduced by Arab officialdom, chose to depart. You have to
consider incidents like that when casting wild claims that the Jews ‘ethnically
cleansed’ their Arab neighbours. Morris’s research is supported by Efraim Karsh
in <i>Palestine Betrayed</i></span><span style="color: red;">. It was the Arabs
who invaded newly-fo0unded Israel, not vice versa. The Jews had been more than
open to the idea of living cheek by jowl with their Arab neighbours. The whole
naqba concept is ahistorical and shows a profound unwillingness on the part of
the Palestinians to accept responsibility for their own actions, for the
threats of death and destruction that were hurled repeatedly at the yishuv, and
for the complete moral vacuum into which they have thrust themselves. I would
like them a lot more if they hadn’t spent 65 years trying to kill as many Jews
as possible.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You say the conflict is
between Jewish settlers and the indigenous people. Of course, the Arabs haven’t
been there ‘since time immemorial’. Most Palestinians (you can see it from
their names) arrived in the region in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, from
surrounding countries such as Syria (don’t forget, British Palestine was
previously southern Syria), Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and further afield. According
to Ottoman statistics, the population of southern Syria in 1860 (a good year to
choose as an example) was 411 thousand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">One topic is
of considerable relevance to the creation of the modern state of Israel, and
that is the above contention that Palestine in the late nineteenth century was
severely underpopulated. What this means, of course, is that when Jewish
settlers arrived in British Mandate Palestine they did not arrive in huge
numbers and push the Arab population out, as is so often claimed. There was
more than enough room for everyone, and the United Nations resolution 181
(1947) that adopted the UN partition plan (one of several partition plans) made
it possible for both Jews and Arabs to have their own states. What happened in
1948 threw this plan into disarray, when the Jews created the state of Israel,
the Arabs rejected their own option to establish a state, and several Arab
countries invaded Israel with the explicit intention of exterminating the Jews
and ‘purging’ the country.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">James Finn
was the British Consul in Jerusalem between 1846 and 1863, during the latter
days of the Ottoman empire. He reported in some years to James Howard Harris,
the third Earl of Malmesbury, who was twice British Foreign Secretary. In a
report to Malmesbury dated 1 January 1859,</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> he wrote of the ‘thinly
scattered population’ and declared that ‘the Mahometan population is dying
out’. An earlier report dated 15 September 1857 was sent to George Villiers,
the Fourth Earl of Clarendon, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In
this, Finn wrote ‘the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants
and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[2]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">A more
poetic but for all that a more depressing account of the country is given by
the American author, Mark Twain, who visited Syria in 1867. If one were looking
for a dreary sort of solitude, he writes, ‘Come to the Galilee for that… these
unpeopled deserts, these rust mounds of barrenness that never, never, never do
shake the glare from their harsh outlines.</span></div>
<div class="reading" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">‘Palestine sits in sackcloth and
ashes,’ he goes on. ‘Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its
fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes
and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no
living thing exists – over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
motionless and dead – about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and
scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment
to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about
that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with
songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the
desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s
miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one
that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour’s presence; the hallowed spot
where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang
Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and
unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem
itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel
the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the
pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted
above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world,
they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once
rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships, was long
ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent
wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared
Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert
places” round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's
voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes. Palestine is desolate and
unlovely.’ </span></div>
<div class="reading" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Norman N. Lewis was the author
of a book on the Arabs of Syria, <i>Nomads and Settlers, in Syria and Jordan
1800-1980</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">.
This volume was based on material gathered by the author over some forty years.
Lewis made ample use, inter alia, of nineteenth-century consular papers from
Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo ‘and other Syrian cities’, material which
he catalogued at the British Legation in Beirut and later at the British
Library in London.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>concurs: ‘Travellers in the interior of Syria in the
eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century were shocked by the
“wretched” condition of the peasantry and by the frequency with which they
encountered uninhabited villages and uncultivated fields even in fertile
districts. Some of those who went far afield, to the Jazirah for example, were
impressed by the vast expanse of obviously cultivable land which had evidently
lain untilled for centuries.’</span></div>
<div class="reading" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Why did this happen? Lewis
provides some sound explanations: </span></div>
<div class="reading" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 30.5pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">‘Some
of the reasons for the temporary or permanent abandonment of villages and of
land were plain to see. Peasants fled rather than ‘entertain’ soldiers on the
march or Ottoman grandees on a journey. Villages were sacked in the course of
local civil strife, ravaged by soldiers or by ex-soldiers turned bandit, raided
by Kurds or beduin. The state of public security in the countryside was
abysmally low.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">This picture
may change our opinions about the early period of Jewish expansion in the Holy
Land, but desolation only impinges on demographics and the context within which
newly arrived Jews found themselves. The contrast between what the Arab and
Turkish inhabitants of Palestine had done with the country over centuries and
the agricultural achievements of the Jews in turning swamp to soil and desert
to irrigated fields should grab our attention. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">As for the
make-up of those who inhabited this scarcely-populated land, we know that, in
the 1830s, an Egyptian General, Ibrahim Pasha, conquered Syria (including most
of modern Israel) from the Ottomans and held it for several years. When he
departed, he left behind him ‘permanent colonies of Egyptian immigrants at
Beisan, Nablus, Irbid, Acre, and Jaffa (next to modern Tel Aviv), where some
five hundred soldiers’ families established a new quarter.’ It is also known
that Circassian immigrants turned up in 1878, followed by a second wave in
1885. Before that, De Haas, whom we have just quoted, says further that ‘The
Muslims of Safed are mostly descended from… Moorish settlers and from Kurds.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[3]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> In 1878, the small
population that inhabited the barren tracts of Southern Syria attracted large
numbers of newcomers composed of Circassians, Algerians, Egyptians, Druse,
Turks, Kurds, Bosnians, and others.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[4]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> According to Lewis,
‘Kurdish and Turkoman nomads were found in northernmost Syria’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Lewis also
stresses the late appearance of some of the more important tribes: ‘The most
powerful tribes in Syria were relative newcomers. They included the Shammar…
and a number of tribes of the ‘Anazah group, including the Wuld ‘Ali, Hasanah,
Fid‘an, Sba‘ah, and Ruwala.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">But it would
be a mistake to imagine that there was no Jewish population in
nineteenth-century Palestine, or that Jews just arrived there after the First
World War and stole the land from the Arabs, finally expelling them in 1948. By
1851, Jews formed the majority of the inhabitants of Safed and Tiberias, and in
less than ten years, they were at least half of the population of Jerusalem.
Muslims were only one quarter. And the Jewish presence was not just in the
cities but on the land, where Jewish farmers ploughed the soil as they had done
for centuries. The first Jewish colony of modern times was not a kibbutz but
the town of Petah Tikva, founded in 1878 by religious pioneers from Europe and
Jerusalem, and today a city of over two hundred thousand inhabitants. Changes
were taking place for Jews and Arabs alike, and those changes were driven by
natural processes like the barren and unexploited soil, the atmosphere of
immigration, or human actions, like the Ottoman Sultan’s edict allowing Jews to
buy land in the region. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Again, you say:</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">The conflict is between Zionist jewish
immigrants (mostly arrivals during the 1900's) and the indigenous population,
who have been there since time immemorial (and probably in large part
descendants of converted Jewish populations in ancient times). Unsurprisingly,
and entirely predictably, the indigenous population have resisted, and will
continue to resist, the robbery of their land and resources. That is the
context that needs addressing.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But the conflict is not
between Zionist immigrants. Rather it is between two things: between the modern
Western mindset and its theories of international law and human rights on the
one hand and Islam and its theories of territorial possession through jihad,
coupled with a centuries-old belief in divinely-ordained law and a rejection of
human rights (only Muslims have rights in Islam: dhimmis have no rights to life
or territory, save what Muslims choose to bestow on them). Had the Jews moved
to almost any other place in the world outside the Muslim sphere, there would
have been little trouble. Had Muslims moved to Palestine, as Norman Lewis’s
Bedouin did, they would have been welcomed with only some friction. Had other
Europeans moved to Palestine, there would have been the same attempts to expel
them. The fault does not lie with Jews fleeing pogroms, prejudice, and a
Holocaust to a country designated for them under international law, a country
with space for new arrivals. It lies with the religious prejudice and the
grudging defiance of international norms within a very short time of the
creation of the Arab League as a token of the Arabs’ bid to be part of the
world community.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Looked at
without context, conditions in the West Bank must seem arbitrary and
unnecessary. But the picture changes greatly once context is allowed to play a
part in the argument. It would be absurd to believe that Israel, which strives
hard to treat its Arab citizens well and to promote their well-being through
education, the use of Arabic alongside Hebrew as a national language, the protection
of Muslim and Christian Arab holy places, and the arrest of Jewish racists who
harbour ill-will towards Arabs it seems absurd to think the same government
would arbitrarily decide to treat West Bank Arabs harshly. That would make no
sense at all, surely. The situation in the West Bank has brought much
opprobrium on Israel and tarnished its reputation internationally. In the long
run, Israel knows that the West Bank will in the end be given over to its Arab
population as the basis for a future Palestinian state.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">I disagree profoundly with
that judgement. The clear evidence on the ground is that Israel intends to
retain complete command of the useful bits of the West Bank (water resources
and major historical sites). It is proceeding to do that by erecting
settlements, walls, and Jews-only roads which divide up the country into small
enclaves (essentially prison camps) in which a limited amount of
self-government is permitted for non-Jews. There is no prospect of Israel
permitting the formation of a viable Palestinian state. The situation in the
West Bank is extremely harsh. A glance at some of the case histories documented
by B'Tselem (</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.btselem.org/"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">http://www.btselem.org/</span></a></u></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">) should be sufficient.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This is a big topic. I don’t think the
West Bank is as bad as you paint it, though. The territory is largely under
Palestinian Authority control. In Area C, Israel has no control over
Palestinian civilians. Area A is under full PA control. And Area B is under
joint Israeli/Palestinian Authority control.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Why is there a need for any control at
all? Because the Palestinians have, since 1947, conspired against Israel, sent
out terrorists to kill any Jews they find, used car bombs, suicide bombers and
anyone else with a weapon to take terrible revenge on Israelis who have done
nothing to harm them. Are little children and babies responsible for the
sufferings of the Palestinians? In the West Bank, there is currently great
frustration following the successful construction of the security barrier, which
has prevented terrorists from inflicting death and injury on innocents. But in
the West Bank, murderers are accorded the highest praise if they die, and are
honoured everywhere; if they end up in an Israeli prison, their needs and the
needs of their families are met by donations from various charities. Would that
be tolerated for a moment here? Would Mark Bridger, who killed April Jones,
gaze out of his prison window and see posters with his face celebrating what he
did? I do not accord Palestinian terrorists any honour at all.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I fear the Palestinian position can best
be summed up in these words spoken by none other than Fawzi Qawuqji, who was
soon to be head of the Arab Liberation Army, the Arab League’s principal
Palestinian armed force in 1948. He said this in the days leading up to the UN
General Assembly vote on partition towards the end of 1947. If the vote went
against the Arabs, he threatened, ‘we will have to initiate total war. We will
murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American
or Jewish.’ You need to contemplate this, for Palestinians and other Arabs and
Iranians are still saying much the same thing today, 66 years later. It is
scurrilous, infamous, and boorish. It is the language of a bully or a gangster.
I am sure you do not disagree. But it typifies the Arab approach to this
problem. The bullying tone has not once been renounced. Cooler heads have not
stood up and been counted. Such threats can be replicated all down the years,
in the mouths of hundreds of Arab and Palestinian leaders, in the sermons of
imams, muftis, khuttab, ayatollahs, Maraji’, and other Muslim eminences. It is
always spiteful, it has no regard for rights, it disavows democracy and
civilized behaviour, it sneers at political settlement, it arrogates to Arabs
and Muslims the only rights, including the right to political control, it
denies even the most basic rights to other people. In shari’a law, a Muslim may
not be prosecuted for killing a non-Muslim. Non-Muslims barely count as human beings.
Islam itself needs to undergo as much of a moral and ethical shift as
Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. But who is addressing that dilemma?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But while preparations for attacks
continue, while militant groups march and train, why should Israel not impose
security restrictions on the Palestinian community? There is an easy way to
stop Israeli control: stop the violence.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">As regards water: In 2008 Palestinian per
capita daily consumption was 270 litres per day, Israel’s was 405, a factor of
1.5, not 4. Egypt, Lebanon and Syria consume about 5-6 times more water per
capita than Israel. Israeli consumption has dropped dramatically due to the
need to use water more economically after consecutive years of drought.
(Source: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from Israel Water Authority). The
claim that the Palestinian water supply is beneath that recommended for basic
living standards is entirely false. The Water Agreement (Oslo II, September
1995) determined that water supply to the Palestinians would increase during the
period of that Interim Agreement by 28.6 MCM/yr, of which 5 MCM/yr would be
supplied to the Gaza Strip and 23.6 MCM/yr to the West Bank. It was agreed that
this quantity would be in addition to the quantity consumed by the Palestinians
in 2005, namely, 118 MCM. In other words, it was agreed that water supply to
the Palestinians during the Interim Agreement period would in the West Bank
increase by 20%. This quantity of water would be part of the quantity defined
as the ‘Future Needs’ of the Palestinians in the West Bank, ie about 70-80
MCM/yr, which would be provided in the framework of the permanent arrangement.
In practice, during the 13 years that have elapsed since the Interim Agreement
was signed, water supply to the Palestinians in the West Bank has been
increased by 60 MCM/yr (not including Gaza), ie by about 50%.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I recommend the following paper, issued
by the World Bank and the Israeli Water Authority, which should help show that
the Israelis are not bent on stealing Palestinian water and actually help
enormously in providing water supplies to the West Bank.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWESTBANKGAZA/Resources/IsraelWaterAuthorityresponse.pdf">http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWESTBANKGAZA/Resources/IsraelWaterAuthorityresponse.pdf</a></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I agree that life for Palestinians in the
West Bank cannot be comfortable. The enclaves you mention are areas caught
between the green line and the security barrier, but they aren’t prison camps.
But I don’t see the short-term solution. The long-term solution is relatively
simple. The Palestinians must embrace speech, in word and in deed. They then
need to start a long process to give Israel confidence that there will be no
more terrorist attacks and that another international war will not take place.
They have to invite teachers into their schools, from the UN, the UK, and
Israel who can start the work of re-educating Palestinian children. They have
to teach them that Jews are not apes and pigs, that killing innocent people is
not praiseworthy, and that peace is always better than war. Once this has gone
on for a generation or so and Israelis have confidence, the restrictions may be
lifted. It is all harder work than fighting, but its consequences will be
profound.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">So why on earth wouldn’t it
pull out now or at least be nice to the Palestinians?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">It can’t pull out now. That would be
suicide. Not so long as Israel is surrounded by forces (Palestinians,
Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qa’eda, Fatah,
Iran, most Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Somalis, Afghans
[especially the Taliban], many Pakistanis, jihadi recruits from Europe and
North America – the list is long) Israel cannot relax its vigilance. If it
pulled out of the West Bank, it could expect exactly what it has received after
leaving Gaza. I want to see a successful Palestinian state, but I don’t want to
see it turned into an armed fortress, a ribat from which fighters from round
the world fight a final jihad against the Jews. So what do we do if we want to see
a Palestinian state that isn’t dedicated to the overthrow of its next-door
neighbour? The world community has to get its act together, grasp the
seriousness of what is happening, stop telling the Israelis how to behave
except when they really merit censure, and accept that Palestinian fudging on
peace and outright rejection of peace, Palestinian racism and threats of total
apartheid, and Palestinian incitement to violence are all unacceptable,
whatever the Palestinians deem to be provocation from Israel. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Well, Israel already is nice to the
Palestinians.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Sorry, but that is a very ignorant statement.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I make it in the full light of
understanding much of what goes on, not from ignorance. Please re-read the
paragraph below, together with some additional comments after it.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"><br />
<span style="color: blue;">You are wrong to imply that all Israeli treatment is
severely discriminatory. Every year, Israel treats many thousands of
Palestinians in its own hospitals. They are not discriminated against at all.
They sleep on the same wards as Jews, they are operated on in the same
operating rooms by the same surgeons, and for the most part they go home with
very favourable opinions of the hospital staff, the first Israelis many of them
will have met. Every year, Israel provides 30 million cubic metres of water to
the Palestinian Authority (and 70 million to Jordan). Every year, hundreds of
Palestinian children are given heart transplants through an Israel charity,
Save a Child’s Heart. Under Israeli occupation, the West Bank economy has grown
at a terrific rate, quite unlike the case in Hamas-occupied Gaza. Here’s
something from a 2011 report by the Washington Institute:</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">‘Following the
establishment of Prime Minister Salam Fayad's government in 2007, the West Bank
witnessed rapid GDP growth each year through 2010, including a 12% spike in
2008, 10% in 2009, and 8% in 2010. The IMF attributes this growth to donor aid,
improved security conditions, decreased Israeli restrictions on movement, and
private-sector confidence due to good management by the Palestinian Authority
(PA). In dollar terms (at constant 2004 prices), West Bank GDP climbed from
$3.3 billion in 2007 to $4.4 billion in 2010, while per capita GDP went from
$1,580 to $1,924, an increase of 22%. The growth looks even better when viewed
over a longer period: in 2010, West Bank GDP was 50% higher than in 2000, and
124% higher than in 1994.’</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Some other points need to be added. When
Israel pulled out of Gaza, it left behind greenhouses purely for the benefit of
the people of the strip, together with domestic and other buildings. The
Gazans, out of pure spite, destroyed everything. That was definitely Israel and
donors being kind only to see their kindness rebuffed. But every year since the
withdrawal, Israel has sent in thousands of tons of aid to Gaza, from food,
building materials, medical supplies and medicines, and seventy percent of
Gaza’s electricity from Israel’s own national grid. Without Israel’s niceness,
Gaza would collapse in days. Despite that, Hamas continues to smuggle hundreds
of rockets for use against Israel. In addition to the two Israeli charities
that provide heart surgery for Palestinian children, thousands of Palestinians
are treated every year in Israeli hospitals. Just today, I read a news story
about how the life of a ten-year-old Palestinian boy from a village near Hebron
has been saved at the Schneider Medical Centre in Petah Tikva. The boy received
a kidney transplant. The donor was an Israeli Jew. Yet you sneer when I say
Israelis are kind to Palestinians. There are dozens of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>schemes and projects that promote
tolerance and goodwill between Arabs and Jews, or provide opportunities for the
two sides to work together. They all involve Israelis being kind to
Palestinians and Palestinians putting aside their grievances to cooperate with
Jews.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The Alliance for Middle East
Peace is made up by over 70 leading NGOs and has an independent international;
fund for peace. Friends of the Earth Middle East brings together activists from
the West Bank, `Israel and Jordan. It works, among other things, to promote the
sharing of water resources. The Valley of Peace initiative for economic
development brings together Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. Among other
things, it runs fifty factories where Jews and Palestinians work side by side.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Friends of the Earth Middle
East brings together activists from Palestine, Israel, and Jordan, and works,
among other things, on ways of sharing water resources fairly. There are the
Peres Centre for Peace, the Aix Group economic study team, the Ta’ayush
Arab-Jewish Partnership, Givat Haviva’s Jewish-Arab Centre for Peace, found in
1949 by Ha’Kibbutz Ha’Arzi Federation, the Parents’ Circle, which brings
together families from Israel and the West Bank who have lost family members in
the struggle, founded by Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son Arik was killed by
Hamas; Avi Levi, director of Green Action, works in the West Bank with Arab
farmers to help them set up cooperatives; Olives of Peace (rather similar to
Green Action) is a joint Israeli-Palestinian business that sells good quality
olive oil (under the brand name Peace Oil, which I have used); since 1970, the
Israeli Jewish-Israeli Muslim village of Neve Shalom has been a model of
co-existence, organizing humanitarian projects, including yet more medical aid
to Palestinians, two schools and a training facility called the School for
Peace; the Hamidrasha Jewish-Arab beit midrash, where Jewish, Muslim and
Christian men and women study together and learn from one an other; the Ir
Shalem co-existence programme, run by the left-wing organization Peace Now;
there is the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, of which you should
know; the famous West-Eastern Divan, founded by Daniel Barenboim, whose
orchestra brings together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians and tours
them internationally; Middle East Education through Technology, which works
with MIT and the Hebrew University and brings young Israelis and Palestinians;
Hand in Hand, four schools for Arab and Jewish pupils, using both Hebrew and
Arabic; the Institute for Circlework, founded by a Jewish German, Jalaja
Bonheim, to empower Jewish and Arab women and many, many more. Most of these
are Israeli-initiated enterprises, others are Palestinian in origin. Seeing all
this, how can you say that Israelis are not kind to Palestinians? That some
soldiers and some haredi settlers treat Arabs badly is true, and it gives me
cause for concern. But there are so many positive things about Israel and its
treatment of an implacable enemy, that I prefer to engage with that than to
play ball with the thoroughly negative, anti-peace philosophy of the
Palestinian leadership, which offers nothing but hostility, Judaeophobia, a
hatred of the West, of democracy, and international law.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Could that have
been achieved under a policy of severe discrimination?</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Answer: yes. Its not too
surprising. All sorts of horrors, eg slavery, are often quite good for
the economic figures.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I find this cynical beyond belief. To
speak of ‘horrors’ is ugly, and it is completely wrong to drag in slavery where
it bears no relevance. Jews only ever played a very minor role in the
Transatlantic slave trade, and there were many Jews who took part in the
anti-slavery movements, such as Ernestine Rose (described by slavery supporters
as ‘a thousand times below a prostitute’), Heinrich Heine, or Nathan Meyer
Rothschild. Modern Israel is entirely free of slavery. Mauretania has about
600,000 slaves, some 20% of the population. The UEA, including Dubai, have an
extensive quasi-slavery network, including child slaves and trafficked
women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saudi Arabia has a large
slave population. Sudan still has the largest slave population in the world.
Rather than refer, however obliquely, to slavery in a context that implies
Israel, might you not be better to involve yourself with one of the charities
that works to free slaves and to end the cultural predisposition for slavery in
Africa and the Gulf States?</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">But let’s get
back to context. How familiar are you with the historical background to the
present situation?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Very familiar, I would say.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">You will,
I’m sure, know all about the way Israel was created, how the United Nations
awarded two states, one to the Jews and one to the Arabs.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">This was done without
consulting the local population and was a collosal mistake. A small minority of
the population was awarded 50% of the land, without taking into account the
views of the others. We live with the legacy.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">As a matter of fact, the local population
was consulted more than once, notably after the Peel Commission reported. Their
rejection of every kind of compromise was based on attitudes that had no
relevance for modern international law, based on Islamic intransigence in the
face of legal moves not derived from shari’a law. You say a small minority of
the population was given 50% of the land. That is not true. The original
Palestine mandate was large, and much of it was made up of the stretch that
became Transjordan (later Jordan), which was handed in its entirety to the
Arabs. It forms 80% of the original area set aside for a Jewish and Arab
homeland. The final UN partition plan gave 56% of what remained to the Jews,
and 43% to the Arabs. But that’s not all. The Arabs already had the giant
territory of Jordan, which is today a Palestinian state with a 90% Palestinian
population. In the partition plan (if the Arabs had accepted it, the Arab state
would have a 99% Arab and some other population, with 1% Jews. The Jewish state
would have 55% Jews and 45% Arabs. The international sector would have had 49%
Jews and 51% Arabs. Overall, the Arabs received 61% of the mandated territory
and the Jews a mere 33%. One-third, not a half.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">We live, not with the legacy of the
partition, but with the legacy of the Arab refusal to give even an inch,
combined with the readiness of the Arabs to have recourse to weapons, to prefer
murder to round the table talks, to the Khartoum Declaration of ‘No
negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel’, the
Hamas Charter’s declaration that talks and negotiations are ‘a waste of time’
and that the only solution to the problem is through jihad. I do not give
people who think like this the right to dictate how I or my friends should live
or where we should live or if we should live. If they invade Israel or attack
or kill Israelis, they should be hunted down and killed or disarmed. That is
the moral thing to do. Otherwise, the Jews might as well have invited all the
post-Reich Nazis to come to the Middle East (as so many did) in order to
continue the Holocaust. Is there a difference? None that I can see. That is the
legacy Israel still has to fight against.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Of course, the
British had already given away a large tract of the future Jewish homeland when
it created Jordan, but in the end it all boiled down to two states. Exactly the
same thing as everybody’s ‘twin state solution’ today. The Jews took what they
were given and were invaded by five Arab countries. The Arabs refused to
establish a state unless it included the entirety of mandate Palestine. The
rest is history. The Arabs have fought several wars to drive the Jews out of
the region, they have openly stated (if we want to talk about explicit
policies) a catch-all doctrine of ‘No negotiations with Israel, no recognition
of Israel, no peace with Israel’. Would it make your life easy if your research
partners adopted such a policy? The Arabs have turned down more generous peace
offers down the years than any beleaguered people in history. And Mahmoud
‘Abbas still says there can be no Jews in a future Palestinian state, while
insisting in Arabic that Israel will be wiped out and replaced by a greater
Palestine. These are not easy conditions in which to work for peace.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel defines itself as a
"Jewish state", and states that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of
Israel - an attitude calculated to enrage 1.5bn muslims. I am not sure of the
situation now but partners in the previous Likud government advocated a greater
Israel including all of present-day Jordan. I believe that the new star of
Israeli politics (Benny something) runs on a popular platform that there will
be no Palestinian state. The consequence of that is either permanent apartheid,
or expulsion of the Palestinians. No, these are not easy conditions in which to
work for peace.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, Why should 1.5 bn Muslims be
enraged if Israeli regards Jerusalem as its capital? What has it to do with
them? Jerusalem was never the capital of any Muslim or Arab state. It is not
particularly holy for Muslims. Muhammad originally made it the focus for prayer
(the qibla) when he was living in Mecca. Some months after his arrival in
Medina, he turned round 360 degrees to face Mecca instead, and that has been
the Qibla ever since. Neither the Dome of the Rock (the Qubbat al-Sakhra) or
the al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the time of Muhammad, and al-Aqsa is something
like the fifth or sixth mosque built on that spot . The Temple Mount is, by
contrast, the holiest place on earth to Jews, since it is where the Jewish
Temple once stood. Why should Israel hand it over to anyone else? When the
Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they destroyed some 50 synagogues. In Hebron,
the Ma’aret Ha-Machpelah, the second holiest place to Jews, is divided between
Jews and Muslims, with a vastly greater portion in Muslim hands. Israel, on the
other hand, does a fantastic job under its law for the protection of holy
places to safeguard all Muslim, Christian, and Baha’i sites. Meanwhile, in
Saudi Arabia almost every single site associated with Muhammad and his
companions has been reduced to rubble in order to prevent pilgrims praying
there, which would constitute polytheism. The 1.5 bn Muslims would do better to
be enraged about the Al-Sa’ud dynasty that takes on itself the right to
permanently dispose of Islam’s holiest places.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I really think you should ignore Israeli
extremists, just as you would ignore British extremists like the EDL or BNP.
Israel has offered a full state to the Palestinians since 1948 and well before,
and no Israeli majority will go with the sort of expansionism you cite.
Religious extremists do talk about the full recovery of Judaea and Samaria, but
that is not at all likely to happen. If the Israelis tried it, they know a
massive war would break out and that every country on earth would oppose them.
They (including Likud) are realists., Israel was set up to be ‘a Jewish state’
from the beginning, and since there are dozens of ‘Muslim states’ and
‘Christian states’, I think it not unreasonable of the Jews to want a very tiny
one of their own. The ‘Benny’ you refer to is probably Naftali Bennet, a former
member of the Yesha Council, the principal organ of the settler movement.
You’re right, he does have some offensive ideas. But you should be aware that
Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned Bennet in the strongest terms. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">All that prevents the Palestinians from
having their own state is the Palestinians. Israelis have made the offers, done
the pullouts, suffered the wars and the intifadas, put their children into
uniform generation after generation, swallowed the rocket attacks, made more
offers, given the aid, cured the sick, buried their dead, asked for respect,
listened to the hate speech, swallowed the lies, prayed for normality, and
faced contumely abroad. The Palestinians have rejected every peace offer Israel
has ever made, and as a result they have lost thousands of dead, warped their
culture, debased their children, pronounced again and again ‘The Jews love
life, but we love death, so we will win’, as if this was to do with winning,
and they have made conflict their raison d’être. They live in a miserable world,
surrounded by a fence, posters of their dead on their walls, their children
armed, their mothers singing how happy it makes them to know their sons are
dead. It is a bizarre world, especially in Gaza, like <i>1984</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> or David Karp’s dystopia in <i>One</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, and it is all their own
doing. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">But until
the Palestinians agree to make peace with Israel (as Egypt and Jordan have
done), Israel simply cannot pull out of the West Bank. It has already pulled
out of Gaza, with disastrous consequences for both sides. Why would Israel wish
further violence upon itself?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Because Israel cannot be a
democracy (even in the limited sense of a Jewish state) if it continues to rule
over another non-Jewish people against their will. So Israel has to make peace.
Seriously. Not trying to get away with talk of peace while transparent land
robbery continues. Everyone sees through the charade.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Israel does not rule over another
non-Jewish people against its will. In Israel proper, everyone has a vote and a
majority are happy to live in Israel, where their life prospects are much
better than they would be in any Arab state. Israel did not choose to rule over
Gaza or the West Bank, or, for that matter, Sinai, the Golan, or southern
Lebanon. It pulled out of Sinai, Gaza, and southern Lebanon, and remains in the
Golan. Prior to the 1967 war, Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank,
including Jerusalem, by Jordan. When Egypt, Jordan and their allies massed
troops on Israel’s borders, with the intention of launching a massive attack,
Israel had no choice but to counter that offensive. The Arabs lost and Israel
came into possession of Gaza and the West Bank. If the Palestinians had come to
their senses and responded to Israeli peace offers, both Gaza and the West Bank
would soon have been free for the creation of a Palestinian state. Instead, the
Palestinians have preached fire and brimstone ever since, and Israel has been
forced to remain in the West Bank to preserve some degree of security. Israel
is visibly a democracy, but a democracy that faces widespread opprobrium and
repeated attempts to destroy it or, in Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s words ‘to
annihilate it’ (<i>qal’ o qam’ kard</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">). There is no ‘transparent land
robbery’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>UN Resolution 242, with
which you may be familiar, was drafted both to guarantee the Palestinians their
state but to provide Israel with a strategy to avoid returning to the pre-5
June lines. Israel was required to withdraw, but not from all the territories.
In accordance with this, various Israeli peace offers have specified land swaps
in order to replace territories lost by Palestine. But the Israeli withdrawal
was made contingent on Palestinian acceptance of peace, something that has not
once been forthcoming. The offer of land is still there, but how often does
someone have to bite the hand that feeds him before the hand gives up?</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">And it is the
violence that lies behind the sometimes harsh conditions imposed on West Bank
Palestinians. You cannot take the violence out of the equation. It is the
overriding context. The Jews do not undertake their obligations in the West
Bank lightly or gratuitously. Under the Balfour Declaration adopted in the San
Remo Agreement, and also under the cession of sovereignty under Article 95 of
the Treaty of Sèvres, there is a limitation on the political rights of the
Jews. They are prohibited from impairing the civil or religious rights of
non-Jews when they exercise sovereignty. But no nation on earth can give up its
right to self-defence. Palestinian culture, on the other hand, will not give up
its right to aggression. Calls for jihad, praise of ‘martyrs’ (i.e. suicide
bombers), threats to kill Jews because they are beasts or viruses or cancers
are a staple of Palestinian TV, of mosque sermons, and of political speeches in
Arabic. And over the years since the 1920s, violence directed against Jews and
Israelis has been fierce, regular, ruthless, and deeply destructive. The two
intifadas killed thousands of Israelis and destroyed entire families.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Lots of violence on both
sides, sure. But you surely know that Israel has killed approx 7 times as many
Palestinians as the inverse.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">A not negligible proportion of
Palestinians have killed themselves, by using suicide vests or guns or other
homicidal devices, knowing full well that they may be killed by IDF troops or agents
of Israel seeking to find the killers of innocents. It is not surprising if the
number of Palestinians killed is greater than the number of Israelis, given how
often the Palestinians have thrown themselves recklessly against better armed
opponents. That’s a shame, but it is how things have been. Sven times is, in
any case, incorrect. The true figure is less than four time. From the
beginning, 24,841 Israelis have been killed and 90,785 Palestinians. And it’s
about twice for the wounded: 35,350 Israelis against 67,602 Palestinians.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Why not look at this table, which shows
that the Israel-Palestine conflict is low down the list when it comes to
fatalities.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities (all figures rounded)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">1. 40,000,000, Red China, 1949-76 (outright killing, manmade famine,
Gulag)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">2. 10,000,000, Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to
1987 (mostly Gulag)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">3, 4,000,000, Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists under Mengistu, artificial
hunger, genocides</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">4. 3,800,000, Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95;
1998-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5. 2,800,000, Korean war, 1950-53</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">6. 1,900,000, Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">7. 1,870,000, Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">8. 1,800,000, Vietnam War, 1954-75</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">9. 1,800,000, Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban
1980-2001</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">10. 1,250,000, West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh
1971)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">11. 1,100,000, Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">12. 1,100,000, Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal
1976-92</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">13. 1,000,000, Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">14. 900,000, Rwanda genocide, 1994</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">15. 875,000, Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between
Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">16. 850,000, Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">17. 650,000, Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua,
Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">18. 580,000, Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after
Portugal's retreat (1972-2002)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">19. 500,000, Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">20. 430,000, Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat
refugees)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">21. 400,000, Indochina: against France, 1945-54</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">22. 400,000, Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">23. 400,000, Somalia, 1991-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">24. 400,000, North Korea up to 2006 (own people)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">25. 300,000 Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">26. 300,000, Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">27. 240,000, Colombia, 1946-58; 1964-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">28. 200,000, Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">29. 200,000, Guatemala, 1960-96</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">30. 190,000, Laos, 1975-90</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">31. 175,000, Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,
1991-1999</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">32. 150,000, Romania, 1949-99 (own people)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">33. 150,000, Liberia, 1989-97</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">34. 140,000, Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">35. 150,000, Lebanon civil war, 1975-90</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">36. 140,000, Kuwait War, 1990-91</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">37. 130,000, Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">38. 130,000, Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">39. 100,000, North Yemen, 1962-70</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">40. 100,000, Sierra Leone, 1991-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">41. 100,000, Albania, 1945-91 (own people)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">42. 80,000, Iran, 1978-79 (revolution)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">43. 75,000, Iraq, 2003-present (domestic)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">44. 75,000, El Salvador, 1975-92</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">45. 70,000, Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">46. 68,000, Sri Lanka, 1997-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">47. 60,000, Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">48. 60,000, Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><b>49. 51,000, Arab-Israeli conflict 1950 – present (+ 8,000 to 15,000
Arabs 1948-49)</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Hence the
checkpoints, patrols, separate roads and the checks on a people many of whose
young men and women are devoted to violence. I could continue at length in
describing Palestinian terrorism, but I’m sure you don’t have that much
patience, so I’ll focus instead on a single instance, from which you may draw
broader conclusions.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">In December
2004, Wafa al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman from Gaza was treated for severe
burns at Beersheva’s Soroka Medical Centre. She remained in hospital till
January 2005. In the following June, she had to return to the hospital for
further treatment. On her way to Beersheva, she had to pass through a checkpoint,
where she was found to be carrying a 22-pound bomb strapped to one leg. She
tried to detonate it there and then, but was prevented. After several years in
prison, she was released as part of the deal freeing terrorists for Israeli
soldier Gilad Shalit. Schoolchildren awaited her on her return home, and she
said to them ‘I hope you will walk the same path we took and God willing, we
will see some of you as martyrs.’ That is fiendish beyond all human
expectation. Wafa al-Biss planned to detonate herself among the doctors and
nurses who had saved her life, and among as many children as possible. Do you
think checkpoints are mere discrimination? Wafa is not the last Palestinian
stopped wearing a suicide vest and planning to gain access to a hospital, to a
hospital where Israel doctors and nurses treat ailing Palestinian entirely
without discrimination. Checkpoints and other restrictions that are imposed on
the denizens of the West Bank are entirely self-inflicted. It is all about
security. Violence and security, twin contexts for restrictive treatment. It is
surely obvious: stop the violence and the preaching of violence and you will be
treated like anybody else. I can remember checkpoints vividly in Belfast. Just
a short walk through town would take me through several checkpoints manned by
the army or the police. It was a restriction, but I never grumbled because I
knew why checkpoints were there. Once, almost my whole family was wiped out
when a bomb exploded under their train. By pure chance, the train was travelling
more slowly than usual. If further restrictions had been suggested, would I or
my family have said ‘no’?</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">I appreciate the personal
anecdote and I do understand the difficult situation Israelis are in. But
Israel cannot get out of its mess by pretending that it is not to blame. Israel
is continuously grabbing more and more land and water by settlements. Jewish
thugs are entering Palestinian houses and turfing the family out on the street
while the IDF stands and watches. Do you not know this? I do not know which
side of the divide you were in N Ireland. But suppose you were a catholic. A
protestant gang comes into your family house and throws you and your old mother
onto the street. The police stand by and laugh. What do you do? Would you be
immune to the call for violent retribution?</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">You seem to have a lot of
time for identifying with the predicament of Israelis, but nothing whatsoever
for the (much worse) predicament of Palestinians.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But Israel is not grabbing more and more
land. The land swaps already on the table will produce 100% of what will be
Palestinian territory. The UN has agreed to let Israel retain some of the West
Bank in order to provide security for the Jewish side. When Israel withdrew
from Gaza, what happened? Has Hamas’s response to freedom been at all helpful
to the peace process? That is why Israel is reluctant to pull out of the West
Bank too quickly, knowing that Hamas is geared up to take control of the
territory.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Israel is providing greater and greater
amounts of water to the Palestinians. It is completely in line with its
requirements under the Oslo Accords, and currently supplies 30% more water than
strictly required. 96% of Palestinians now have running water. Despite
Palestinian claims, Israelis and Palestinians use almost the same amount of
water. As of 2012, per capita water use is 150 MCM for Israelis and 140 MCM for
Palestinians. However, Palestinian mismanagement of water resources has led to
the loss of one-third of their own water. The Palestinians do not treat 94% of
their wastewater, whereas Israelis recycle 75% of theirs. Palestinians get the
highest amount of aid of any community in the world, so there should be plenty
of money to cater for this.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Where Jewish thugs enter Palestinian
houses I share your distaste. If IDF soldiers stand by, they should be
court-martialed or disciplined in some other way. I do care about the
predicament of ordinary Palestinians, but I have no sympathy at all for their
disastrous leadership, which has got them into a succession of disasters year
after year. And to the extent that many ordinary Palestinians support violent
action against Israelis, praise murderers, listen to mosque sermons that heap
the very worst abuse on Jews (and do note that, in Arabic it is much, much more
common to speak of al-Yahud than al-Sahyuniyya), watch television shows that
would be banned in any Western country, bring their children up like the
children in Ishiguru’s <i>Never Let Me Go</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, knowing they will die as they reach
adulthood, hand round sweets on hearing of murders like the massacre of the
Fogel family – that is to say, when them behave like reprobates<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and scoundrels, then I cannot praise
them or smile at them, because I know the next bomb will be for me or a friend
of mine. Is it asking too much of them to behave like grown-ups, to act to give
their children lives, to start businesses, to recognize that they live right
next door to one of the most successful countries in the world, and to ask for
help from Israeli expertise?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Further down you
write that ‘since Israel maintains total military control of all of historic
Palestine it should be viewed as a single unit’. Apart from the non-sequitur,
this illustrates the gulf between us in terms of academic disciplines. The
statement is nonsensical. Israel occupies only a part of what you term
‘historical Palestine’. Put simply, there was never any entity called Palestine
between the Roman departure (when it was Syria Palaestina), the Byzantine
period and finally the era of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid empires and the creation
of British mandate Palestine. Under the preceding Ottoman empire, it was
regarded as essentially southern Syria, and it was as part of Syria that the
Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s wanted to treat it. The British mandate area is
the only one relevant to present claims. It is much smaller than the area of
Syria Palaestina, which may be historical but is wholly irrelevant to modern
international boundaries. A large part of it was the area handed to the
Hashemite Arabs to form Transjordan (now Jordan). Israel is not in military
occupation of Jordan. Gaza was at one point occupied by Egypt, but then fell
into Israeli hands until 2005, when it was handed back to its Arab residents.
Israel is not in military occupation of Gaza. Israel itself is not under
military occupation, since it was legally established as a state through the
San Remo conference, the League of Nations, and the United Nations. The only
area under Israeli occupation is the West Bank, but things are not that simple.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Following the
Oslo Accords of 1993, Israel relinquished much of its control over the West
Bank. The area is now divided into three sectors. Sector A is totally under
Palestinian control and includes 55% of West Bank Palestinians. Area B has
Palestinian civilian administration with Israeli security. It includes 41% of
West Bank Palestinians. And Area C is under Israeli control but includes a mere
4% of West Bank Palestinians. What this boils down to is that Israel has
military control over 4 per cent of all West Bank Palestinians and no control
over 96%, nor any over all the Palestinians living in Gaza. So in what sense
does it make sense to speak of ‘all of historical Palestine’ (whatever you mean
by that) as ‘a single unit’.</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Thanks for the history
lesson, but it's all pretty irrelevant. The general understanding of the term
Palestine is the area between the med and Jordan valley/Dead<b> </b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Sea.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Well, I’m the historian, and I don’t
understand why you would consider all that irrelevant. The definition of
Palestine you give is only the area used to define the British Mandate (and it
goes right to the eastern border of Jordan if you take the original British
Mandate area). There was no ‘Palestine’ prior to 1920, and only the Arabs and
Palestinians use your definition today. But the area you mean was southern
Syria, and in the lead up to 1948, there was considerable rivalry between Syria
and Jordan, both of whom wanted it to form a Greater Syria (yes, even the
Jordanians).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">If you mean that
the whole of mandate Palestine (minus Jordan) should become a single entity, in
other words, one country then I must tell you that that would not only spell
the end of Israel, it would almost certainly lead to a genocide of today’s 6
million Jews. Hamas alone have promised that task to themselves, and if you
read their Charter, you will see the threat spelled out in stark language. That
Charter is readily available online. Here’s a link to a translation (which I
recommend) from Yale University:</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp</span></a></u></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">. No-one who ha<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>s not read it (or any of the crucial documents included in the classic
compilation, the Israel-Arab Reader) really has a right to make suggestions for
the future of Jews living in Israel, however well meaning those suggestions may
be.</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">See above about the
situation in Gaza. The horrendous conditions has provided fertile ground for
violent extremism there. But the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, including
the majority from Hamas, are ready to make an accommodation with Israel. It
will certainly not be easy, and a two-state arrangement is almost certainly
necessary as an intermediate step. Unfortunately Israel has done everything it
can, with its destructive settlement policy, to make a two-state arrangement
even more difficult than it would have been.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, I can agree with some of this,
but not all. You blame the extremism on the ‘horrendous conditions’ in Gaza,
but the truth is very different. The beginnings of Salafi Islam in its modern
form go back to the 1920s with the work of a fundamentalist writer, Rashid Rida
in Egypt. He was soon followed by Hasan al-Banna’, who founded the Muslim
Brotherhood, also in Egypt, modeled on the Hitler organizations on the 1930s.
Later, the great Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, created the most
extreme style of Muslim thought and wrote a seminal book, <i>Ma’rakatuna
ma’a’l-Yahud</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">,
Our Struggle with the Jews. Back in the 1940s, the Brotherhood engendered
branches in other countries, one of which was the Palestinian Muslim
Brotherhood, now known as Hamas. In India Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi became greatly
influential in the Arab world after his anti-democratic, anti-Christian and
anti-Jewish books were translated into Arabic.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Islamic terrorism has deep roots, and
those roots have been as much in comfortable and prosperous cultures as in
impoverished ones. Today, Gaza boasts luxury hotels and restaurants, its elite
drives expensive sports cars, house prices are galloping up. Things are bad,
but not so bad. That has not led to any diminution of attacks on Israel, any
reduction in the hate speech directed against Jews, or any willingness to talk
with an enemy who has offered and still offers benefits to the people of Gaza.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I certainly do not agree that ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel has done everything it can, with
its destructive settlement policy, to make a two-state arrangement even more
difficult than it would have been.’ <span style="color: red;">Read the Hamas
Charter, as I suggested earlier. The Charter inveighs against peace plans of
all kinds and insists that only war can solve their problems. How do you expect
to get a two-state solution when one side sets its face firmly against such a
solution and demands only what it wants and to hell with everybody else? These
are people who threw their own Palestinian rivals out of windows in high-rise
buildings. If not actually insane, Hamas fall little short of it and clearly
suffer from personality defects that rule out a healthy nationalism, moderate
religion, and a willingness to talk.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">You say,
moreover, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">‘the fact that
there is a fraction partitioned off in such a way as to have a local Jewish
majority and which is favoured with a high degree of democratic rights is not
highly relevant, in my opinion’<span style="color: blue;">. That is pure bigotry,
and I don’t hesitate to say so.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Why this should be bigotry
is unknown to me.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Perhaps I misunderstand you. But the
implication is that a Jewish-majority entity, even with democratic rights, is
not relevant to our discussion. What if it were an Arab-majority entity with
democratic rights? Would that seem relevant? I would consider either to be
relevant to any discussion of a two-state solution.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Israel was
created in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman empire as were
Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, all of which had the same rights (though the
Arabs dispensed with democracy pretty quickly). It was created as a home for
the Jews, a people who were severely persecuted in Europe, killed in their
millions, and treated as second-class citizens in the Islamic world. That was
its raison d’être, and it has fulfilled its promise very well indeed. The fact
that in this region only the Jewish state knows how to govern itself, functions
democratically, provides full freedom for the press, gives opposition parties
and anti-Israel NGOs the same rights they would have here is highly relevant.
All the Arab states have had exactly the same chance as Israel to lead
democratic lives and all have disintegrated into tyranny and religious
extremism. That is a very good argument for saying that Israel, not any of its
wanton neighbours, should be the model for government across the Middle East.
But all the surrounding states spit nothing but the most vicious antisemitism
and seek to destroy Israel, with all the good things it has done for mankind.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">See above. The conflict is
not between Israel and the Arab states, but between Zionist jews and
Palestinians.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">As I have said before, it is both of
these and more. A majority of Jews support Israel. 75% of US Jews polled in
2010 said that caring about Israel is a significant part of their Jewish
identity. So, most Jews are Zionists, and for good reason. But this is not
mainly a conflict between Zionist Jews (or Zionist non-Jews like myself) and
Palestinians, nor a clash between Israel and the Arab states. Many Arab states
are not much involved in the conflict. Most important, and related to what I
have just said about Islamic extremist, the rejection of Israel coincides with
the emergence of a resurgent Islam and the growth of intemperate, fractious,
and intolerant forms of Islamic belief and practice. Traditionally, Islam has
never conceded much to non-Muslims, and this absolutism is rampant in the
modern era. Why should Israel or Jews be held to blame for Islamic obstinacy?</span><span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">‘Even these local
democratic rights have some severe discriminatory aspects such as the “law of
return” which is racially based and inhumane.’ <span style="color: blue;">The
international community created Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue;"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">True. But this was done
without consultation, and against the wishes, of the inhabitants of the area.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">That’s not true. I’m tempted to embark on
another history, but I’ll try to restrict it here. Israel was not created
‘without consultation’. Endless consultations took place between the different
parties involved before and following the UN partition resolution. It seems
that the Arabs, however, were quite weak in their approach to lobbying, whereas
the Jews were much better at it. The decision to create a Jewish homeland
within or alongside an Arab state was made in the wake of one war and completed
in the wake of a second, when the League of Nations and the United Nations
dealt with the fragmentation of the Middle East, first after the total collapse
of the utterly undemocratic, non-consultative Ottoman empire. There were
numerous Arab organizations capable of negotiating with the British and members
of the UN. The various members of the Arab League met regularly and were represented
by the rulers of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, who talked with the British,
Americans and others. There was no lack of consultation. You are quite to say
that partition was against the wishes of the inhabitants of the area, but had
they agreed to two states, it is highly likely that the outcome would have been
to their benefit. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">Today, as endless government reports and
individual surveys will tell you, antisemitism has grown out of measure in
Europe and the Middle East, to the point where Jews have fled or are fleeing
countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Holland has gone into antisemitic
overdrive. Belgium the same. Attacks on Jews are up everywhere. Even as a
non-Jew I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. But in my childhood and youth
I thought genocide of the Jews to be a thing of the past, buried in all our
memories, never likely to come into the light again. I was wrong. Yet knowing
that another Holocaust is no longer such an impossible thing, I read the words
of a rational man, and I see him determined to weaken the one country in the
world that can guarantee a safe haven for any Jew who seeks it. Jews have a
right of return because Jews need the protection it affords.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Fine. I do not have a
problem with that. But Palestinians who were expelled from that same place must
also have a right of return. In fact they already have a right of return,
enshrined in the Geneva conventions and numerous UN resolutions. The problem is
that Israel and its supporters block its implementation.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The right of return issue is complex
enough to take up the time of whole university departments. All the covenants
and resolutions that bear on this subject have been analyzed, discussed, agreed
with and disagreed with ad nauseam. It is arguable that the Palestinians who
left Israel in 1948 and 1967 do not have a right of return. And I see no sign
of a right of return or compensation for the roughly 900,000 Jews who were
forced out of the Arab world post-1949. I do not like the idea of a right of
return, not just for the 1948-49 refugees, but also for their descendants to
the present day. I cannot see why Israel should bear the cost of repatriating
people who were pushed out of their territory by Arab committees and armed
forces. Given the subsequent behaviour of the Palestinians, I do not for a
moment understand why Israel should allow into its territory people who have
fought against it, agitated against it, boycotted it, and threatened it with
extinction should they ever get a chance. Note that this privilege is never
extended to other refugees from around the world. Those who were displaced
after World War II were eventually given new homes and granted new
citizenships, but the Arabs have refused citizenship for Palestinian refugees,
kept them in camps, and demand they be returned to Israel, where they will, in
all probability, cause disruption and renew violence. The abstracts cited by
the Arabs bear no relationship to the ongoing for a Jewish safe haven in a
world awash with anti-Semitism.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">The result is that a
Russian who can rustle or bribe through some papers stating 1/4 Jewish
ancestory on his mothers side can arrive in Israel and claim citizenship, while
my friend in Southampton, who has the keys and the legal deeds to his family's
house in Majdal Askalan (now Ashkelon), cannot cross the borders.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Is your friend a British citizen? If so,
he lives in a stable country, and no doubt his children are well educated and
will have successful futures. If he is a British citizen or intends to become
one, he can pass into Israel on the same basis as myself. This country is full
of people from disparate countries, many of whom are asylum seekers and
refugees. They are not given an automatic right of return to their homeland,
simply because that ‘s not how the i</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;">I do not challenge
your right to criticize Israel. But you carry that criticism into irrational
and prejudiced territory. I have asked you to examine real facts about Israel,
but you come back to me with surmises and inaccuracies. Your profession drives
you to do better than that. To visit Israel with open eyes. See fault by all
means, but do not load your criticism with existential weight, do not call for
the extinction of one of the best, most creative, most human rights focused
countries in the world – for such I hold Israel to be.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">I do not call for the
extinction of Israel. On the contrary, I think that a wise Israeli government
would immediately withdraw the settlements, agree to implement UN resolutions,
allow the refugees to return or be compensated, and allow the formation of a
truth and reconciliation committee on the S African lines in which the crimes
of both sides will be aired and defused. A secure Palestinian state would be
set up alongside a secure Israel. I think that is surprisingly likely. My
experience of Israelis and Palestinians has made me realize that the two
peoples are astonishingly similar.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I agree with some of this, but not all.
If giving up the settlements would guarantee peace, I would agree to it.
Removing settlements did help foster peace in Sinai. That included the struggle
to take families from their homes in Yamit. But I don’t see any precedent for
that, do you? Pulling out of Gaza did diddley squat for the prospects of peace,
and actually worsened the situation. And just as you call for the Palestinian
refugees to be restored to Israel, yet you refuse to let 350,150 Jewish
settlers stay in the West Bank. A truth and reconciliation committee would, no
doubt, be a good idea, but not if it resulted in reiteration of all the
trumped-up charges against Israel. Crimes there have been, but most of what
Israel has done has been legal. I’m pleased to read that you think two secure
states side by side is ‘surprisingly likely’, though I confess that I’m less
optimistic. If this were a straightforward political struggle, I’d agree. But
the introduction of Islamic defiance at a period when Islamic is on the march
and wants nothing to do with Western ways of doing things makes me skeptical
about the likelihood of change. The two peoples are indeed astonishingly
similar, but the two religions are poles apart.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">In the fullness of time I
would hope that the two states merge into a single democratic entity.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, I’d like to look
again and finally at this last statement of yours. I believe it is the most crucial
thing and the truest signal to the nature of the dispute between us. It is
easier for me to see, I believe, because I am greatly experienced in Islamic
Studies. Your statement is – tell me I’m wrong if I misinterpret you – founded
on your experience with European, North American Australian, Christian, and
Jewish democratic understandings of the state, of treaty-based
internationalism, of human rights, and of the multicultural society. If I
thought that a future Jewish-Palestinian entity would be based on the
Westphalian theory of international order, on the original ideals of the League
of Nations and the United Nations, I might well agree that it would be the
perfect solution, though I would remain cautious of a world that did not permit
a Jewish state. Nevertheless, it is an ideal to aspire to, and I commend you
for it.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But I must say that I think
you are very wrong indeed in what you assume. The issue is not Western
international law. It never has been. The core of this matter is Islamic law. A
long lecture on this subject would take pages upon pages, and I have no desire
to inflict that on you. I will concrete only on what is salient to this
discussion. First, shari’a law is divine. Its basis lies first in the Qur’an,
the unalterable word of God. No-one in over 1400 years has ever challenged this
text. Its second basis is made up of six canonical books, the collections of
the sayings and doings of Muhammad. These are not God’s word, but they are the
next best thing to it and cannot easily be challenged. Finally, some shari’a is
founded in the <i>sira</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> or biography of the prophet. The methods of modern historical
science do not apply to either the hadith or the sira (or only for Western
scholars and a tiny number of Muslims).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This means that the matters I am
about to mention can never be challenged without a real risk of apostasy, which
will be met with threats of physical violence and attempts on the writer’s
life. A majority will always favour retention of laws derived from these
sources.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">According to Rudolph Peters,
the world’s leading analyst of Islamic holy war, the Islamic law of nations is
based, not on treaty obligations or the deliberations of international
institutions, but on the law of jihad. It is as simple as that, and it works in
a manner utterly different to the concepts of Western nations, all of which are
negated by Islamic thinkers. The law of jihad states that Muslims are bound to
spread the faith of Islam by preaching followed by physical conquest of
non-Muslim territory. The early history of Islam (starting with the prophet) is
one of continuous conquest, and later Islamic history is a story of further
jihad accompanied by mercantile endeavours and open conversion. If a territory
starts out as the abode of pagans or atheists, there will be a call to
conversion, followed by mass killing. If (as happened in the early phase) the
territory belongs to Christians (or, in theory, Jews, or, in Iran,
Zoroastrians) the inhabitants will be fought if they fight back and may be
killed in battle. But on conquest they may choose between death and the status
of dhimmis or protected people, provided they pay the <i>jizya</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> or poll tax and observe
various regulations that enforce their role as submissives (Islam itself means
‘submission’). This has taken place throughout Islamic history. It has been
marked by the decline in Christian and Jewish communities, especially in the
modern period.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The principle behind all this
is that Muslims are regarded as the followers of God’s final revelation,
possessors of his final word (with the Jewish and Christian scriptures
dismissed as ‘corrupt’) and, as such have a permanent mission to bring Islam to
the rest of mankind, by preaching where possible, but mainly through conquest
by jihad. For the rest of the world, this is a threat, and one that has a
present-day reality in the spread of violent Islam terrorism.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Should your unitary state ever
come into being, I would count the lives of Israel’s Jews in days.
Remonstrations from the United Nations, the European Union, and anybody else
would be disregard. Because the Jews have fought against the Arabs (and, in a
fashion, against the Iranians), the desire to drive them to condign punishment
would override all other sentiments. They would be treated as Muhammad treated
the Jews of Medina in his day. Killing them would be another Final Solution.
The Western powers, recognizing the need not to antagonize the Arabs, newly
come into possession of Israel’s shale oil and gas reserves, would not seek to
rock the boat.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Naturally, the Jews of Israel
(and others from round the world) would not want to let that happen to them, so
the conflict would continue and perhaps the Arabs would be expelled for a
second time. But there are dozens of Islamic countries, and the creation of a
single entity would doubtless encourage all of them to send forces in order to
root out the Jewish presence once and for all.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">What would not happen is the
happy home you envisage. Israel is not in the heart of Europe, and Europe has
lost its love for Jews and the Jewish state.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the end, I believe there is one hypostatic thing that separates us.
This is a willingness on my part to accept as benign a democratic, law-based,
rights-observant state, with many warts and blemishes, with repeated yet
scarcely deliberate failures to live up to its own ideals and aspirations. I am
willing to accept Israel as it is, with constant hope for improvement –
something that has, in so many ways and by so many measures, already taken in
place, albeit in part. This has happened against the odds, for no other country
in human history has been so hated and so often threatened with extinction.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Whereas you, even though you know how much better Israel than most other
countries, choose to exceptionalize it, seeing its faults to the exclusion of
its merits and ignoring the far greater faults of those other nations whose
inhabitants cry out for your support, and at the same time finding nothing good
to say about the positive contributions Israel has made internally and
internationally. It has saved lives all round the world, through its
agricultural innovations, its medical inventions, its scientific discoveries,
and its aid missions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I don’t know what to do about this. I have been a confirmed lover of
Israel (and I hope not a foolish one) for almost all my life, you have been an
anti-Zionist, possibly for just as long. There is nothing I can do to help you
adopt a more moderate position. What I do know is this. If you, the
international Left, the Muslim world, and the Palestinians, along with millions
of people who couldn’t care less about Israel succeed by whatever means, it
will bring about, in months or years a second Holocaust. I am as certain of
that as I am of anything. You say you do not hope for the destruction of
Israel, and I believe you, but you do hope for a jolly reunited Palestine to
which all Palestinian refugees will return, and not just the refugees from
1949, but generation upon generation of their descendants. That alone would
spark off massacres of Jews, in fulfillment of eighty years of threats of
genocide, threats that are still written and uttered to this. Think of the
‘Arab Spring’, think of Syria, think of the slaughter of Christians in most
Muslim countries. The threats are directed at the Jews, and not just the Jews
living in Eretz Yisrael. The destruction of Israel would open floodgates
elsewhere. And with the deaths of 6 million Jews in Israel, all the
infrastructure of Jewish settlement would be destroyed. Think what happened in
Gaza when Israel pulled out. There would be no more world-level science
(censorship of science is endemic in the Muslim world, evolution is taught
nowhere), no more Nobel prizes (Jews have some 200 out of a world population of
14 million, Muslims have 9 out of a world population of 1.6 billion), no<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more ranking on the Nasdaq Index, no
more significant work in medicine, restrictions on literature (much more
censorship), and much greater loss across the board.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I have spent a lifetime studying Islam, and I believe the Muslim world
contributed greatly to the sciences, to alchemy and hence to your own
discipline of chemistry, to art and architecture, to poetry, to natural
history, to the development of the astrolabe, to astronomy, to philosophy and
mystical philosophy, to painting (mainly through the miniature form), to
exploration, to trade, and much else. But today, all that is gone, and the
Muslim world contributes very little indeed to the sciences or culture.
Instead, modern Islam, from about the 19<sup>th</sup> century, has given us the
culture of jihad, a continuation in places of slavery (and the Arab slave trade
was the longest and most widespread form), and has bequeathed the Taliban,
al-Qa’ida, Hamas, Hizbullah, the writings of Sayyid Qutb and Hasan al-Banna’
and Abu’l A’la Mawdudi, daily car bombs and suicide bombings, beheadings, the
oppression of women, gays, and religious minorities, the insanity of much of
the Arab world, the madness of Iran, the craziness of Afghanistan, the ongoing
bigotry and violence of Pakistan, 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, the endless bombings and
massacres in Israel, Woolwich, the Bombay assaults, the Boston Marathon
bombings – a tiny few from all the terror attacks worldwide. Wikipedia has a
comprehensive list of therse attacks: if you look at it, you will see a great
swathe of Israeli flags, indicating the excessive number of individuals killed
in Israel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">If Israel falls, that is what will replace it. Mindless terrorism. Hamas
will kill anyone, Jew or Muslim, who stands in the way of an Islamist state.
Hizbullah will move in, followed by forces from Iran. Fatah, Islamic Jihad and
others will make their own bid for power. Now, you may think that ‘</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">In the fullness of time I would
hope that the two states merge into a single democratic entity.<span style="color: red;">’</span></span><b> </b><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;">That is not how things would
turn out, and I’m sure you know it. Mahmoud ‘Abbas has already declared that</span><b>
</b><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;">no Jews will be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. Hamas
want to kill all the Jews. Iran takes the same view.</span><b> </b><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Most
of the Islamic world believes that Jews are vermin who deserve to be eradicated.
The last thing that will emerge from a merger of two states is a single
democratic entity. There are no true democracies in the Middle East bar Israel.
Take away the Jewish ethic that has created Israel as a real democracy and you
will see the area revert to savagery. Why would you doubt it?</span><b> </b><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;">There
are too many anti-democratic forces at work in the Middle East to make it
beyond belief that all the theocrats and dictators will give up their old ways
and start embracing the Jews as their long-lost kin.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<b><br />
</b><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Thank you, Malcolm, for taking the trouble to read so far, and for your
patience in engaging in what has become a protracted debate. If you want to
take this further, I’m game for more. And if you think we have reached a point
beyond which further discussion is pointless, as you have suggested, well at
least we have both tried. Keep well and don’t inhale too many toxic substances.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Best wishes,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Denis</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> ‘Past or Apprehended Disturbances’, p. 61.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[2]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> F.O. 78/1294 (Political No. 36) in A. M. Hyamson, <i>The
British Consulate in Jerusalem (In Relation to the Jews of Palestine, 1838 –
1914</i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">) 2 vols., London, 1939-1942,
vol. 1, p. 249.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[3]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid. p. 425.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9009004#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[4]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> Peters, <i>From Time Immemorial</i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">, p. 196.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-21588473100409259492013-06-04T11:50:00.001-07:002013-06-04T11:50:12.341-07:00Here is my latest (and probably final) exchange with Prof. Malcolm Levitt. Please note that it contains three texts. His last letter to me, in black, in which he quotes earlier material from me (in blue) and, finally, my responses to his letter, in red. Good luck with it. Forgive any typos or howlers, and overlook any repetition (almost inevitable). That said, do enjoy it.<br />
<br />
By the way, it's long, so I have split it in two: you'll need to read the next post as well. <br />
<br />
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">My, my, Malcolm, you
have given me a lot to think about this time round. However, I will try to do
justice to your argument, and where I concede that you are right I will say so.
On the whole, and as you may very well expect, I do not find your arguments as
compelling as you might have hoped, much as you have not let yourself be much
influenced by mine. But I do honestly trust that through this dialogue we may
both come to appreciate the broad or specific thinking for which we both speak,
albeit we speak as two people alienated from one another’s perceptions. How far
it will develop I can’t tell, but as it is we only have glimpses of each
other’s perceptions. Yet that is not a bad thing in itself. It may not move me
closer to your viewpoint or you to mine, but it may leave us with a better
understanding of those viewpoints. <br />
<br />
Rather than repeat your technique of interpolating one letter with comments
within the entire text, I propose to cite relevant passages from your last
letter and to comment on them. I will leave your material in black and make my
comments in red.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I will begin with your
brief introductory paragraphs.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Monaco; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">First, many of your critical points (and also those from others) are in
the line of "why criticize Israel, when country XXX does far worse
things". People who make such comments are usually unfamiliar with
political activism and how it works. It's not some sort of (reverse) beauty
contest in which you choose the absolutely worst human rights offender in the
world at the particular moment in time and concentrate on that. The fact that a
particular country is abusing human rights is sufficient to criticize it, and
to try to do something about it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">While this makes some sense, it leaves the basic question unanswered.
Many supporters of Israel are often critical of this or that policy and of
evidence of human rights abuses where they occur. What we do not do is make a
song and dance about Israel since we do not believe its abuses are serious
enough to single it out. You will be familiar with the principle of triage in
an emergency medical situation. The more badly injured someone may be, he moves
towards the head of the queue, while those whose injuries are not
life-threatening remain at the back. Nothing you say will convince me that
Israel’s breaches of human rights are even a fraction of those committed by a
country like Iran. Ordinary Iranians, a people I have known and loved since
1966, deserve considerable support from human rights organizations in the West,
yet those organizations are parsimonious in the support they give. Most of the
time the governments and NGOs are too busy condemning Israel or supporting a
wide range of boycotts, apartheid week events, and flotillas of junk for them
to come to the aid, verbal or otherwise, of those who most desperately need
their help. Everyone is frightened of Iran, with the result that one of the
most obnoxious regimes on earth gets away scot-free with its executions,
tortures, and repression, while all the time building nuclear weapons for use
against Israel and others of its enemies. Israel does not hang gays, doers not
even imprison adulterers, does not persecute its Baha’i minority, treats
patients from its chief enemy state in its own hospitals, and has an exemplary
record regarding human rights. It often makes mistakes, owing to pressure from
different political forces, but it does better than other countries that are
never indicted.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But you choose to move Israel to the very top of the
triage queue. While men and women bleed and die in many other countries, you
push a democratic, human rights-observant state to the front, as though your
political preoccupations give you the right to pass over the Iranian
dissidents, the Baha’is, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians who may be Iranian
citizens yet are treated as if they were nobody at all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is also important to take account of context. By
this I mean that Israel, unlike the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy,
Germany, Canada, Australia, the US or any other Western democracy, faces an
existential threat. Iran is building nuclear weapons with the express aim of
attacking and destroying Israel. Hamas, Hizbullah, Fatah and every other
jihadist group in the world makes the destruction of the Jewish state its
fondest aspiration. Over the years, several Arab states and the Palestinians
have launched war after war and wave upon wave of terrorist attacks against
Israel, cutting off their own noses as they have done so. It should not be
surprising if Israel has to take decisive security measures to protect its citizens
from such wrath. That wrath originates in a violent form of anti-Semitism, the
very thing Israel was created to avoid or defend against. Not every country has
the luxury of defending itself through words alone.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Next, you say:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Monaco; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In addition, many of the countries XXX which some critics would prefer
to be targets of campaigns are already official enemies, for example Iran.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Iran is technically an enemy state for most Western
democracies, yet, as I have said, there are very few protests at state or
public level. There are no TV documentaries about its behaviour, no major
newspaper or magazine articles, no broad public engagement with the wrongdoings
of the regime. Yet Israel, which is not the enemy of any democracy, which was
established by democratic means, and which has a heritage of suffering and
denial that is outmatched in scale only by what the Russians endured under
Stalin and the Chinese under Mao, Israel has become the primary focus for
international condemnation. This makes no sense. The Left in many countries has
allied itself with radical Islam and with neo-antisemitic far-right activists
and bawls loudly about Israel in a way no-one lamented the excesses of the
Soviet Union or the depredations of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Their agitation, their
use of violence to stop Israeli lecturers speaking at universities, to end
concerts by Israeli orchestras in public concert halls, and to howl at Israeli
dance troupes and singers and theatre groups chill me to the bone, since it is
all visibly anti-Semitic. I am not a Jew, but I feel it in the soles of my
feet. You are a Jew, and it surprises me that you either do not feel it as I
do, or prefer to sanction it for political motives. The very fact that Israel
alone is singled out for this treatment as no other country on earth is
prioritized, that Israel and Israel alone is rushed to the head of that triage
queue convinces me that the motion underlying almost all of this a just plain
old Jew hatred.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The major point about
Israel is not that it is a uniquely bad human rights offender (although it is
bad enough)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I would like you to tell me why Israel is ‘bad enough’
in respect of human rights. As you will know, the Declaration of Independence
of the State of Israel</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <span style="color: red;">endorsed all human rights values,
something that has never happened in any Islamic state, least of all in those
whose law is based on the Shari’a and stated clearly that the State of Israel
would ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its
inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex, and guaranteed freedom of
religion, conscience, language, education and culture</span>. <span style="color: red;">I would much rather live in Israel than in Iran, Egypt,
Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and numerous other countries.</span> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The main modern human rights issues are set out in the Declaration of
Human Rights, which is pretty comprehensive. The whole thing is long, but here
is some of the text:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">All
human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed
with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of
brotherhood<span style="color: blue;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The basic laws of Israel fully endorse this. There are no Israeli
laws that contradict this. No apartheid laws, for example, modelled on those of
South Africa. Yet quite insanely anti-Israel activists repeatedly describe Israel
as ‘an apartheid state’ and hold an annual Israel Apartheid Week. Why? There is
no apartheid in Israel. Yet people believe that. If I declared ‘Britain
Apartheid Week’, I would be laughed at. Why do responsible people not laugh at
those who perpetuate this easily disproved myth? You’re a scientist. You know
that no-one takes seriously creationists or flat earthists or 9/11 conspiracy
theorists or other cranks. That the apartheid Israel myth has so much traction
is surely because those who believe in it don’t know the first thing about
Israel or the Middle East.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The Universal Declaration also states:</span></div>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l33 level1 lfo6; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a2"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Everyone is
entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or
other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of
the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or
territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>trust, non-self-governing or under
any other limitation of sovereignty.</span></li>
</ul>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Which Israeli law, court ruling, or policy undermines this article?
There is no race bar in Israel: Arab Israelis are full citizens. They are
discriminated against, but by individual citizens, not the state. Colour is not
a basis for any official discrimination, and people of all colours do thrive in
Israel. There is no legislation that discriminates on the basis of sex (save
for two religious issues, the get and the situation of women at the Kotel),
language, religion (Israel is the only rights-observant country on this issue
in the Middle East). Political and other opinion is protected, as you must
know. Not only are there political parties that oppose the state, but there are
also dozens of NGOs, journalists, and other individuals who regularly display
hate for the Jewish state. No-one has ever banned <i>Ha’aretz</i></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> from being published.
On the other hand, ultra-Orthodox racist works like Rabbi Shapira’s anti-Arab <i>Torah
Ha-Melekh</i></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> have been seized by the police.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Furthermore:</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a3"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Who in Israel does not have those rights?
Criminals can lose their liberty, but that is true in every single country.
Security is only at risk from terrorist organizations who infiltrate Israel
with the aim of killing innocent civilians.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a5"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a6"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before
the law.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">It may be worth citing U.S. Supreme Court
Justice William J. Brennan, who said in 1987 that despite the difficulties in
safeguarding civil liberties during times of security crises, he said ‘it may
well be Israel, not the United States, that provides the best hope for building
a jurisprudence that can protect civil liberties against the demands of
national security.’</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a7"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">All are equal before the law and are entitled without any
discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal
protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and
against any incitement to such discrimination.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You must be aware that Israel’s courts often rule in favour of
Israeli Arab citizens and against the Israeli government. Israeli law prohibits
the arbitrary arrest of citizens, defendants are considered innocent until
proven guilty and have the right to writs of <i>habeas corpus</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> and other procedural
safeguards. Israel holds no political prisoners. Merely holding opinions
critical or dismissive of the Israeli state is not enough to result in anyone’s
arrest or imprisonment. But involvement in terrorist activity will lead to
incarceration, as it will in any country you care to name. Israel maintains an
independent judiciary, as do other democracies.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a11"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a12"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a13"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">(1) Everyone has the right to
freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">(2)
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return
to his country.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Israeli citizens can travel and live freely within the borders of
Israel. Restrictions in the West Bank are very limited and are undertaken for
security purposes.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a14"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a15"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">(2) No
one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to
change his nationality.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Although Israel is a Jewish state, citizenship is not defined by
Jewishness. Arabs born in Israel have Israeli nationality just as much as Jews
and regardless of whether they are Muslims, Christians, Druze or anything else.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a16"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1) Men and women of full
age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the
right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to
marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.</span></div>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l17 level1 lfo20; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">(2) Marriage shall be entered
into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">While this is broadly true for Israelis, the country has to make
adjustments to its marriage laws. The Ultra-Orthodox Jewish lobby has
successfully forced the government for many decades to recognize only religious
marriage. This has caused problems for agnostics, atheists and others, and has
forced many to travel to Cyprus for a civil wedding. It’s not a happy state of
affairs and is likely to get worse as demands for gay marriage increase
(something that the haredim and other extremists bitterly oppose). This breach
of human rights arises, not from any desire on the part of the government, but
by a political need to appease the Ultras. The issue of free and full consent
is more problematic, given that Ultra-Orthodox Jews and strict Muslims alike
insist on arranged marriages. For everyone else, of course, consent is normally
free and full. The breach of human rights takes place because the government is
sworn not to interfere with religious rulings and customs (which would
constitute a greater breach of human rights after all). None of this is
generated by the Israeli government. Secularists like myself would prefer it if
they took a harder line with the extreme Orthodox. For all that, it is not
evidence that the state of Israel sets out to reverse human rights rulings or
ideal practice.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a17"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="a18"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Everyone has the right to freedom of thought,
conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or
belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or
private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and
observance.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Israel is clearly an exemplar state in this regard. Not one of its
neighbours, nor any Islamic state anywhere in the world offers even a fraction
of the protection Israel offers for apostates, heretics, members of different
faiths, religious dissidents, and others. When Jordan controlled the West Bank
from 1949 to 1967, the authorities destroyed around forty synagogues. Under
Israeli control, the army has not deliberately damaged any mosque, but vandals
(including those involved in price-tag acts) have tried to burn a few. The work
of vandals does not constitute a breach of this article.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Everyone
has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom
to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I think you know that Israel functions in this
respect like any open democracy. It has opposition parties in the Knesset. It
has newspapers like Haaretz that consistently take an anti-government stance.
NGOs like the new Israel Fund (which opposes the occupation and settlements),
the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, </span><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27Tselem"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">B'Tselem</span></a></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">, </span><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machsom_Watch"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Machsom Watch</span></a></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">, </span><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Black"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Women in Black</span></a></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">, </span><span style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_for_Israel%27s_Tomorrow"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Women
for Israel's Tomorrow</span></a></span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (Women in Geen), with its abhorrent
anti-government line that calls for the transfer of Israeli Arabs, the
pro-Palestine groups who welcomed President Obama in Israel last March,
Christian anti-Israel groups like Sabeel and EAPPI, and many other
organizations are all given free rein in the Jewish state, provided they remain
within the limits of the law, exactly as is done in any democracy.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">As you might expect, I could continue to take
articles from the Universal Declaration, but I hope I have shown that, with
very few exceptions, Israel does adhere to the principles and demands of human
rights, at least as much as does the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia,
France and other European countries. That you should express the view that
Israel is ‘bad enough’ makes me wonder just what standards you would regard as
acceptable, for surely you should treat any other democracy as equally ‘bad
enough’, citing its failings where they occur in stark contrast to its positive
achievements. You make no allowance whatever for the simple fact that Israel,
unlike any other democracy, faces an intolerable security burden, having been
invaded and terrorized over many decades by enemies that simply refuse to give
up, citing the old Khartoum Declaration refrain of ‘No peace with Israel, no
negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel’ ad nauseam. Faced with
external and internal threats, all democracies respond by increased security
measures, as I learned in my youth about Britain within Northern Ireland. That
did not make the UK a state opposed to human rights or ‘bad enough’, and the
security measures were quickly relaxed when both sides made peace. What can
Israel do when faced with an enemy who won’t even get round a table to
negotiate?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You say that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel
receives unprecedented financial, military, diplomatic and financial support
from Western democracies. This unconditional and long-term support from the
West has enabled a mindset within Israel in which its politicians feel they can
commit any number of human rights abuses without consequence. The unconditional
support from the West, largely in defiance of international law, is a situation
which makes Israel unusual.’</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I’m not sure what to make of this. All
round the world, countries receive financial, military, diplomatic and
financial support from Western democracies. The United States, for example,
gives aid round the world well in excess of what it gives to Israel. Its
military and financial aid in 2011 amounted to some $49.5 billion. In 2004,
almost ten years ago, private aid from the US stood at $71.2 billion. In 2011,
the US gave over $10,000 millions to Afghanistan. Israel comes next, with
$2,995 million. It’s a lot of money, but it helps preserve stability in a very
unstable region, which is why America contributes the money in the first place.
And did you notice that John Kerry has just agreed to provide $4 billion for
the development of the West Bank, quite a bit more than the US gives to Israel?
But did you also notice that the PA has turned the payment down rather than
make any political compromises?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Unfortunately,</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Unfortunately, that is entirely in
keeping with Palestinian behaviour down the decades. As you will know, in 1937
the British Peel Commission published a 404-page report following a thorough
investigation of the Palestine Mandate. The report recommended partition, and
offered the Jews a mere 20% of the entire Mandate territory and the Arabs 70%.
Add to that the whopping 77% of the <i>original</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> Palestine, also given to the Arabs of
the region, and the Arabs walked away with a territorial gain far in excess of
what other people (think of us Irish) could have hoped for. The plan was to
merge the two Arab entities into a single Arab state under King ‘Abd Allah. A
majority of the Zionist movement accepted even this grudging division of the
land. The Arabs, led by that monstrous man, soon to be a war criminal,
al-Husayni, rejected it out of hand. Determined to have everything, they came
closing to losing it all. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">They made the same mistake over and over
again, when they rejected fresh, generous offers to make a fair partition of
the land (retaining Jordan as the first Palestinian state) in 1947, 1948, 1949,
1967, 1973, 1979 (the Camp David Accords), 1994, 1998 (the Wye River
Memorandum), 2000 (Camp David – the most generous offer to date –followed by
the second intifada), again in 2000 (Assad walked away from 98% of the Golan),
2001 (when 92% of Palestinians supported attacks on Israeli soldiers, 58%
attacks on civilians), 2003 (the Road Map: Israel pulled out of population
centres, increased aid, and dismantled outposts; the PA flatly refused to stop
terror), 2005 (Israel pulled completely out of Gaza), 2007 (Annapolis, when Olmert
offered 93% of the West Bank and a full land swap, ‘Abbas turned it down),
2008, and 2009 (Netanyahu offers a full Palestinian state, the 6<sup>th</sup>
Fatah Conference resolves to ‘totally reject recognition of Israel as a Jewish
state’.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You might say you admire the Palestinians
for their resolve, for their refusal to give up an inch of what they believe to
have been their land, for their integrity in rejecting the very notion of a
Jewish state or the presence of a single Jew in their midst, indeed anywhere in
the Middle East. I would not be so kind. They are eaten up by a profound
antisemitic prejudice, a level of hatred so great they can never contemplate a
Jew in the next room. It is not a noble sense of attachment to their homeland
that drives them, but an unmoving predilection for violence above negotiation,
murder rather than kindness. Throughout their pronouncements, in sermons, on
television, and in school textbooks I see nothing but a wicked racism, and it
surprises me that anyone on the left can contemplate such unswerving devotion
to the cause of killing Jews because they are Jews. What they by rejecting
every solution that is presented to them, instead of working to find a better
formula, is to hurt themselves and keep the Middle East in a state of tension.
It is now my conviction that peace will not be possible for the foreseeable
future because hatred of Israel is based on jihad and anti-Semitism, and there
seems no way of bypassing such ingrained sentiments.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You next say</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Anyone can criticize an official enemy country
(e.g. Iran), or a far-away powerful country about which we can do very little
(e.g. China). But such criticisms are usually masks for the crimes that our own
countries and allies are committing.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Really, this is too far-leftist for me to
take very seriously. (And I am a Labour-voting, middle-of-the-road liberal.) I
really don’t think you have thought this through. If I criticize the regime in
Iran, I will be arrested, thrown into jail or placed under house arrest, and
not impossibly end up swinging on the end of a rope. You know perfectly well
that that never happens to any critics of the UK, US or other democratic
governments (including Israel). Democracies have free presses, open discourse
in universities, open access to MPs, congressmen, and MKs, there is freedom to
set up political parties, there are tribunals, commissions, courts and many
other bodies who will listen to formal complaints about the state. There are
very few attempts to cover up our crimes, and there aren’t that many crimes to
cover. What crimes there are (by the army, for example) can brought to pubic
attention and thus to court. This is what happens in Israel – how else could a
newspaper like <i>Haaretz</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> survive? </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Some of the respondents have demanded that I
condemn Arab human rights abuses. Fine, I condemn them. So would anyone else
with any decency. So what? Can we go back to the point, now, please, which is
Israel?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, this is not an argument. Nobody
is stopping us going back to Israel, especially since Israel is the primary
object of this debate. At least you recognize that a decent person would
condemn Arab human rights abuses and, I trust, those of Iran, many African
countries, China, and so on. Of course you do. But you seem to think that we
should move on from them to the human rights abuses of Israel, which you appear
to regard as equally serious. I find this reprehensible, in that I have never
seen evidence that Israel’s human rights record is demonstrably egregious, as
are those of the countries I have mentioned. I have always enjoyed visiti</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Monaco;">ng Israel, have been free to
travel anywhere, and have never been subject to arbitrary arrest. But I have
not chosen to visit Iran, much as I love it, since 1979. Given my previous
contacts there, the research I was engaged in (all perfectly respectable here)
and my personal attitudes to the clerical regime, I preferred not to take the
risks further visits would have entailed. I have never felt that about Israel.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">‘It's important to understand that one does not run
an inverse beauty contest and decide which country is the worst, and boycott
it. That would be highly ineffective. The criterion has to be “which tactic is
most likely to do good in that particular case, and least likely to do harm”.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I don’t entirely follow this. I do not
see why it would be ineffective to sanction and boycott a country whose people
are in immediate need of relief</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">
<span style="color: red;">from the unconscionable actions and demands of a
government that</span> <span style="color: red;">offends democracy and prohibits
freedom.</span> <span style="color: red;">People in such countries cry out for
early relief, but they are denied succour so long as people like yourself focus
on Israel, a country whose people are not in any such need.</span> <span style="color: red;">Frequently, anti-Israel activists justify their boycott,
divestment and sanction campaign by shrilly declaring Israel to be ‘an
apartheid state’. But, as I have said before, there is visibly no apartheid in
Israel. Nor, quite frankly, is there apartheid in the West Bank. Gaza can speak
for itself, but it is no longer Israel’s concern. You may think is easier to take
action against Israel, but surely that is only because Israel is a democracy
which provides an open arena in which accusations and complaints may be made.</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Monaco;"> Many people make accusations
against the British governments, but they have never been deprived of an
opportunity to pursue their accusation in the public square, in the Houses of
Parliament, through the media, or through the courts. There is really no need
to persecute Israel because it is equally open. But the citizens of Iran,
China, Tibet, Sudan, and all other rights-denying states do not have a voice.
They cannot their complaints through a parliament, courts, or the media. They
need advocates abroad, yet everywhere the Left is preoccupied by a state which,
whatever its problems, is driven by law and a need for fairness. If the Left
concentrated its calls to boycott to the UK or Ireland or France while denying
their voice to millions round the world who plead for help, it would be
considered a betrayal of the ideals of the Left and of the downtrodden everywhere.
That is also true of an unhealthy focus on Israel.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Monaco;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Monaco;">You continue, arguing as follows:</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 41.0pt; mso-list: l27 level1 lfo35; tab-stops: list 41.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -23.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">(1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel is
strongly dependent on support from the West (2) Israel is too powerful and its
victims (the Palestinians) are too weak in the face of the Israel/West
combination (3) Israel has implemented a harsh apartheid regime in the occupied
territories, partly in collusion with ruling Palestinian elites (the Oslo
accords).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This makes no sense either.
Many countries depend on support from the West, as I have said. What support
Israel receives is not massive, and the country still has large pockets of
poverty. Nevertheless, the Israeli economy as developed by internal innovation
and marketing places the country as number 16 in a table of world economies. It
is also worth pointing out that the West Bank and Gaza receive large donations
form all round the world, notably from the richer Arab states and dozens of
Muslim charities. Unlike Israel, the PLO/PA and Hamas have siphoned off large
sums, initially to line the pockets of Yassir Arafat, then Mahmoud ‘Abbas and
his sons, and more widely to buy weapons of all kinds with which to fight
Israel.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You say: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel is too powerful and its victims
(the Palestinians) are too weak in the face of the Israel/West combination.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Why should Israel be made to
suffer because it is more powerful than its enemies? Many countries are more
powerful than others. By your argument, we would end up in a world like the one
satirized by socialist/humanist Kurt Vonnegut in his short story, Harrison
Bergeron. In that society, anyone who is more powerful than other people
(stronger, faster, with better eyesight, more beautiful, more intelligent etc.)
has to wear devices to reduce them to the level of less well endowed people.
Naturally, the result is a disaster, just as it would be if Israel were to
abandon its advantages in military force, science, business, culture and so on.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The Palestinians had every
chance to build a stable state and threw it away. On three auspicious
occasions, Arab armies invaded Israel with the explicit aim of slaughtering its
Jewish population. They lost each time, but instead of behaving sensibly and
calling it a day, to the present they call for jihad and refuse to recognize
Israel. Now, given that Israel has such a strong economy and is in the habit of
giving help to countries all round the world, it might be expect ed tnhat the
Palestinians could all these years have benefited from Israeli know how and
hands-on assistance. Don’t forget that when the West Bank and Gaza were under
full Israeli control, their economies steamed ahead, but once Hamas and the PA
took over, both economies sank. Is it too hard to see why I favour Israel over
the intransigent, belligerent Palestinians. But Palestinians who showed
themselves willing to make peace and get on with their lives would be the
darlings of my heart.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel has implemented a harsh apartheid
regime in the occupied territories, partly in collusion with ruling Palestinian
elites (the Oslo accords).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Well, that isn’t true, and I’m
sure you know it. There is no apartheid regime in the West Bank (though Mahmoud
‘Abbas has promised he will institute one if he ever gets his state, and there
are numerous apartheid states in the Arab world). And ‘harsh’ is a gross
misnomer. There are thousands of men and women in the West Bank (and unoccupied
Gaza) who plan to carry out direct murders of Israeli citizens. They have
murdered thousands in the past. The only things that have stopped them have
been IDF patrols and checkpoints and, most effective, the long security
barrier. I really don’t care if anyone is inconvenienced by having to wait an
extra fifteen minutes to go through a checkpoint if doing so saves a sin</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Monaco;">gle child’s life</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Monaco;">. <span style="color: red;">Every time a
terrorist has been stopped at a checkpoint wearing a suicide vest (and, as
often as not, carrying a permit to attend an Israel hospital), it has been a
victory for peace and common sense. Yet the Palestinians continue to make
heroes of these monsters, especially those who have killed large numbers of innocent
Jews. Apartheid was embedded in South Africa in a legal manner, with dozens of
apartheid laws. There are no such laws for Israel or the West Bank. To come out
from under the burden of apartheid, the South Africans had to dismantle the
state. The security measures that operate in the West Bank can be much more
easily lifted: the Palestinians must abandon their unnecessary armed struggle,
make peace, and show they have no further intention of entering Israel to slit
another baby’s throat. That will be hard and will require considerable
political fortitude, but the responsibility for doing it rests squarely on the
Palestinians, not the Israelis. Yet you prefer to hurt the Israelis.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Monaco;">As for the ruling Palestinian
elites, the last thing they can afford to do is collaborate with their greatest
enemies. The Oslo Accords have not been well observed on either side, but I
don’t see why they were in principle such a bad thing for the Palestinians
since they might have led to a permanent peace and long-term advantages for
both Israelis and Palestinians. Don’t you want things to go well for the
Palestinians?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">Israel's aims are to take command of all important
resources there such as water and historical sites </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You should know that Israel protects the
holy sites in the West Bank just as much as it does in Israel proper. The
Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is controlled by the Palestinian police. It
has been most at risk when, in 2002, a large group of Palestinian terrorists
took it over and threatened the lives of some 200 monks. IDF troops refused to
break into the building. The second-holiest Jewish site, the Ma’arat
Ha-Machpelah or Tomb of the Patriarchs is under Palestinian control. When I was
there, I and my companion were squeezed into a tiny space reserved for Jews,
the rest being monopolized by Muslims. Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem is more
controversial. It has been attacked by Palestinian terrorists many hundreds of
times, including 290 firebombs and IEDs in a six-month period. The Palestinians
say they regard it as a mosque dedicated to Bilal, but their repeated attacks
on the structure leave me wondering just how much respect they have for the
place. Currently, there are attacks every day using stones and Molotov
cocktails. Given that Islam has a long history of conquest followed by the
capture of churches and synagogues which are turned into mosques, denying their
original function, and that over forty synagogues were demolished when the
Jordanians occupied the West Bank, I cannot see how the Israelis can with any
confidence return the tomb to the PA. There are many references to Rachel in
the Torah, but not one in the Qur’an.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You say </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">the boycott raises the visibility of Israels
actions and sends a message to Israeli politicians that they cannot continue to
assume the unconditional support of the West.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I honestly don’t think this is true. Most
intelligent Western politicians will not be drawn into what is so obviously an
intolerant attack on a decent country, carried out for the most part by
strident young wreckers who can never see good in anything but the causes they
espouse. When these extremists call for the boycott of an ‘apartheid Israel’,
anyone with any knowledge of the country knows the accusation is untrue and has
been deliberately twisted for extreme political ends. I think most know too
that this anti-Israel agitation is largely if not entirely only anti-Zionist on
the surface, but anti-Semitic underneath. The former Labour MP Denis MacShane
is very perceptive about this.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">This increases the chance that Israeli politicians
will understand that they need to move towards a true peace agreement, and not
conduct a charade.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Well, this is the pot calling the kettle
black. Israel has launched more peace initiatives since the 1940s than there is
room here to list. The Palestinians have turned down each and every initiative
and continue to do so, refusing even to come to the negotiating table. I need
hardly mention Hamas and its conviction that the only way to a solution is
through jihad and that peace talks and negotiations are simply ‘a waste of
time’. Why should Israeli politicians have to learn anything? They have by any
standards been generous in what they have offered the Palestinians. The
Palestinians have never reciprocated any of Israel’s moves to peace. When
Israel pulled out of the Sinai to make peace with Egypt, what did the
Palestinians do? They went on with their terrorism. When Israel pulled out of
southern Lebanon, what did the Palestinians do? They went on killing Israelis
wherever they could find them. When Israel pulled everything out of Gaza, what
did the Gazans do? They trashed everything the Israelis have left behind for
them to use, then elected Hamas and set off to fire over 12,000 rockets into
civilian areas. And yet you think it’s a good idea to boycott Israel in order
to teach members of the Knesset how to conduct relations with the Palestinians.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">I judge that it is a policy that can be adopted by
anyone, and is most likely, in this particular situation, to do good - just as
it did in S Africa, which is a rather similar case, in my opinion.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">No, it doesn’t do good, because it is
built on a lie. Just like your statement about South Africa being ‘a rather
similar case’. That is historically and politically ridiculous. There is
absolutely no comparison between Israel and South Africa. Where are the
apartheid laws in Israel? To cite just a few, where are the Population
Registration Act, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, the Bantu
Education Act, the Coloured Persons Education Act, the Immorality Act, the
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Amendments Act, the Native
Land Act, the Group Areas Act Coloured Persons Communal Reserves Act, the Pass
Laws (around nine of them), the Riotous Assemblies Act, the Unlawful
Organizations Act? There are plenty more of the same. And you suggest that
Israel, which has no laws remotely like these and which has handed authority
for about 90% of the West Bank to the PA is similar? Israel is a democracy with
laws that treat all citizens as equals. Please don’t ask me why it is
profoundly immoral to suggest otherwise. For a succinct but powerful account of
this, why not read the attached op ed that appeared this month in the San
Francisco Examiner? The author is a black member of the South African
parliament who lived under apartheid and has visited Israel many times.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">As far as Gaza is
concerned, I would add that if you ethnically cleanse many hundreds of
thousands of people and drive them into a huge prison camp, on which you then
impose a near-seige, for an indefinite time, and regularly terrorize, bomb, and
assassinate, one should not expect the development of Scandinavian social
democracy in that place.</span><span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, where do
you get all this from? Israel did not ‘ethnically cleanse’ hundreds of thousands
of people in 1948-49. Read Efraim Karsh’s <i>Palestine Betrayed</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, a scholarly, fully sourced
and cogently argued study of the period. Most of the Arabs who fled in 1948 did
so because the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab Liberation Army told them to get
out in order to make room for the armies who invaded Israel. They promised the
Arabs they would return to their homes to celebrate a victory that never came.
In other places, Arabs fled be cause the Arab armies had started a devastating
war. In places like Haifa, the Jewish population pleaded on many occasions with
their Arab neighbours to stay, but were ignored. Finally, in a small handful of
places, Jewish forces did force Arabs out because they were in the way of
fighting. It could all have been avoided if the Arabs had taken up the UN offer
of a state for themselves.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">And the flight was planned months before
the war. The Arab Military Committee instructed the Arab League’s members ‘to
open the gates… to receive children, women and old people [from Palestine] and
to support them in the event of disturbances breaking out in Palestine and
compelling some of its Arab population to leave the country.’ The secretary
general of the Arab League, ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Azzam, declared in May 1946 ( a
full year before the war) that ‘Arab circles proposed to evacuate all Arab
women and children from Palestine and send them to neighbouring countries, to
declare “Jehad” and to consider Palestine a war zone’. And that’s exactly what
happened. Yet Israel, whose people pleaded with Arabs to stay, is blamed for
it. You couldn ‘t make it up, could you?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">And what ‘prison camp’ can you
possibly mean? Millions of Palestinians live in Jordan, Syrian (until
recently), Lebanon and elsewhere. Jordan is more or less a Palestinian country.
What Palestinians do not have in the rest of the Arab is citizenship and
freedom to work in most professions. All other post-war refugees have settled
down and taken citizenship in other countries. Only the Palestinians remain,
and they do so because of Arab politics. They are there, large numbers of them
still in refugee camps, because Arab governments want to keep them there as a
reproach against Israel. Why do they have one bloated refugee organization
devoted to them alone, while the rest of the world has to get by with a single
organization of its own. ‘Prison camp’ is simply too emotive, too inaccurate,
and too malicious for what I would call ordinary political discourse.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Now, I wrote earlier ‘But you
still insist that</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"> “with
respect to Israel itself there is definitely severe discrimination against some
non-Jewish elements but for the most part the veneer of an egalitarian
democratic society is maintained - for the time being”.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: red;">I really don’t know what to make of
that. Does giving the vote to all citizens constitute a ‘veneer’?</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">To which you have replied:</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">The word "veneer" was badly
chosen. Let me concede that point and take that word back. On the one hand,
Israelis would love to have a proper functioning democracy, with equal rights
for all. But on the other hand, they can't, because Israel has defined itself
as a "Jewish state", and there is no such thing as a "Jewish
state" that is also a democracy, unless the state consists of Jews alone. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Thank you for retracting
‘veneer’. But I don’t understand your following argument. Why can a Jewish
state not be a democracy? Back home, we have an ‘Irish Republic’, where most
people are, liker myself, of Irish descent. But we also have lots of immigrants
from different parts of the world. I’ve not noticed anyone claim that Ireland
is not a functioning democracy. France is another case. The République
française is French in origin and spirit, with that sense of Gallic exclusivity
that has left its stamp on the wine, the cheeses, the cafés, the women, and the
little vans that run down its little streets. When you are in France, you know
you are in France. Yet France has millions of non-French citizens, mainly from
North Africa, it has large numbers of zones sensitives, and it is a
multicultural democracy. I am sure you like the New Israel Fund, its political
views, and its work for human rights within Israel. But surely you also know
that it maintains that ‘Israel is and must be a Jewish and democratic state’
and that it was ‘among the first organizations to see that civil, human and
economic rights for Israeli Arabs is an issue crucial to the long-term survival
of the state’. If they see no contradiction between Israel as a Jewish
democracy and work within that democracy to ensure full rights for Arab
citizens, surely you will not tell them they are wrong.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">You say:</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">That is an obvious point of principle,
but there are numerous practical instances of discrimination against non-Jews
within Israel, for example:</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">The following Ten Facts
about Palestinians in Israel in the Appendix to Ben White's recent book
'Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy' help to
set the record straight.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">It’s worth saying here that I
don’t like White or his strident lack of common sense. He has supported the
apartheid slur against all evidence, he supports the BDS campaign, especially
within the academic sphere. As you may know, in 2010 he masterminded a ban on
one of Israel’s foremost historians, Benny Morris (a man who had helped debunk
many myths in the Zionist narrative), from lecturing at Cambridge University.
As a Cambridge PhD, I feel offended that anyone should take it upon himself to
do that, and I trust that you, as an academic, would feel the same. White has
supported a call to boycott the Habima Theatre, Israel’s National Theatre that
performs for and involves Jews and Arabs both, when it came to the UK to play
The Merchant of Venice at the Globe. He has – and for an academic I find this
beyond outrageous – criticized the very idea of having Israel Studies in British
universities. Such criticism helps undermine the very principles on which
Western universities are based. Universities throughout the Middle East (I have
studied at one and taught at another) suffer badly from restrictions on what
may be taught or published, and some countries have interfered directly in what
is taught in the UK. White has also defended Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad from
perfectly reasonable charges of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. And he has
claimed that comparing Israelis to Nazis is ‘not antisemitic’. I don’t believe
White is someone I would trust, whether in his opinions or his claim to
rational facts. He is surely best described as an agitprop rabble-rouser or
something to that effect. He does not seem to understand moderation. That said,
I will pass on to his ten points.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">1. Since 1948, over 700
Jewish Communities have been established in Israel (not including settlements
in the Occupied Territories). The only towns established for Palestinians
citizens were seven in the Negev, and only as a way of removing the Bedouin
population from other areas.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This is typical of White’s
almost hysterical approach to fact. Of course more Jewish towns were built. The
Jews were, in the main, new arrivals and had to build, and in due course they
greatly outnumbered the Arabs But most Arab towns remained inhabited after
1948, and Arabs have remained in high numbers in most Jewish towns. Given the
numbers, it all adds up to a reasonable balance. It resembles the situation in
Ireland (most inhabitants are Irish), Scotland (most are Scots), Wales (most
are Welsh) and so on across the globe. The Arabs in Israel are well catered
for: the population of Acre’s Old City is 95% Arab, Lower Haifa is 70% Arab.
There are high percentages of Arabs in Jaffa, Tayibe, Jaljulai, Kafr Bara, Kafr
Qassim and elsewhere. 55% of the population of East Jerusalem is Arab, and
there are large numbers in Abu Ghosh, Bayt Jamal, and other places in that
region, with thirteen Arab neighbourhoods round Jerusalem. There are 21 Arab centres
in the NW Negev, and 24 in the Haifa District, while the Northern District has
53% Arabs. I attach a list (and map) of Arab settlement in Israel. Please
consult it and ask yourself if it makes sense to complain that there are so
many Jewish towns. And ask where Mr White comes up with that high figure of
seven hundred, and why he has not made a calculation to compare populations,
and why he has not defined ‘towns’.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">2. Significant
authority over areas like land ownership and rural settlement is invested in
bodies that are constitutionally mandated to privilege Jews [like the Jewish
National Fund.]</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Israel is a Jewish state, so
it seems logical that government and other bodies will privilege the
considerable majority of the population who are Jews, just as English district
councils and other bodies favour their own local populations. Given the
historical facts of the Zionist movement that led to the creation of Israel,
the JNF (Keren Kayemet Le-Israel) was a necessity if Jewish settlers were to be
able to lease government (Ottoman, British) and private land. Nothing in
Israeli law exists to prevent Arabs obtaining funds for land lease from wealthy
Arab states, but Saudi Arabia and others will not give their money to
development within the Jewish state. That isn’t Israel’s fault. And White
ignores the fact that the JNF has done great good for all Israel’s citizens. It
has planted over 240 million trees in Israel. It has also built 180 dams and
reservoirs, developed 250,000 acres of land and established more than 1,000
parks. Since 2009, the JNF has been helping the Palestinian Authority plan
public parks and other civic amenities for the Palestinian city of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawabi"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Rawabi</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, north of Ramallah. The JNF provided the
Palestinian Authority with 3,000 tree seedlings for a forested area being
developed on the edge of the new city. Although there are issues with the JNF,
they are all at the level of questions involving any bureaucracy organization
anywhere in the world. But problems like these can affect any country. It is
wrong to single out Israel for behaviour comp[arable to what may be found in
most countries and a great deal less harmful to the totality of its citizens
than measures taken across the world.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">3. The amount of land
belonging to Palestinian refugees that was expropriated by Israel's 'Absentee
Property Law' amounts to around 20 per cent of the country's total pre-1967
territory.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This doesn’t cause me to lose
much sleep. As I have explained, the vast majority of Arabs either chose to
leave or</span><span lang="EN-US"><b> </b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">were pushed or enticed out by Arab
organizations and Arab armies. It was a tragedy, but it was not a tragedy of
Israel’s making. Down the years, however, money from land and building sales
has been retained by the Israeli Ministry of Finance for possible compensation
to Palestinians. Currently (as I write) cases for restitution are being brought
before the Supreme Court, and if they go through, it will mark a substantial
shift in legislation in this field. The point is not so much that some
injustice was done in the past, but that Israel operates under the rule of law.
It does not deserve to be treated like a Third World dictatorship.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">4. Roughly one in four
Palestinian citizens are 'present absentees' (i.e. internally displaced), their
land and property confiscated by the state.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This is a distortion of the
historical and contemporary reality. When the fighting ended in 1949, the only
people who had been ethnically cleansed were the 850,000 Jews displaced from
Arab countries. Arabs who remained in Israel (on the right side of the green
line) became Israeli citizens, whether they had fled from their villages or
not, and all were rehoused. Not a single Jew was left in any of the Mandated
territory that remained in Arab hands. In the middle of a fierce war for Jewish
survival (a mere three/four years after the end of the Holocaust), many Arabs
fled their homes, prompted (as I have said) by Arab officialdom and foreign
military. There were no Israeli plans to destroy villages or displace anyone,
and the number of places where this did happen was negligible. It is time the
Arabs took responsibility for what they did. Arabs who were displaced are not
refugees but Israel citizens. They were all rehoused. Likewise, those Jews who
were displaced from the rest of the Mandate were all rehoused – not by the
Arabs who had displaced them, but by their own people.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">5. An estimated 90,000
Palestinians live in dozens of 'unrecognised villages' in Israel. They suffer
from home demolitions and a lack of basic infrastructure.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, you are letting Ben White
mislead you disastrously. He creates distortions of history and present fact
because he cherrypicks his information and uses it pejoratively, to create
false realities. His use of the term ‘Palestinians’ here is calculated to give
a false impression, connected to tropes of suffering and persecuted
Palestinians. Strictly speaking, Palestinians live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Arabs living in Israel are Israeli Arabs, a community that thrives more completely
than their Palestinian brethren. However, if we are talking about the
‘unrecognized villages’, we are speaking of Israel’s Bedouin (Badu, Badawiyin)
population, and that places this in a completely different context.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The Badu are nomads who originated
in (and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>still reside in) the
Arabian peninsula. Like many other nomads in the Middle East (like North
Africa’s Berbers/Imazighen or Iran’s tribes (Qashqa’i, Baluch etc.), the
Bedouin have changed during the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Some remain nomadic,
but increasing numbers have chose or been required to settle.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">in </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Syria</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, the Bedouin way of life
effectively ended during a severe drought from 1958 to 1961, which forced many
Bedouin to abandon herding for standard jobs. Many have been further displaced
by the current civil war. Governmental policies in </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Egypt</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Israel</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Jordan</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Iraq</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisia"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Tunisia</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, oil production Arab states
of the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Persian Gulf</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Libya</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, as well as a desire for
improved standards of living, effectively led most Bedouin to become settled
citizens of various nations, rather than stateless nomadic herders. In most
countries in the Middle East the Bedouin have no land rights, only users’
privileges,<sup> </sup>and that is especially true for Egypt.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Between 1967 and 1989, Israel
built seven townships for the Badu in the north-east Negev. One, Rahat, is the
world’s largest Badu settlement. Outside these seven towns, there are numbers
of unrecognized villages. It’s very easy to see why they are not given official
recognition by the state. It’s all down to the concept of planning, which
applies here in the UK and across the Western world. These Badu villages were
built chaotically without taking into consideration local infrastructure. They
are scattered all over the Northern Negev and often are situated in
inappropriate places, such as military fire zones, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reserve"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">natural
reserves</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">landfills</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">, etc. No regular state would
recognize them as suitable places to live.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But Israel does not leave the
Badu to simmer in chaos of their own making. On September 29, 2003 Israeli </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Israel"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">government</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> has adapted a new ‘Abu Basma
Plan’, according to which a new regional council was formed, unifying a number
of unrecognized Bedouin settlements into the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Basma_Regional_Council"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Abu
Basma Regional Council</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">. This resolution also regarded the need to establish seven
new Bedouin settlements in the Negev. This meant the official recognition of
unrecognized settlements, providing them with a municipal status and
consequently with all the basic services and infrastructure. The council was
established by the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Ministry_of_Interior"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Interior
Ministry</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> on 28 January 2004.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Israel
is currently building or enlarging some 13 towns and cities in the Negev.
According to the general planning, all of them will be fully equipped with the
relevant infrastructure: schools, medical clinics, postal offices, etc. and
they also will have electricity, running water and waste control. Several new
industrial zones meant to fight unemployment are planned, some are already
being constructed, like </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idan_haNegev"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Idan haNegev</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> in the suburbs of Rahat. It will have a hospital and a new campus
inside. The Bedouins of Israel receive free education and medical services from
the state. They are allotted child cash benefits, which has contributed to the
high birthrate among the Bedouin (5% growth per year). But unemployment rate
remains very high, and few obtain a high school degree (4%), and even fewer
graduate from college (0.6%).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">In September 2011, the Israeli
government approved a five-year </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_development"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">economic
development</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"> plan called the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawer_Commission"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><i>Prawer plan</i></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">. One of its implications is a
relocation of some 30.000-40.000 Negev Bedouin from areas not recognized by the
government to government-approved </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township"><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">townships</span></a><b>. </b></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, I would like you to
take a deep breath and compare Ben White’s very negative and malicious picture
of the ‘unrecognized villages’ with the efforts being made by Israel to make
life for the Badu better than it is for most nomadic groups in the Middle East.
Perhaps more can be done, but there is time for that, and Israel faces the same
problems with the Badu as do other countries with hyper-traditionalist
minorities. It should not stand in a list of criticisms directed against
Israel, any more than we should throw up the treatment of Romanies in the UK or
Romania or the Tinkers in Ireland.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red;"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">6. Residency in 70 per
cent of Israeli towns is controlled by admissions committees that filter out
those deemed 'unsuitable' for the 'social fabric' of the community.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Ben White is letting his
prejudices run away with him. There are only some 150 community settlements in
Israeli, which will hardly add up to 70%. Most have only a few hundred
residents, some as few as thirty. They are not really ‘towns’. This is not a
massive national problem, though it does raise questions. These community
settlements (sg. Yishuv Kehilati) are more or less identical to housing
cooperatives in many other countries, like India or the United States. In all
of these places worldwide, there are local elected committees who decide who
they want or do not want as new members.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">And this produces the problem
for Israeli and other cooperatives. Residents often choose to be in communities
whose fellow members are similar to themselves, who share their beliefs or
political or artistic ideas. This means that Arab Israelis are regularly
rejected, as are gays, single parents, or Jews of different backgrounds, such
as Mizrahim. And this should be illegal under Israeli law. However, the law
concerning these communities have reinforced the right of residents to choose
new members, creating a tension between one standard of legislation and
another. Nevertheless, the Arab Human Rights organization argued last December
before the Supreme Court that the communities law is illegal. I do not know if
there has been a formal response yet. Now, I don’t disagree that this is
discriminatory, but I don’t see why it should be cause for the particular
condemnation of Israel. Israel is a democracy, and proper appeals will surely
be heard and laws passed in order to improve the situation. We are not talking
about a dictatorship here, where liberal legislation is rendered impossible by
the powers that be.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
<br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">7. Despite making up 20
per cent of the population, the state development budget for the Palestinian
minority is just 4 per cent.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">This is mostly a quotation
from <span class="text14">Hadash (the former Raqah party) chairman Mohammad
Barakeh. As you may know, Hadash is an extremist anti-Israel party, and Barakeh
(Baraka) is a leading opponent of the state within the Israeli parliament. I’m
not an economist (I still have difficulty adding one and two), so I’m willing
to take this at face value. However, I think that the statement as it stands,
without context, may be misleading. The context surely has to be the actual
development of Arabs in Israel, of which there has been a great deal. The Arab
community in Israel has experienced remarkable advances since 1948, in areas
like healthcare, longevity, education, housing and political enfranchisement.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span class="text14"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Israel has
not stinted so greatly in its contribution to the Arab sphere. For example, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">allocations to Arab
municipalities have grown steadily over the past decades and are now on a par
with, if not higher than, subsidies to the Jewish sector. By the mid-1990s,
Arab municipalities were receiving about a quarter of all such allocations,
well above the 'share' of Arabs in Israel's overall population, and their
relative growth has continued to date. In numerous cases, contributions to Arab
municipal budgets substantially exceed contributions to equivalently situated
and sized Jewish locales, let alone the larger and more established Jewish
cities where government allocations amount to a fraction of municipal budget.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I recommend a recent article
by Professor Efraim Karsh (who succeeded me a couple of years ago as editor of <i>The
Middle East Quarterly</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">). It details the advances made by Arab Israelis: <i>Israel’s Arabs:
Deprived or Radicalized</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">One thing that White does not
allow into his equation is the simple fact that Israeli Arabs benefit, not just
from specific monies devoted to their sector, but from money spent on all those
other parts of Israeli life in which they share, such as the universities, in
which they form 20% of the student population, paralleling their percentage in
society at large. While these will give you a better sense of context, I will
not go so far as to say there is no problem. Israel could spend more on its
Arab population and get better results for everyone. But all countries
disfavour minorities. In Israel, the Ultra-orthodox communities suffer more
badly than Arabs. That is partly their fault, because they choose to ignore
most areas of Israeli life, notably military service, which forms a route into
Israel society in general. Arabs suffer from that exemption too. But both
sectors may now come to benefit from exposure to life in the IDF as public
opinion swings to the introduction of legislation that will demand that
everyone fit to do so should take part in some form of national service.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">8. The Education Ministry spends more
than five times as much on Jewish students as Palestinian students.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">I don’t doubt that something
like this is true.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1.0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">But it isn’t the whole story.
Here are some figures from 2010: ‘In 2010, the number of computer science
teachers in the Arab sector rose by 50%. The Arab sector also saw a rise of
165% in instructors teaching technology classes and a 171% increase in the
number teaching mathematics. The number of physics teachers in Arab schools
grew by 25%, those teaching chemistry by 44% and in biology by 81.7%. And here
are more from that article I just mentioned, by Efraim Karsh.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"></span></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;"><b>‘</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">No less remarkable have been
the advances in education. Since Israel's founding, while the Arab population
has grown tenfold, the number of Arab schoolchildren has multiplied by a factor
of 40. If, in 1961, the average Israeli Arab spent one year in school, today
the figure is over eleven years. The rise was particularly dramatic among Arab women
who in 1961 received virtually no school education and today are equally,
indeed better educated than their male counterparts (in 1970-2000, for example,
the proportion of women with more than eight years of schooling rose nearly
sevenfold - from 9% to 59%).</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In 1961, less than half of Arab children attended school, with only 9%
acquiring secondary or higher education. By 1999, 97% of Arab children attended
schools, with 46% completing high school studies and 19% obtaining
university/college degrees. In 2011, over a half of Arab twelfth-grade students
(two thirds of Christian students) won the matriculation certificate, with
dropout rates of Arab students similar to those in the Jewish sector: 1.8% and
1.5% respectively. Indeed, the dropout rate in the weaker parts of Jewish
society were higher than their Arab equivalent: 3.1% among ultraorthodox Jews
and 3.6% among foreign native Jews, compared to 2.6% in the Bedouin sector -
the weakest part of Arab society.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Nor do Jewish schools enjoy better individual services than their Arab
counterparts. In 2007/08, for example, Arab students were six times more likely
to receive didactic assessment, and five times more likely to have a nurse
based in their school, than their Jewish counterparts. Arab students had somewhat
more frequent access to youth and/or social workers, as well as truancy
officers, while Jewish students had somewhat better access to psychological and
educational counselling.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">More important, during the past twelve years, relative investment in
Arab education has far exceeded that in the Jewish sector resulting in a
significantly larger expansion across the board: Teaching posts in pre-primary
Arab education trebled, compared to a twofold increase in the Jewish sector;
Arab primary education posts grew three times faster than their Jewish
counterparts while the relative increase in Arab secondary education posts was
six times higher than in the Jewish sector.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Still more dramatic has been the story in higher education where the
numbers of Arab graduates multiplied fifteen times between 1961 and 2001. Fifty
years ago, a mere 4% of Arab teachers held academic degrees; by 1999, the
figure had vaulted to 47%. In 1999, the proportion of Arab students studying
for advanced degrees was 19%; a decade later 34% of Arab high school graduates
passed the university entry exams. And while this figure is still lower than in
the Jewish sector (48%), it is compensated by the much larger Arab presence in
education colleges where Arab students occupy 33% of all places - way above
their relative population share.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">9. Public Officials,
including Members of the Knesset and cabinet members, routinely and publicly
express racism towards Palestinians with impunity.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">That there is racism in Israel, I do not
deny. But racism in the UK, the USA, France, and pretty well any country with
citizens of mixed ethnicity is at least if not greater than anything known in
Israel. Probably the most visible racism comes from the Ultraorthodox Jewish
community, whose written and spoken statements about Arabs are every bit as
vile as anything the Arabs say about Jews. There is a difference, however. In
Arab countries, nothing is ever done to penalize anti-Semitic speech. Foul
comments about Jews, most of them as debased as anything said or written or
drawn in the Third Reich are treated as normal and are openly expressed on
radio, television, mosque sermons, political speeches, and school textbooks.
They are often accompanied by exhortations to violence against Jews or the
celebration of killings or maimings carried out against Jews. These
celebrations and the exhortations that precede them are approved of and made by
Palestinian officialdom.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">The situation in Israel is quite
different. While much racism exists, even in high places, it is not approved by
a majority of the population. Incitement to racism is prohibited by law, and
many racists have been arrested and punished for their activities. Because
there is no coercion in Israel to adopt the ways of any one ethnic or cultural
identity, the country is characterized by the presence of a variety of racial,
religious, linguistic, and other allegiances. That can engender friction, as it
does in other countries of mixed ethnicity like Lebanon, Syria, Iran or the UK.
A 2010 State Department report indicated that Israeli law outlaws the
expression of racism and that the state does in fact implement these rules. I’m
sure the enforcement of laws against racism in Israel is not enough, any more
than in the UK. But just as you can join anti-racist groups here, you can ally
yourself with Israeli outfits like the Coalition against Racism in Israel. It’s
more positive than White’s technique of taking a problem out of context and
listing it as an indictment of Israel.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana;">10. Shin Bet, the
domestic intelligence agency/secret police, openly fights peaceful and legal
efforts by Palestinians citizens to challenge the 'Jewish' nature of the state
[i.e. to campaign for equality between Jews and non-Jews within Israel].</span><span lang="EN-US"><b><br />
</b></span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">Malcolm, this is
rather vague, isn’t it? The Shin Bet is Israel’s internal security service,
just like the UK’s MI5, America’s FBI, Germany’s Verfassungsschutz, and other
agencies round the world who have much the same mandate. Shin Bet/Shabak’s
mandate includes state security, revealing terrorist organizations,
interrogating terror subjects (within the limits of the law, something insisted
on by thre Supreme Court in the 1990s), providing the state with intelligence
to back counter-terrorism in the West and Gaza, counter-espionage, and other
forms of security for state officials, buildings and airlines. White paints a
picture of a demonic Gestapo-like agency that seeks to block peaceful
demonstrations and activities by Palestinians. You should know that if
Palestinian challenges are peaceful and legal, the most that may be expected is
policing, much as would happen here in the UK even for peaceful demos. But
Israel is not the UK, and many demonstrations and protests quickly turn
violent. In villages like Bil’in and Ni’lin there are weekly protests about the
security barrier, but these are never free of violence or the threat of
violence. And I don’t see how these protests advance the cause of equality. The
security barrier has saved hundreds of lives from attacks by Palestinian
terrorists. I have no respect for the peace-loving qualities of individuals or
groups (including Western groups) who fight to have it removed. And I can’t see
why anyone should protest in favour of equality for Jews and Arabs in a country
where such equality is guaranteed in law. Absence of morality is not the result
of some oppressive determination of the Israeli state but discrimination on the
part of individuals, social sectors like Haredi Jews, and some state or
military officials. It’s OK to call for greater observance of the laws on equality,
though I suggest the best way to achieve that would be to involve oneself in
the many voluntary and state-sponsored bodies that encourage greater
integration for Arabs and wider understanding for Jews through working together
and engaging in projects like Save a Child’s Heart that stress our common
humanity.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: red; font-family: Verdana;">From here, you comment directly on
passages from my previous letter. I’ll do what I can to widen my arguments. I
have turned my original statements blue, and my new ones are red, as above.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana;"></span></div>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-83330610128542221842013-05-16T04:40:00.001-07:002013-05-16T04:40:25.064-07:00I have been more than a little remiss about adding to this blog since late last year, but I still write a lot about Israel – and recently published a little book entitled 'Dear Gary, Why You're Wrong about Israel', which is a response to an anti-Israel activist (look for it on Amazon if you haven't done so already). Anyway, in an attempt to break the non-posting habit of several months, here's a little exchange of letters between myself and Professor Malcolm Levitt of Southampton University. It started with a remark he made in support of Stephen Hawking's decision to boycott Israel by refusing to attend a major conference there. See what you make of this.<br />
<br />
<br />
Denis<br />
<br />
<br />
First, my initial letter to him<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;"><span style="color: blue;">> <br />
> Dear Professor Levitt,<br />
> <br />
> I am not a chemist nor, indeed, a scientist of any kind. My academic <br />
> background exists in a very different field, but one, I hope, that is of <br />
> particular relevance to the subject of this e-mail. I am a former lecturer in <br />
> Arabic and Islamic Studies and a former editor of The Middle East Quarterly, <br />
> an international journal. My PhD was in an adjunct area of Persian Studies. I <br />
> have a particular interest in the Middle East (where I have lived, first in <br />
> Iran, later in Morocco) and my several visits to Israel have created in me a <br />
> particular interest in matters relating to that country, both religious and <br />
> political.<br />
> <br />
> I was alerted today to a statement you made recently relating to the decision <br />
> by Professor Steven Hawking to boycott a conference due to be held in Israel, <br />
> when you said ‘Israel has a totally explicit policy of making life impossible <br />
> for the non-Jewish population and I find it totally unacceptable.’ Assuming I <br />
> have quoted you correctly, I feel impelled to ask you where on earth you <br />
> obtained such a manifestly nonsensical view. Like anyone, I feel free to <br />
> criticize Israel when its government policies stray from the straight and <br />
> narrow. Like any country, Israel makes mistakes. But when critics level <br />
> accusations that are simply divorced from reality – that Israel practises <br />
> apartheid, for example, or that it is ‘a Nazi state’ – then I cannot let such <br />
> remarks pass by.<br />
> <br />
> Israel is the one country in the Middle East (and often far beyond) of which <br />
> it plainly and categorically cannot be said that it ‘has a totally explicit <br />
> policy of making life impossible’ for adherents of any but the dominant faith. <br />
> In Iran, for example, members of the indigenous Baha’i religion (about which I <br />
> have written extensively) are hanged, imprisoned, denied employment in all <br />
> professions, refused entry to the universities, and are threatened with <br />
> genocide. Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews there are treated harshly. For <br />
> many, life is impossible. Jews have been driven out of all the Arabs <br />
> countries. In most Arab countries (notably Egypt), Christians are persecuted, <br />
> churches are destroyed, and whole communities have been leaving over the past <br />
> ten years and more. Those are all countries you would do better to condemn.<br />
> <br />
> Israel is the only country in the Middle East whose Christian population has <br />
> risen steadily since 1948. And Israel’s treatment of the Baha’is is exemplary: <br />
> they have their international centre in Haifa, where they have built gardens, <br />
> terraces, and white marble buildings facing the Mediterranean, half of a <br />
> UNESCO World Heritage Site that puts the Iranian regime to shame. The other <br />
> half of the UNESCO site is situated outside Acre and contains the holiest of <br />
> the Baha’I shrines. In Iran, every single one of the Baha’i holy places has <br />
> been bulldozed, never to be rebuilt. Every Baha’i cemetery has met the same <br />
> fate.<br />
> <br />
> In Israel, then 1967 Protection of Holy Places Law guarantees the safety of <br />
> all Jewish and non-Jewish sacred sites:<br />
> <br />
> <br />
> 1. The Holy Places shall be protected from desecration and any other <br />
> violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the <br />
> members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their <br />
> feelings with regard to those places.<br />
> * Whosoever desecrates or otherwise violates a Holy Place shall be <br />
> liable to imprisonment for a term of seven years.<br />
> * Whosoever does anything likely to violate the freedom of access of <br />
> the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their <br />
> feelings with regard to those places shall be liable to imprisonment for a <br />
> term of five years.<br />
> 2. This Law shall add to, and not derogate from, any other law.<br />
> 3. The Minister of Religious Affairs is charged with the implementation of <br />
> this Law, and he may, after consultation with, or upon the proposal of, <br />
> representatives of the religions concerned and with the consent of the <br />
> Minister of Justice make regulations as to any matter relating to such <br />
> implementation.<br />
> 4. This Law shall come into force on the date of its adoption by the <br />
> Knesset.<br />
> <br />
> This Law is rigorously applied to Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Baha’i and other <br />
> holy places. There is nothing remotely like it in any Islamic country. In <br />
> Saudi Arabia it is expressly forbidden to build churches, synagogues, temples, <br />
> and it is illegal for Christians and others even to meet in their own homes to <br />
> worship.<br />
> <br />
> The Israeli law of citizenship and other related laws confer on all citizens <br />
> the same rights and responsibilities. This applies to non-Jews as fully as to <br />
> Jews. Arabs are full citizens of the state, they may vote in all elections, <br />
> they may form political parties (and there are quite a few of them), they may <br />
> stand for parliament (and a great many serve in it), they serve as members of <br />
> the Supreme Court, as judges in other courts, as university teachers and <br />
> professors, 20% of all students in all universities are Arabs (with Arabs <br />
> forming 18% of the population), and so on. There is, quite flatly, no law or <br />
> regulation calling for any form of apartheid. Go to Israel (and it may help <br />
> you a lot to do so) and watch: no restaurants barred to Arabs, no shops barred <br />
> to Arabs (Christian or Muslim), no buses for Jews only, no trains, no <br />
> university campuses, no hotels, no beaches. All Israelis have the same rights.<br />
> <br />
> Not only that, but consider the situation of women in Muslim countries, <br />
> especially now that Salafi and other radical Muslim groups are taking over <br />
> across the region. In Israel, women have full rights with men. That includes <br />
> Muslim and Christian women. In all Muslim countries, homosexuals face hanging, <br />
> flogging, and other cruel punishments. In Israel, they hold gay pride marches. <br />
> Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish men who are gay only have rights and <br />
> protection under the law in Israel.<br />
> <br />
> I have hinted at religious freedom and its denial in all Muslim states. The <br />
> Israeli position has been set out thus:<br />
> <br />
> "Every person in Israel enjoys freedom of conscience, of belief, of religion, <br />
> and of worship. This freedom is guaranteed to every person in every <br />
> enlightened, democratic regime, and therefore it is guaranteed to every <br />
> person in Israel. It is one of the fundamental principles upon which the <br />
> State of Israel is based… This freedom is partly based on Article 83 of the <br />
> Palestine Order in Council of 1922, and partly it is one of those <br />
> fundamental rights that "are not written in the book" but derive directly <br />
> from the nature of out state as a peace-loving, democratic state6'… On the <br />
> basis of the rules – and in accordance with the Declaration of Independence – <br />
> every law and every power will be interpreted as recognizing freedom of <br />
> conscience, of belief, of religion, and of worship."<br />
> <br />
> I find it remiss of you, as someone endowed with considerable intellect, to <br />
> have been so grossly misled about the reality of life in Israel. Your <br />
> statement goes beyond the limits of reasonable and fair discourse. I can only <br />
> consider you to have been misled by unprincipled persons who wish to <br />
> disseminate falsehoods about Israel for base motives. In the face of the facts <br />
> I have given and your freedom to board a plane to Israel in order to see all <br />
> of this for yourself, I have to ask you to apologize to the citizens of a <br />
> moral, ethical and democratic people, both Jews and Arabs, who have endured <br />
> almost daily attacks from enemies determined to wipe them from the face of the <br />
> planet. That Jewish Israelis have had the patience and moral strength to hold <br />
> out the hand of friendship to so many Arab citizens while experiencing suicide <br />
> attacks and rocket fire from their brethren across the border should inspire <br />
> you to think again. As a university teacher you have a responsibility to <br />
> dissociate yourself from such a totally explicit lie as the one you have <br />
> uttered. Please reassure me that you understand the points I have tried to <br />
> make.<br />
> <br />
> <br />
> Yours sincerely,<br />
> <br />
> <br />
> Dr. Denis MacEoin</span></span></span> <br />
<br />
Next, his response to me.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;"><br />
<span style="color: blue;">> Dear Denis<br />
> Thanks for your comments and insights. First let me make it clear that when a <br />
> journalist interviews you over the phone and distils what you said into a few <br />
> words it does not always come out precisely as one would wish. In this case I <br />
> would say that Israels policies are indeed totally explicit and severely <br />
> discriminatory when it comes to the occupied territories. In that case the <br />
> statement attributed to me in the paper is accurate. With respect to Israel <br />
> itself there is definitely severe discrimination against some non-Jewish <br />
> elements but for the most part the veneer of an egalitarian democratic society <br />
> is maintained - for the time being. But since Israel maintains total military <br />
> control of all of historic Palestine it should be viewed as a single unit. The <br />
> fact that there is a fraction partitioned off in such a way as to have a local <br />
> Jewish majority and which is favoured with a high degree of democratic rights <br />
> is not highly relevant, in my opinion. In any case even these local democratic <br />
> rights have some severe discriminatory aspects such as the "law of return" <br />
> which is racially based and inhumane.<br />
> I hope this clarifies matters somewhat.<br />
> Best wishes<br />
> Malcolm<br />
> Sent from my iPhone<br />
> <br />
> On 11 May 2013, at 19:54, "Denis MacEoin" <br />
> <maceoin btinternet.com="" u=""><a href="mailto:maceoin@btinternet.com">mailto:maceoin@btinternet.com</a></maceoin></span></span></span><br />
>> wrote:<br />
> <br />
> Prof. Malcolm Levitt<br />
> Dept. of Chemistry<br />
> Southampton University<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span></span><br />
And finally (for the moment), my longer reply to him. I hope it all makes sense!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;">FAO Malcolm Levitt<br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Malcolm,<br />
<br />
I do understand about journalists and their ways. I have suffered from the same misinterpretations many times in the past. But I am surprised that you again say that ‘Israel’s policies are indeed totally explicit and severely discriminatory when it comes to the occupied territories’. That at least qualifies your earlier statement. May I take it, then, that you do not now say that Israel has a totally explicit policy of making life impossible for the non-Jewish population’. If that is so, then we are part of the way towards a better understand. However, I still take exception to the view that Israel’s policies are severely discriminatory when it comes to the occupied territories. Now, I do not say that there is no discrimination in either Israel proper or in the West Bank. Discrimination is practically ubiquitous and is very hard to eradicate. I was brought up in a severely discriminatory society, Northern Ireland, in the 1950s and 1960s, and I have had close first-hand knowledge of how discrimination operates. There is plenty of discrimination here in the UK, as there is in any country you care to mention. Discrimination against Palestinian Arabs is severe in Gaza, where Hamas kills its opponents or gay men and imposes strict controls on individual liberties. The Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese and others discriminate harshly against Palestinian refugees. <br />
<br />
But you still insist that ‘with respect to Israel itself there is definitely severe discrimination against some non-Jewish elements but for the most part the veneer of an egalitarian democratic society is maintained - for the time being’. I really don’t know what to make of that. Does giving the vote to all citizens constitute a ‘veneer’? Does permitting non-Jews to serve in parliament seem like a veneer? Does granting university places to Arab students in proportion to the Arab size in the general population seem like a veneer? Or perhaps you think that, at some future date, Arab graduates will have their brains sucked of everything they have learned? Or that all the votes that have been cast by Arabs will be taken back as if in a magic trick? What non-Jewish elements do you mean? Be precise, and demonstrate whether the severe discrimination you speak of is state-ordained or simply the sort of discrimination that one can find in any country. Is Israeli discrimination more severe than that found in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Sudan, to give three examples? I think that last comment – ‘for the time being’ – unnecessary and cynical. Israel has consistently improved conditions for Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, since 1948, and I am unaware of any sense in which circumstances for non-Jewish Israelis have gone into reverse in that period, in fact I know for a fact that they have improved to the point where Israel’s Arabs enjoy better livelihoods, working conditions, and general living conditions than their brethren in most other Arab countries. Do you really think that the countries responsible for the misnamed ‘Arab Spring’ or for the tyrannical regimes that preceded and succeeded those upheavals have anything, the slightest thing, to teach Israel about how to conduct its affairs and treat its citizens well? Egypt kills Coptic Christians, persecutes them, burns down churches; Libya is full of intolerance; Lebanon sees a widening rift between Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’is, while refusing Palestinians the right to work in over seventy professions; Syria piles intolerance upon intolerance. There is now a mass exodus of Christians from the Middle East. But in Israel the Christian community is still growing after 65 years. Can you really say that any of this is evidence that Israel deserves to be criticized by you or anyone else, while a country like Iran, that allows the demands of religious extremism make life a misery for most of its citizens. In my earlier e-mail, most of which you have ignored, I drew attention to a key fact, that Israel is the only country in the Middle East (and as far afield as the Muslim world in its entirety) that not only tolerates the Baha’i religion but encourages it to the point of running its international affairs from Haifa and possessing beautiful buildings and gardens, while all Baha’i properties in Iran were turned to rubble long ago. Why would a country that stands out in so many ways be your choice to find fault with? If you truly care about human rights, why on earth aren’t you picketing the Iranian embassy, the Libyan embassy. The Egyptian embassy or (some years ago) the Syrian embassy or the Saudi embassy. Those are countries that really do make life impossible for their non-Muslim (and many of their Muslim) citizens. Their breaches of human rights are egregious and well known. Yet you bother about Israel, a country I for one would be more than happy to live in, even though I’m not a Jew.<br />
<br />
But you speak of Israeli government policy in the West Bank, and that it is this you find severely discriminatory. No doubt there is much to be deplored. Life in the West Bank cannot hope to be normal, given the very nature of the occupation and the sort of society that has been created there by political and religious leaders. But I think you miss something very basic in your portrayal of Israel and the West Bank – context. Looked at without context, conditions in the West Bank must seem arbitrary and unnecessary. But the picture changes greatly once context is allowed to play a part in the argument. It would be absurd to believe that Israel, which strives hard to treat its Arab citizens well and to promote their well-being through education, the use of Arabic alongside Hebrew as a national language, the protection of Muslim and Christian Arab holy places, and the arrest of Jewish racists who harbour ill-will towards Arabs it seems absurd to think the same government would arbitrarily decide to treat West Bank Arabs harshly. That would make no sense at all, surely. The situation in the West Bank has brought much opprobrium on Israel and tarnished its reputation internationally. In the long run, Israel knows that the West Bank will in the end be given over to its Arab population as the basis for a future Palestinian state. So why on earth wouldn’t it pull out now or at least be nice to the Palestinians?<br />
<br />
Well, Israel already is nice to the Palestinians. You are wrong to imply that all Israeli treatment is severely discriminatory. Every year, Israel treats many thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals. They are not discriminated against at all. They sleep on the same wards as Jews, they are operated on in the same operating rooms by the same surgeons, and for the most part they go home with very favourable opinions of the hospital staff, the first Israelis many of them will have met. Every year, Israel provides 30 million cubic metres of water to the Palestinian Authority (and 70 million to Jordan). Every year, hundreds of Palestinian children are given heart transplants through an Israel charity, Save a Child’s Heart. Under Israeli occupation, the West Bank economy has grown at a terrific rate, quite unlike the case in Hamas-occupied Gaza. Here’s something from a 2011 report by the Washington Institute:<br />
<br />
‘Following the establishment of Prime Minister Salam Fayad's government in 2007, the West Bank witnessed rapid GDP growth each year through 2010, including a 12% spike in 2008, 10% in 2009, and 8% in 2010. The IMF attributes this growth to donor aid, improved security conditions, decreased Israeli restrictions on movement, and private-sector confidence due to good management by the Palestinian Authority (PA). In dollar terms (at constant 2004 prices), West Bank GDP climbed from $3.3 billion in 2007 to $4.4 billion in 2010, while per capita GDP went from $1,580 to $1,924, an increase of 22%. The growth looks even better when viewed over a longer period: in 2010, West Bank GDP was 50% higher than in 2000, and 124% higher than in 1994.’<br />
<br />
Could that have been achieved under a policy of severe discrimination?<br />
<br />
But let’s get back to context. How familiar are you with the historical background to the present situation? You will, I’m sure, know all about the way Israel was created, how the United Nations awarded two states, one to the Jews and one to the Arabs. Of course, the British had already given away a large tract of the future Jewish homeland when it created Jordan, but in the end it all boiled down to two states. Exactly the same thing as everybody’s ‘twin state solution’ today. The Jews took what they were given and were invaded by five Arab countries. The Arabs refused to establish a state unless it included the entirety of mandate Palestine. The rest is history. The Arabs have fought several wars to drive the Jews out of the region, they have openly stated (if we want to talk about explicit policies) a catch-all doctrine of ‘No negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel’. Would it make your life easy if your research partners adopted such a policy? The Arabs have turned down more generous peace offers down the years than any beleaguered people in history. And Mahmoud ‘Abbas still says there can be no Jews in a future Palestinian state, while insisting in Arabic that Israel will be wiped out and replaced by a greater Palestine. These are not easy conditions in which to work for peace.<br />
<br />
But until the Palestinians agree to make peace with Israel (as Egypt and Jordan have done), Israel simply cannot pull out of the West Bank. It has already pulled out of Gaza, with disastrous consequences for both sides. Why would Israel wish further violence upon itself.<br />
<br />
And it is the violence that lies behind the sometimes harsh conditions imposed on West Bank Palestinians. You cannot take the violence out of the equation. It is the overriding context. The Jews do not undertake their obligations in the West Bank lightly or gratuitously. Under the Balfour Declaration adopted in the San Remo Agreement, and also under the cession of sovereignty under Article 95 of the Treaty of Sèvres, there is a limitation on the political rights of the Jews. They are prohibited from impairing the civil or religious rights of non-Jews when they exercise sovereignty. But no nation on earth can give up its right to self-defence. Palestinian culture, on the other hand, will not give up its right to aggression. Calls for jihad, praise of ‘martyrs’ (i.e. suicide bombers), threats to kill Jews because they are beasts or viruses or cancers are a staple of Palestinian TV, of mosque sermons, and of political speeches in Arabic. And over the years since the 1920s, violence directed against Jews and Israelis has been fierce, regular, ruthless, and deeply destructive. The two intifadas killed thousands of Israelis and destroyed entire families.<br />
<br />
Hence the checkpoints, patrols, separate roads and the checks on a people many of whose young men and women are devoted to violence. I could continue at length in describing Palestinian terrorism, but I’m sure you don’t have that much patience, so I’ll focus instead on a single instance, from which you may draw broader conclusions.<br />
<br />
In December 2004, Wafa al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman from Gaza was treated for severe burns at Beersheva’s Soroka Medical Centre. She remained in hospital till January 2005. In the following June, she had to return to the hospital for further treatment. On her way to Beersheva, she had to pass through a checkpoint, where she was found to be carrying a 22-pound bomb strapped to one leg. She tried to detonate it there and then, but was prevented. After several years in prison, she was released as part of the deal freeing terrorists for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Schoolchildren awaited her on her return home, and she said to them ‘I hope you will walk the same path we took and God willing, we will see some of you as martyrs.’ That is fiendish beyond all human expectation. Wafa al-Biss planned to detonate herself among the doctors and nurses who had saved her life, and among as many children as possible. Do you think checkpoints are mere discrimination? Wafa is not the last Palestinian stopped wearing a suicide vest and planning to gain access to a hospital, to a hospital where Israel doctors and nurses treat ailing Palestinian entirely without discrimination. Checkpoints and other restrictions that are imposed on the denizens of the West Bank are entirely self-inflicted. It is all about security. Violence and security, twin contexts for restrictive treatment. It is surely obvious: stop the violence and the preaching of violence and you will be treated like anybody else. I can remember checkpoints vividly in Belfast. Just a short walk through town would take me through several checkpoints manned by the army or the police. It was a restriction, but I never grumbled because I knew why checkpoints were there. Once, almost my whole family was wiped out when a bomb exploded under their train. By pure chance, the train was travelling more slowly than usual. If further restrictions had been suggested, would I or my family have said ‘no’?<br />
<br />
Further down you write that ‘since Israel maintains total military control of all of historic Palestine it should be viewed as a single unit’. Apart from the non-sequitur, this illustrates the gulf between us in terms of academic disciplines. The statement is nonsensical. Israel occupies only a part of what you term ‘historical Palestine’. Put simply, there was never any entity called Palestine between the Roman departure (when it was Syria Palaestina), the Byzantine period and finally the era of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid empires and the creation of British mandate Palestine. Under the preceding Ottoman empire, it was regarded as essentially southern Syria, and it was as part of Syria that the Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s wanted to treat it. The British mandate area is the only one relevant to present claims. It is much smaller than the area of Syria Palaestina, which may be historical but is wholly irrelevant to modern international boundaries. A large part of it was the area handed to the Hashemite Arabs to form Transjordan (now Jordan). Israel is not in military occupation of Jordan. Gaza was at one point occupied by Egypt, but then fell into Israeli hands until 2005, when it was handed back to its Arab residents. Israel is not in military occupation of Gaza. Israel itself is not under military occupation, since it was legally established as a state through the San Remo conference, the League of Nations, and the United Nations. The only area under Israeli occupation is the West Bank, but things are not that simple.<br />
Following the Oslo Accords of 1993, Israel relinquished much of its control over the West Bank. The area is now divided into three sectors. Sector A is totally under Palestinian control and includes 55% of West Bank Palestinians. Area B has Palestinian civilian administration with Israeli security. It includes 41% of West Bank Palestinians. And Area C is under Israeli control but includes a mere 4% of West Bank Palestinians. What this boils down to is that Israel has military control over 4 per cent of all West Bank Palestinians and no control over 96%, nor any over all the Palestinians living in Gaza. So in what sense does it make sense to speak of ‘all of historical Palestine’ (whatever you mean by that) as ‘a single unit’.<br />
<br />
If you mean that the whole of mandate Palestine (minus Jordan) should become a single entity, in other words, one country then I must tell you that that would not on ly spell the end of Israel, it would almost certainly lead to a genocide of today’s 6 million Jews. Hamas alone have promised that task to themselves, and if you read their Charter, you will see the threat spelled out in stark language. That Charter is readily available online. Here’s a link to a translation (which I recommend) from Yale University: <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp">http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp</a></u></span>. No-one who has not read it (or any of the crucial documents included in the classic compilation, the Israel-Arab Reader) really has a right to make suggestions for the future of Jews living in Israel, however well meaning those suggestions may be. You say, moreover, ‘the fact that there is a fraction partitioned off in such a way as to have a local Jewish majority and which is favoured with a high degree of democratic rights is not highly relevant, in my opinion’. That is pure bigotry, and I don’t hesitate to say so. Israel was created in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman empire as were Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, all of which had the same rights (though the Arabs dispensed with democracy pretty quickly). It was created as a home for the Jews, a people who were severely persecuted in Europe, killed in their millions, and treated as second-class citizens in the Islamic world. That was its raison d’être, and it has fulfilled its promise very well indeed. The fact that in this region only the Jewish state knows how to govern itself, functions democratically, provides full freedom for the press, gives opposition parties and anti-Israel NGOs the same rights they would have here is highly relevant. All the Arab states have had exactly the same chance as Israel to lead democratic lives and all have disintegrated into tyranny and religious extremism. That is a very good argument for saying that Israel, not any of its wanton neighbours, should be the model for government across the Middle East. But all the surrounding states spit nothing but the most vicious antisemitism and seek to destroy Israel, with all the good things it has done for mankind.<br />
<br />
‘Even these local democratic rights have some severe discriminatory aspects such as the “law of return” which is racially based and inhumane.’ The international community created Israel as the world’s only Jewish state. Today, as endless government reports and individual surveys will tell you, antisemitism has grown out of measure in Europe and the Middle East, to the point where Jews have fled or are fleeing countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Holland has gone into antisemitic overdrive. Belgium the same. Attacks on Jews are up everywhere. Even as a non-Jew I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. But in my childhood and youth I thought genocide of the Jews to be a thing of the past, buried in all our memories, never likely to come into the light again. I was wrong. Yet knowing that another Holocaust is no longer such an impossible thing, I read the words of a rational man, and I see him determined to weaken the one country in the world that can guarantee a safe haven for any Jew who seeks it. Jews have a right of return because Jews need the protection it affords. I do not challenge your right to criticize Israel. But you carry that criticism into irrational and prejudiced territory. I have asked you to examine real facts about Israel, but you come back to me with surmises and inaccuracies. Your profession drives you to do better than that. To visit Israel with open eyes. See fault by all means, but do not load your criticism with existential weight, do not call for the extinction of one of the best, most creative, most human rights focused countries in the world – for such I hold Israel to be. Most of all, I deplore your readiness to tear apart such a country, when you appear not to stand up against human rights enormities in countries that also call for Israel’s demise. Why is that? Why does Iran pass muster even as it hauls its political opponents, its religious heretics, its gay men and its women charged with adultery to the gallows? Why do you condemn Israel that has hanged only one person in its history, Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of the Holocaust? There can be only reason for this exceptionalism, but I leave it to you to use your powers of reasoning to decide what that may be.<br />
<br />
If I have been a little harsh, do understand that I cannot see a brave and honest country trounced by someone who is uneasy about the facts pertaining to its existence and its actions and say nothing. I live a rational life and I base my understanding of Israel on what I believe to be facts and rational arguments. Perhaps you can still do that.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Yours sincerely,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Denis<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;"><br />
> <br />
</span></span></span>
<br />
<br />Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-33032138331607516132012-10-07T11:31:00.002-07:002012-10-07T11:31:45.776-07:00I am a member of the Irish Zionist Action Group, an online community that struggles to make Israel's voice heard in an unusually hostile environment. One of our members recently wrote to Eamon Gilmore, the Tanáiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs, raising the issue of the persecution of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank. He was sent a dismissive reply that put most of the blame for the situation in Gaza on Israel's blockade and that employed a statement from the Palestine Centre for Human Rights, which was described as 'independent'.<br />
<br />
I was prompted by this to write to the Tanáiste myself, and the following letter is what I sent today. I don't expect a positive response, but at least this puts him on notice that there are stronger arguments than his.<br />
<br />
Here's my letter:<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 12.0px;">FAO Eamon Gilmore T.D., Tánaiste<br />
Mary Connery, Private Secretary<br />
<br />
<i>A Chara<br />
</i><br />
I am writing in reference to a letter signed by Mary Connery (and, I assume, on your behalf), sent in reply to a letter from a friend of mine, Barry Williams, who has copied me in to the correspondence. I am writing in my private capacity as an Irish scholar in the fields of Arabic, Persian and Islamic Studies, who has written books and articles in leading journals and contributed to the major reference in this area, <i>The Encyclopedia of Islam</i>. I have also worked as the editor of a major American journal, <i>The Middle East Quarterly</i>. On the strength of this, I believe I may claim some degree of expertise in the present matter.<br />
<br />
I have chosen to write because I am troubled by several of the statements in your letter to Mr Williams. You state that he wrote to you ‘in relation to reports of the conversion of two Christians to Islam in Gaza’, and it is this you address in the rest of your reply. Only the middle paragraph of his letter referred to the two conversions. The first paragraph spoke of the plight of Christians in the Middle East in general. And in Iraq and Egypt in particular.<br />
<br />
Your objectivity in this matter is called in question by your citation of remarks by the Palestine Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), a lobbying body notorious for its anti-Israel activism, its failure to decry human rights abuses by Palestinians in the Palestinian areas or in Israel, its whitewashing of terrorist actions by Palestinians, its open support for Hamas (denounced as a terrorist organization by the European Union, the US, Canada, Israel and Japan, its false accusation that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’, and its extreme bias against Israel.<br />
<br />
You are, of course, perfectly free to refer to them, but surely only after you have made clear their partisanship. And I would have hoped you would like at least one Israeli site as a point of reference, given that Israel continues to have a security presence in Judaea and Samaria (currently called the West Bank), and possibly a neutral site (hard as they are to find).<br />
There is no recognition on the Tanáiste’s part that different types of Christian persecution are frequent and almost ubiquitous in the Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, and that this persecution takes the forms of murder, arson, rape and intimidation <br />
<br />
I do take your point that Hiba Abu Da’ud and Ramiz al-Amash, the two Christians referred to by Mr Williams as forced converts to Islam, have declared that they converted of their own free will. I would not choose to exemplify anti-Christian animus by these two converts. But I am surprised that you do not seem to have employed a non-Muslim expert on Islam to provide you with a broader picture of conversion as a theme within Islamic culture. A better understanding of this sensitive subject might help shed further light on the cases of conversion we are familiar with.<br />
<br />
The forced conversion of Christians and Jews is rare in Islamic history, since both communities are permitted to keep their lives and property if they agree to submit to Muslim rule and to observe a series of humiliating impositions. Nevertheless, a Muslim may not be punished for the killing of a Jew or a Christian. In the modern period, when contact with Christian powers has become commonplace, anxieties about colonization, imperialism (but not Islamic imperialism) and, of course, inability to cope with the reality of Israel as an advanced and tolerant state have often been deflected onto local communities. After 1948, for example, Jewish communities living in Arab countries were expelled, leaving 900,000 as refugees. This did not happen to the Christian communities, but over the years pressure has been placed on Christians to leave Pakistan, Bangladesh, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere. Do not forget that North Africa and the Levant were wholly Christian regions that fell to Islam in the 7th century and have, over the years, seen Muslims replace Christians almost everywhere. In the modern period, it must be noted that Christians have increased in numbers in only one Middle Eastern state, namely Israel. In all others, numbers have plummetted.<br />
<br />
You are right in saying that many Christians leave the West Bank and Gaza for economic reasons, and you identify the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza as a key factor. Of course, the blockade is legal under international law and essential as a means of restricting the smuggling by sea of weapons that may be used by Hamas and affiliate bodies, largely to attack Israel. But Gaza itself is far from being economically deprived. Apart from the large sums Hamas receives in aid (but spends on other things), the strip has some 600 millionaires and several thousand near millionaires. Members of Hamas and others drive luxury cars (smuggled in through tunnels), eat at a couple of first-class restaurants, and buy luxury goods in a large shopping mall. This suggests to me that economic woes may not be the primary factor driving Christians to leave. That it was the rise of militant Islamism more than anything that prompted Christian departures is best illustrated by the fact that the exodus increased during the two <i>intifadas</i>. ‘Between October 2000 and November 2001, 2,766 Palestinian Christians left the West Bank, of which 1,640 left the Bethlehem area and another 880 left Ramallah.’ (Cited Weiner, see below.) The Christian population of Bethlehem only dropped sharply after 1994, when the town came under control of the PA. Prior to that, this had been the ,most highly populated Christian presence anywhere in the Holy Land. U.S. Congressman J.C. Watts attributes the departure of Palestinian Christians to being “driven [out] by the steady persecution of the PA and the realization that they will face worse treatment under a possible future Palestinian state.”<br />
<br />
More pertinent than economic considerations – or so it seems to me – is the broad context of intimidation and control that today’s Christians live under in Gaza and the West Bank. I recommend that you read a very helpful report on this written by Justus Reid Weiner, a legal expert who has specialized in this field. He does not gloss over the facts. His book is entitled ‘Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society’, and you can consult it online. (jcpa.org/text/<b>Christian</b>-Persecution-<b>Weiner</b>.pdf)<br />
<br />
Weiner and others have identified a range of events that show increasing animosity towards Christians in Palestinian areas. The introduction to Weiner’s treatise refers to the Christian community there and says ‘They are a group whose persecution has gone almost entirely ignored by the international community, the relevant NGOs, and other human rights advocates. Facing widespread corruption in the PA security and police forces, facing growing anarchy and lawlessness in an increasingly xenophobic and restless Muslim populace, the Palestinian Christians have been all but abandoned by the very people whose task it is to protect them. The current massive emigration of Palestinian Christians from the territories can be demonstratively linked to the political empowerment of the Palestinian Authority in those areas.’<br />
<br />
Weiner himself dedicates his book to one Ahmad El-Achwal [Ahamd al-Ashwal], a Palestinian Muslim who converted to Christianity, was subjected to imprisonment, torture and intimidation at the hands of the Palestine Authority, and was murdered in 2004. He was a father of eight children, who lived in a refugee camp. His conversion to Christianity was entirely of his own free will.<br />
<br />
Achwal’s murder is paralleled by the killing of Rami Khadir Ayyad in 2007. Ayyad was the proprietor of the only Christian bookshop in Gaza, an outlet run by the Palestine Bible Society. Miltants put his shop to the torch, stabbed him to death, and left his body in a street in Gaza City. For years, he had received death threats for his missionary work among his fellow Palestinians. Some months earlier, a bomb caused severe damage to the Bible Society’s main building. To understand this properly, it is vital to bear in mind that, in all Islamic countries, proselytism by any religion but Islam is strictly banned by law, while any attempt to teach one’s religion may end – as it often does – in death. Even religious aid workers are open to the mere suspicion of being abroad in order to spread Christianity – as witness the killing in 2010 of ten medical aid workers in Afghanistan: their murders were justified by the Taliban on a charge of being there to spread Christianity.<br />
<br />
In these countries, many Christian or Baha’i missionaries live quiet lives, perhaps until they die, knowing that open proclamation of their faith will inevitably lead to disaster. In Iran, the Baha’is – the country’s largest religious minority – have been hanged, dispossessed, denied permits to work in their professions, and denied entry to higher education. All their holy places, shrines, and cemeteries have been reduced to rubble. This is an example of how an Islamic regime treats non-Muslims in general. Christians in Saudi Arabia will be arrested and punished even for holding prayer sessions or Bible readings in their homes. So severe is the ruling Wahhabi sect that it has destroyed most of the earliest holy sites and cemeteries in Mecca and Medina. Recently in Mali, Islamists have destroyed most of the shrines belonging to the well-known tendency of Islamic mysticism, Sufism. In Pakistan, the blasphemy law has been used repeatedly to accuse Christians of disrespect for Islam or Muhammad or the Qur’an. As you may well know, the most recent example was an 11-year-old girl with Down’s Syndrome. Even here, the penalty called for was death. If a handicapped eleven-year-old child was deemed a suitable object for condign punishment, how much more are adult Christians the potential victims should anyone raise doubts about them. Let me assure you that this is as true in Gaza and the West Bank as it is in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. In most Muslim countries, Jews are not welcome at all.<br />
<br />
My point in raising the situation in other countries is simply this, that if Christians have been killed in a relatively tolerant country like Morocco (where I used to teach), it may be presumptuous to imply that Christians in violence-prone areas like Gaza, Judaea and Samaria do not suffer from a similar level of brutality and intimidation.<br />
<br />
Let’s return to the Palestinian territories. According to the <i>World News Daily</i>, ‘The once vibrant Christian communities of Bethlehem and Nazareth, with roots in the “land of Jesus” going back to first century Israel, are rapidly declining in the face of a systematic campaign of persecution conducted by the same Muslim terrorists intent on driving the Jews into the sea.<br />
<br />
‘Beatings, sham legal proceedings, property seizures, dismissal and replacement of elected Christian leaders, accusations of selling property to Jews and intimidation by gunmen with links to the government of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have so reduced Christian populations in the cities of Jesus’ birth and boyhood’ one community leader predicts all Christians will be gone within 15 years.’ <br />
<br />
The same source states that <i>‘</i>Bethlehem-area Christian leaders and residents, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity... said they face an atmosphere of regular hostility and intimidation by Muslims.’ Again, ‘Christian leaders said one of the most significant problems facing Christians in Bethlehem is the rampant confiscation of land by Muslim gangs.’<br />
<br />
Another source says ‘One Christian Bethlehem resident [said] her friend recently fled Bethlehem after being accused by Muslims of selling property to Jews, a crime punishable by death in some Palestinian cities. The resident said a good deal of the intimidation comes from gunmen associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah organization.’ And again, Islamists march through Nazareth chanting ‘Islam is the only truth’ and ‘Islam shall rule all’. Why wouldn’t Christians feel intimidated? These are men with guns in a place brimming with a culture of death and a crippling need to assert male power through bombing, shooting and the slitting of throats. This may be done mainly to Jews, but Christians are a captive group who serve well enough as a people on whom to vent their anger.<br />
<br />
In September 2005, a ‘riotous, murderous’ mob of Muslim extremists attacked the West Bank Christian village of Taiba, chanting ‘Let’s burn the infidels, let’s burn the Crusaders’. Nothing was done to compensate the Christians or to punish their Muslim attackers.<br />
<br />
In 2007, Muslim terrorists ransacked a Christian complex in Gaza and did irreparable damage to a Catholic school and a convent.<br />
<br />
Lina Ata’ Allah, a receptionist at the Silesian Convent and Church in Bethlehem illustrates the pettiness of pressures on Christians since the PA took control: ‘They spit at us, try to force us to wear headscarves, and in the [Islamic] fasting month of Ramadan that begins in a few days, the Palestinian police even arrest us for smoking or eating on the streets.…The Muslims want to get rid of us, they want us to live like them.’ Another example of this petty diminishing of Christians on the West Bank is the decision of the Voice of Palestine radio station that Christian names must not be included in any obituaries announced on their services. Again in Bethlehem, where there were once numerous Christian shops on Nativity Square, doing profitable business for the tourist trade, since PA control almost all these shops have been replaced by Muslim ones. As Said Ghazali reported in the Palestinian weekly newspaper the <i>Jerusalem Times</i>, ‘Cemeteries have been vandalized in Bethlehem. In Nazareth…property was damaged and Christian symbols were desecrated. Worshippers were prevented from attending religious services. An atmosphere of fear has been created.’ Other Christian holy places have been threatened or attacked.<br />
<br />
A particularly vicious anti-Christian activity is the rape of young Christian women. Rapists are seldom punished in Muslim countries, since blame is placed on the victim. To have been raped means, in some cases, that a girl may be killed by her parents or brothers in an honour killing. Otherwise, the girl will be rendered ‘dirty’ and not capable of marrying a Christian man. This is when a Muslim man may offer to marry her, something that is the only solution for such a young woman. After marriage, she will be offered the option of converting to Islam. Such incidents are not uncommon, and you should bear them well in mind when considering instances of forced conversion. In the case that was mentioned, I would doubt very much that the woman and possibly the man were under some form of coercion.<br />
<br />
Samir Qumsieh runs Bethlehem Radio al-Mahid. He has registered over 100 attacks on the town’s Christian community just for the two to three years 2003 to 2005. In 1948, Bethlehem had a Christian population of 80%. Since the PA took control in 1995, that figure has dropped to 23% or, according to other sources, 12%. Boundary changes skilfully adjusted by Yassir Arafat when he was given authority in the West Bank in 1994 have been a primary factor in creating this imbalance.The same thing has been true in Nazareth, Jerusalem and elsewhere. To place this in context, wherever Christians have lived in the Middle East, there has been a drastic decline, often from majority status to that of a tiny rump. Numbers have dropped significantly in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq. (For a series of articles on this wider picture, see <i>The Middle East Quarterly</i>, 2001 8:1, here: <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.meforum.org/meq/issues/200101)">http://www.meforum.org/meq/issues/200101)</a></u></span>.<br />
<br />
In 2005, Christians handed a dossier with full details of Muslim violence and intimidation to Church leaders. But those leaders have done nothing. Instead, they have acquired a reputation for corruption and collusion with the Muslim authorities. Seeking a quiet life without confrontation is an ages-long response to finding oneself beneath the boot of powerful opponents, and while it may in some measure be excused, it has not helped Christians under Hamas or PA rule to expose their plight to the world, including Ireland. Likewise, when Christians have made direct approaches to PA president Mahmoud ‘Abbas, their pleas for help have gone unanswered.<br />
<br />
If you are still sceptical about the problem, may I refer you to as statement by the senior Franciscan cleric in Jerusalem, Father Pierbattista Pizzbella: ‘The problem exists. The Christian community has always suffered in the last few years because we are a minority. Many have the temptation to leave, so the community is shrinking.’ And they leave because Muslims intimidate them. Economic reasons play a part, as you suggest, but they are less important than the stimulus of fear. If economic concerns alone that forced Christians to leave, one has to ask why the same pressures did not to a great extent apply to the Muslim part of the population. In the West Bank, the population growth rate is over two percent, with a net migration rate of zero. Christians leave, few Muslims do so. I have to conclude that special factors pertain in the Christian case, and I do not find it hard to believe that these factors are a manifestation of the Christian persecution to which I have already alluded. It should be noted that there were no reports of Christian persecution in the West Bank or Gaza while Israel was in control, but that intimidation began after Israel handed the West Bank to Fatah in 1995 and then evacuated Gaza in its entirety in 2005, leaving first Fatah then the terrorist organization Hamas to run the area.<br />
<br />
American Congressmen and Senators have spoken openly about the persecution of Christians under the PA and Hamas. There is nothing secret about it. Yet you present a concocted picture in which all seems rosy in this area. You write that ‘Christians are an integral and long established part of the Palestinian community’. When the issue of a Christian exodus is raised, you write that ‘the overwhelming majority of the decrease is due to economic migration as a result of the Israeli blockade of Gaza rather than any other factor’. Will you, in the light of all the evidence I have given you here repeat those manifest untruths to my face? Your e-mail to Mr Williams presents a distorted image of the region, making Palestinian society seem rose-tinted and the only real fault is the Israeli blockade of a terrorist entity that has been recognized as that by several countries who are Ireland’s allies.<br />
<br />
Many decades ago, the Palestinians (who were then merely Arabs) embarked on a policy to kill as many Jews as possible, and to that end they have fought three major wars, carried out almost daily terrorist activity against civilians, and used two <i>intifadatan</i> to kill more Jews in more places. Is it surprising that such people, who constitute some of the worst in any society, primarily through their use of the suicide bomber, might not hold back from persecuting or killing Christians?<br />
<br />
<br />
You write at the start of your letter, ‘Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is a fundamental human right protected in international human rights law, and the Tanáiste strongly believes that individuals should never be intimidated or suffer any form of prejudice or persecution as a result of their religious beliefs.’ You end by saying ‘Ireland will continue to raise issues concerning freedom of religion in all multilateral for a to ensure that all individuals have the right to practice their faith.’<br />
<br />
No doubt you and the Tanáiste believe all that in the abstract, but I see none of it brought to reality. The Baha’is of Iran have for decades now been unable to practise their faith openly and are persecuted on its account. Christians in Saudi Arabia face imprisonment just for praying together. Christians in Pakistan are arrested and sometimes killed. Coptic Christians in Egypt are subjected to all forms of abuse and not even allowed to repair churches. And across the Palestinian regions, as I have set out briefly in this letter, Christians of all types are harassed, killed and raped. Just because they are Christians. In Hebron on the West Bank, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest sanctuary of the Jewish people, has been taken by Muslims and turned for the most part into a mosque.<br />
<br />
What have the Tanáiste or the Taoiseach or the Dáil done to alleviate the sufferings of the groups I have mentioned, and others across the Muslim world? Have you written little letters reassuring complainants that all is really well and that the persecutors are sweet and loving folk who deserve our understanding? Perhaps you use highly biased sources like the Palestine Centre for Human Rights.<br />
<br />
Something is wrong. I would not have expected to read a letter like the one you sent to Barry Williams, coming from a holder of a high state office in a Western country ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and human rights. You must do something about this. You must find broader and more reliable sources of information on all these matters. Whatever the advantages of trade with Islamic states, I plead with you not to sell out to their demands to place Islam on top of everything they say and do, and their unconcealed insistence on keeping non-Muslims in their place or in no place at all.<br />
<br />
I hope I have made my argument clearly enough. Naturally, I am willing to answer any questions you may have or to add to any point that has been left unclear. But I do hope to receive an answer that involves a reconsideration of your reply in the light of the evidence I have presented, that things are neither happy nor promising under PA and Hamas rule, and that it may not be long before towns like Nazareth and Bethlehem will be emptied of Christians and the churches and holy places there turned into mosques, a fate that has befallen numerous important churches from the beginning of Islam until now.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Is mise le meas<br />
</i><br />
Dr. Denis MacEoin<br />
</span></span>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-40064134070618898032012-09-27T18:52:00.003-07:002012-09-28T11:40:22.620-07:00<b>A Letter to the British Foreign Office</b><br />
<br />
Here's a letter which I'm about to send to the FO once I get the proper address. Any suggestions for improvement will be welcome. This is an improved version over the one I first posted. Mostly, it's a correction of typos.<br />
<br />
Denis<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>FAO Simon Fraser, William Hague, and
Alistair Burt</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dear Sirs,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I write in support of a petition I have
recently signed, asking the British Foreign Office to alter its position on
what has become an unnecessarily vexed question concerning the capital of
Israel. As you know, Israelis are unanimous in regarding Jerusalem as their
capital, not Tel Aviv (where the British embassy is currently located), nor
Haifa nor Jaffa nor Petah Tikva nor anywhere else in the country. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is not hard to understand why the
first Israeli parliament chose Jerusalem as its seat, even before it had built
an edifice suitable to the needs of the men and women who sat in its
chamber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For many centuries, Jews
in the Diaspora had clung to a hope, not only of a return to the Holy Land, but
to Jerusalem in particular, the erstwhile home of its holiest Temple and the
scene of so many primary events in Jewish and Christian history. This might be
dismissed on the grounds that religious belief should not determine a city’s
status, but many cities derive their significance from their role as religious
centres, from Mecca and Medina (the latter having been the first capital of
Islam), to Karbala’ and Mashhad, to Varanasi (Benares) and the Vatican City.
This original attachment, intensified by daily prayers while facing Jerusalem
and repeated wishes to return there, was later supplanted by the governmental,
educational, trading, defensive, legal and bureaucratic concerns of the capital
of a secular state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As a people who have been
deeply wronged in the past, Jews have tried to build their own state along
lines of equal citizenship, a single legal system, human rights, and the
protection of all holy places. But when Jordan occupied East Jerusalem from
1949 to 1967, Muslim holy places were renovated while 58 synagogues were
destroyed and 38,000 Jewish graves were demolished. In addition, Jews were not
allowed to set foot in their own holy places, notably on the Temple Mount. By
contrast, when Israel retook Jerusalem in 1967, the Temple Mount was handed to
a Muslim authority on account of two Islamic structures built on top of it, the
al-Aqsa mosque and the Qubbat al-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Such depredations and a lack
of reciprocity have made Israelis wary of a Muslim takeover of East Jerusalem,
where the holiest sites are located: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall (the
Kotel), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives, and the famous
Jewish graveyards, still vandalized horribly by Arab criminals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But the Palestinians have
made it their business to turn Jerusalem into a bastion of Islamic holiness,
not just because the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock are there, but
because they now claim that there has never been any Jewish connection to the
city or to the land of Israel. There was, they boast, no Jewish Temple there.
All Biblical references to the Temple and to Jerusalem as a city built by King
David are summarily and ahistorically dismissed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Given that Muslims have
demolished the holy places of more than one religion, the Jews are rightly
concerned lest Jerusalem fall under Islamic control. In Saudi Arabia for
decades now, the government has been engaged in the destruction of Islamic holy
places in Mecca and Medina. Lest you think me in the grip of some obscure
fantasy, I should explain that the Wahhabi form of Islam, which governs Saudi
Arabia, is utterly ruthless in its condemnation of anything that may be
worshipped instead of God. They have demolished over 200 historical sites to
prevent pilgrims praying at them. In Mali, a similar form of Islam – Salafism –
has recently demolished dozens of shrines belonging to the Sufi form of Islam.
And in Iran, the government has demolished all the holy places and cemeteries
of the persecuted Baha’i religion. Israel, by way of contrast, protects and
nourishes the large international headquarters and two holiest shrines of the
Baha’is, places now recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Is it surprising that the
Israelis, backed by Jews and others like myself round the world, are desperate
to maintain the integrity of the city, knowing as they do that Muslim Arab rule
would carry a greatly heightened risk to the Old City and its environs? Israel
has been generous towards Muslims and their holy places, but they fear that if
increased pressure were to come from Saudi Arabia or Iran or, nearer to hand
from Hamas, everything Jewish might be eliminated. Palestinians have taken
control of the Jewish Tomb of Rachel, the third holiest site for Jews. They
have commandeered most of the Ma’arat Ha-Machpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs
in Hebron and made access for Jews to a tiny space very difficult, as I can
personally attest. This is the second holiest site for Jews, containing as it
does the tombs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the earliest days of
Islam, the Prophet Muhammad adopted from his Jewish neighbours the practice of
turning towards Jerusalem during the five daily prayers. But in the year 622, a
few months after his arrival in Medina, he did an about turn during one prayer
session and from then on directed his followers to pray towards his home city
of Medina. He severed all direct ties with Jerusalem, and in the centuries that
followed Jerusalem was never a provincial capital, nor the heart of a Muslim
country or empire. Medina in the first years, then Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul
and other cities became the capitals of Islam. Cairo was the major city in
North Africa, Fez and Rabat capitals of the west, Esfahan, Tabriz, Tehran and
others the royal cities of Iranian dynasties. And so on. But Jerusalem was
never given such signal importance. This is significant. Palestinian wishes to
make Jerusalem defy centuries of insignificance would lock us into a dispute
that could last one thousand years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">For this reason, Jews
everywhere will refuse to relinquish a city that was theirs from the beginning,
and they will not reward people who have tried to take what was never theirs,
who have tried to deny the historical record concerning the Jewish presence in
a city that has been Jewish for 3000 years. To confirm the place of Jerusalem
at the heart of Jewish life and prayers and as the eternal capital of their
only homeland, Jews and Israelis appeal to honest governments to do the right
thing and recognize that Jerusalem is the city where all the key aspects of
Israeli life converge. No Israeli regards Tel Aviv as his or her capital. It is
demeaning to treat Israelis as children by telling them this or that foreign
government knows better than they and their government when it comes to
designating Jerusalem their capital. I do not think you treat any other capital
city in this way. You do not call Cork the capital of Ireland, nor Glasgow the
capital of Scotland, nor the cathedral city of St. David’s the capital of
Wales, nor Marseilles the capital of France. I do not believe the Foreign
Office means to be insulting in this matter; but if foreigners called
Birmingham the capital of England and the UK, would you not feel aggrieved?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Israel’s enemies call in all
seriousness for the destruction of the country. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called
on all Islamic nations to ‘exterminate Israel’ (my translation). The Arabs,
faced by their repeated failure to achieve this by military means or terrorism,
have turned to secondary means, saying that there never any Jews in Israel,
that they themselves were there first, an impossible 9000 years ago, and that
Jerusalem was always an Arab city (a claim that directly contradicts the
accounts of Arab historians like al-Tabari). It is a cheap and dishonest
attempt to rewrite history itself and to introduce confusion into a simple
narrative. Denying the historicity and modern reality of Israel, of Jerusalem,
and of Israelis by refusing to liberate the city from the string of fictions
that has tied so many in knots, allows falsehood and deceit to rule in
international affairs. Britain is still a great country that is admired the
world round for its probity. I do not doubt that you, like myself, wish to see
that image remain untarnished. But I have to say that it is in some measure
tarnished when you try to steal the Israeli capital from the Israelis
themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yours sincerely,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dr.
Denis MacEoin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">15
Erskine Court</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lindisfarne
Close</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Newcastle
upon Tyne</span></div>
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-86215381781155879702012-09-12T11:49:00.000-07:002012-09-12T11:49:45.972-07:00I've just been engaging in one of those day-in, day-out online wars with a number of anti-Israel types, some of whom are well-informed (which is refreshing). Don't you hate it when they keep coming back at you, sniping away? One (less well-informed) thought Israel invaded the Arab states in 1948. Today's offering from the other side (and sometimes I think it IS the Other Side) prompted the following from me (but I've edited this).
1967 6-Day War not seen as defensive? Let me paste the following:
Professor, Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, past President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)11 states the following facts:
“The facts of the June 1967 ‘Six Day War’ demonstrate that Israel reacted defensively against the threat and use of force against her by her Arab neighbors. This is indicated by the fact that Israel responded to Egypt's prior closure of the Straits of Tiran, its proclamation of a blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat, and the manifest threat of the UAR's use of force inherent in its massing of troops in Sinai, coupled with its ejection of UNEF. It is indicated by the fact that, upon Israeli responsive action against the UAR, Jordan initiated hostilities against Israel. It is suggested as well by the fact that, despite the most intense efforts by the Arab States and their supporters, led by the Premier of the Soviet Union, to gain condemnation of Israel as an aggressor by the hospitable organs of the United Nations, those efforts were decisively defeated. The conclusion to which these facts lead is that the Israeli conquest of Arab and Arab-held territory was defensive rather than aggressive conquest.”
Here is another, more relevant to your claim that the UN did not recognize that Israel fought a defensive war. The source is non-Israeli:
Judge Sir Elihu Lauterpacht wrote in 1968, just one year after the 1967 Six-Day War:
“On 5th June, 1967, Jordan deliberately overthrew the Armistice Agreement by attacking the Israeli-held part of Jerusalem. There was no question of this Jordanian action being a reaction to any Israeli attack. It took place notwith-standing explicit Israeli assurances, conveyed to King Hussein through the U.N. Commander, that if Jordan did not attack Israel, Israel would not attack Jordan. Although the charge of aggression is freely made against Israel in relation to the Six-Days War the fact remains that the two attempts made in the General Assembly in June-July 1967 to secure the condemnation of Israel as an aggressor failed. A clear and striking majority of the members of the U.N. voted against the proposition that Israel was an aggressor.” [Lauerpacht is an Honorary Professor of International Law at Cambridge and founder of the Lauerpacht Centre for International Law in the University.]
You also need to look at UN Article 51 and General Resolution 3314 to see the grounds for deciding what is and what is not defensive war, and to see why the UN refused to denounce Israel for fighting an 'aggressive' war.
Further down, and speaking of Israel, you write 'We could discuss what you mean by "very decent"' [I had called Israel a 'very decent' country]. We could indeed. Let me spell it out. Israel has passed and enforces laws and guarantees rights for women, people of all races, gays, religious minorities from Islam to Baha'i. Not one other state in the Middle East and beyond has or enforces laws of this kind. In Iran, all the holy places and cemeteries of the minority Baha'i religion have been bulldozed to the ground; in Israel, the Baha'is have two large religious sites that form a vast UNESCO World Heritage Site. Is all that not decent? In Israel, Arabs have identical rights to Jews. They vote, serve in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court, serve as diplomats, attend university (forming 20% of any student body). Israel sends aid teams round the world to help after disasters. Is all that not very decent? Israeli hospitals treat, not just Jews or Israeli Arabs, but Palestinians, especially Palestinian children, hundreds of whom have had heart repair and transplant operations. Not very decent? Israeli researchers have invented dozens of drugs and medical devices that are in use round the world, saving lives. Would you call that indecent? Israelis invented the re-Walk device, an exo-skeleton that allows paraplegics to walk (one wholly paralyzed British woman used it this year to walk the London Marathon). Decent or indecent? It's up to you. Rather than go for years with ongoing terrorism that was killing Israelis and forcing Israeli troops to kill Palestinian terrorists (and, o0ften, bystanders), Israel spent a fortune to build a fence that has now saved hundreds of lives on both sides. Decent? They had the choice of going down the Nazi route, of course, and carpet-bombing the West Bank, but chose not to. It was a moral choice. Where is your moral compass. Israel offers the world a remarkable wealth of positive things and stands head and shoulders above any of its neighbours (Iran? Syria? Egypt? Libya? Work it out). It's what a civilized, cultured, tolerant and morally decent country is like. Israelis do not use suicide bombers. They do not fire rockets without discrimination into civilian areas. They produce good music, great literature, successful sportsmen and women, wonderful artists, and genuine possibilities in life for its Arab citizens. They love life, not death. They do not seek martyrdom. They play on the beaches, they listen to jazz, they play classical music, they produce dancers of international stature (like the Bat Sheva Dance Company), they grow grapes and drink wine, they are multiracial, they try to entice the Palestinians to peace talks and are rebuffed, just as they have always been rebuffed. They are not the worst people in the world. Rather, they are among the best. Their greatest problem lies in the fact that their neighbours hate them to a level you probably don't even guess, and that they all, without exception, want to commit genocide in order to eliminate all the region's Jews and the Israeli state itself. Do you really hate Israeli that much? Do you call for jihad? What precisely would you recommend? Would you expose Israel to genocidal killers who have a long history of terrorism? Israelis are normal people, like you and me. Why destroy a people like that? Israel is a very decent country indeed. Think again and ask yourself why you aren't out there condemning really criminal states like Iran. Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-36743849320482331652012-09-06T11:32:00.001-07:002012-09-06T11:32:51.314-07:00Israel and homeopathy – sort of.
That's not a very good title but, like most titles, it will do. Please forgive me if you think I'm digressing from the basic Zionist narrative of this blog, but if you will read further, you'll see I'm not. I want to start by making some observations about myself and homeopathy, and if you have patience you'll finally see where this leads.
My wife is a very experienced and successful homeopath and the author of some twenty books on health issues, including several on homeopathy. In my day, I've been a homeopathic patient and for many years the chairman of Britain's Natural Medicines Society. I'm not trained in medicine, but I am fascinated by many aspects of it, especially the research that has been done into alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy. So, that's my bias.
If you know nothing about homeopathy,I won't take up time here to explain it. Google will, no doubt, give you more than one place to go in order to read about it. The main thing (and Google will show this to you quite vividly) is that, ever since its emergence in the 18th century, homeopathy has been enormously controversial. If anything, it is just as controversial today as it was then. Supporters of orthodox medicine hate it. They don't just mildly dislike it, they hate it with venom.
But homeopathy has its respectable side. The British Royal Family has used it since the days of Victoria, and one of the Queen's physicians is always a homeopath. In 1948, it was adopted into the British National Health Service. This was always controversial, and there have been attempts to close homeopathic hospitals, something that happened a long time ago in the United States.
Just last week, in the cabinet reshuffle, a new Health Secretary was appointed. He is Jeremy Hunt, and he is a supporter of homeopathy. This simple fact has unleashed a torrent of wholly irrational abuse. The Guardian (remember it?) has had several 'Comment is Free' pages, one based on an article by me, and has published one based around the Hunt appointment. In all these cases, the number of commentators reaches to well over 1000. If you read them, substitute 'Israel' for 'Homeopathy' and you will find yourself in familiar territory. About 99% of these posters trumpet themselves as rationalists, yet not one shows the least sign of being equipped to engage in a rational argument. They have never read academic books on homeopathy, never visited a homeopath, never sat in with a homeopathic doctor or vet (many homeopaths start life as conventional doctors), never read the numerous scientific papers on the subject. When asked for evidence to support their position, they just get more abusive. Their language is never temperate. Nobody challenges the homeopaths to engage in a properly moderated discussion. When someone like myself points out that the placebo effect cannot possibly explain how herds of dairy cows recover from mastitis when a liquid homeopathic remedy is put into their drinking troughs, they simply ignore it.
Hatred for homeopathy is not, of course, restricted to Guardian readers, any more than hatred of Israel and Zionists has its only home in that paper's pages. But the Guardian does encapsulate a certain world view that relates particularly to a certain category of person, young to middle-aged, would-be intellectual, leftist in their politics, vitriolic when condemning things they disapprove of, be it homeopathy or Israel. We've all seen it, haven't we, that extraordinary ability to criticize without evidence, that need to distort whatever evidence there may be or to present as fact something that simply isn't true ('Israel is an apartheid state'). There are times I want to blow a gasket reading yet another post saying the Jews invaded Palestine in 1948, drivel masquerading as common sense, childish rubbish pretending to be part of adult discourse. The worst thing is how so many present themselves as rational people. Most will have been to a university somewhere, where they have been introduced to the concept of rational, evidence-based argument. That then becomes their pose. But the pose does not disguise the underlying sickness of their minds. Young Westerners who can chant 'Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas' are clearly sick. All those posts calling for the murder of Jews are not the work of the sane, the rational, the commonsensical.
The two situations are, I think, analogous. Just as I have no objection to someone engaging in a scientific debate in order to debunk homeopathy (and with the open-mindedness to consider evidence in its favour), so I have no axe to grind with someone who wants to argue the one-state solution or even a total Arab takeover of Israel, provided they do so with statistics and historical records, and avoid aspersions like 'Nazi state' or 'there was never any Jewish temple in Jerusalem'. Greater rationality will get us all further, just as a real desire for peace will bring us closer to it. No country in history has had to endure, not simply physical attack, but the antagonism of most of the world, vitriolic expressions of hatred, outright lies, wilful misunderstanding, immoral assertions of morality, and a self-defeating hatred of the enemy by the enemy itself.
Let's look at something related to all this. When we watch film of Palestinian crowds in Gaza or the West Bank or rioters in Cairo or anti-Israel marchers in London or Paris, or members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or the International Solidarity Movement screaming at lecturers, drowning the music at a classical concert, howling at a performance by the Bat Sheva dance company – do we not see what so many politicians refuse to see – namely a primitive force seething at civilization. It is the Arab countries that have been and are plunged into wave after wave of violence. It is the Palestinians who have mastered and passed on the art of the suicide bomber and conferred on it the status of the highest aspiration, the most eloquent art form, the art of death achieved in its singularity, its momentary denial of life, not just for the bomber, but for others who did not wish it. It is the supporters of the Palestinians in the West who have denied the best impulses of their own society, the orderly progress of their own civilization, the rule of law and order, and who have found refuge in the weakness of their own countries to clamp down on threats of violence and anti-Semitic abuse.
I worry that homeopathy, a slow, gentle but incredibly effective healing method, is at risk of being banned by a crowd of neurotics driven to impose their own beliefs on others. And I am concerned that countries led by dictators, religious extremists, theocrats, torturers, anti-Semites and other legions of the possessed may pile pressure upon pressure to make life almost unbearable for Israel.
The only answer is evidence. Scientific evidence (already available) that homeopathy can be more effective than any conventional therapy for the right conditions. And evidence that the Palestinians and their Arab partners (not to mention Iran) have for many decades attacked Israel and refused to recognize it or make peace with it; and evidence that Israel has bent over backwards to make peace and has asked very little in return. The problem is, of course, that evidence as such is of no real use unless those who examine it have the right attitude, that they are unblinkered and not driven by prejudice. But it is rare to find many who are genuinely open-minded.
There are two excellent studies that illustrate this issue within a scientific context. Many of you will have read Thomas Kuhn's classic, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', which is where the term 'paradigm shift' comes from. Kuhn argues with numerous details that when a younger generation comes along and tries to shift the paradigm of scientific knowledge in one or another field, the older generations snarls and rejects the evidence for the new paradigm ('what do you mean, the earth goes round the sun? How dare you?'). Harry Collins's study, 'Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice' leads the reader through an array of experiments with which he was personally involved or which he observed. The experiments go from seemingly very easy to replicate (but actually hard) to the very outré. In all cases, especially the later ones, scientists display a great deal of personal prejudice, even outright bigotry.
If that is the case with science, it is not surprising it happens even more grossly in religion and politics. I don't doubt that I and other Zionists carry illusions and that we are in our own way prejudiced. But I think that our opponents are motivated by nothing more than a distorted weltanschauung, a world view so seriously polluted by lies, myths, and distortions of reality that it is of no use in any debate about the key issues, much less in the negotiation of peace talks. And I think that Israel, whatever its faults, is actually pretty well much what it claims to be, that its reality is incontrovertible. Israel really has been attacked again and again, it really has done its best to create security with minimal harm, it really does work for the human rights of its citizens, and it really is a world leader in all areas of science and technology. These and other things are our evidence. Our problem is to find partners on the other side. I don't believe we can find anyone. Where do we go from here?Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-38244432056160957102012-09-03T14:44:00.002-07:002012-09-03T14:44:39.025-07:00I haven't been posting here for some time, but I have been writing things you may wish to read. Here's one, a letter I wrote a few months back to the American writer Alice Walker, an anti-Israel activist.
Denis
20 June 2012
Alice Walker
c/o Wendy Weil Literary Agency
New York
Dear Ms Walker,
This is not a fan mail, though I wish it were. It is, equally, not a criticism of any of your books, which have said so much to so many. It is that very simple thing, a request to reconsider. I am, like yourself, a writer, having published (mainly with Harper Collins UK and US) over twenty-five novels under two different names. I am also a former academic in Arabic and Islamic Studies and a former editor of the Middle East Quarterly. I know the Middle East well, and have lived in Iran and Morocco.
I was, not to put too fine a point on it, shocked to the core to find that the sensitive author of The Color Purple and so many other books that speak to the heart has refused to let a Hebrew translation of that first, classic story to be published. Nor was I less shocked to discover that a woman of your merit and generally sound political judgement had joined forces with groups and individuals who campaign against the state of Israel and treat it with the sort of contempt that would be better reserved for the countries that surround it.
You have spoken out against racism, yet you accuse a country that is visibly anti-racist to be the opposite of what it is. Please don’t dismiss what I say without further thought. It seems that you condemn Israel because it practices apartheid. Have you ever been to Israel? Have you ever walked Israeli streets, spoken to Jewish and Arab Israelis, sought out clear signs of the apartheid you’ve been told you will find there? I do not think you have, for had you done so you would have been surprised by the absolute absence in Israel of any of the features of apartheid, as it was applied by the South African government years ago. That apartheid had as its principal aim the separation of blacks and whites and was hell for black people for many, many years. Though it pains me to say so, I find it offensive that you and other anti-Israel activists feel it necessary to indulge in an outright falsehood. Think of South African apartheid and all its ramifications. Did blacks have the vote outside their ‘homelands’? Did they serve in parliament or as government ministers? Were they sent abroad as diplomats? Did they serve as judges?
In Israel today, every Arab citizen has exactly the same right to vote and be elected as any Jewish citizen. There are Arab members of parliament. Arab members of the cabinet. Arabs on the Supreme Court. Arab diplomats. Beyond that, not one place is forbidden to Arab Israelis. They can sit in the same cinemas as Jews, swim in the same pools, run on the same beaches, eat in the same restaurants, attend the same universities, lecture at those universities, lie on adjacent beds in the same wards in the same hospitals. Palestinian children attend speciual educational courses alongside their Jewish coevals and are taught the virtues of co-existence.
And thinking of Palestinian children, an Israeli charity called ‘Save a Child’s Heart’ brings well over 200 children suffering serious heart conditions and operates to save their lives. 40% of the children who underwent cardiac surgeries are from Africa, 49% are from the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Iraq and Morocco, 4% are from Eastern Europe and the Americas and 7% are from Asia. And you call this an ‘apartheid state’? The PA, Jordan, Iraq and Morocco are all sworn enemies of Israel who regularly call for its destruction and for the genocide of all Jews living there. Would an apartheid state save the lives of its enemies’ children or allow Palestinian women to give birth in its hospitals, side by side with Jewish women? Am I completely insane for thinking you have it all back to front?
You may well say to me, what about Gaza, what about the West Bank? – those are the places where apartheid takes place. But does it? Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and in doing so exposed itself to year after year of rocket and mortar fire from Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The territory is currently under the control of Hamas, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist entities. Israel has two functions there: to exercise a wholly legal sea and land blockade in order to prevent Hamas acquiring (mainly through tunneling) advanced weaponry, most of it supplied by Iran, another country which openly calls for genocide in Israel. To mitigate the impact of the blockade, Israel has set up an important border control station, through which thousands of tons of goods pass into Gaza every week. Life is not easy for Gaza, but it is controlled by an armed group whose charter calls for the killing of Jews and rejects peace-making of any kind. This is many things, but it’s not apartheid.
The West Bank has nothing I would call apartheid. 96% of Palestinians live under the Palestinian Authority administration. Overall, Israel is responsible for security. For a period of many years, wave after wave of terrorist attacks have come out of the West Bank, especially in the form of suicide bombings. To this day, Palestinian streets boast posters bearing the faces of suicide bombers, buildings, including schools, are named after them, schoolchildren are taught to admire them, to write poems for them, and to hanker after martyrdom themselves.
Are Palestinians on the West Bank treated badly? Probably. But how badly is badly? There is a war going on, a quiet war that nonetheless exposes innocent civilians on both sides to constant danger. But the Palestinians have for over sixty years refused to take up the very fair deal offered them by the United Nations in 1947, and until they do so and establish a state that does not dream of the destruction of its neighbour simply because it is a Jewish state, there cannot be peace, there cannot be honest dialogue, and there cannot be a full programme of mutual assistance.
Terrorism and war are the twin contexts within which all today’s problems lie. It has been said that ‘If the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be peace tomorrow. If the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel.’
I am writing to you because I believe you have shown yourself on other issues to be open-minded and attuned to context. You have taken a stand for gay people, yet seem unaware that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where homosexuals enjoy full rights and can celebrate their status in public. Tel Aviv is rightly considered one of the gay capitals of the world. Surely this is important to you. Does it not go a long way towards refining your image of the Jewish state?
I am a liberal (in the British sense at least), and Israel is the only country I know in the Middle East that pays more than lip service to the human rights in which we both believe. It bewilders me that someone as open-minded and open-hearted as yourself should choose to support the side of violence, of prejudice, of outright hatred. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that you must be – as are so many of those who hate Israel – simply ignorant of the realities of life there. I do not say that to blame you – ignorance of the Middle East runs right through Western societies, from media pundits to presidents and prime ministers.
I could write pages more in an attempt to help you see reason, but I don’t think that would, in itself, achieve very much. You don’t want to be preached to, I’m sure of that – and I’ve already preached more than I intended at the outset of this letter. But we do share one thing and that is the power of imagination. It takes imagination to see beyond the dogmas on either side of an argument like this. And that is what I want you to do, to use your imagination to see past the innumerable lies and obfuscations that have blinded people’s eyes to what has really been going on between the Jews and the Arabs.
It is still not uncommon – particularly in Arabic writing and speech-making – for Israel’s enemies to speak of it as ‘a Nazi state’. This is commonplace. It occurs as often as not along with a deep ignorance of the very great real evil the Nazis did, with denial of the Holocaust, with street banners reading ‘Why didn’t Hitler finish the job?’ and ‘God Bless Hitler’. You will not need prompting from me to agree that this modern attempt to turn the tables on a people who suffered the Holocaust and now carry it in their blood is worthy of the strongest condemnation. But it is the Palestinians and their allies who voice these gruesome sentiments, and it is the Israelis who run charities to save children’s hearts, who send out aid missions to Haiti and Japan and Mali and throughout the world because they believe in humanity, who have helped feed most of Africa, who have produced one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries, who save lives everywhere with their medicines and medical devices.
Please take this opportunity to revise your thoughts about Israel. If it should ever be destroyed – as its enemies fervently hope it will be – it will be a disaster for the Middle East and for the world. Find books, watch videos, cast your mind about to discover what Israel really is. Talk to some Jews, and not just those who are opposed to Israel. It is not what you think it is, of that you can be sure. And if you would like to visit Israel and probe into things yourself, just let me know and I will help arrange it.
Thank you for reading this far. If you take what I say seriously, you will be surprised by what you find, bright against what you thought you knew but did not.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-56345330849513820932011-12-29T10:47:00.000-08:002011-12-29T10:52:38.724-08:00A Letter to the Archbishop of WestminsterFollowing midnight mass on Christmas Eve, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, delivered his annual homily for the occasion. In it, he made a reference to Christians in the West Bank which I and others found offensive and ill-informed. I wrote a letter to him, setting out what I believe to be the important context within which his words appear either ignorant or biased or both. His statement is quoted in the text of my letter, which I reproduce below. Is there anything I should have said or anything I should not, please let me know in your comments.<br /><br /><br />Denis<br /><br /><br /><br />The Most Reverend Vincent Nichols DD<br /><br /><br />Your Grace,<br /><br />I hope you will forgive my writing at such a busy time of year, but I have a serious concern that will not wait for expression. I am not a Catholic, but my concern is, in the main, not about your religion, but your politics. To introduce myself briefly, I am a writer and a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies with a serious interest in Iran and the Middle East in general. Late on Christmas Day my attention was drawn to your Midnight Mass homily. When I found a copy online, I found it well expressed and diligent in its portrayal of the mysteries you set out to expound. But since I am not a religious man, I can make no better comment on the homily and its religious content. It would be inexpressively arrogant of me to challenge you on any of that, nor did I feel compelled to do so.<br /><br />As you may already have surmised, my problem lies with your departure into political matters in a manner that, I believe, exposes you to real and spontaneous criticism. You wrote a short introduction to this theme in words I find no fault with, but for which I had heartfelt agreement:<br /><br />‘We are to see clearly the reality of the world around us. As we look at the real circumstances of Christ's birth so too we look with fresh eyes on the anxieties and insecurity which touch many peoples' lives. We are to be freshly attentive to the needs of those who, like Jesus himself, are displaced and in discomfort. We are to see more clearly all those things which disfigure our world, the presence of the sins of greed and arrogance, of self-centred ambition and manipulation of others, of the brutal lack of respect for human life in all its vulnerability. While recognizing how complex moral dilemmas can become, we are to name these things for what they are. We too live “in a land of deep shadow”.’<br /><br />Just last week, I watched a three-part television adaptation of the Nativity story. You may have seen it yourself. It was dramatically balanced, presenting both the religious narrative and the harsh realities of life in first century Judaea: Mary’s fear of being stoned, Joseph’s anxiety about his attachment to a sixteen-year-old girl who has fallen mysteriously pregnant, Herod’s fear of the Romans, the shepherds’ distress under Herod’s rule, and much else. Your connection of the Nativity to contemporary suffering is perfectly balanced; but your later application of that principle leaves much to be desired, almost certainly as a result of your ignorance of the realities of life in the West Bank. Such ignorance is widespread, so I do not single you out for sharing in it. But your calling and stature make it vital for you to get something like this right, otherwise your words will pass on shadows of that ignorance to all who hear and read you and will darken the minds of another generation.<br /><br />You say that ‘We too live “in a land of deep shadow”,’ and I don’t doubt the veracity of it. What you mean exactly by ‘a land’ is neither here nor there, since most of the world is in some kind of darkness and has always been so. It is the curse of the human race. We are in agreement. But in a moment we are not. You continue by saying:<br /><br />‘That shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight. At this moment the people of the parish of Beit Jala prepare for their legal battle to protect their land and homes from further expropriation by Israel. Over 50 families face losing their land and their homes as action is taken to complete the separation/security wall across the territory of the district of Bethlehem. We pray for them tonight.’<br /><br />‘Particularly heavily’? Can you in all sincerity say that your singling out of events in Beit Jala merits that use of ‘particularly’? A difficult and misunderstood situation for some people becomes a paradigm for the shadow enveloping mankind? Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer. Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent. In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised. Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly.<br /><br />Instead, it is the predictable condemnation of one of the world’s most democratic, liberal, and tolerant states that occupies your thoughts. You speak of a ‘separation/security wall’ without irony. Overall, this barrier is not a wall, it is a fence: it will be about 500 miles long when finished, and only about 3 percent of it will be a wall or is a wall now. There are very cogent reasons why some sections are built from concrete and are very high, unlike the rest, which is primarily chain-link fence. When the second intifada erupted in 2000, gunmen belonging to Fatah Tanzim squads went into mainly Christian houses in Beit Jala and used them as strategic points from which to fire into the Jewish civilian enclave of Gilo, a mere 800 meters away. They fired at first with Kalashnikovs and stolen M16s, then with heavy machine guns. The battles fought in Beit Jala, together with the return fire the Fatah shooting provoked, caused great difficulties for the Christians of the town, who wanted to stay apart from the Muslim-centred violence, whereas the Muslims of the Tanzim wanted to attract return fire into Christian properties. Not surprisingly, the Christian residents tried to force these terrorists (many of whom were from outside Beit Jala) outside their homes. In retaliation, the gunmen beat Christians badly. Christian women were harassed by Muslim men from a nearby village, Beit Awwad.<br /><br />That violence was spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Hundreds were killed by terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, and hundreds more on the Arab side when Israeli troops fired back. It was the second intifada, on top of thousands of similar incidents since 1948, that impelled the Israelis to take hard action against those who wanted to kill them, to attack them specifically as Jews, and to wipe them out or expel them entirely from the Holy Land. Building the barrier was and is harsh to many who live in the West Bank, but it has cut terrorist attacks by over ninety percent. That is an achievement that must be taken into consideration before any condemnation of the wall or the fence. It was never the Israelis who started the violence, nor do they seek to continue it.<br /><br />Tragically, the barrier did not prevent a hideous massacre in March of this year, when two Palestinian youths entered the Jewish settlement of Itamar, not very many miles from Bethlehem. They took knives and murdered five members of the same family in their sleep, including a five-month-old girl, whom they decapitated. The bodies of her mother, father, two younger brothers and baby sister were found by twelve-year Tamar Fogel, when she stumbled on a scene of such carnage that I flinch to describe it. It is in attacks like this that Israeli toughness begins, in which the plan for a long security barrier was born. <br /><br />I know that some of the actions that have been taken to build or expand the barrier have resulted in injustice. But I weigh such injustice against several things. I weigh it against the photographs I was sent of the Fogel family massacre and the courage of young Tamar Fogel in facing up to her future as an orphan, yet still committed to her faith and her land. I weigh it against my understanding of how Israel behaves as a country. Israelis have a deep commitment to justice, something achingly evident in the number of times their Supreme Court has ruled against the government, not least in the matter of the security barrier. In 2004, for example, the Court ruled that ‘The route that the military commander established for the security fence ... injures the local inhabitants in a severe and acute way while violating their rights under humanitarian and international law.’ The route was changed. In 2005, the Court issued an injunction against the government and the Israeli Defence Forces against the building of the fence round the village of Iskaka, and in the same year forced a halt to the barrier’s construction near Ramallah. Similar rulings have continued to the present day. If the appropriation of land in Beit Jala is illegal and can be shown to have merit, the case will undoubtedly receive a hearing. It may take time for such a case to pass through the judicial system, but what country can offer instant justice save one that makes no pretence at consideration, due process, or justice? If justice is your concern – and I see no reason for it not to be – may I please ask you to direct your criticisms to Iran, where sentences of death are passed in minutes, or to Syria, where justice is firmly in the hands of the regime, or to Saudi Arabia, where a misdemeanour may take you after Friday prayers to the main square in Riyadh, where an executioner’s sword will quickly teach you manners.<br /><br />Israel, by contrast, has always applied its laws fairly and justly. The only person Israel has ever hanged was Adolph Eichmann, one of the planners of the Holocaust. There is no death penalty, even for the most horrendous acts of terror. This year, in return for a single Israeli soldier, who had been kidnapped illegally and kept incommunicado even from the Red Cross for many years, the Israeli state sanctioned the release of over one thousand Palestinian prisoner, many of them with hands stained by the blood of innocents and children. Israel has well-enforced laws to protect the rights of women, homosexuals, and members of religious minorities. Although Muslims have at various times destroyed synagogues in Jerusalem and elsewhere, the Israelis have long recognized that control of their own holiest site, the Temple Mount, is vested in the Muslim waqf authority and that control of almost the entirety of the second holiest structure of the Jewish faith, the Ma’arat Ha-Machpelah is also under the authority of the waqf Council. When I visited this shrine – the resting places of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac with other patriarchs – we found ourselves squeezed into a tiny space, while Muslim visitors had full run of the place. There is a lack of balance between the two. In Iran, the regime has destroyed all the holy places and cemeteries of its own largest religious minority, the Baha’is. In Israel, the Baha’is practise their faith openly and have established their international centre in a series of dazzling buildings and luscious gardens that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site of remarkable beauty. I ask you to judge here whether it is customary for the people of Israel to behave towards non-Jews with contumely, for it is the implication of that deep shadow that hovers over your sermon. If you do indeed mean the Israelis, if you do indeed think of them as bearers of that shadow, I must ask why. Why are Israelis thought to embody the heavy shadow of your accusation when true haters of mankind abound yet are never the targets of your anger. And if it is not the Israelis as Israelis but the Israelis as Jews, I think you will agree with my that that cannot be a helpful road down which to travel.<br /><br />I write all that as a sort of prelude to a wider discussion. There is much at stake here. That muchness derives from your singular attention to a single place, or two contingent places, Bethlehem and Beit Jala. It would be easy for the uninformed to conclude that the Israelis are bent on the expulsion of Christian families, who are in your sermon portrayed as the victims of an arbitrary Israel ruling. That is not how it seems to me.<br /><br />After the Palestinian Authority took control of most of the West Bank in 1995, Muslim families from Hebron (where Jews are very badly treated) and elsewhere moved to Beit Jala and illegally seized private land and property. This came on top of a long period when pressure was placed on Arab Christians to migrate from towns like Nazareth, Bethlehem, and elsewhere. In 1914, Christians constituted 26.4 percent of the total population in what today is Israel, the Palestinian areas, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while by 2005 they represented at most 9.2 percent (Phillipe Fargues, "The Arab Christians of the Middle East: A Demographic Perspective," in Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East, Andrea Pacini, ed, Oxford University Press). But the same thing is emphatically not true of Israel. In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period. <br /><br />It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states. This does not surprise me, for Islam has a long history of intolerance towards Jews and Christians, and religious sensitivities take precedence for many, regardless of the nationalist and economic dimensions of the conflict. Let me cite some relevant statements by the well-known Muslim-Arab journalist, Khaled Abu Toameh, who brings a hidden problem into the open. Writing in 2009, he says:<br /><br />‘Christian families have long been complaining of intimidation and land theft by Muslims, especially those working for the Palestinian Authority.<br /><br />‘Many Christians in Bethlehem and the nearby [Christian] towns of Bet Sahour and Beit Jalla have repeatedly complained that Muslims have been seizing their lands either by force or through forged documents. . . .<br /><br />‘Moreover, several Christian women living in these areas have complained about verbal and sexual assaults by Muslim men.<br /><br />‘Over the past few years, a number of Christian businessmen told me that they were forced to shut down their businesses because they could no longer afford to pay "protection" money to local Muslim gangs.<br /><br />‘While it is true that the Palestinian Authority does not have an official policy of persecution against Christians, it is also true that this authority has not done enough to provide the Christian population with a sense of security and stability.<br /><br />‘In addition, Christians continue to complain about discrimination when it comes to employment in the public sector. Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority 15 years ago, not a single Christian was ever appointed to a senior security post. Although Bethlehem has a Christian mayor, the governor, who is more senior than him, remains a Muslim.’<br /><br /><br />May I recommend you also read this valuable report written by David Raab and published by a very sound think tank, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp490.htm<br /><br />A statement by the Palestinian Authority Information Ministry makes it clear that ‘The Palestinian people are also governed by Shari’a law... With regard to issues pertaining to religious matters. According to Shari’a Law, applicable throughout the Muslim world, any Muslim who [converts] or declares becoming an unbeliever is committing a major sin punishable by capital punishment... The [Palestinian Authority] cannot take a different position on this matter.’<br /><br />Such rulings have a major effect on all Christian churches and make life impossible for potential converts, who are only safe if they seek refuge in Israel or go abroad.<br /><br />Let me cite a couple more passages from reports that make this same point in fresh ways.<br /><br />An Israeli government report in 1997 asserted more direct harassment of Christians by the PA. <br /><br />In August 1997, Palestinian policemen in Beit Sahur opened fire on a crowd of Christian Arabs, wounding six. The Palestinian Authority is attempting to cover up the incident and has warned against publicizing the story. The local commander of the Palestinian police instructed journalists not to report on the incident....<br /> In late June 1997, a Palestinian convert to Christianity in the northern West Bank was arrested by agents of the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Service. He had been regularly attending church and prayer meetings and was distributing Bibles. The Palestinian Authority ordered his arrest....<br /> The pastor of a church in Ramallah was recently warned by Palestinian Authority security agents that they were monitoring his evangelistic activities in the area and wanted him to come in for questioning for spreading Christianity. <br /> A Palestinian convert to Christianity living in a village near Nablus was recently arrested by the Palestinian police. A Muslim preacher was brought in by the police, and he attempted to convince the convert to return to Islam. When the convert refused, he was brought before a Palestinian court and sentenced to prison for insulting the religious leader.... <br /> A Palestinian convert to Christianity in Ramallah was recently visited by Palestinian policemen at his home and warned that if he continued to preach Christianity, he would be arrested and charged with being an Israeli spy.<br /><br />Another report in 2002, based on Israeli intelligence gathered during Israel's Defensive Shield operation, asserts that ‘The Fatah and Arafat's intelligence network intimidated and maltreated the Christian population in Bethlehem. They extorted money from them, confiscated land and property and left them to the mercy of street gangs and other criminal activity, with no protection.<br /><br />Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself. <br /><br />The Christians of Beit Jala are, I suspect, being used to put pressure on Israel. The protest may well be part of a long and insidious campaign to malign and weaken Israel in the eyes of the world. Thus, Israel has been described as an ‘apartheid’ when it is, in fact, free of all traces of apartheid. What racism there is is on the same level as that found in the UK. Israel has been called a ‘Nazi state’ in an attempt to hurt Jews in the most painful way imaginable. It has been termed an ‘intolerant state’ when its reputation for racial, religious, and other forms of tolerance raises it above most nations.<br /><br />I believe you owe the people of Israel an apology or an explanation. They need to know why you chose to single them out, selecting their actions as particularly examples of the shadows that lie on us. I cannot see Israel as a shadow, though I have seen it as a country surrounded by shadows all its life. It is a country of hope for millions. It has been a safe hand in securing the safety of Christianity’s holiest places, places that would fall into disrepair and be threatened with ruin should Israel be replaced by an Arab state, in direct allegiance to Islamic law, which forbids the repair of Christian churches or synagogues.<br /><br />I have, I fear, abused your hospitality. I hope you have been able to spare the time to read my little letter. I trust it has given you cause for thought. What may arise from that is entirely up to you. I believe I have played my part, but if you know more, I can point you in other directions. Thank you for troubling to read so far. I have trusted that you would, and I have trusted in your innate goodness to awaken in your conscience new insights into the behaviour of a country that seeks peace when others lust for war.<br /><br /><br />Yours most sincerely,<br /><br /><br />Dr. Denis MacEoinDenishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-16494292951242801082011-08-11T16:50:00.000-07:002011-08-11T17:35:36.970-07:00The Iranian Human Rights CommissionIf you haven't been huddling somewhere since the UK riots, you will already know that the brutal regime that governs Iran (if 'governs' is the right word) has announced the formation of some putative Human Rights Commission to sort out the British. They will, I think, send a delegation to these shores to instruct us in the true meaning of human rights. What that means, if I'm not mistaken, is advice on how to shoot down protesters of any kind, especially anyone marching for democracy and freedom. We'll all appreciate that, I know, and our police will be glad to exchange their baton rounds for more lethal 9mm parabellums. Being a Belfastman by birth and training, I can see now that our Troubles need not have gone on so long if we had only applied a full dose of human rights and shot everybody who went on the street during a curfew or went on a protest march. I can still remember a friend of my father's saying (this was at the very beginning of the thing) that he (a member of the B Specials no less) was off to get his sub-machine gun in order to kill Catholics. I used to think he was a bad man, but now, enlightened by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I recognize his devotion to human rights and his willingness to put them into practice.
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<br />Of course, it isn't all guns on citizens. This Iranian commission will, I'm sure, do sterling work telling us how to handle our own uncontrollable women. As we know, Iran is in the vanguard of women's rights in the world. They have a rightful place on the UN Commission for Women's Rights, and who can gainsay that? Look at it objectively. In the West, in the UK above all, women run wild. I have seen them with my own eyes. Even my wife is out of control (in Persian, bi-bazbini). She's goes to cafés with her sister, with no man around to keep an eye on her, she never wears proper hijab (bad-hijab é, agha), she sees male patients without a guardian present. And she's not the worst. But when the Iranians get here, they will sort women like her and her sister out. Her sister knows all about this: she used to be married to an Iranian, so I don't doubt she'll be eternally grateful to be put in her place again.
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<br />Most of all, they'll show us what to do with our homosexuals. As we know, Mr Ahmadinejad made it clear while speaking to the United Nations, there are NO homosexuals in Iran. We could be like that by the proper application of human rights values: once they are gone, there will be no more human rights issues and the Anglican Church (and a large part of the Jewish community) will have one problem less to deal with.
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<br />Speaking of Jews, The commission is bound to give us all pointers on how to deal with our Jews (and any Jews reading this should be dancing in the streets at the good times on their way for them). Iran, after all, loves Jews and only persecutes an indigenous religious minority, the Baha'is. They do have some naughty human rights measures they would like to apply to all Jews, of course, such as genocide. You can't argue with that, can you.
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<br />Of course, the human rights commission is just another vicious fantasy. Laughable, but indicative of something deeply worrying, not only in Iran, but throughout the Middle East. It is the ubiquity of the lie. The enormity of it. This lie has many forms, but some of the worst relate to Israel and the Jews. The worst is the claim that there were never any Jews in the Holy Land a.k.a Palestine. No Temple. No Me'arat ha-Machpela. No David. No Solomon. Abraham? He was the first Muslim and nothing to do with the Jews. The Israelis/Jews are Nazis. The racially mixed Israeli state is an apartheid state. As someone wrote to me last week, only one of Israel's wars was a defensive war. The Palestinians go back over 3000 years. Jerusalem is a holy city for Muslims, not Jews.
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<br />You know all this and more. What these and other tropes have in common is a compulsive need to turn history and contemporary fact on their head. Barefaced lies are stated publicly and without embarrassment, on the principle that saying something over and over again results in it being internalized and believed in with greater fervour than one might believe in fact.
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<br />It starts, I think, with the Qur'an. The Qur'an gives a host of Biblical stories devious twists, Islamicizing figures like Abraham, Moses, Ishmael, Mary, and Jesus. It is generally thought that Muhammad learned a lot from the rabbis of his day and came into contact with some heretical Christians, but that he garbled what he heard and produced alternative versions of Judaism and Christianity (thus, the Jews believe Ezra is the Son of God). The Quranic stories later get mixed in with accounts called Isra'iliyat, legends and fanciful tales from Jewish sources.
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<br />Since the Qur'an is deemed the Word of God, no Muslim will ever admit that it gets these things wrong. Instead, a new culture grows up, convinced of its own perfection. The Bible (both Jewish and Christian) has been hopelessly corrupted and cannot be relied on in anything.
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<br />And so it becomes easy to deny the truth of anything the Jews say or the propriety of anything they do. The lie is buttressed by the Qur'an and the Law. And secular means of establishing historical proof, such as archaeology, are sneered at just as much as the Bible. Our opponents live in a fantasy realm, impervious to Biblical and other classical accounts and immune to the methods of modern scholarship.
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<br />And now, no doubt, they are set to re-write the history of the UK.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-82208183690155552992011-07-19T09:51:00.001-07:002011-07-19T09:51:45.381-07:00A Letter to the Leader of the UK Green PartyTo Caroline Lucas MP<br />Leader of the UK Green Party<br /><br /><br />Dear Ms Lucas,<br /><br />I have just finished the short but intriguing interview you gave to Martin Bright for the Jewish Chronicle, and I feel there are points I should make about some parts of it. Let me say a few words about myself first, so you understand where I am coming from. I’m a former academic in the broad area of Persian, Arabic, and Islamic Studies. Politically, I describe myself as a liberal, but not a member of any party. That means there are many things about the Green Party which I admire and others I do not. For as a long as I can remember, I have been a supporter of Israel, and not a day goes by without my contributing in some small way to the debate that surrounds Israel and the Palestinians. (You may even find my blog of help, ‘A Liberal Defence of Israel’ of help: http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.com/.)<br /><br />Be that as it may, let me turn to some remarks of yours in the course of Martin’s interview. I thought it impressive that you chose to speak with a local rabbi, Elizabeth Tikvah Sara about the Green Party’s approach to the boycott and divestments dialogue. That you conclude that more sensitive language is needed is commendable. However, I don’t think it’s just the language that is at fault, but thre whole thinking behind the BDS movement. That initiative is based on the conceit that Israel is a rogue state, a state that engages in actions that breach human rights, that imposes a form of apartheid on Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, that oppresses Palestinians in various ways, that impedes the economic growth of Gaza and the West Bank, that continues to occupy Palestinian land without due cause, that kills Palestinians for no good reason, that targets Palestinian children, and much more.<br /><br />If you support the BDS movement, I must assume that you believe at least some of those accusations. My worry is that, if you do so, it is out of the best intentions, but very far removed from a genuine context. I will not present you with an argument that Israel is a perfect country and its people long-suffering saints. That would not be true. But I would still argue that Israel is guilty of very little of what she has been condemned for. And I would argue that you need to read at least one intelligent book about these issues, since you do seem to have difficulty with the context.<br /><br />For example, when Martin asked if there would soon be a Green Party boycott of Syria or Iran, you fobbed him off by saying ‘I think the difference with Israel is that so many other tools have been tried for so many decades with such extraordinary lack of success, that people have been driven to use these these other tools.’ What on earth can you mean by this statement? What has happened over the years is this. In 1948, Israel, a democratic state (not a dictatorship like any of its neighbours) was invaded by five countries, by six armies who stated aim was to kill all the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. This took place three years after the end of the Holocaust. No other country went to Israel’s aid, despite its being a UN state. The Arabs had been offered a state in 1947 too, but chose to resort to violence instead of taking up the offer. In 1967, Arab armies massed tanks and infantry on Israel’s borders, preparing to render the region judenrein. The Israelis fought back and won. In 1973, an invasion on Yom Kippur took the Israelis by surprise, but again they fought back and again they won. Do you think they ought to have put down their arms and let their enemies, as they claimed, ‘finish wehat Hitler started’. They are still saying that, by the way. Who do you blame for all this? Israel or the Arab states.<br /><br />Since the 1960s, the Palestinians have been masters of terrorism, hijacking aeroplanes, sending suicide bombers into kindergartens, restaurants, buses or anywhere else. Who is to blame for this? Who launched two intifadas aimed at killing as many Jews as possible? The Israeli solution was not to go into the Wesrt Bank and slaughter civilians, but to build a fence that has now dropped the incidence of terrorist acts by over 90%. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? <br /><br />In 2000, at Camp David, Yasir Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank and the whole of the Gaza Strip. He walked out. Nobody walks out on an offer of almost 100% of what they have demanded. In business, it would be suicidal. In politics much the same. Were the Israelis to blame for this, should ‘tools’ have been used to bring them into line. The Israelis have made gesture after gesture for peace. They left Sinai, Southern Lebanon, and Gaza. None of these gestures bore fruit in peace. To this day, Palestinian leaders (such as Mahmoud Abbas) when speaking to their own people in Arabic talk of taking conrol of both their territory and Israel and of driving the Jews into exile. A future Palestinian state will, according to Abbas, will be judenrein. (Jordan is already free of Jews and will not allow Jews to enter.) The Palestinians simply will not wake up to the fact that they will have to do like anybody else in their situation and compromise. So, who do you need to put pressure on? The Israelis, who have been desperate for peace since 1947/48 or the Palestinians (and other Arabs) who are fixated by their horror of a Jewish presence on what was Islamic soil?<br /><br />Further down, you say ‘I think the Naqba (sic), the occupation, that’s been going on for decades. You could say that Syrian oppression has been going on for decades but in terms of the wider awareness of what’s going on there and the particular violence we’ve seen over the last few months, it is a much more recent phenomenon.’ I don’t know where to start with this. As a minor point, the nakba (it’s a k, not a q) is not the occupation. The nakba is the ‘disaster’ of 1947/48, when the UN brought a Jewish state into being, when Arab armies were defeated, and when local Arabs were forced (as often as not by Arab armies) out of their villages. The nakba was their own doing, when they launched the invasion. In towns like Haifa, the Jewish leadership pressed their Arab citizens to stay, but Arab leaders from the Arab Higher Committee, told them to go so that Arab troops could take the town. Nothing, absolutely nothing, prevented the Arabs from setting up their own state. Now, the occupation of the West Bank has been going on for decades (though Gaza was abandoned in 2005), but the problem has been, not that the Israelis won’t give up (I’ve mentioned Begin offering 95% of the West Bank), but that the Palestinians will not give up on their idea of a Palestine from the sea to the Jordan. Even now, the Jewish settlements take up no more than 3% of the WB, and the Israelis have offered an equivalent amount of land to compensate. The Palestinian response is, as ever, no. That happened famously after the 1967 war, when the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued a declaration (the Khartoum Declaration) that insisted on ‘the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it’. Is Israel to blame for that (it has never been rescinded and can be found in similar words in the Hamas Charter of 1988, or in this statement from Hizbullah’s 1985 Risala maftuha: ‘We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev's and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity. Or, as the Fatah Constitution puts it: ‘Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine.‘<br /><br />These are all terrorist groups. They refuse even to negotiate, and they play games with Western politicians like yourself, convincing you that the Israelis, not themselves are to blame for the lack of progress in peace talks.<br /><br />Let me go a bit further. I can’t believe what you have said about Syria. Anyone (including Western governments and intelligence agencies) knew perfectly well how horrible most Arab regimes were and are. The monstrosities of the Iranian regime have been well known since 1979: they hang their victims in public from cranes. Yet the West has never done anything serious to bring them to book. Iran’s (and Syria’s) human rights records have never been hidden. So were those of Saddam Hussein. Of Mubarak. Of Ghadhafi. Of Saudi Arabia (they don’t hang, they decapitate their victims in a public square). Of Algeria. Of Hamas (they kill opponents by throwing them off rooftops). But not till this year have we done anything (and it’s little enough) to stop the violence. Maybe you knew nothing about this till now, but in that case you and your party shouldn’t be supporting boycotts in a region you know so little about.<br /><br />As for human rights, I think you’ll find that most of the people living in most Arab states would prefer to live in Israel than where they are. Some already take refuge there, notably gay men and women. Back home they can be beaten badly or hanged or thrown from a height. In Israel they can meet together openly, live together, and join in gay pride marches, should they wish. In Israel, women are not discriminated against. They have the same rights as men, they are conscripted into the army, and they suffer none of the discrimination their peers suffer in Muslim countries. Israel’s record on treatment of religious minorities is unsurpassed. I will give you a simple contrast. You may know that Iran’s largest religious minorities is the Baha’i faith, a religion that originated in Iran in the 19th century and currently has adherents in most parts of the world, but almost none in Islamic states. (I have written several books and many articles about them.) As you may have heard, the Baha’is are severely persecuted by the Islamic regime, which has executed over 200 of their leaders, which has destroyed them financially, destroyed their books, refused admission to universities for their young men and women, and has demolished their holiest places and ploughed up their cemeteries. But if you go to Israel (something I heartily wish you would do), you can visit two UNESCO World Heritage Sites belonging to the Baha’is. Here, they have their two holiest shrines (one in Haifa, one near Acco), their international archives, the seat of of their supreme administrative body, and much else, all surrounded by some of the loveliest gardens you can imagine. So, please tell me why a party like yours chooses to boycott Israel and doesn’t say ‘boo’ to Ayatollah Khamene’i and Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad about their criminal activities. Nobody is executed in Israel for adultery, or being gay, or being Muslim, or being a member of the opposition. So why the boycott? Don’t you feel ashamed to be boycotting a country that has achieved so much in such a short time to improve conditions for its citizens, yet can’t drum up the energy and interest to speak out against regimes that kill and torture and support terrorism or arm terror groups (as Iran and Syria do)? Israel is a genuine democracy that includes all its citizens, Arab and Jew. It has no system of apartheid in any part, despite wild claims to the contrary. Saudi Arabia operates an apartheid system, within which it bans non-Muslims from certain areas and forbids Jews to enter under any circumstances. Why not boycott a country that really does carry out human rights abuses? The Green Party has said that ‘There is no place for capital punishment in a criminal justice system which is compassionate, just and respectful of human rights. No country or state should retain the death penalty in its criminal justice system.’ Israel, as you should know, abolished the death sentence from the beginning and has only hanged a single person and that for good reason: Adolf Eichmann was a chief organizer of the Holocaust, and it’s hard to see who the Jewish state could have let him live. But today, Israeli gaols are filled with Palestinian murderers, chiefly terrorists. Recently, two young Arab men were placed in prison to stand trial for the sickening slaughter of five members of a Jewish family, the Fogels, in a settlement called Itamar. They stabbed to death the father, mother, two little boys, and beheaded a five-month-old baby girl. Those boys will never face a death sentence in Israel. In Gaza, people danced in the streets when they heard of the murders. That was last March. Iran hangs on almost a daily basis, Saudi Arabia has regular work for its executioner, China has the highest rate of executions in the world. But you boycott Israel.<br /><br />To quote further from the interview: ‘Ultimately, Ms Lucas explained, the Green Party's support of the boycott should be seen in the tradition of activism rooted in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. "For many people I think that's what they're looking at and thinking if we did it on South Africa…", her voice trails off. "And there are many parallels that are drawn.”’ What parallels exactly? Let me remind you that, in apartheid South Africa, the regime aimed to keep blacks and whites wholly separate. There were segregated buses and trains, segregated restaurants, segregated beaches, segregated schools, segregated hospitals (and ambulances),and segregated cinemas. Blacks lived in townships, whites on farms and in the cities. Blacks were disenfranchised. And on and on, as I’m sure you well know. But here is the point: not one of those segregations applies to Israel. There are no places reserved to Jews or to Arabs, no all-Arab public transport, no Arab-only or Jewish-only cinemas or swimming pools or schools or – importantly – universities (where Arab students form 20% of the student intakes, in accordance with the Arab percentage in the general population. When I was in the Hebrew University last March, everywhere I went I saw Arab students, including a possible majority of women. So, go ahead and draw parallels, and go ahead and boycott Israel to punish Israelis for their attempt to create a rounded and balanced society, and stay shtum about countries in the region that have their own apartheid ambitions. For decades now, Christians have been forced out of Arab countries, notably the West Bank. The only Middle Eastern country that has seen a rise in the Christian population is Israel. But why not boycott Israel for that? I have yet to hear a single politician raise his or her voice to protest that exodus of Christians from their homes.<br /><br />I’m not writing this letter in a spirit of antagonism, and I hope you don’t feel that I have. I wouldn’t be writing this if I felt antagonistic. We have a lot in common I too have a degree in English (before the Arabic, Persian etc.) and I greatly admire your principled support for homeopathy (my wife is a well-known homeopath and author of books on homeopathy and women’s health; I was for a long time chairman of the UK Natural Medicines Society). In so many ways, I admire what you do and a great deal of what you stand for. That’s why I’m taking the trouble to write, and at this ridiculous length! I hate to see someone who normally impresses me peddling such a tawdry notion as the boycott of Israel. I have a strong feeling that you simply don’t know much about the history of all this, or about issues such as Arab anti-Semitism. I believe that if you knew a lot more about that anti-Semitism and its corrupting influence on Arab and Iranian and Pakistani society you would begin to realize why the boycott and disinvestment campaign is driven, as much as anything, by an unyielding hatred for the Jewish people. Delegitimization of Israel has become the focus for Fatah, Hamas, and other groups, now they are prevented from taking suicide bombers into Israel proper. It’s not a case of taking my word for any of this, and hoping I’m not a nutcase after all. You can delve into website after website to read for yourself how far the Nazi defamation of Jews has merged with older Islamic hatred. Not many years ago, anti-Israel marchers, composed of both radical Muslims and far-left activists appeared on the streets of London, Amsterdam and elsewhere chanting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’. The boycott is a major strand in the delegitimization campaign, and it has its roots in anti-Semitism. Such actions are carried out by much the same people as though who define the UK or the USA as ‘terrorist states’, who see dark conspiracies everywhere, who state in a matter-of-fact way that Jews were behind 9/11 and that thousands were warned to stay away that day. It is not Israel that these agitators and conspiracy theorists hate, it is the presence of Jews on Islamic territory, and they will do all they can to suborn honest politicians like yourself into believing their upside-down world view, by manipulating your best intentions to their ends.<br /><br />Forgive such dramatizing. I only want to get across to you just how vile this hatred for Israel has become, to give you a quick glimpse into what it does to the truth. I have written enough for one sitting. If you have read thus far, thank you for taking the time to do so. Beyond this, there are two things you should do. The first is to read more about this topic. To start with, why not read Robin Shepherd’s excellent and recent study A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem with Israel ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0753827131/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943586&sr=1-1). <http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0753827131/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943586&sr=1-1).> After that, perhaps any of the Israel texts by Alan Dershowitz, such as The Case for Israel ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Israel-Alan-Dershowitz/dp/0471679526/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943761&sr=1-1). <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Israel-Alan-Dershowitz/dp/0471679526/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943761&sr=1-1).> This book is much hated by the anti-Israel brigade, but I have always found him sane and reasonable.<br /><br />More importantly, perhaps, you have to spend some time in Israel. There are two ways to go: the Israeli embassy will happily get you there (and may even cover the cost of your trip), but you may not like to go about with an official guide. So just book yourself on a flight to Tel Aviv and have a holiday. <br /><br />There, that’s it. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have (provided I can answer them!). Forgive my impertinence in making this demand on you, but I deem it too important to let lie. A forest of lies surrounds Israel like great Birnam wood. I want to help you see through the thickets in order to make the most moral and ethical decision you can.<br /><br /><br /><br />Dr. Denis MacEoin<br /><br />Newcastle upon TyneDenishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-56511694645458605982011-05-20T15:57:00.000-07:002011-05-20T16:06:33.649-07:00A Letter to the Secretary of State for DefenceLast Sunday (15 May), I was at a wonderful conference called 'We Believe in Israel'. It was held in London, and almost 2000 people were there. The choice of sessions was overwhelming: it seemed hard to miss a good one.<br /><br />The plenary session in the morning was opened by a speech by Dr. Liam Fox, Secretary of State for Defence, a man rightly praised for his pro-Israel attitudes. However, on this occasion, he said a number of things that sparked a very negative response on the part of half or more of his audience, who booed him. I'm sure he was taken aback, thinking that most of what he had to say was designed to please a Zionist crowd.<br /><br />Afterwards, I felt he needed a briefing on what had gone wrong, but I wasn't sure where he'd get one. Whoever had advised him when preparing his speech had got several points badly wrong, and I wasn't sure that he would turn to the Israeli embassy or anyone else who might explain things. So I wrote a long letter in an attempt to bring some clarity into his life. The letter is on its way to the Ministry of Defence, and I hope he reads it.<br /><br />It won't do any harm to spread knowledge of this letter more widely, so here it is. Any comments will be helpful. And, no, my timing was wrong, so there's no reference to Obama's horrendous call for Israel to return to the Auschwitz borders.<br /><br />Rt. Hon. Dr. Liam Fox<br />Secretary of State for Defence<br /><br />Dear Dr. Fox,<br /><br />I have just returned from the ‘We Believe in Israel’ Conference, held in London on Sunday. Your opening speech to a large and sometimes hostile audience was impressive and, for the most part, nuanced, and I want to congratulate you on it and, rather belatedly, on your address to this year’s Herzliya Conference, which was outstanding. Your love for Israel and the support you offered her were obvious from the outset. If only more politicians could see this matter as you do…..<br /><br />But you must have been dismayed and somewhat puzzled by the reception some of your remarks received. It may have seemed unfair to have such a pro-Israel speech countered in parts by hostile voices, and that is to be regretted. But there is, I think, a silver lining, in that this provides an opportunity to explain why those matters were deemed contentious by fifty per cent or more of your audience. Given the overall composition of that audience, it’s clear that they enjoyed and agreed with the largest part of what you said. I don’t doubt that, if asked, everyone would have agreed that your heart was in the right place, but that you had been misled, as often as not by nuggets of received wisdom which most or all of us think mistaken. So, what about the other passages?<br /><br />The first one to draw my attention was your eulogy of British treatment of Jews and then Israelis during the Mandate and around the time of Israeli independence. I don’t have access to your text, but I remember that you spoke highly of British support for Jews and unprejudiced assistance in the creation of Israel. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite, and I say this with sorrow as a British patriot willing to defend this country on a broad front. After the White Paper of 1939, Britain closed Palestine to almost all Jews. This had an immediate impact, since it prevented thousands of European Jews trying to flee the impending catastrophe in their homelands, shutting off what might have been their safest place of refuge. After the war, Britain imprisoned many thousands of concentration camp survivors in camps on Cyprus and turned back attempts by other Jews to land on the shores of the Mandate. In 1948, as the Israeli war of independence was about to break out, Britain threatened to intervene on the side of Egypt. At the same time, Britain left forts, weapons and ammunition for the Arabs and nothing for the Jews, with the strong implication that they hoped for an Arab victory, which would drive the Jews out of the country. During that war, Transjordan’s army was led by thirty-eight British officers. And there has long been a perception that, like the Quai d’Orsay, Britain’s Foreign Office has always been strongly pro-Arab.<br /><br />I’m sure you can appreciate why your expression of a rose-tinted picture of British-Jewish and British-Israeli relations did not go down too well with those parts of your audience who were aware of these more negative facts. However, let me add that, in the many years I have been privy to Israel advocacy circles, I have never come across anti-British sentiments. You are doubtless aware of that yourself. All I would ask, then, is a greater measure of consciousness on your part. Some measured affirmation of the difficulties Britain has caused the Jews down the years would go a long way to winning approval from similar audiences in future.<br /><br />Now I must address those three issues about which Sunday’s audience grew vocal in disagreement. These were three areas on which your listeners felt you had misrepresented the facts, not about past history, but about matters that touch more nearly on the present day and the hopes for a valid peace process. I hope I did not misunderstand you in any of these.<br /><br />1967 borders<br />At one point you stated that any final settlement would require Israel to return to her 1967 borders. That is not true. The relevant UN resolution 242, whose chief author was the British peer Lord Caradon, affirmed the principle that there should be ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’. That resolution was accepted by Israel but flatly rejected by the PLO, a rejection that lies at the root of later conflicts. As you may know, Caradon and his fellow drafters deliberately omitted the definite article before the word ‘territories’, leaving the interpretation of which lands should be vacated by Israel to future negotiations. He did so because he knew the 1967 borders were ‘inadequate’ and exposed Israel to attack on its eastern flank. No Israeli government will ever accept a return to those borders, nor will they be compelled to do so in any future negotiations.<br /><br />Famously, the late Abba Eban referred to the pre-war 1967 lines as ‘Auschwitz borders’, because they exposed Israel to attack: ‘We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation which will never be repeated in history.’<br /><br />Settlements<br />Certainly, there are few topics in the Israel-Palestine debate more contentious than this one. There is almost universal condemnation of Jewish settlements, from the White House to the UN to the EU. Your statement on Sunday that called the settlements as ‘illegal’ and an ‘obstacle to peace’ was not therefore unusual in that context, but you will recall how much disagreement it provoked in the hall. You can hardly be blamed for expressing an opinion that is so widely shared, but I do think you should pause to ask if what you said is true.<br /><br />A close examination of the claim of illegality will show where the fallacy lies. The settlements are not illegal. Controversial, certainly, and, in the case of the tiny, trailer-camp units, as much condemned in Israel as outside. The legal defence is simple. When Israel entered the West Bank (Samaria and Judaea) in 1967, it did so to protect its own citizens from attack by Jordan. In such a situation, occupation is provoked and justified by enemy aggression. British occupation of part of Germany in 1945 was, by the same argument, wholly legal, and has never been challenged. The West Bank had previously been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1950, following its conquest in the 1948-49 conflict. Thus, in 1967, the Israelis did not occupy Jordanian sovereign territory. Nor did they occupy sovereign Palestinian territory since the Palestinians had not acted on earlier resolutions to establish an Arab state alongside Israel. This means that the West Bank is merely ‘disputed territory’, not illegally occupied sovereign land.<br /><br />Apart from this, it should not be forgotten that the Jewish people have a long connection to Judaea and Samaria, a connection that long precedes Arab conquest in the 7th century. In the 20th century, several settlements were set up with full legal recognition, in places like Neve Ya’cov and the Etzion Bloc, or older habitations like Hebron. Neve Ya’cov was forcibly abandoned when it faced attack from Jordanian troops in 1948 and was occupied by Jordan. Only when Jews returned there after 1967 was any question raised about legality. The same is true of the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion). <br /><br />I do recognize that, in your position as a member of the UK government, you cannot say that the settlements are not illegal’, but on Sunday I think a more nuanced expression might have helped allay people’s fears that, despite your public Zionism, you subscribed to the accusation of illegality. This is not easy territory, but it is territory about which Israel cannot afford to back down. It is all but certain that any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will result in an acceptance of the major settlements as part of Israel, in exchange – it has been suggested – for unoccupied areas of comparable size.. More worrying than the Israeli retention of little more than 5% of Arab land is the current Palestinian position, which refuses to have even a single Jew living in its territory. This may prove a major obstacle in the case of Hebron, where the small Jewish population is already subject to severe restrictions. In Israel, of course, Arabs form some 20% of the population, with equal rights under the Constitution.<br /><br />Jerusalem<br />A touchier topic, on the whole, than settlements, and with the potential to upset an audience like Sunday’s. But this is less clear-cut than the other issues, since the future status of Jerusalem is entirely negotiable. In some ways, the issue revolves less around legality and more around religion and emotion on both sides, though more, I think, the city’s centrality to Judaism, I suggest, is more relevant than its historical character for Muslims. I should, perhaps, explain that I’m a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and that I have a keen sense of what is involved here. For Jews, it is not just the division of the city (something you consider necessary) that is hard to contemplate, but the way that division would take place. By taking East Jerusalem, the Palestinians would gain complete control over the Temple Mount, the holiest place in the world for Jews. Despite cries to the contrary, neither Jerusalem nor the Temple Mount have ever had much importance for Muslims or Arabs. In the early phase of his mission, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers prayed towards Jerusalem, following the practice of the Jews in Medina. But about ten months after his move to Medina, he abruptly swung right round during prayers to face Mecca, literally turning his back on Jerusalem. There is even a verse in the Qur’an which records this change of direction and states that it is preferable to the previous one. By contrast, Jewish worship has focused on the city from the time of King Solomon, and remained firmly fixed there throughout the long years of the diaspora. Given that Muslims have Mecca and Medina (both cities closed to Jews), Muslim control over east Jerusalem would be unjust and might lead to renewed conflict over the mere fact that it had fallen into non-Jewish hands.<br /><br />In Jewish hands, Muslims would enjoy the same rights they already have of access to the twin mosques on the Mount, the al-Aqsa and the Qubbat al-Sakhra. Israeli treatment of non-Jewish holy places has always been exemplary. Haifa contains an extraordinary UNESCO World Heritage Site, which contains the gardens, shrines, and international headquarters of the Baha’i religion. In Iran, by contrast, all the Baha’i holy places have been bulldozed and built over, and their cemeteries trashed. That alone causes me to consider Israeli control preferable to any by the Islamic waqf authorities. The Waqf authorities are guided by shari’a law, whose principles form the foundation of the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law. In general, shari’a rulings are deeply prejudicial to the rights of Jews and Christians, and give no status at all to the followers of any other religion. By contrast, the Israeli Law for the Protection of Holy Places (1967) provides a more equitable basis for the control of Muslim, Jewish and Christian sites throughout the Old City.<br /><br />There is another reason for Jewish concern. In Hebron, you can visit the Ma’arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, secondary only to the Temple Mount in Jewish affection and veneration. I visited it in March, and was deeply impressed by this large building dating from the days of King Herod, i.e. the same period as Herod’s Second Temple, of which the Kotel or Western Wall remains. Because Hebron is chiefly Arab and Muslim, the Tomb, which is believed to be the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah, comes under Islamic control. The result is pitiable. Jews are allowed to use only 20 per cent of the edifice and are not allowed to improve or develop it in a seemly manner. Nor is any form of historical or archaeological research permitted. This naturally gives rise to concern for the Jewish and Christian sites in east Jerusalem should they be made subject to shari’a law, which is harsh regarding churches, synagogues, cemeteries, and other sacred sites.<br /><br />This is difficult to put into political words, but it is immensely important to Jews who, after some two thousand years have regained a measure of access to their holiest sites only to see them at risk of being repossessed by the same people who banned them from entering the Tomb of the Patriarchs for 700 years. There has to be a better solution to the issue of Jerusalem, therefore, than a crude division of the city, which, incidentally, is mentioned some 700 times in the Bible but not once in the Qur’an. <br /><br />I did not at first intend to write at such length, but the subjects demanded their say. I hope you will not interpret this as a letter of criticism: it is not. I understand that official UK policy on these matters makes it hard for you to introduce another note, however correct that might be. But I believe your work in this field would benefit from closer discussions from a representative grouping of pro-Israel activists, both Jews and non-Jews like myself. There is no shortage of organizations, and just about as many opinions. Nonetheless, I think the points I have made do come close to what most of us believe.<br /><br />Yours sincerely,<br /><br /><br />Dr. Denis MacEoinDenishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-20278442263293675092011-04-08T14:57:00.000-07:002011-04-08T14:58:29.641-07:00A Letter to the QuakersTeresa Parker<br />Middle East Programme<br />Society of Friends<br /><br />Many years ago, I came very close to joining your ranks and becoming a Quaker. I have generally admired much of what you do and some of what you believe. But I am now thoroughly grateful that I did not become a Quaker then, for I fear I would have to abandon you now. I find myself frequently disappointed in the Quaker attitude to Israel, and more so given your recent decision to boycott settlements in Samaria and Judaea, which you regard as illegal under international law. That is, of course, highly inaccurate. There is no firm position in international law concerning these settlements, and authorities veer from one side to the other and will do so until the matter is resolved by a future peace treaty or other instrument. The only point I wish to make in this regard is that, so long as the legal position remains unclear, you have no right to declare the illegality of the settlements, particularly since you are not a properly constituted legal body with the authority to pronounce on such matters. There is something high-handed about your position, which clashes with traditional Quaker belief in the virtues of humility.<br /><br />I have spent much of the past week composing a letter to a 12-year-old girl called Tamar Fogel, and distributing it to people around the world, who have written in support of the letter and the sentiments it expresses. The letter will be delivered to Tamar before Passover next week, by her grandparents. Even for a professional writer like myself, it proved a difficult letter to write. Tamar is the oldest of the three surviving children of the Fogel family. On returning from her Sabbath youth club three weeks ago, she found her parents and three of her siblings murdered in a bath of blood. Her mother had been stabbed to death, her father and two brothers had had their throats slit, and her 3-month-old sister had been beheaded in her cot. The perpetrator or perpetrators have so far remained in hiding. When news of this atrocity was made known, Palestinians in Gaza handed out sweets and danced in the streets of Gaza City.<br /><br />The massacre of this harmless family, all residents of one of the settlements you so despise, is only the latest in a long line of atrocities that have been carried out against Israeli civilians. Palestinian terrorist attacks have no excuse, yet I have never seen a supporter of the Palestinians march or protest against the very great evil they represent. A website entitled ‘Quakers in Israel and Palestine’ says almost nothing about Israel, but records a long list of activities you have undertaken in the Palestinian territories. An American website called ‘Quakers With a Concern for Palestine-Israel’ has a series of links, not one of which presents the Israeli point of view, but most of which reiterate a pro-Palestinian position. Does that seem balanced to you? Fair? Helpful? Likely to work towards peace? Another site, entitled ‘Quakers in Britain’ has a page named ‘Israel-Palestine’. It shows a photograph of part of Israel’s security barrier, to be precise a section of the barrier which is a wall. Only 3% of that barrier is a wall, the rest is a fence. Why did Quakers choose to show the wall when the fence would have been more representative? Does that match Quaker ideals of fairness and justice? The barrier has reduced terrorist attacks within Israel by around 90 percent. Might it not have been appropriate to have made that clear? You will know that images of this wall sector are routinely used by groups and individuals who seek to defame Israel and who mischaracterize the barrier and the reasons it is there. Can you explain how Quaker ideals sit alongside those of groups motivated by anti-Semitism and hatred for the Israeli state?<br /><br />Palestinians have done much to worsen their position. While sympathizing with their plight, fairness demands we take notice of their many acts of self-defeat and hatred. They have fought wars against Israel and killed thousands in terrorist actions. They continue to do so, and their boldness in semi-military action grows year by year. Israel has done much to help them and for over 60 years has appealed to them to accept the legal status of Israel and to build their own state alongside it. Yet their newspapers, their school textbooks, their radio, their television and their mosque sermons are filled every day with exhortations to kill Jews, with appeals to young children to grow up to become suicide bombers, with blood-curdling cries to launch a jihad once more against the Jews, ‘those sons of apes and pigs’. Speaking in English, Palestinian politicians preach peace, but in Arabic they deliver a message to their people of ‘No surrender’ and predict a day when there will be no more Jews and no more Israel. Does it not seem to you that Quakers might be better employed in trying to break down these dreadful barriers of hate and militancy? But do Quakers have the courage to do so? You have made many friends with Palestinians, but fewer, to my knowledge, with Israeli Jews or, for that matter, Israeli Arabs.<br /><br />If the Quaker movement stands, in the eyes of non-Quakers, for anything, it is the pursuit of peace. Your efforts, when directed to that end, have been commendable. We all hope and work for peace. It is an essential quality of civilized human life that all of us, be we religious or secular, should make efforts in the path of peace and reconciliation, for without them civilized life is not possible. I do not, however, believe that boycotting one side in this conflict is conducive to peacemaking. Through her tears, the little girl Tamar, whom I mentioned above, told an interviewer that she was resolved to continue in the path set by her parents. Her surviving family, her grandparents, aunts and uncles are all religious people, much like yourselves. They work hard to build something that symbolizes the survival and endurance of the Jewish people against the odds. No people in history have gone through the persecution, brutalization, and contempt that he Jews have done. We all thought that, when the Holocaust had ended, its horrors would speak to mankind and mark the end of hatred of the Jews. And yet it is clear today that anti-Semitism is as strong as it ever was, perhaps stronger. Hatred of Israel has become a mask for hatred of the Jews. Why else would the one Jewish state be singled out for the daily opprobrium that is heaped on it? Why do ordinary young people march in the streets chanting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’? Not in Berlin in 1939, but in London in 2009. Having survived the Holocaust and returned to their homeland after 2000 years, the Jews are not going to cave in to your boycott or any other trick that singles them out for punishment, much as Hitler singled them out. <br /><br />For over 60 years, the Jewish people have done all in their power to make peace with their neighbours. They have given up Sinai and Gaza, and they will give up most of the West Bank when a reasonable deal has been made with their enemies. What have the Palestinians given in return? In 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from an offer at the Camp David Summit that gave him 97 percent of what he had asked for. He then started a pre-planned second intifada, in the course of which over 1000 Israelis and over 4000 Palestinians were killed. While Israeli hospitals continue to treat Palestinians of all kinds, the Palestinians have offered a steady diet of violence, from suicide bombings to bullets to car bombs. They fire rockets on civilian communities, they target children, they teach their children to kill. No Israeli school teaches violence. So why do people of peace like yourselves prefer to boycott Israelis and to leave untouched the men of violence? Perhaps you will say you work among the Palestinians to inculcate a love for peace. If that is so, may I say in sorrow that your efforts have borne no fruit? As time passes, the Palestinians grow more violent, not less, more dismissive of gestures for peace, not less.<br /><br />You have a role to play in the Middle East, but at present I believe you are playing the wrong one. The settlements are a prickly subject that will be settled in its own time. It is fairly certain that most of the settlements there now will remain. The Palestinians and the Jordanians say that no Jew will be allowed to remain on Arab soil. Yet 20% of the population of Israel is Arab. Racism against tolerance, surely. I think it would be better if you could agree not to interfere in the settlements, for which you seem ill-equipped. Work with both sides, by all means. Give comfort to the Jews and good counsel to the Arabs. Associate yourselves with activities like Israel’s Save a Heart Campaign, which gives heart transplants to Palestinian children. Much good can come of that, and your help would be much welcomed. Go to Hebron and see for yourselves how the small Jewish population is restricted to 3% of the town, on pain of death. Much reconciliation is needed there. Visit Givat Haviva's Jewish-Arab Center for Peace, the Parents Circle-Families Forum, the four Hand in Hand schools in Israel and the West Bank, and many, many more. Such projects offer a positive response to alienation and fear. Boycotts only exacerbate enmity. <br /><br />I do not doubt your motives, your sincerity or your commitment. I only ask if you are properly informed about the realities of the Middle East and whether you do not take your information from tainted sources. You must act by your own lights, but I fear that is exactly what you are not doing. You have a mission to the Palestinians, and that is essential. But I believed you also have a mission to the people of the settlements, to children like young Tamar Fogel and her two brothers. The horror she witnessed will never leave her. But nor will the determination she has to build on the foundations left by a loving mother and father. If it is possible, I would ask you to visit some settlements and to sit in silence with the people who live in them. But do not boycott them or the produce they work so hard to grow. <br /><br /><br />Yours sincerely,<br /><br /><br />Denis MacEoinDenishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-88542858103997799192011-04-06T12:16:00.000-07:002011-04-06T12:58:31.407-07:00Letter to Edinburgh University Student AssociationThe following letter was written to the EUSA following their vote to boycott Israel because of its 'apartheid'.<br /><br /><br /><br />The Committee<br />Edinburgh University Student Association<br /><br /><br /><br />May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain’s great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field.<br /><br />I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.<br /><br />Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a ‘Nazi’ state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nüremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.<br /><br />Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Baha’is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran? <br /><br />Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres. <br /><br />In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?<br /><br />University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha’is.... Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. <br /><br />I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it? Of course he would, and he would not have stopped there. Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense to you. I have given you some of the evidence. It’s up to you to find out more.<br /><br />Yours sincerely,<br /><br /><br />Dr. Denis MacEoinDenishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-11448822411623787172011-03-31T08:11:00.000-07:002011-04-01T06:10:20.129-07:00An Open Letter to Tamar FogelDear Tamar,<br /><br />We have never met, nor are we likely to. I am not a Jew nor an Israeli, though for many years I have defended both Jews and Israelis from the physical and political attacks that are made on them. I live in England, though I'm Irish. The Irish used to be great enemies of the English, who did bad things to us, but who gave us their language, something in which we excel. But many years ago, long before you were born, the enmity between the Irish and the English faded. We are not the same people, but we no longer hate each other, and the English Queen will soon make her first visit to Ireland, in a gesture that the past is past, that we are now allies, not enemies.<br /><br />The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.<br /><br />I have watched you in two videos, the first time when Binyamin Netanyahu came to visit you and your grandparents, and I still remember the force with which you challenged him, such an important man and such a young girl. And after that your tears. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now that the dead are at peace, and your two living brothers may grow up with less dark memories, but that you above all are old enough and aware enough to carry the most terrible memories through the rest of your life. But I also saw a second video in which you spoke to a reporter from Israeli National Television, and here your tears gave way to a most articulate, awesomely mature, and moving assertion of your right to live in Samaria. I wish every Palestinian could watch that video with an Arabic voice-over. Perhaps there and then they might see that their fight against Israel is worthless, that you will never surrender, that you will not let yourselves be led to the slaughter as happened all those years ago. Rabbi Chaim Potok once wrote that there are no more gentle Jews. He did not mean that Jews are no longer kind or good, but that they now know how to fight back. Kol Hakavod for every word you spoke.<br /><br />You will grow up among strong people, and you will finally marry and have children of your own. That may seem far off to you, but to someone much older like myself, it will happen in no time at all. When that happens, and when your two brothers find wives and have children, there will soon be more Fogels than before. They cannot substitute for the dead, but they can stand up and speak for them down the long years to come. Your life, however much you may wish it otherwise, will be overshadowed by the terrible event that has fallen on you. You will ask questions and you may find answers. After the Shoah, many rabbis tackled the question of hester panim, asking why HaShem had seemed to turn his face away from his people. I am not a Jew, and I cannot provide easy answers to those questions. You must seek your own answers from your rabbis and in your scriptures. One answer may be found in a short sound recording that was made in Belsen shortly after its liberation by British forces. It was made by the BBC and contains at the end description of a Shabbat service held by a British rabbi, at the end of which the survivors stand and sing HaTikva. They are weak, they are out of tune, some of them will still die: but they are singing in open defiance of the very great Nazi evil that had overwhelmed them and their families. Three years after that, the state of Israel was established.<br /><br />I'm writing, first because I'm a writer and that's how I express my feelings best. But also because I want to convey just how many people's thoughts are with you. You have your grandparents and aunts or uncles, and after that you have your small and concerned community of I'timar, but beyond that you have a world of people, Jews and non-Jews, who stand with you in your grief. We feel helpless, not knowing what we can or should do to help, yet longing to do so. How many people can say they truly love the murderers who came to your house that night? Some may hand out candies and dance in the streets, but how meaningful is that? They love themselves and their own dreams of glory, but who can truly love men of blood, people who kill infants in their cradles? <br /><br />For you the greatest problem of the next few years may be this: you are still a child and you deserve to be reading funny books and watching films and playing games and going to your youth club; but many will treat you as an adult before you are entirely ready for adult responsibilities. You do seem older than your years, but you should not be rushed into adulthood. I am sure your grandparents and others will understand this and will do their best to protect you from those who want to take your childhood away from you.<br /><br />Enough of the advice! Everyone likes to give advice. You don't have to listen to any of it, and advice isn't really the reason I've written. You are in my thoughts and in the thoughts of millions of other people because the murder of your family has gone so deeply into so many people's hearts. The list of atrocities carried out on Jews, not just in Israel but beyond, is very long. As a result, it's easy to let them all blur together into one mass. But every so often one death or a group of deaths stands out and demands special attention. One day there will be a memorial to the sacrifice your family made. People from far away may come to visit it. Photographs of it will appear in the press. But the true memorial will be you, an ordinary girl, with a torn heart and a wounded soul, going to school, going to shul, making friends, baking bread, sewing, cooking, reading, blushing when a certain young man comes to speak to you, going to Kever Yosef to marry him, giving birth to your first child. I just mean to say that no-one expects from you heroic deeds, no-one wants you to have to shoulder resistance to all the evils you know better than most. It is your ordinary deeds, the day-to-day living of an ordinary life that are for the creators of horror the most painful thing of all, that Jews will continue to live on land sanctified by Jewish blood. At the end of that recording made in Belsen, someone calls out 'Am Yisrael Chai'. By living, the killers only bring eternal disgrace on themselves, their families, and everyone who shelters them. By living, you make clear to everyone that the People of Israel live, that their light will not be snuffed out, and that when your enemies have gone to dust and seen a darkness beyond measure engulf them, the light of the Jews will illuminate the nations. Grow and be happy and tell us what you see on your journey.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-16328931972202426842011-01-17T16:30:00.000-08:002011-01-18T10:04:56.058-08:00Loosening the beltI’ve been thinking this through for some time. Think, think, think. It clears the brain and makes all things evident: I recommend it to all my friends and relatives. What I’ve been thinking is simple: why don’t we destroy Israel? I don’t mean some mild redrawing of Israel’s fascist boundaries, or putting all those shameless Israeli women in burkas. They should be so lucky. No, I mean the hot patootie, wipe it off the face of the earth, off the map, off the pages of time, as my little chum Mahmoud There Are No Gays in Iran Ahmadinejad keeps telling us to do. I’m inclined to let him do it himself, because he has almost got the wherewithal, but I have some misgivings about putting everything into his hands.<br /> For one thing, half a dozen nuclear bombs on the Zionist Entity would take care of it. No more Israelis, no more Nazi Zionists, no more fascist Jews, no more Christians, no more Baha’is, no more apartheid, no more gays. What’s not to like? There’s only one teensy drawback: Fifty megatons will take out all the Palestinians as well and probably contaminate Gaza and the West Bank. Sorry, Judaea and Samaria. No, that’s not right. Filastin.<br /> Think about it as I have done. It’s not the land we hate. In fact, we love the land, we’ve loved it since 1964, long before the Zionists even heard of it. Before there was ever such a thing as a Jew. So the land is kosher. Actually, no, it’s halal or something. There were Palestinians on this land from before the Flood. It’s in the Qur’an, you just have to read it. Naturally, all this changed when the Jews invaded, following the Holocaust they caused in Germany and the deaths of millions of German Muslims and the SS Peace Corps. They drove all the Palestinians out and created another Holocaust, just like that. So all we have to do this time round is drive the Jews out, back to Germany, to their comfortable gemütlich homes given to them freely by the German Reich. There are many old SS men who will jump at the chance to help them settle in again.<br /> Once the Palestinians return to their homes and take possession once again of those places so dear to their hearts, the homes they left in tears all those thousands of years ago, in the ancient Palestinian city of Tel Aviv and towns and villages everywhere, they will take possession of the lot. Think of that! The shops, the swimming pools, the universities, that neat little network of electric cars, all the businesses and technology centres, the farms, the electric cars, the widescreen high-definition TV sets, the restaurants, the falafel stands, the hospitals, the garden centre on Mount Carmel (we’ll demolish the shrines, of course, just to keep Mr Najdi Ahmadi-Mahmoud happy), the schools, the libraries (I’m not quite sure what those are, but they sound worth a look), the IT centres, Yad Vashem (which we will turn into a museum of the Palestinian Holocaust, which we will name Tadhkar wa Ism), in fact the whole bloody lot.<br /> I got to about this point in my thinking, and I shared my thoughts with all the brothers and sisters out there. It’s not exactly rocket salad, is it, getting rid of the bad guys and putting the good guys in. There’d be an overnight transformation, wouldn’t there? Palestine would be Seventh Heaven, graced by pictures of the shuhada’ and nasheeds chanting everywhere you go. Why worry? But one of the sisters came up with a small problem that needs a bit more thinking. How the f*** do we run the place? She pointed out that the Jews were some sort of geniuses.<br />‘Geniuses?’ I guffawed. ‘You mean Jewnesses?’<br />She shook her head. Then she explained to me what a genius is. I must say, I was taken aback. It wasn’t a concept I had come across before. I had heard of martyrs, naturally. But not this. But not to worry, I said. ‘The glories of Arabic and Islamic civilization fly like banners before us….’ She let me go on for a while in similar vein, then she explained about the Noble (or is it Nobel?) prizes. ‘Nearly one hundred and seventy for the Jews,’ she said. I laughed out loud. ‘Is that all? The Muslims pick up Nobel prizes every other day.’<br />She looked rather worried when she answered me.<br />‘Actually, Ahmad, they don’t. Even at the most generous, they have only won nine Nobels. Ever.’<br />‘Well, that’s obvious,’ I told her. ‘Stands to reason. There are far, far more Jews than Muslims. Always have been. And the Nazi Jews are really, really rich. You just have to look around.’<br />‘Ahmad, there are about thirteen million Jews in the entire world.’<br />‘So, a couple of million Muslims? We win hands down.’<br />She shook her head.<br />‘Actually, we don’t. There are one point six billion Muslims, Ahmad. One point six billion.’<br />‘But if we throw all those Israeli Jews out or put them where the sun doesn’t shine, there’ll be none left, right?’<br />‘Not in Israel, no.’<br />‘So the Arabs and the Muslims get to take over.’<br />‘Yes.’<br />‘And they run the hospitals and the laboratories and the science institutes and the IT centres for research and development, and they win a lot of Noble prizes. We could even introduce Noble prizes of our own. We could call it Al-Ja’iza al-Nabila.’<br />‘Maybe,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe not. And it’s Nobel, not noble.’<br />‘Why maybe not?’<br />‘Ahmad, the Muslim world is a mess scientifically.’<br />‘How can that be?’ I asked, a little sarcastically, because I could see which way this particular wind was blowing. ‘We produced al-Khwarizmi and al-Farabi and Avicenna and Galileo….’<br />She stopped me, and for a moment I thought she was going to lay a hand on my arm, but I gave her a warning look and the moment passed.<br />‘Galileo was a Christian,’ she said. ‘As for all the rest, they lived in the middle ages.’<br />‘Well,’ I defended myself, ‘there’s no reason we can’t become great again.’<br />‘Ahmad, the countries belonging to the Organization of the Islamic Conference have an average of 8.55 scientists per every 1000 people.’<br />‘See, what did I tell you?’<br />‘Ahmad, the world average is 40.7. And the OECD countries have an average of 139.3. The OIC contains some of the richest countries in the world, like Saudi Arabia. Where are the Palestinians going to find the expertise to run all the enterprises you mention?’<br />‘We’ll patent everything we invent and catch up that way.’<br />‘I don’t think there have been any Palestinian patents. Now, Pakistan is one of the most active Muslim countries in terms of science. It has produced 8 patents in forty-three years. Israel has more companies quoted on the high-tech NASDAQ stock exchange in New York than any other country outside the United States. In innovation it outshines all its neighbours. Between 1980 and 2000 our neighbours the Egyptians registered 77 patents in the US. Our rich friends the Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.’<br />‘But we have universities,’ I clamoured. ‘And lots of young people, and even more when they no longer have to blow themselves up to show the Israelis who’s the boss.’<br />‘Ahmad, not a single university from an OIC country is in the top 500 universities list. Did you know that in 1000 years the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in a single year?’<br />‘All right,’ I said, ‘you’ve made your point. We work slowly but surely. But where can we find help to replace all the Jews once we’ve kicked them out? I mean, Palestine will have to be proud and free. It’s our destiny.’<br />‘Ahmad, the Jews are the ones with the destiny. All we know how to do is blow ourselves up in public places. That’s not a destiny, that’s mass suicide.’<br />‘What then? We’ll have to create a new country, a what-do-you-call-it? A Goldene Medina. Won’t our friends help? The Saudis, perhaps.’<br />‘The Jews were our friends all along. If you kick them out, you’ll just have to grovel and ask them back in again and let them get on with what they were doing in the first place.’<br />‘And I’ll get a Fa’iza Nabila for that?’<br />‘I expect you will, Ahmad. You certainly deserve one.’<br />She squeezed my hand. Quite forward, really, but I let her go on squeezing.<br />‘Can we give Fa’izat Nabilat to people who blow themselves up? If they kill people, that is?’<br />‘I expect they’d like that, Ahmad. But you’re forgetting already that we want the Jews to stay. Permanently.’<br />This time I squeezed back. Impure thoughts went through my head. For the first time in my life, my suicide belt felt heavy. Maybe she would take it off for me.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.israellycool.com/pro-israel-blog-off-2011/"><img src="http://www.israellycool.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/blogoff.bmp"></a>Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-10702369798616588592010-07-21T14:59:00.000-07:002010-07-21T15:00:07.362-07:00Last night I went to a concert by the Russian-Jewish-American singer and songwriter Regina Spektor. I was probably the oldest person there, but I was delightful to see so many grey heads among a bunch of teenage fans – a tribute to the range of Regina's writing. It wasn't as great a concert as it might have been: Regina seemed distracted and almost unfriendly throughout; but at the end she revealed that her cellist had died earlier in the tour and that she found it hard to perform with her usual grins and chats with the audience. He'd drowned by accident on the 6th of July (this was the 20th).<br /><br />Well, that was my evening. I don't know why, but when I looked round the magnificent auditorium, it struck me that there weren't any visibly Muslim women there. Thinking of the same concert hall, one of the finest and most welcoming in Europe, I realized I hadn't seen anyone wearing hijab at the Patti Smith gig I'd been at not long before, or the tango orchestra just after that, or even at the not very good concert of Iranian music I'd attended in a different hall. I've never seen any at an opera performance, or plain old classical music concert.<br /><br />Now, this may all be quite misleading. After all, I don't go to that many concerts or to many different venues, so it could all be happening elsewhere. But here's the problem: I shop in town once a week, on Friday. 'Town' is Newcastle upon Tyne, which is a small city in the North East of England. Newcastle doesn't have a large Muslim population compared with places like Birmingham or Bradford, yet on a Friday afternoon I will see dozens of Muslim women in hijab of some sort. Two weeks ago, I counted sixty-four. Some wear the niqab, others look pretty in coloured headscarves and tight jeans or even a short skirt and stockings. I wouldn't expect the niqabi types to turn up at a Regina Spektor concert, but why not a teenager who doesn't look as if religion is the first thing she thinks of when she wakes up in the morning.<br /><br />Am I being reasonable in wondering where these young women are? Well, yes, I think so. Although they are fairly visible in the main shopping mall, in shops, and even in the Costa's Coffee café my wife and I frequent, they aren't noticeable at cultural events. Does this matter? I think it does. When I carried out my research on Muslim schools, I found on several school websites a prohibition on pupils taking part in music, dance, even gym and games. In one case, a boy was criticized for wanting to play cricket for Pakistan, since cricket is one of the most disgusting things anyone can waste his time in. In several other cases, I read that playing chess is forbidden, because he who plays chess, it is as if he has dipped his hand in blood.<br /><br />Why does this matter, and how is it related to Israel? First of all, I deplore the fact that very few Muslim girls will become ballet dancers, or boys and girls with talent for music ever come to develop that talent, or children who might become great cricketers or footballers or gymnasts or swimmers or divers, ever aspire to take part in the Olympics. This abstention from most forms of popular or elevated culture takes a ghastly toll on young Muslims, both men and women, but particularly women. This self-deprivation is inspired as much as anything by a doctrine known as al-wala' wa'l-bara', which translates roughly to 'Loyalty and Enmity': loyalty to Islam and enmity to everything that is not Islam. Strict Muslims should not make friends with non-Muslims. Muslim women may never marry non-Muslims. A Muslim should not give a Christian workmate a Christmas card or a Jewish boss a Rosh Hashana card. Nor should he attend a Christmas party. Because to do any of these things would be to imitate the unbelievers, the kuffar, and put the Muslim on a par with corrupt and evil non-Muslims.<br /><br />In the early days of the Yishuv, the original Jewish community in Palestine, relations between Arabs and Jews were not altogether bad. From the 1920s or so, inspired in part by men like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, that began to change, and much of that change was due to the attitude, based on the al-wala' wa'l-bara' doctrine, that the two communities could not and should not live together. The 1948 onslaught against the newly-created Jewish state was frequently defined in these terms. In his recent book, 1948, historian Benny Morris shows that the invasion of Israel was understood as a jihad. It is still regarded that way today. Underlying the Arab rejection of a two-state solution and the demand for a single state, is a belief that Muslims can only live with Jews or Christians when the latter are decidedly in the minority and are under Muslim control.<br /><br />Israel is one of the most culturally developed countries in the world. Most Jews found it easy, not simply to integrate into Western society, but many became important figures in just about every field of human enterprise, including the arts. Some Muslims have done the same in traditional modes like Persian classical music or calligraphy, others in Western art forms like literature. But overall, the Muslim contribution has not been on the scale one might expect from a world population of 1.6 billion. In Israel, there have been excellent projects to bring Muslims and Jews together through art and other means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projects_working_for_peace_among_Arabs_and_Israelis, notably Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan, a musical group. But Muslim antipathy to the arts (apart from architecture and calligraphy) limits the work that can be done, since young Muslims often have to get through three barriers, first that antipathy, second issues around al-wala' wa'l-bara', and thirdly the huge resistance to Israel, Jews, and Zionism.<br /><br />Not long ago, a Muslim woman, Rima Fakih, was elected Miss America. A lot of Muslims thought it was the best thing to happen in a long while, and they were right. The more Rima Fakihs on the Muslim side and the fewer Yusuf al-Qaradhawis the better for everyone. The misery men of the Islamic clergy bring nothing but misery, with their total inability to understand the world around them.<br /><br />This was a major factor in what went wrong after Israel's founding. The main five Arab states that invaded Israel after the declaration of independence were either members of the UN or in line to receive its recognition. Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were all UN members states, while Transjordan had been created by the League of Nations and would join the UN in 1955 as Jordan. The shame of the invasions lies precisely in the refusal of those Arab states to recognize the authority of a body to whose principles and authority they subscribed. The United Nations was the best expression at that time of a new world order that was brought into being following the Second World War, and membership brought with it both benefits and responsibilities. This was the way countries worked together, the way they obtained their legitimacy in the world community. But many of the Arab states (and others later) wanted to have it two ways: they belonged to the UN and used it as a platform for their speeches and accusations, but they also belonged to the Arab League, a body brought into existence a few months before the UN. When Israel was established by the UN, the Arab League turned its back on it and announced a war intended to destroy both new UN member states. The result of that selfish decision has been catastrophic for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. When I think of the good that would have come of cooperation, I want to weep. A more vibrant Israel, a prosperous Palestine, and no violent deaths on either side, young men and young women becoming singers and dancers and artists and writers and actors, not suicide bombers, not hate-filled monsters who love death more than life, who throw away their own lives and the lives of all those other young people who have died so innocently and so undeservedly down the long years of conflict.<br /><br />And why? Because of al-wala' wa'l-bara', because Hajj Amin al-Husseini had been chairman of the Palestinian Higher Committee and he loved Nazis and hated Jews, because the Arab League states only pretended to want a new order and really wanted things to stay the way they had been for generation upon generation, and because the UN states were mostly kuffar, and integration into the international community, true integration was unthinkable, because Muslim women won't get into bed with non-Muslim men (unless they want to have their throats cut), and Muslim men will get into bed with Jews and Christians (and never Hindus or Buddhists or Baha'is), but if there are babies they will be brought up as Muslims, because faith and hope only travel in one direction, and the wives must convert too, because love changes nothing and everything, because going to a concert doesn't kill you, and swimming in a swimsuit in a swimming pool doesn't kill you, and playing cricket for Pakistan won't kill you, and all of these innocent, life-affirming things have been banned or denatured until all the beauty is gone, and the longing for beauty too. I want to see a pretty young Muslim woman in a bikini on a beach and to feel desire for her, because that is one of the affirmations of life and beauty. I want this pretty young woman to meet a Jewish man and love him and marry him, and for nobody to turn up at their door with a gun or a knife to kill them. I want a world without niqabs and burqas that make beauty seem like something sick, something to be hidden, because the flesh is corrupt and the body is vile and if a man sees so much as a woman's thumb he will be driven to unfathomable depths of liquid desire, and he will rape her, and she will deserve to be stoned because she let him see her thumb. As a man, I believe a woman's face, the face of a pretty, a beautiful woman, is the loveliest thing there is. I want to see a Muslim woman high up on a diving board at the Olympics, soaring through the air with perfect elegance and grace. If her body is beautiful, that's part of the perfection. A burkini would make her and the sport absurd. I want to see a Muslim woman in the orchestra at my next concert. I have a video of the Algerian singer, Souad Massi singing in French in concert with Marc Lavoine in Paris. She could pass as French, but when she sings in Arabic she's Algerian. The only way she will die will be because her enemies have finally got to her. But if they kill her, they kill themselves in part.<br /><br />The more that Muslims break from the narrow, bigoted, and maladjusted clerics who try to enforce the principles of al-wala' wa'l-bala', the closer we will be to the day when common sense takes over. Under the Meiji emperor, Japan adopted the principle of Japanese spirit with Western know-how, and the Japanese took full advantage of it. It's time for some Islamic reformer to step up to the plate and start the ball rolling towards integration.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-90831660931767272842010-07-03T17:00:00.000-07:002010-07-03T17:56:54.394-07:00Lies, lies, and lies about liesI'm going to start this by talking about anti-Semitism. You're probably all aware that anti-Israel activists, when told they are anti-Semites, hotly deny the charge, saying they are just opposed to Israel and its policies. I don't believe them, any of them. Let's start with anti-Semitism itself. We know that for some 2000 years, Jews have been persecuted across Europe and the Middle East, and that this persecution culminated in the Holocaust. The Holocaust had all sorts of knock-on effects, especially in Europe. I was brought up in the shadow of it. All my generation were. One thing the Holocaust did was to make anti-Semitism unpopular. You couldn't admit openly you were an anti-Semite. Only ex-Nazis in the comfort of their private homes in South America or Cairo could get it off their chests, that they still hated Jews, that they still longed for another Holocaust. Everybody else avoided any association with the Nazis and far-right politics. Of course, as time passed, little groups of far-right lunatics stood around in wet fields making the Hitlergrüss and saying Seig Heil, because it made feel better to be absolute nonentities in funny suits. People on the left became pro-Jewish and, for a time, pro-Israeli. <br /><br />But gradually, mainly in the past twenty years or so, there came a point when people couldn't keep their hatred of Jews pent up any longer. These weren't fascist thugs any longer so much as self-proclaimed liberals and leftists. They became infected with anti-Semitism because they wanted someone to pity and the Jews were no longer pitiable. In Wanderings, Chaim Potok's very readable history of the Jews, he says 'there are no more gentle Jews'. This time round, he argues, the Jews will not let themselves be herded onto railway trucks and shepherded into gas chambers. The young men and women of today's IDF exemplify Potok's declaration perfectly. Pity the Nazi who tries to herd them anywhere.<br /><br />For some reason, a lot of people don't like this. But they still don't like to be called anti-Semites, because anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and they aren't racists. They think they aren't racists because anti-racism is the keystone of modern right-on politics. But they are racists, so they have a problem. They have a lot of circles to square, and to do that they have employed a range of lies that cast a spell on the media and most of the general public. It goes something like this. The Jews are no longer suffering, but someone must be suffering in order to deserve our pity, and the obvious candidates for victimhood are the Palestinians, because those nice Arabs I met at our conference tell me they are. This must mean that the Jews are... A hard think here, I suppose, then the obvious answer. The Jews, sorry, the Israelis are Nazis. Not 'like the Nazis'. They are Nazis. That sweet young Israeli girl doing her first year in the IDF and feeling pangs of homesickness every night is a Nazi. That boy with a kippa dovening in a field full of tanks is a Nazi. Gilad Schalit is a Nazi.<br /><br />Next, if there's to be some sort of equivalence, there has to be a Holocaust. What? you say. What? But it's obvious, they reply. There has been a Holocaust of the Palestinians. If this makes you feel nauseated, I don't blame you. You ask, when, how many, where? They sneer and talk about Jenin (51 dead) and say it's worse than gas chambers. And to make this worse, a lot of them deny the real Holocaust, aided and abetted by a UN member state, Iran.<br /><br />As a result of this warped style of thinking, we are living in a fantasy world. It doesn't matter how many rockets Hamas fire, they are some sort of friendly prank. The separation fence isn't a fence but an 'apartheid wall'. And it doesn't matter how racially mixed and free and democratic Israel is, it is, as we all know, an apartheid state. It's unimportant how many times the Palestinians say they refuse to recognize Israel and to make peace, because we know they are the true peace-makers, and it's the Israelis who are the obstacles to peace.<br /><br />The thing is, this is all so transparent a three-year-old could see through it. It's like those Visible Man dolls, all its veins and organs and bones on display. Why do so many people fall for all this? A lot of them are students. Where on earth are they studying, what subjects, with whom? Because something basic is wrong with their education. Two weeks ago I went to a lecture on Islamophobia by a rabid anti-Israeli speaker. This man was in his 40s and dressed as if he was sixteen. He spoke in a very loud voice, and he thundered home the message that racism was wrong and islamophobia was wrong. He is a senior lecturer at a university near me. He could not tell the difference between racism and feelings of disquiet about a religion. This is the standard that passes for rigorous across the board today. Nobody wants to think any more, least of all about Israel. They hate Israel with a viciousness that can only originate in dark psychological problems with Jews. I don't know why that is, and I don't know how to solve it, but it's the most dangerous single thing in the world today. I mean it. Hatred of Israel is going to provoke another war in the Middle East, and that war is capable of spreading to Europe, America and beyond. Iran is in the hands of lunatics, and other lunatics have made hatred of Israel the only political issue of any importance in the world. If we don't do something to stop this, a lot of people are going to die. And they won't all be Israelis.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9009004.post-18139959015464541282010-05-21T16:18:00.000-07:002010-05-21T17:30:33.195-07:00The man in the photographIt's time I wrote a new blog: the last one is dated August 2009, whenever that was. This evening, I chaired a panel at an event held by the Anne Frank Trust (the UK partner of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam). This evening's discussion was part of a month-long festival being held by the Trust in Woodhorn Museum, near Ashington in Northumberland. The main focus of the festival is an exhibition (one of several) devoted to Anne Frank, her family, their fate, and the events taking place in the world around them. Of her family, only one person survived, her father. She and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen, not that long before the end of the war. <br /><br />During the discussion, people spoke of ways in which bigotry and hatred could be eliminated, and many worthy things were said about education and asylum seekers and terrorism. But before joining the panel, I had gone round the exhibition again, and two images out of hundreds had stayed in my mind this time. One, which many of you will have seen, shows a man standing half-way in a pit while a bunch of German soldiers idle and chat. One soldier stands next to the man, holding a pistol pointed at his head, and we know that once the picture has been taken, he will shoot his prisoner and let his body tumble into the pit on top of others, no doubt to be followed by many more. It is a disturbing photograph, not least because the prisoner – a Jewish man, we presume – stands awaiting death without cringing, with what little dignity is left to him. There is no-one to bid him farewell, no-one to whisper a prayer in his ear, only the soldiers, who have lost their humanity. Perhaps some of those soldiers are alive today, old men, near enough to death themselves. Are they riddled with guilt? Will there be someone to say comforting words to them and hold their hands on their deathbeds? Who knows? I just know that I wouldn't want to be one of them.<br /><br />Another photograph in the exhibition is less well known. It shows a Jewish man with a beard. Behind him a German soldier is laughing. Unseen except for his hand, another soldier holds a long razor against the man's neck. Did he cut his throat with it? Or did he let him walk away, secure in the knowledge that, sooner or later, all Jews would die, that he would not even have to stain his uniform with Jewish blood because neater, more humane ways of killing had been introduced? Who knows?<br /><br />Looking at those two photographs, I come away, like any normal person, with mixed feelings of pity and rage. And I come back to the discussions we had tonight and the assumption that all can be put right so long as we adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All well and good, but I know that being kind to these thugs, seeking to enlist their help in educating their fellow Nazis, or (had it been written then) reading to them slowly from the Universal Declaration would end in raucous laughter and, quite probably, a bullet in my brain. The raw truth is that the only thing that would stop those killers as they go about their duty would be exactly that: a bullet in each of their heads. Against all my normal qualms about killing, I set the fact that, behind the man with the pistol, there is a long line of men, women, and children, each of whom will be made to stand in that pit, and that he means to kill them. And after him, another man with another pistol will down another hundred or thousand until the pit is full and the bodies are buried from sight. Like most of you, I would happily fire the gun.<br /><br />Chaim Potok once said 'There are no more gentle Jews'. Of, course, there are, millions of them. But what he meant is clear. The next time a thug with a pistol sets out to snuff out Jewish lives, he must reckon with Jews who will not just stand waiting for the bullet, but who know how to use guns themselves. And this, more than anything, is the logic behind Israel. Every time the IDF takes on Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, it makes a statement, that Israel was created as a safe haven for Jews. <br /><br />Israel is not a nation founded on brute force, but it is a nation made up of individuals who, should they see others at the mercy of brutes and sadists will step up and bat. And every time someone sheds a tear for a Hamas gunman cut down or a suicide bomber put out of action or a missile-firing child-killer shot before he can send his missile aloft, I think to myself that they would not have shed a tear for that man teetering in the pit or that other trying to stop screaming as the razor caresses his neck.Denishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05674063273157934670noreply@blogger.com2