Growing Trend To Delegitimize Israel Worries Jewish Leaders

The trend toward delegitimizing Israel's existence as a Jewish state is growing not only in Europe, but also in the United States, according to Jewish-American academics and community leaders.

Anti-Israel attacks are even beginning to affect Jewish supporters of Israel, who have been accused of trying to silence public debate, they said.

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"Public attention is currently focused on Europe, due to initiatives like the British academic boycott," he said. "In the U.S., the problem is still under the radar. But as a planning institute, we believe that it is necessary to formulate policy on this issue now."

Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz told Haaretz that American academics are at the forefront of those denying Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Veteran advocates of this position, such as Tony Judt and Noam Chomsky, were joined last year by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, both from reputable academic institutions, who charged that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) dictates American foreign policy. Their article, which generated shock waves, is being turned into a book, which is slated to be published in September. The fact that a respected publisher paid Walt and Mearsheimer an advance that is thought to have totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars attests to how hot the publisher thinks this issue is, Reinharz said.

---EOE---

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/880081.html

by buying up so many congresscritters and senatwhores, and attacking anyone who even hinted at giving a serious look at Palestine, they have screwn themselves.

and "White people" would never be considered interchangeable in standard DU discussions, the other noun-swapping is...

I notice the conflation too.

Their strident threats, their graymail, their veiled and not so veiled threats, and their reactions to straightforward debates have come back to haunt them.

I'll keep my eyes open for evidence of this and stay worried.

What 'evidence' will you be keeping an eye out for and what are you worried about?

n/t

at you as "anti-Israel attacks" and anti-Semitism what else would they expect?

I usually stay away from discussions about Isreal (period). Seems like you have to pick a side before entering, then wait for return fire.

I have yet to hear or be involved in a "discussion" about Isreal that didn't mandate picking a side first. It's amazing to me how high on the scale emotions start very mention of Isreal, and reason or being open-minded is just unheard of.

There have been, on very rare occasion, interesting and productive discussions on Israel. But, it doesn't amaze me the scale of emotions when Israel is mentioned, it has been this way since her inception and will likely continue until she is destroyed.

...mindless militarism and hegemony, under the guise of national security, is the recipe for self destruction. It won't work in the case of the U.S. (we're engaged in very similar imperialist ventures), it won't work for Israel -- IT DOESN'T WORK, PERIOD. Don't take my word for it, check your history books.

pick a side for you.

I've been accused of antisemitism, and of being a likudnik fascist - so far, not both in the same thread, which indicates some people actually read what is being written even in the I/P threads. But it does short circuit genuine discussion.

In the I/P debate, there is sadly no place for unaffiliated, open-minded or "Column C" people.

You're either a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite or a Zionist neoconservative pawn of AIPAC.

When the accusations reach these extremes, practical debate becomes impossible.

we say anything that Israel does wrong, we are anti-semitic???

Perhaps you can explain why it is when one defends Israel we are called "pro-occupation" and "Islamaphobic?"

No doubt there are chauvinists in both countries, as in Britain or any other country, who do consider all criticism as illegitimate or bigoted.

It's not a common view on the part of people who join DU.

There is a difference between saying "Bush is a terrible president" or "Bush lost to Gore but got into the White House through fraud" or "The war in Iraq is immoral, illegal, and an unmitigated disaster" or "America has worse health care policies than most Western countries" versus saying "America should not exist" or "America is responsible for every evil in the world" or "America deserved 9-11". The first set of comments are critical but not anti-American; the second set of comments would be anti-American.

Similarly there's a difference between saying, "Olmert is an incompetent prime minister" or "Israel over-reacted and acted wrongly in Lebanon" or "Israel should end the occupation" versus saying "Israel is a rogue nation, and should not exist, or should be moved to Europe" or "Israeli civilians deserve to be attacked by Hamas" or "Israel is a curse to America and caused the Iraq war" or, worst of all, "X (a Jewish politican or group or voting constituency) are traitors who put their allegiance to Israel ahead of their allegiance to their own country".

Most of the arguments that I get into over Israel itself tend to focus on the difference between "Israel has treated Palestinians badly" and "Israel is THE ONLY COUNTRY that has treated Palestinians badly." The first may be true; the second is certainly not true.

But my most intense objections are to dual-loyalty accusations based on ethnicity or religion. This is not something specific to Jews; in fact in the UK, it more commonly refers to people who are Moslem; or Asian origin; or both. But I'll stomp on it whenever I see it, and whoever it refers to.

...is more widely and aggressively challenged, NOT Israel itself, and compounding rather than separating these two very different positions is misleading and, I think, no accident on the part of the Amiram Barkat.

There have been several posts here calling Israel an illegitimate nation, a rogue nation, a "mistake," and a plethora of other things. Those are not comments about the occupation, but rather about the nation of Israel.

...comments you refer to does not make my statement untrue. MOST editorials highly critical of Israel challenge the legitimacy of the occupation, not the state itself.

No one accused half the world of being Anti-Semites when they called for sanctions on South Africa to end its Apartheid regime.

Also, I don't see half the world being called anti-Semites for calling for an end to Israeli occupation.

But there is a difference between opposing the occupation (or any other Israeli policy or action) and opposing Israel's right to exist, or treating it as a uniquely evil country.

I firmly defend my right to criticize Israel or ANY country. I have actually myself been criticized once or twice on DU for being too critical of Israel, as well as for the reverse; but no one has ever said I was anti-semitic; nor have I seen this commonly said of people who are far more critical of Israel than I am - so long as they stick to the topic of Israeli policy, and sometimes well beyond that. I think that some of us do get uncomfortable when it is implied that Israel is a uniquely bad country, and e.g. deserves to be boycotted when other countries that practice bad policies are NOT being boycotted. However, I don't even regard most of this as anti-semitism: I think that it mostly constitutes a part of what I call 'mirror-image-ism', where some people react to right-wing American propaganda against certain countries by assuming that the complete reverse must be true, and that therefore it must be America's allies, such as Israel and (mostly for non-UK-ers!) the UK, that are a sort of 'axis of evil'.

What is more problematic, and more likely to give rise to allegations of anti-semitism, is when people (a) attribute extreme forms of power to Israel or Jews, and in particular, suspect Israel or AIPAC or some other Jewish group of having single-handedly forced America to pursue the war in Iraq and especially (b) when they are too ready to suspect Jewish voters and politicians of 'dual loyalty' or 'dual citizenship' or 'having allegiance to Israel rather than their own country'. I am not even saying that the people who put forward such views here are personally anti-semitic; but I do think that they have been influenced by theories that do have origins in anti-semitism.

for one-quarter of the world being called anti-Semites?

How much of the world is sufficient, do you think?

The argument was that there was an *increase* in anti-semitism and in a desire to de-legitimize Israel as a Jewish state (I assume that the latter refers to calls for the so-called one-state solution; not to calls for an end to the occupation as such).

Whether this is an accurate argument could be a matter for debate; but it is not saying that EVERYONE in these countries is anti-semitic.

... In a bigoted world, it takes 10 "atta-boys" to make up for 1 "aw shit".

...more sophisticated, disciplined, and thoroughly widespread with their PR/propaganda than Israel. Israel's problems are NOT PR related.

You refer to a bigoted world in order to play the victimhood card, while the rest of the world cites a 40+ year brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine (the real victim) and all the propaganda driven bigotry and hatred that inspires it.

When they get together with their 'think' tanks and then join forces with the likes of Ralph Reed and Bush/Cheney, they can all go jump in a lake. All of them.

I don't think anyone on DU supports either the Republicans or Likud. And I doubt that anyone who said "I hope Netanyahu loses the next election badly" would receive anything other than overwhelming agreement from DU-ers.

I agree that the Neo-cons, Likud, and Thatcher's heirs in Britain should all go and jump in a lake; but that still leaves plenty of Americans, Israelis and Brits who are not far right!

How did Britain put up with the poodle for so many years? We don't have the 'no confidence' mechanism, only impeachment which is to put it mildly, cumbersome.

(1) A no-confidence motion is usually only a realistic possibility if a PM's majority is relatively small, so that a combination of the Opposition and some rebels in the PM's own party can form a majority of votes in Parliament. Blair's majority has been too large for this to be a likely possibility. This wasn't because an overwhelming majority of British citizens voted for him; it was because our first-past-the-post electoral system tends to give PMs a majority disproportionate to their actual share of the vote.

(2) There was no real Opposition alternative. The Leader of the Opposition in the 2005 election was Michael Howard, a right-wing and very unpopular Tory.

So we depended on Blair's party putting pressure on him to resign. And, as Britain does not have an American-style primary system, there was not that much that the voters could do about this directly.