SPME Editor’s Note: These pieces are reprinted from the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research Daily Israenet Briefing of March 6, 2009. from their series, “When Free Speech Becomes Hate Speech.”
THE MYTH OF ‘ISRAELI APARTHEID’
Yoram Elron
National Post, March 6, 2009
This week, at Concordia and McGill, and on university campuses throughout the world, scores of events will take place under the banner of Israeli Apartheid Week. An annual tradition running in its fifth year, Israeli Apartheid Week is a hate-fest devoted to demonizing Israel.
As the nomenclature suggests, the goal of this forum is to portray Israel as the modern-day incarnation of South Africa’s morally repugnant apartheid regime. Such comparisons are pure fallacy and demonstrate ignorance to the true meaning of the word apartheid.
Derived from the Afrikaans words “apart” (apart) and “heid” (hood), apartheid is the state policy of racial segregation involving political, legal and economic discrimination based on notions of racial superiority. How one can even begin to compare Israel, the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, to such a regime is beyond comprehension.
One need only turn to Israel’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, to discredit the myth of “Israeli apartheid.” In it, full civil rights and “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture” are extended to all citizens-Jews and Arabs-“irrespective of religion, race or sex.” This document drafted in 1948 still serves as the basis for relations between the state and minority communities.
Today, Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up 20 per cent of the population, enjoy the same rights and freedoms as the Jewish majority. These rights include the right to vote and run for public office, the right to form political parties and criticize government policies in the free press, the right to purchase and lease private land, and the right to travel without restriction. Arabic is even recognized as an official language together with Hebrew, and appears on all legislation, roads signs and in all public buildings.
In Israel freedom of religion is sacrosanct and access to all holy places is safeguarded by the state. Adherents of the Baha’i faith maintain their central religious shrines in Acre and Haifa, where they are free from the persecution faced in their native Iran, while the Islamic waqf (endowment) enjoys custodianship over the Temple Mount, where Muslims worship freely. Israel’s legal system recognizes the religious courts of all faiths and even accords equal status to Jewish talmudic law, Muslim sharia law, Druze law, and Christian law for all personal status issues including birth, marriage and divorce.
Politically, Israel’s 1.4 million Arab citizens enjoy many more freedoms in Israel than citizens of any other country in the Middle East. In the Knesset, Israeli Arabs account for 10 per cent of the current seat distribution and are represented by three Arab parties with ideological views ranging from anti-Zionist Marxism to Islamism. Like all citizens, Israeli Arabs are free to petition Israel’s Supreme Court for any violation of their basic rights. In the free press, which includes dozens of Arabic-language media outlets, Arabs can express their views more freely than in neighbouring countries.
During the past several years alone, Israeli Arabs have made tremendous strides in all facets of Israeli life. Raleb Majadele, a member of Knesset for Labour, became the first Israeli Arab to sit in the cabinet, while Salim Joubran, is Israel’s first Arab Supreme Court justice. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israeli Arabs serve as ambassadors, while in the army many Arab senior officers have risen to the rank of general. Enrolment in institutions of higher learning has risen steadily among Arabs, especially at Haifa University, where today they account for more than 20 per cent of the student population. At Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, about one third of the medical staff is Arab. Israel’s national soccer team, which includes Jewish and Arab players, is yet another example of peaceful coexistence between communities.
It is sad that the very rights and freedoms enjoyed by Israel’s Arab minority remain unknown to many Arabs in surrounding countries, let alone to minorities including Jews and Christians, who are barred from acquiring citizenship in countries such as Saudi Arabia. Today, in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Palestinian women, who were once among the most educated and avant-garde in the Arab world, are coerced into wearing the hijab, while in Israel women of all faiths are free from all forms of religious repression. In Israel, homosexuals live free from harassment, while in Iran they are lynched in the public square. In Israel, alleged criminals-including terrorists captured by police-are given due process, while in other Middle Eastern countries they are decapitated or, in the case of terrorists, glorified as martyrs.
If it is “apartheid” that Israel’s critics are looking for, they are looking in the wrong place.
Perhaps next year universities will think twice before giving a tribune to those who propagate such fallacious myths.
(Yoram Elron is Consul-General of Israel for Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.)
ANTI-SEMITISM, THEN AND NOW
Jonathan Kay
National Post, March 3, 2009
People speak of anti-Semitism as if it were a monolithic evil. But it’s not. There are two distinct strains of Jew hatred. Unfortunately, our society is still fixated on fighting the one that went out of style four decades ago.
The difference between the two begins with the way Jews are depicted. [Consider] a poster published in German-occupied Poland in 1941 [that] exemplifies the Jew-hatred spouted by the Nazis. (The caption reads: “Jews and Lice: They cause typhus.”) [Next consider] a poster circulated on Canadian campuses this week to mark “Israel Apartheid Week,” [that] typifies the more recent variant.
Aside from the obvious-the language and style of illustration-what crucial difference do you notice?
In the Nazi poster, the Jew is a piece of filth-a rogue pathogen within gentile society. The image perfectly captures Hitler’s view of Jews as a “bacillus infecting the life of peoples.”…
Aside from retaining the general sense that the Jew (or, to give the fig leaf its due, “the Jewish state”) is a scourge upon the world, everything has changed [in the other poster]. The Jew is no longer diseased and wretched. Just the opposite: He is an omnipotent, teched-up superman, murdering a defenceless Palestinian child from above.
In this latter detail-the use of a child victim to communicate the extent of the Jew’s evil-the anti-Israeli propaganda of today is similar to the posters and textbooks of the Nazi era, which often showed shadowy Hebrews menacing German children. But the Nazis usually took care to personalize the Jew as a craggy, hook-nosed ghoul-an image meant to further the idea that Jews were so genetically inferior as to be literally inhuman.
Aside from editorial cartoonists in the Arab world (many of whom faithfully copy Nazi-era stereotypes to this day), anti-Semitic propagandists of our own age typically omit the Jew’s features altogether in favour of a faceless, Star-of-Zion-emblazoned tank or helicopter. As in the Nazi era, the Jew isn’t fully human-but now he’s an all-powerful Nazgul instead of a pitiful Gollum.
What explains this radical transition in the presentation of anti-Semitic propaganda? Three factors.
The first is ideology: When the Nazis went down to defeat, they took with them the intellectual basis of “germ-theory” anti-Semitism-the toxic notion that certain races or groups are genetically inferior or parasitical. In our era, to compare Jews to leeches is to announce oneself as a bigoted creature from society’s discredited fringe.
The second reason is tied up with the history of Israel itself: After the Jews established their own state in 1948, it became impossible to typecast them as mere parasites contaminating foreign hosts. This was especially true after the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel scored a crushing military victory against Egypt, Jordan and Syria-not the sort of manoeuvre you’d expect from typhus-stricken old men.
The third reason is political: The leaders who find anti-Semitism useful today aren’t extreme nationalists such as Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini (though Hugo Chavez admittedly has been wandering into that territory). Instead, they are radical Muslims-and their allies in Western activist groups, who speak the tropes of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-racism and all the other fashionable antis.
In this left-wing intellectual climate, disparaging any race or religion per se is off limits. The preferred tactic is to disparage the allegedly colonial, imperialist, racist nature of their actions.
In keeping with our society’s obsession with victimhood, the propaganda strategy against Israel now is entirely passive aggressive. While the Nazis loved to dwell on the virility and superhuman indomitability of Aryans, the Jews’ enemies now are represented in propaganda by five-year-olds carrying teddy bears. (For more in this vein, watch the 60-second promotional movie on apartheidweek.org,in which you will see a cartoon mock-up of Gaza’s population that contains no men of military age-just a bunch of sorrowful kids, mommies and granddads.) The moral dimension of the conflict-terrorism versus counter-terrorism, a society seeking peace versus one that seems addicted to war-has been replaced by a sentimental Marxist-inspired tale of the virtuous oppressed rising up against an evil oppressor.
Broadly speaking, in other words, the locus of anti-Semitism has moved almost entirely from the right side of the political spectrum to the left. Here in Canada, you still do see a few isolated anti-Semites of the Nazi persuasion here and there-David Ahenakew is one rare example. But for the most part, the neo-Nazi movement is confined to a few self-parodic Internet chat rooms (many of whose members, we’ve learned in recent years, are actually bored human-rights bureaucrats looking to stir up hate-speech charges).
These days, the hatemongers targeting Jews’ right to live peacefully spout the mantras of “social justice” and “peace studies,” not racial purity. Their movement is dominated by the sort of leftists and minority activists whom the Nazis (neo or otherwise) would have up against the wall in a heartbeat if they had the chance. (Running down through the published list of 11 speakers at the University of Toronto’s Israel Apartheid Week, for instance, you will find no fewer than three Canadian aboriginal activists. Who knew these people were such experts on the Middle East?)
It also must be admitted that the anti-Semitism of today is a lot more subtle than the old-fashioned variety: Except in clear cases of blood libel such as the IAH poster, it’s often hard to tell where legitimate criticism of Israel ends and Jew-hatred begins. As a result, Jews themselves-middle-aged university professors and career feminists, most typically-are often drawn into radicalized campaigns against Israel, and sometimes even can be seen marching gullibly arm-in-arm with kafiyah-clad protesters chanting for Jewish blood in Arabic.
It’s a disgusting spectacle, especially when you hear their maudlin rhetoric-”massacre,” “crime against humanity,” “genocide,” “holocaust.” If these words may be applied to the unintentional killing of several hundred Gazans during a counterterrorist operation, how does one describe the wholesale slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands in places such as Chechnya and Darfur? (“Megamassacre”? “Giga-genocide”?)
You don’t have to be anti-Semitic to pervert language or logic in this way, but it certainly helps. And I can see why many of my correspondents want universities to ban Israel Apartheid Week, or at least the most vicious IAW propaganda.
Though I personally don’t care much for censorship, one might even think that this is the sort of issue in which our country’s human rights commissions (last seen defending a Muslim woman’s right to appear masked in court) might take an interest. But you’d be wrong.
Our entire human rights establishment was built in the 1960s and 1970s on the assumption that anti-Semitism would always be a creature of the extreme right. And to this day, the dinosaurs who run the nation’s HRCs-along with their allies in the identity politics industry-persist in the ridiculous notion that the main threat to Jews emanates from drunken old fossils like Ahenakew or the eight unemployed hamburger-flippers who get together in Calgary every year to exchange badly rehearsed Hitler salutes.
They treasure this conceit for an obvious self-serving reason: Vilifying Nazis is easy. Taking on politically correct Muslims and campus lefties on parade is hard. Anti-Semitism thrives when lazy people look the other way. That much, at least, hasn’t changed.
[NB: To view the posters Jonathan Kay discusses, click here. -ed. ]
