albionroad@tiscali.co.uk
Monday, 18, June, 2007
(02, Jumada al-Thani, 1428)
ArabNews
Dr. Johnson said that Scotsmen loved Scotland better than truth. But the great 18th century British sage had never encountered a Zionist. There are Zionists who seem to love Israel much better than truth and many of them do not even live there. One such is the British novelist and newspaper columnist, Howard Jacobson. Jacobson takes criticism of the Jewish state extremely personally.
In the wake of the controversial resolution by British academics to discuss boycotting Israeli universities, he published a typically intemperate tirade denouncing the would-be boycotters as “Zionophobic zealots”. His insinuation was that far from being concerned about the human rights of the Palestinians they are really skulking anti-Semites.
Yet it was also typical that Jacobson barely addressed the specifics of the oppression that have led Britain’s University and College Union to consider boycotting Israeli universities.
His article conveyed little sense that he has troubled to familiarize himself with the punitive conditions afflicting Palestinians with regard to educational opportunities, the primary reason for the resolution, or with regard to anything else.
You would learn little from Jacobson about the detaining of pregnant Palestinian women at Israeli checkpoints, or the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli bulldozers, or the laying waste by the Israeli Defense Forces of Palestinian olive trees, or the monopolizing by Israeli settlers of scarce Palestinian water resources.
Indeed, he is apt to write as though the notion that Israel might be guilty of the systematic victimization of another people is one that could only be entertained by diseased minds.
Operating on the principle that attack constitutes the best form of defense, Zionists like Jacobson characteristically resort to intellectual intimidation, logic-chopping and legalistic bullying.
Jacobson is a kindred spirit of the snarling US Zionist, the Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is currently teaming up with the British Zionist lawyer Anthony Julius to mount a swingeing counterattack against proponents of the boycott. Dershowitz vows to “devastate and bankrupt” them.
This is not the language of civilized discourse; it is the language of the gangster whose objective is less to engage in dialogue with his opponents than to eliminate them.
Zionists especially resent the apparent indifference of critics of Israel to flagrant abuses of human rights perpetrated in other parts of the world, such as the oppression of Chechnya by Russia or of Tibet by China.
Here, they gloat, is proof that such critics are motivated not by humanitarianism but by a rabid obsession with scapegoating one particular racial group. It is true that there are critics of Israel who seem strangely inattentive to crimes against humanity that are not committed by Jews.
However, it is striking how, in accusing its critics of singling out Israel for censure to the exclusion of other rogue states, Zionists seldom pause to concede that Israel itself has anything to apologize for, that its own human rights record might indeed be hugely open to question.
For to make such an admission would be to undermine their favorite claim: That those who take exception to Israel’s actions do so simply because they are looking for a convenient excuse to externalize their loathing of Jewish people.
Besides, for Zionists, it is nothing if not a useful distraction to point to other countries’ iniquities whenever instances of Israeli turpitude are under discussion.
None of this means that the case for instigating an academic boycott against Israel is unanswerable. It is, to say the least, a sorry thing when such action is being contemplated by scholars whose first loyalty ought to be to open debate and the free circulation of ideas.
Moreover, it is eminently possible that a boycott of Israeli universities will simply strengthen the forces of intolerance and extremism in Israeli society, pushing the country still further to the right.
All the same, it is understandable that those who care about the plight of the Palestinians feel that there is no longer any alternative to protesting in whatever way possible against a country that, despite its monstrous breaches of international law, continues to be accorded preferential treatment by Western governments while enjoying the strident support of diaspora Zionists with far greater access to the media than champions of the Palestinians have ever had or are ever likely to have.
It has become imperative to bring home to Israel that people across the world are disgusted beyond measure by the perpetuation of a 40 year-long occupation on the part of a nation that trumpets its status as the Middle East’s only democracy.
Indeed, if there is one reason above all why Israel’s inhumanity toward the Palestinians evokes special outrage, it is because the Jewish state has prided itself on its lofty ethical standards and because its betrayal of those standards is widely felt to be a betrayal of the entire civilized world.
The writer and activist Ghada Karmi wonders how Israel has been able to get away with injustices that would have established almost any other country as a moral pariah.
One of Zionism’s most penetrating critics, Karmi has for the past 30 years been furiously committed to the battle of ideas against Zionism, the struggle to challenge the official Zionist narrative which has held sway in the West, with its emotive picture of Israel as a desperately vulnerable haven for a persecuted people.
Her provocative new book, “Married to another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine”, is the product of much hard thinking on the subject of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Born in Jerusalem, Karmi comes from a Palestinian family that sought refuge in Britain following the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Her acclaimed memoir, “In Search of Fatima” (2002), recounted how she grew up in the 1950s in the Jewish-dominated north London suburb of Golders Green and how she gradually grew aware of belonging to a racial minority whose very existence was barely recognized by mainstream Western society.
Karmi contends that Zionism was an inherently flawed ideology, based as it was on the attempt to create a Jewish majority in a land dominated by non-Jews.
Her title refers to the words of two Viennese rabbis who, following the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 — at which the idea of setting up a Jewish state in Palestine was first mooted — made an exploratory visit to the region.
To their acute dismay, the rabbis discovered that Palestine was inhabited by a long-settled Arab population and therefore already spoken for.
“The bride is beautiful”, they cabled their colleagues in Vienna, “but she is married to another man”.
The Palestine-Israel conflict, including the chaos currently raging in Gaza, may be said to have its roots in the narcissistic Zionist fantasy that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without land”.
It was a candid Israeli Zionist historian, Benny Morris, who acknowledged that it had never been “reasonable” for the Zionist project to succeed, for by its very nature it meant either “perpetual cruelty and repression of others, or the end of the dream”, and for Zionists the latter option was unthinkable.
Ghada Karmi believes that justice can never be achieved for the Palestinians except within the context of a unified state.
Yet such a solution could only become viable if world Jewry were to awake to the full significance of the Viennese rabbis’ original discovery, and the trouble is that the Zionist mentality is based on a primal act of collective denial.
It is this, surely, that explains why flesh-and-blood Palestinians seldom feature in Zionist discourse.
The oddly abstract anger of Zionists like Howard Jacobson indicates a pathological reluctance to face up to the immutable reality of the other man’s existence.
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