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And having read this piece at Tikkun's website, I'm even more torn. Partly because it's not entirely consistent, but also because I don't have access to transcripts of the speakers at the rally mentioned below. Here's a revelant chunk:
[A]t that rally the ANSWER coalition put forward an array of speakers who used anti-Israel rhetoric to link the struggle against the Iraq war to Israel-Palestine. This was offensive to a very large numbers of Jews who attended the rally.
We at TIKKUN are very critical of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. We support an end to the Occupation, withdrawal of Israel to the pre-67 borders (with minor border modifications mutually agreed to by both sides), reparations for Palestinian refugees, an end to terror by both sides, and military arrangements for security for both Israel and Palestine. For this position, TIKKUN has been vilified in the organized Jewish community for being anti-Semitic and self-hating Jews. So we are particularly sensitive to not allowing those kinds of charges to be used when people are articulating legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy.
However, what demonstrators experienced at the ANSWER rally was something far different—a climate of hostility to Israel which can only be understood as a manifestation of underlying anti-Semitism. The ANSWER organization is dominated by a group of people from the Workers World Party who do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. Using their position as organizers (meaning, that they were the first ones to get the permit and announce these demonstrations), they have used the Iraq war demonstrations to recruit people to their narrow sectarian worldview.
Of course, Israel deserves criticism for its human rights abuses. We have done that consistently in Tikkun magazine, and in full page advertisements we bought in the NY Times, LA Times and S.F. Chronicle. Yet so do the acts of terror against random Israeli civilians by groups claiming to represent the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. But ANSWER has not permitted any critique of Palestinian violence—only of Israel. Moreover, while Israel's denial of human rights is worthy of critique, it is not more deserving of critique than the far greater acts of human rights abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein against his own people, and the genocidal acts of mass murder against the Kurds. But ANSWER did not permit any criticisms of Saddam Hussein. Nor of the human rights abuses of China in Tibet, Russia in Chechnya, or of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, etc Criticisms of Israel are not inherently anti-Semitic, they become anti-Semitic when raised in a context in which the topic is something else (say, war against Iraq), but the only country in the world being critiqued for human rights abuses is Israel. As we've argued elsewhere, it is not racist to critique Black crime in the U.S. in the context of discussing white crime. But it is racist if the focus suddenly becomes Black crime and there is no mention of the far greater reality of white crime. Singling out Israel in the context of a war rally about Iraq is racist. And so too is calling for "self-determination" of all peoples in the world, but not including the self-determination of the Jewish people. Yet ANSWER’s leadership has made it clear that Israel has no right to exist.
The piece stresses the importance of differentiating between legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and being anti-Israel/anti-semitism, but aside from the problem of lumping those last two ideas in together, they don't seem to be sure where the line is to be drawn. And I don't see how you can argue that Israel shouldn't be mentioned when one is discussing Iraq - there are points of comparison, from UN Resolutions to ethnic persecution to WMD... |
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