Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006

From: Judea Pearl <judea@CS.UCLA.EDU>
To: r.segal@abdn.ac.uk
CC: judea@CS.UCLA.EDU
Subject: anti-zionist rabbi

Dear Dr. Segal,
Responding to your letter on SPME, please notemy oped at The Jewish Chronicle Nov. 3, which dealsprecisely with this sort of problems (copy below). It is hard for us to call Rabbi Cohen an antisemite, but we can openly and sincerely label him a RACIST. I hope Leeds faculty does just that.

Best regards,

—————-
Dr. Judea Pearl
Daniel Pearl Foundation
www.danielpearl.org

The Jewish Chronicle, London
Comments & Analysis
November 3 2006

Worse than antisemitism

Judea Pearl says anti-Zionism is not a cover forantisemitism: it is the other way round

Following the all-party parliamentary reporton antisemitism, many have condemned anti-Zionism for being a flimsy cover for antisemitism. I disagree. I condemn antisemitism for being an instrument for a worse form of racism: anti-Zionism.

Anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical antisemitism. I contend thatframing anti-Zionism as a racist phenomenon is a necessarystep in the efforts to curb the spreading hatred of Jews.Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives — the Spanish and Palestinians,for example, namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.

Are Jews a nation? A collective attains nationhood statuswhen its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned a claim to nationhood by thinking like a nation since the turn of 20th century, not by residency or land ownership (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine). Jews, likewise, have been thinking like a nation for three millenia and are currently bonded by common history and destiny more than they are bonded by religion.

The centrality of Jewish nationhood surfaces when we consider Israel’s insistence on remaining a “Jewish state.” What Israeli meanby this term is a “national Jewish state,” not a “religious Jewish state” — theocratic states (like Iran and Pakistan) are incompatible with modern standards of democracy and pluralism, as well as with the largely secular Israeli society. Anti-Zionist racists use this anti-theocracy argument to delegitimise Israel by taking the “Jewish” only in itsnarrow, religious sense.
But Jewishness is more than just a religion. It is an intertwined mixture of ancestry, religion, history, country, culture, tradition, attitude, aspiration, nationhood and ethnicity, and we need not apologise for not fitting neatly into the standard textbook taxonomies — we did not choose our turbulent history.

As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than antisemitism. It targets the most vulnerable Jews: the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or their children, to eternal statelessness within a genocide-prone environment.Anti-Zionism also rejects the glue that binds Jewstogether — their collective memories and historical aspirations.Both are pivotal components of Jewish identity.And while people of conscience reject antisemitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a ticket for social acceptance in many European circles, notably on college campuses.

How? Anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern interreligious discourse. Religion is zialously protected in our society — political views are not.

For example, a student organization on a California campus lastyear hosted a meeting under the banner, “A World Without Israel.” Imagine the international furore that a meeting called ” A World Without Mecca” would provoke.

So, in the name of “open political debate,” university administrators would not think twice about inviting MIT linguist Noam Chomsky to speak on campus, though his anti-Zionist utterances offend the fabric of my Jewish identity deeper than any religious insults,cartoons included, can offend a believer. Religion hasno monopoly on sensitivity.

Strategically, while accusations of antisemitism are easily deflected by the accused’s pointing to his or herrecord of religious open-mindedness, charges of racism exposethe injustice of denying people the right to a sliver of land in the birthplace of their history. It shifts the frame of discourse from debating Israel’s policies to the root cause of the conflict — denying Israelis their basic rights as a nation.
Charges of “racism” highlight the inherent asymmetry between the Zionist and anti-Zionist positions. The former grants both Israelis and Palestinians the right for statehood, the latter denies that right to one, and only one, side. This asymmetry puts Zionism back on the high moral grounds of “fair and balanced” and forces itsopponents to defend a one-sided ideology. For example, I have found it effective, when confronting an anti-Zionist speaker, to ask: “Are you willing to go on record and state that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a conflict between two legitimate national movements?” This question forces one’s opponentto face defending a morally indefensible bias.

Modern society prides itself on free speech, which entails freedom to preach hatred and racism — we graciously accept this peculiarity of modern life. However, free speech also entails the freedom to expose racism, be it white-supremacy, women-inferiority, Islamophobia or Zionophobia. Not by censoring but byconfronting.

In summary, the formula “Anti-Zionism = Racism” defines a principled paradigm for fightingantisemitism and resurrecting Jewish dignity.

*****

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son. He is co-editor of I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the AmericanNational Jewish Book Award.