[THS] Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics

[Peter Webster]

Independent.co.uk

Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics

Thursday, 8 May 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk:80/opinion/commentators/johann-
hari/johann-hari-the-loathsome-smearing-of-israels-critics-822751.html]

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to
describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate
and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-
appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews,
rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider
process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the
Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the
Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-
Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-
lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week,
I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped
from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their
reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of
the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media
monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an
anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in
North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in
calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like
this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest
Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning
the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she
was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the
West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause":
the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau,
calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those
responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the
right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the
most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the
Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The
Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing:
"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such
movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in
many respects to some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American
figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to
the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a
group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission
statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and
security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David
Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and
said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from?
She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively
punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while
"individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to
Holocaust denial as a national project". Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as
a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their
standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies.
Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas
government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month
found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it
more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an
Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and
secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major
human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the
mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West
Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West
Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by
roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli
human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the
racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has
widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-
President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw
ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He
made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan
Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers
arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors
who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be
scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that
moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded
the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan
Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters'
hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz
campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university.
He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek
and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The
campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for
speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming
more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal
Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right
organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of
demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it
prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because
it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages
diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said
to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of
decency, sir, at long last? H ave you left no sense of decency?"

j.hari at independent.co.uk