It is a good country, Austria. In the year after self-satisfied 60th and 50th anniversary celebrations of the state and after a boring, but from every side very disgustingly executed election campaign – enriched with personal attacks and definitely not free of latent and open anti-Semitism – some glances beyond the national plate and on the national reflection on the matters are worth the effort, in this pause until the next distasteful political events.
Improving Israel’s image means fighting anti-Semitism
Even in autumn of this year 2006, when our little country had to solve different problems and sorrows, some (few and little) groups and organizations tirelessly and idealistically are striving for the task to improve the image of Israel in the European soup of opinion, and be it just by supplying and circulating those factual criterions to objectify, which are suppressed or intentionally forgotten by deeply rooted or newcomer critics of Israel here. That those groups, friendly to Israel, also have to fight actively against anti-Semitism, is really not the fault of Israel. On the coherence between old or new anti-Semitism and critics on Israel a satisfying amount of books has been published in the last time, many of them were even read, deplorably scarcely by anti-Semitists. With the scholarly definition, it would be anti-Semitism to make greater demands on Jews and on Israel in matters of ethics, human rights, democracy and policy than on all the other nations, they can live here as hardly as with the definition that cirrhosis of the liver mostly comes by drinking.
One would have wished to hear the support of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper for Israel also from European politicians, but in little, neutral Austria, the thorns of the own history, followed by the need of relativism and the mentality of a final stroke, still sit far too deep to let the approach to the Middle East “be guided by our values”.
Has Austria done enough?
After all, also here we have paid national restitution – sixty years later. But there were differences of hundreds of percent between the compensation paid in three Western countries in recent years to the heirs of Jewish property taken during the Holocaust. Germany, France and Austria have completed the handling of 80 percent of restitution claims. The average compensation paid by Germany was 95,000 euros, 3.5 times higher than the 27,000 paid by France and nearly twelve times higher than the compensation paid by Austria. The central reason for the low compensation sums paid by Austria was the predetermined restitution ceiling of $210 million, a sum that in practice limited claimants to an average 13 percent of the value of their property.
Ideologic dilemma at the Right
So why being also for Israel, after this great Austrian achievement? Where suppression and historical misinterpretation mix with frustration and envy, in the actual situation many docking attachments are offered to populist parties of the extreme right, which have maneuvered themselves into complex ideologic dilemma. In the one hand, the immanent anti-Semitism of their ideology and it’s processing for the use in beer tents was eclipsed by disgusting polemics against Moslems in Austria in the last years – because of the more “vivid” danger of Islamic “Umvolkung” (a newly created term by the extreme right in Austria for turning a nation’s character into that of foreign intruders) – but not lastingly suppressed. (338.988 Muslims, 96.052 of which are Austrian citizens and 242.936 foreigners, are facing only 8.140 Jews, 6.112 of which are Austrian citizens and 2.028 foreigners. Source: Statistic Austria, national census 2001). In the other hand, the extreme right traditionally is against the USA, which are in “captivity of their east-coast” (meaning the Jews), against their imperialism and therefore against Israel, therefore for the “poor Palestinians” and for everything which supports Arab nationalism, makes strong impression on oil producing, Arab neighbour countries and possibly will keep European prices for fuel affordable that way.
“Sophisticated” biasedness at the Left
At the Austrian left, nothing seems far better, but they are operating on other intellectual levels. Their polemics against Israel mostly is more diffuse and not so suitable for beer tents, but therefore more dangerous. Arguments are explosively embellished with such an amount of false facts, that the shattered sceptic cannot comprehend them ad hoc, and that their correction would produce ten times the effort. Now there should not so be mentioned those, who misinterprete the heir of Bruno Kreisky and instrumentalize it for their own purpose, e. g. for many others, the Society for Austrian Arab Relations, who partly argue with open anti-Semitic undertone and sometimes circulate more radical approaches than some Palestinian groups. Nothing else could be expected, if they should not miss their purpose.
Scholarly opposition
Under the super-elastic cover of democracy, human rights and efforts for peace, also acknowledged, politically “unsuspected” Austrian institutions for information and education, most of them with an scholarly approach, in biasedness as high as possible, are used to pack cheap, anti-Israeli contents in impressive, scholarly discourses and lectures on the Middle East problem and to sell them to interested people. Concerning biasedness, simply the programs of some institutions, such as Diplomatic Adademy, Austrian Institute for International Policy and others, furnish proof. Who looks there for information on Middle East, is not only occupied by historical misinterpretation (political delivery of the invention of the Palestinian nation and an artificial “Palestinian history” included) of some “new historians” like John Bunzl et alii, but also gets the impression by especially selected lecturers (e.g. Uri Avnery and others), that peace in Middle East now only will be possible under the conditions given by the Palestinians, to which Israel submissively has to surrender.
Human rights, newly defined?
Beyond that, human rights are newly defined – territorial occupation by the victorious power (Israel) after a war clearly was an “offence”, but retreat from occupied Gaza stripe also clearly was an “offence”, since this left the rival Palestinian groups in their own self-destroying chaos of a civil war. Protected, safe borders and controls at few checkpoints are an “offence” by Israel, in any other cases, e. g. the Spanish enclaves (therefore EU) in North Africa, Pakistan and India, North and South Korea and other high-security borders in our world, this is an acknowledged measure.
Missile shelling and suicide bombing on civil areas and targets count as terrorist acts worldwide, except Israel, there they are just reasonable measures of the otherwise defenseless national construct of Palestinians, who nowadays suffer the most from the disagreement between their political leader groups. While for Al Fatah a Palestinian state beneath Israel (territorially rather diminished by Arab areas – therefore the demand for the right of return for Arab refugees) seems to be imaginable, Hamas still demands a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Interpretations of human rights, focussing friendly to Palestinians, like to leave aside facts, just to support their demands.
Jewish groups have estimated that since 1948 at least 900,000 Jews have been forced to leave their homes in Arab countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. At least 600,000 went to Israel. The rest sought sanctuary in France, Britain, the United States and other countries. The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries has estimated that Jews lost more than $100 billion in personal and community assets through confiscations by various Arab governments.
Israel’s opponents and Utopia
While the world glances rather helplessly on Afghanistan and Iraq, where different islamistic, religiously and politically motivated Arab groups slaughter their own civil population by terrorism and civil war, the anti-Israeli activists for peace and mostly self-nominated experts for the Middle East assume that Israel just would have to reduce herself to a little Jewish enclave from Haifa to Tel Aviv – naturally with free access for Arabs looking for work – to come a flourishing, prosperous Arab Palestine into being beneath and around, a shelter of democracy and peaceful contacts with each other.
One and only democracy in Missle East
Austrian opponents of Israel, normally of democratic mind, also simply analyze beyond the fact, that in the Middle East Israel is the only, working, active western democracy, based on occidental values, which are so highly esteemed in Europe. The incompatibility of Islamic countries under extremist religious rule and western democracy is surely not the fault of Israel’s existence, even when more and more lectures in torrent of words and distorting facts would be held and publications would be secreted by those peace-motivated Palestine-theorists.
We have to reply biasedness
Nonetheless one has to reply them. Therefore also on scholarly fields it was very important to found an organization in Austria, which does not leave the topic of the Middle East up to biasedly orientated and motivated proponents of Palestine, but strives for facts and arguments to objectify it. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East – Austria, the Austrian branch of the international organization Scholars for Peace in the Middle East(SPME), will hold their inaugural meeting in November 2006 and operate as an organization yet registered in Austria. It is not the only, but a new and surely effective instrument to fight biasedness, and yet networking with the Austrian-Israeli Society (OEIG).
Chava Gurion is member of the SPME Austria – Chapter.
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The Inaugural General Assembly of SPME Austria will be held on
Wednesday, November 22, 2006, 6 pm
at the
Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance
1010 Wien, Wipplinger Str. 8
