(Author: Chuck Volpe, Vol. 66, No. 1, Pesach 2011)
I wish to approach the matter of the delegitimisation of Israel in a slightly different way.
Firstly, the metaphor of ‘a trial’ is an appropriate one to describe the structure of the delegitimisation project – Israel is the defendant in the dock, its enemies are the prosecutors, the venue is the court of Western public opinion. Like the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, Israel faces accusations that are multifarious and indeterminate and hence difficult to counter. There is a sense that the verdict has been reached even before evidence is led; and no matter what the evidence, nothing can undo the guilty verdict, for the sin of which Israel is accused is primal, original, and existential. In this bizarre forum, all that is clear and real is the venom behind the charges.
Secondly, the delegitimisation of Israel has its counterpart in the Christian delegitimisation of the religious Jew in the Middle Ages. Delegitimisation in this sense punished the ‘stubborn’ Jewish rejection of Christian revelation by treating Jews as outcasts from the Christian communion and consequently from the moral community. In quite a literal sense, the Jew was regarded as being ‘outside the law’ – in this case the moral law – thus denying him full moral consideration. The implications of this should not be missed. Denying people ‘full moral consideration’ means being able to treat them as less than human; it is to strip them of those aspects of their humanity which would ‘stay our hand’ in dealing with them. It is upon perceptions such as this that the death camps were built.
The delegitimisation of Jews as individuals in the post-Holocaust world is anathema. No decent person would want to be associated with such a project. But antisemitism is protean in its nature and has found another form in which to express its poison, namely, in the delegitimisation of the Jewish collective. The antisemite is reborn as an anti-Zionist, a convenient transfiguration since gives cover to his Jew-hatred. The desire to destroy Jews is reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish State. The alleged risk to global peace and security is no longer the ‘Jewish peril’ but the ‘Israeli peril’. The assumption is that Israel must be eradicated, either by violence as Ahmadinejad would do, or peacefully, as some in the Liberal Left would prefer. No matter how it comes about, its dissolution is regarded as imperative and inevitable.
It is crucial to understand that this delegitimisation project is a clear and serious threat to Israel. Talking Israel down is taking Israel down. The cumulative effects on Israel’s reputation of such words and expressions as ‘shitty’, ‘Nazi’, ‘racist’, ‘apartheid’, ‘ethnic cleanser’, ‘occupier’, ‘war criminal’, ‘violated international law’, ‘use of disproportionate force’, ‘liability’ etc. have been devastating. No other state in the world is talked about in such terms.
How to respond?
It is pointless directing ones efforts towards those who would destroy Israel by violence – groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. One cannot negotiate with those who want you dead. These enemies must be met in their own currency – with military force. In respect of those who are less militant – the LiberalLeft, multiculturalists and similar ideologues – the chance of persuasion by reasoned argument is small in the face of their strongly-held ideological beliefs. Occasionally, perseverance does pay off, for, like the early morning mist, ideology can be dissolved when exposed to the harsh light of truth. But this should not be our main focus.
The target of our efforts must be the court of Western public opinion. While this court is notoriously fickle and simplistic, with no judge to explain and moderate the verdict; where nuances are lost and impressions are everything; and where, more often than not the outcome depends on the rhetorical cleverness of the opponents, we have no choice but to make the best case we can. We must work to retain our supporters, to swing those who are as yet undecided and ensure that Jews around the world continue to believe in the Zionist dream and the future of the Jewish people.
Claim: “Israel is not free, is not a democracy and abuses human rights”
In its report Freedom in the World 2010 Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors freedom, and advocates for democracy and human rights, 194 countries and 14 select territories were surveyed. Nine countries judged to have the worst human rights conditions were: Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, as well as one territory, Tibet, whose inhabitants suffer similarly intense repression. Within these entities, ‘state control over daily life is pervasive, independent organizations and political opposition are banned or suppressed, and fear of retribution for independent thought and action is ubiquitous.’
Another eight countries appear near the bottom of Freedom House’s ratings scale: Belarus, Chad, China, Cuba, Guinea, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; included are two territories – South Ossetia and Western Sahara. These countries and territories ‘offer very limited scope for private discussion while severely suppressing opposition political activity, impeding independent organizing, and censoring or punishing criticism of the state.’
Israel is noticeably absent from this list. In fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East deemed by Freedom House to be classified as ‘Free’. Most Middle Eastern countries are deemed ‘Not Free’, with a few deemed to be ‘Partly Free’. These facts demand an answer to the question: why is Israel the primary focus of those concerned about freedom, democracy and human rights?
The tyranny of ideology
The Liberal Left, as represented in certain parts of academia and the media, have since 1990 been struggling to replace their vision of utopia which disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union and communism. Unlike Fascists who were forced to come to terms with their ideology when the death camps were opened after the Second World War, the Left never had to come to terms with their blindness to the horrors of communism in the same way. For this reason they were able to replace (quite seamlessly) one set of ideological fantasies with another. Just as their loathing of Western society and humanist values blinded them to the horrors of communism, so have they became blind to the profoundly antidemocratic politics of the Arab world. They blithely overlook the abuse of women and homosexuals, deride secularism, pour scorn on enlightenment values, and recast religious terrorism as the direct result of Western brutality. They will support any group that stands in opposition to the West, and as a result have become ‘fellow travellers’ with some of the world’s most loathsome ideologies and regimes.
Frankly, this is no mean feat given the fact that these ideologies are open to view and unequivocal regarding their nature. Jew-hatred in the mainstream Arab media is peddled openly, indeed ostentatiously, every day of the week. It’s all there – the cartoons of Jews portrayed as daemons and murderers, depicted as the origin of all evil and corruption and the authors of an unrelenting conspiracy to destroy Muslim society in order to eventually take over the world (confirming The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Judaism is shown as a sinister and immoral religion based on cabals and blood rituals. This unrelenting campaign to delegitimise Israel as the Jewish state and the Jews as a people is dehumanising in the extreme.
Indeed it goes further. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas explicitly call for the obliteration and destruction of all Jews. Surely the similitude to the Nazi regime the absolute low of human degradation – should draw some condemnation from the ‘humanistic’ Left. Apparently not.
Israel is an apartheid or racist regime
In comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, or even to Nazi Germany, the impression is created that Israel no more ‘deserves’ to exist as a state than the Third Reich or apartheid-era South Africa did. Any cursory study of apartheid South Africa and Israel today would yield the conclusion that the two simply do not resemble one another. Labelling Israel an apartheid state reflects less on Israel then on those who would so delegitimise it. The latter show themselves to be historically illiterate, guilty of bias and intellectually dishonest.
Briefly, an apartheid Israel would not allow Moslems to vote; the country’s literary prize would never have gone to an Arab; its universities would not be open to Arab students; anti-Israeli human rights organisations would not be allowed to operate; hostile Palestinian authors such as Edward Said would not be translated into Hebrew; and its Supreme Court would not defend the human rights of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians against army interventions or considerations of national security.
It is as well to consider that the apartheid analogy with Zionism originated as part of the Soviet ‘antiimperialist’ policy in the 1960s, in particular after the embarrassing defeat of the Soviet Union’s Arab clients in the Six-Day War. This neo-Stalinist fabrication was part of a Soviet disinformation policy, which included accusations that the Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in implementing the Holocaust. Furthermore, the notion of a ‘chosen people’ was said to imply a call by the Jewish God to rule over colonised people, i.e. the Arabs. Arab governments lost no time in assimilating these horrendous fabrications to their own propaganda. Zionism was merged with ‘racism’, ‘imperialism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘militarism’ to form a nexus of evil in a Manichaean worldview that appealed strongly to those with a grievance. Of course, antisemitic stereotypes served as an impelling catalyst to this noxious mixture. From the outset, the intention was to delegitimise, isolate and reduce Israel to pariah status. Indeed, it has provided the basis for the recent academic and trade boycott resolutions in the United Kingdom, Canada Norway and South Africa, not to mention the infamous Durban UN World Conference against Racism in 2001.
If one seriously wishes to find an analogy to apartheid in the Middle East, one would do well to look at some Arab states in their treatment of women, other religions, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities (for example, the way Palestinians have been treated by Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and some of the Gulf states).
The Liberal Left as is evident, is unperturbed by these facts. Having supported the minting of false coin during communist times, they have no difficulty in peddling some of its remnant forms in the present.
The moral requirement of ‘universalizability’
“A moral imperative must be applicable to everyone” says the 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. If “thou shalt not kill”, for example, is to become a moral law it must apply to everyone. The same applies to all moral laws – they must be applied universally or not at all. In other words, consistency is required with respect to the application of moral principles.
This creates a problem for those who would treat Israel differently to other nations – for example, to deny Jews national determination while upholding it for other comparable peoples; to affirm international law but not in Israel’s case; to be outraged by the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, but to be untroubled by the Islamic nature of Iran or Saudi Arabia; to regard as racist the social inequalities between Jew and Arab in Israel, while being indifferent to the legal inequalities between Muslim and non-Muslim in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim states; to regard Jewish nationalism (that is, Zionism) as uniquely pernicious amongst all the world’s nationalisms; to be reluctant to take a position on the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the Russian actions in Chechnya, while holding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank an indefensible evil of global consequence; to excoriate alleged racist sentiments among Israelis but to refuse to acknowledge the virulent racist themes towards Jews in much of Arab nationalist discourse. What is evident is that these voices are not speaking the language of morals but rather indulging in ideological discourse whose goal is clearly the delegitimisation of Israel. In any court of decency, this is unacceptable. Their hypocrisy must be exposed, their giddy selfrighteousness shown to be no more than narcissism, their unwillingness to take on the real totalitarian human-rights violators nothing more than cowardice.
How might Israel best assist your organization in upgrading its response to the assault on Israel’s legitimacy?
Jews in the Diaspora overwhelmingly believe in the idea of Israel as the Jewish state, that is, a state for all Jews including those in the Diaspora. Exactly what this means has been debated since at least the beginning of the 20th Century and is still not resolved. But while the jury a still be out on the intellectual definition of the Jewish state, the emotional ties to Israel are intact and strong.
At a time when Israel’s very legitimacy is being questioned it is vital for Israel to define itself in some vital aspects. In particular, what are its borders – the Green Line or the Jordan River? What sort of state is it to be – democratic or otherwise? If Israel defines its border along the Green line, its Jewish and democratic status is guaranteed; if the Jordan River becomes the border, either its Jewish status or its democratic status is compromised. The lack of clarity on these issues fuels the delegitimisation project and creates uncertainty on the part of good people – Jews and non-Jews – who wish Israel well and support its cause.
Gaza is no longer ‘occupied’ but the West Bank – a territory which exists ‘in limbo’ pending an exchange of land for peace in a final settlement continues to fuel calls to end the ‘occupation’. It is this so-called ‘occupation’ that is central to the delegitimisation campaign. This brings us to the issue of the settlements. While the settlements remain, it is very difficult to distinguish between Israel’s vital security needs and the impression that it is involved in a ‘land grab’. Furthermore, the cost of the settlements and the exigencies required to protect them from the native Arab population creates an enormous financial burden on the state as well as the impression that ‘separate development’ (as in apartheid) is taking place. The many social problems – education, poverty, etc. from which the country suffers – is possibly the price Israel is paying for the diversion of funds to the West Bank. As important is the corrosive aspect of the occupation on what could be termed ‘Israel’s soul’.
These are difficult issues to grapple with, but if we do not do so now and make the necessary decision, the future will be placed in the hands of other forces over which we have much less control.
Chuck Volpe is a Port Elizabeth-based businessman and Jewish communal leader. He is currently chairman of the Eastern Cape Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies
