The New York Times published today a devastating report on Hamas’s increased incitement against Jews in Gaza:

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.” …

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Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.

A new AJC-Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education study, Palestinian Textbooks: From Arafat to Abbas and Hamas, focuses on hate in Palestinian texbooks used in school is Gaza and the West Bank.

At first glance, the two books inhabit different worlds. One, carrying the imprint of a prestigious publisher, is riding high in the Amazon bestseller chart. The other, from a tiny publisher in Atlanta, would not make a bestseller list on Amazon or anywhere else. The first book is splendidly printed and bound, reflecting the gravitas of the authors. The second looks and feels cheap, like a trinket from a murky political gathering.

And yet this is one instance where packaging tells us very little. What counts is that the two books – Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, which everyone is talking about, and James Petras’s The Power of Israel in the United States, an unabashedly conspiratorial tome unnoticed by the reviewers – focus upon the same subject. What counts even more – lest readers should think that my purpose is to damn by association – are the arresting similarities between the two books in terms of argument.

continue reading "Mainstream or Just Extreme?"

Decades ago a criminal defense attorney offered a credo for the zealous defense of a client: “Contest everything, concede nothing, and when defeated allege fraud.”John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their new book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, go to similar lengths to defend their thesis that Israel is a strategic liability.

While The Israel Lobby is a more nuanced effort than their earlier London Review of Books article, the main problem is the same: Walt and Mearsheimer genuinely believe that U.S. interests in the Middle East are overwhelmingly tied to the Arab states, not to Israel. They are at a loss to understand why what seems obvious to them is lost on the majority of Americans, including those who make policy decisions.

continue reading "When All Else Fails: The Israel Lobby"

A seasoned observer of the British trade union scene put it to me in stark terms. “You’d be hard put,” he said, “to find a union in the UK that isn’t sympathetic to the boycott of Israel.”

His observation was made in a conversation which took place a few days before the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) voted, at its conference, to back the boycott of Israel. That vote, on July 4th, brings the number of British unions supporting the boycott campaign to four: journalists, academics, public and voluntary service workers and now the union representing those working in an array of industries from transportation to food.

The TGWU’s debate reproduced the same themes which emerged at the other union conferences. Firstly, the portrayal of Israel as country forged in colonial sin and therefore solely responsible for all the conflicts in the area, including the recent bout of intra-Palestinian bloodletting in the Gaza Strip. Secondly, the indignant protest that a boycott of Israel can never be, by any stretch of the imagination, antisemitic.

continue reading "Laboring the Boycott"

A few years ago an American Indian friend phoned me, absolutely perplexed. He could not reconcile two stories in his morning paper – one in the news section, the other in sports. Both were about major Florida universities.

The first story reported universal outrage at and severe sanctions on a fraternity which had hosted an event where participants dressed in blackface. The leadership of the university spoke in strong language about not tolerating racism, the hurt of stereotypes, the psychological impact of dehumanization, and the incompatibility of such offensive behavior with the standards of a university.

The second noted, without comment, that the leadership of another Florida university (which had an Indian mascot) was encouraging students to show up at a major sporting event in red face.

continue reading "Israel as the N-word"

AJC Executive Director David Harris blogs for the Jerusalem Post. From his latest entry:

In the first, Mordechai Eliyahu, a former chief rabbi, chose the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day to reveal the “true” reason why so many perished in the Shoah – because of their embrace of Reform Judaism. This is so stunningly obtuse, so mind-bogglingly offensive, that it leaves me breathless.

That it was expressed by a former chief rabbi suggests it can’t be so easily dismissed as the ranting of one individual who may have fallen on his head that morning. To rebut it lends the outlandish allegation too much credibility, yet to ignore it means burying our heads in the sand to the way some Jews might actually think.

Our enemies see us as one people. Why can’t we? [JPost]

Complete list of Harris’s blogs [JPost]

On Hitler’s Birthday, April 20, a group of neo-Nazis will either march through Cincinnati or prepare a lawsuit if their demonstration is not permitted. City leaders should not fall into the trap of trying to draw a line between what seems like competing interests – protecting free speech and articulating a strong community response against hatred. It can do both, and at the same time decrease the likelihood of future marches.

In 1994, an Illinois community was faced with a Ku Klux Klan march, and, rather than try to stop it or counter-protest, it developed “Project Lemonade.” Designed to make something positive out of a bad situation, people pledged money. The longer the rally lasted, the more money people promised. Money went to things the white supremacists would despise the most. It worked, and other communities have now used this approach, funding anti-hate educational initiatives, police training and supporting victims of hate crimes. The neo-Nazis did not have their free speech rights infringed, but their speech became no longer “free.” The more hatred they spewed, the more money actually was raised for positive things.

continue reading "Lemonade for Hitler’s Birthday"

This is the good news: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has emerged as one of the strongest advocates of Israeli security of any European head of state in recent years.

After Germany assumed leadership of the European Union and the Group of Eight in January, Chancellor Merkel revived the Mideast Quartet (the U.S., the EU, Russia and the UN) to bring movement into the nearly defunct Mideast peace process. In early April, on her second visit to the Mideast in two months, Chancellor Merkel warned Iran to stop threatening Israel, made abundantly clear her abhorrence for terrorism, and refused to meet with Palestinian officials who are members or supporters of Hamas.

This is the worrisome news: A Global Scan poll commissioned by the BBC in March 2007, determined that 77 percent of Germans believe that Israel has a negative impact on world affairs. In fact, only 10 percent of Germans believe Israel has a positive impact, scantly more than the new European Union member countries Poland and Hungary.

continue reading "Germany and Israel: Friendship and Criticism"

When I recently asked some friends which chapter of Jewish history should be mandatory knowledge for all Jews, some chose the exodus from Egypt, others the establishment of modern Israel and some the emergence of prophetic Judaism.

I found it odd that no one selected the Holocaust.

Yet the Holocaust is precisely what American Jews have chosen. After all, Holocaust education permeates Jewish school curriculums, Holocaust museums have emerged throughout America, and Yom HaShoah commemorations, like the ones we will have this month, are ever-present. In turn, Jews, for whom Jewish philosophy remains untouchable, turn to the destruction of European Jewry as their dominant historical memory.

continue reading "Holocaust Memory and Jewish Identity"