The annual chorus of hypocrisy and exaggeration that surrounds “Israeli Apartheid Week,” is in full swing as both sides do their best to demonize and discredit the other. This propaganda war is being fought with inflammatory rhetoric that redefines and manipulates politically-charged terminology.
A Conservative member of Parliament is planning to introduce a motion in the House of Commons that would condemn the week as “anti-Semitic.” The Liberal Party will likely to favour the motion, after Michael Ignatieff recently joined in the condemnation. This is, however, in stark contrast to a 2002 article he wrote for England’s the Guardian newspaper, where he compared the Palestinian territories to a “Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.” Of course, Ignatieff changes his opinions on the Middle-East more often than most people change their socks. In 2006, he said he wasn’t losing sleep over Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli air strikes – comments he quickly backed away from.
Last week, the Ontario legislature unanimously passed a motion condemning the event – or at least its name — on alleged “moral” grounds, though cynics might point out that Premier Dalton McGuinty is heading to Israel on a trade mission later this spring.
All this comes on the heels of a B’nai Brith report that claimed 2009 saw the highest rate of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada since the Jewish organization began its annual survey in 1982. But this should be taken with a grain of salt.
In the report, the group also condemned the week as an anti-Semitic “hatefest,” a non-word that has been used by the Conservative party in similar contexts.
“Israeli Apartheid Week” may be extreme, and certainly does not promote any sort of reconciliation, but it isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic. Being opposed to the policies of the Israeli government is not synonymous with being opposed to Israel. Even being opposed to Israel is not necessarily anti-Zionist and most importantly being anti-Zionist is hardly synonymous with being anti-Semitic.
Zionism is a new idea, born out of the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe in the late 19th century. From the beginning, traditional and religious Jews opposed it. Even now, many ultra-Orthodox Jews, including those living in Israel, are opposed to Zionism on religious grounds (they believe the Jewish people are not supposed to return to the land of Israel until the coming of the Messiah). Are these Hassidic Jews anti-Semitic? Well, using the B’nai Brith’s definition of the term, they probably are.
Over the past 10 years the B’nai Brith has increasingly expanded the definition of anti-Semitism – especially when it comes to criticism of the state of Israel. But by watering down what they consider hatred, they do a disservice to those who are actually victims of anti-Semitic actions.
In 1999 the B’nai Brith anti-Semitism report stated that: “Although legitimate criticism of the State of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, some people use coded language to disguise antisemitism as anti-Zionism. Issues relating to the Middle East continue to serve as a trigger for antisemitic invective or slurs.”
But by 2009 the report stated that: “It is becoming increasingly complex to isolate anti-Israel rhetoric, which has been intentionally entangled in antisemitic discourse - from a completely separate, more ‘traditional’ anti-Jewish hatred unconnected in any way to the Middle East conflict. Making this distinction is no longer even a realistic proposition.” The conflict in the Middle-East has created strange bedfellows: secular leftists, radical Islamists and neo-Nazis against mainstream Jews, neo-Conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists steadfastly supporting Israel. Neither side has done enough to combat the radicals, extremists and, yes, racists in their midst.
Many on the pro-Israel side would say that opposing the existence of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic because it is denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination and that any person claiming Jewish ancestry, from anywhere in the world, should be allowed to move there.
Yet these same individuals will turn around and say the Palestinians are not a “real people” and that they should go to other Arab countries, rather than live on the land their grandparents occupied.
And the B’nai Brith report indicates that the group may be moving to an even more expansive definition of anti-Semitism, where merely saying that Israel is racist would be considered anti-Semitic. So next year, we can expect the rate of anti-Semitism to rise in their eyes.
But at the same time the “Israeli Apartheid Week” protesters will condemn the excesses of Israeli troops, but will not condemn the killing of civilians and outright hatred by Hamas or Hezbollah. The labelling of Israel as an “apartheid state” has created such a storm of controversy that organizers spend much of their time defending their use of the term itself and trying to fit Israel into a South Africa-shaped box. The other option - to speak of apartheid in broad terms- doesn’t help, because many countries could be called “apartheid states,” including Canada itself. "At a recent IAW event at McGill a statement was read denouncing "Canadian Apartheid". But nobody is about to boycott Canada, which draws more charges of unfair anti-Israeli bias.
As extremists amp up their rhetoric, the very serious and legitimate concerns on both sides of the struggle are getting lost in the crossfire of accusations of on the one side, and anti-Semitism on the other.
1 comments