Are Israel’s policies and military acts shooting Israel in the foot? Henry Siegman says it all in the final paragraph of his essay (item 4):
“Israel’s problem is not the Palestinian or Arab refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state. It is, rather, the increasing difficulty of Jews familiar with Jewish values to recognize it as a Jewish state.”
Less than half the Jews of the world live in Israel. If only half of those who live abroad disassociate themselves from Israel, there will be no use for a Jewish state.
I’m occasionally asked if I think that Israel has the right to exist. That’s a non-question. So many states exist on the bones of their former indigenous populations. Do the United States, Canada, South America, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, etc etc etc have the right to exist? They exist. The question is not that of right but of how. Might does not make right. And for Israel might has not brought security. Nor are Israel’s policies and acts bringing more Jews to identify with Israel. To the contrary. Israeli, in their eyes, is rapidly deligitimizing itself.
I’m in a rush to go to a demo supporting those actors and others of the Israeli theatrical world who refuse to act in the West Bank.
More tomorrow.
Dorothy
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Ynet Monday,
August 30, 2010
Foreign legalists to defend Israel abroad?
Foreign Ministry conference attended by 170 legal experts from 32 countries aims to fight de-legitimization against Jewish state
Despite the strike and the distance from the media, the Foreign Ministry on Sunday opened a first-of-its-kind conference which included 170 legalists from 32 countries who arrived in Israel to discuss tactics to handle the de-legitimization being waged against the Jewish state.
Jerusalem hopes to recruit reputable legal experts from around the globe to help combat the growing criticism against Israel.
The conference’s goal was to outline to the foreign legalists the issues Israel is facing in the filed of international law, and also to learn from them how to adapt the Israeli legal arguments to the international community.
The foreign guests are slated to meet with Supreme Court judges, military prosecution heads, ministers and Knesset members.
“The conference’s participants have a great thirst for what is happening here, and they feel that the issues are too complex and lack the knowledge and understanding of the Israeli arguments and the legal complexities,” said Daniel Taub, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy legal advisor.
“This reflects the understanding that we need allies abroad,” he added.
The Foreign Ministry is not hiding the fact that it hopes these legalists will become advocates of Israel after returning to their countries. “We are currently in the midst of an extensive and planned war of de-legitimization against Israel,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon on Sunday, opening the conference.
“Seekers of justice must unite and fight against the network of terror and its supporters.
The refusal by actors to perform in occupied territory is not delegitimization of the state, as the prime minister claims, but the expression of a legitimate and worthy position.
The settlement of Ariel is in occupied territory, and future sovereignty over it is a matter of dispute. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes, and declares, that “the capital of Samaria” will become part of Israel in any future peace agreement, but even he realizes that Ariel is different. The fact is that his government froze construction in Ariel, not in Haifa or Givatayim.
But even during the settlement freeze, the Netanyahu government has been using symbolic means in an attempt to reinforce an image of Ariel as an integral part of Israel: upgrading the academic status of the Ariel University Center of Samaria and building a new performing arts center in the settlement. That is how the government is trying to blur the Green Line.
Thirty-six actors, directors and screenwriters who disagree with the government’s policy published a letter to theater managements in which they announced their refusal to take part in performances in Ariel. The letter expressed the artists’ conscientious objection to performing in occupied territory and noted the right to protest in a democratic society. They succeeded in putting the debate about Ariel on the agenda. But their position is unacceptable to Israel’s rightist government, which quickly responded with typical aggressiveness. Netanyahu, Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz are all threatening to deny government funding to cultural institutions that refuse to hold performances beyond the Green Line.
Netanyahu is acting like Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural commissar: He is trying to compel artists to express a government policy that seeks to annex Ariel, by threatening to harm their livelihood. Instead of respecting Israeli citizens’ freedom of conscience and right to protest, Netanyahu is treating them like forced laborers mobilized to serve the ideology of the ruling party. Refusing to perform in occupied territory is not delegitimization of the state, as Netanyahu claims, but the expression of a legitimate and worthy position.
Theater actors are not marionettes, and cultural coercion of artists who fear for their livelihood does not befit a freedom-loving country. Cultural and academic institutions that receive budgetary support from the state do not owe it obedience in return. On the contrary, the government should be thankful for the existence of institutions that constitute such a vital interest for Israeli society.
On May 31, I joined some 50 students and faculty members who gathered outside Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to demonstrate against the Israeli military assault on the flotilla carrying humanitarian aid toward Gaza. In response, the next day a few hundred students marched toward the social-sciences building, Israeli flags in hand. Amid the nationalist songs and pro-government chants, there were also shouts demanding my resignation from the university faculty.
One student even proceeded to create a Facebook group whose sole goal is to have me sacked. So far over 2,100 people (many of them nonstudents) have joined. In addition to death wishes and declarations that I should be exiled, the site includes a call on students to spy on me during class. “We believe,” ends a message written to the group, “that if we conduct serious and profound work, we can, with the help of each and every one of you, gather enough material to influence … Neve Gordon’s status at the university, and maybe even bring about his dismissal.”
Such personal attacks are part of a much broader assault on Israeli higher education and its professors. Two recent incidents exemplify the protofascist logic that is being deployed to undermine the pillars of academic freedom in Israel, while also revealing that the assault on Israeli academe is being backed by neoconservative forces in the United States.
The first incident involves a report published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, in Israel, which analyzed course syllabi in Israeli sociology departments and accused professors of a “post-Zionist” bias. The institute defines post-Zionism as “the pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream.” In addition to the usual Israeli leftist suspects, intellectuals like Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm also figure in as post-Zionists in the report.
The institute sent the report to the Israel Council for Higher Education, which is the statutory body responsible for Israeli universities, and the council, in turn, sent it to all of the university presidents. Joseph Klafter, president of Tel-Aviv University, actually asked several professors to hand over their syllabi for his perusal, though he later asserted that he had no intention of policing faculty members and was appalled by the report.
A few days later, the top headline of the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that another right-wing organization, Im Tirtzu (If You Will It), had threatened Ben-Gurion University, where I am a professor and a former chair of the government and politics department. Im Tirtzu told the university’s president, Rivka Carmi, that it would persuade donors to place funds in escrow unless the university took steps “to put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt” in its politics and government department. The organization demanded a change “in the makeup of the department’s faculty and the content of its syllabi,” giving the president a month to meet its ultimatum. This time my head was not the only one it wanted.
President Carmi immediately asserted that Im Tirtzu’s demands were a serious threat to academic freedom. However, Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar, who is also chairman of the Council for Higher Education, restricted his response to a cursory statement that any move aimed at harming donations to universities must be stopped. Mr. Sa’ar’s response was disturbingly predictable. Only a few months earlier, he had spoken at an Im Tirtzu gathering, following its publication of a report about the so-called leftist slant of syllabi in Israeli political-science departments. At the gathering, he asserted that even though he had not read the report, its conclusions would be taken very seriously.
Although the recent scuffle seems to be about academic freedom, the assault on the Israeli academe is actually part of a much wider offensive against liberal values. Numerous forces in Israel are mobilizing in order to press forward an extreme-right political agenda.
They have chosen the universities as their prime target for two main reasons. First, even though Israeli universities as institutions have never condemned any government policy—not least the restrictions on Palestinian universities’ academic freedom—they are home to many vocal critics of Israel’s rights-abusive policies. Those voices are considered traitorous and consequently in need of being stifled. Joining such attacks are Americans like Alan M. Dershowitz, who in a recent visit to Tel-Aviv University called for the resignations of professors who supported the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from Israeli companies until the country abides by international human-rights law. He named Rachel Giora and Anat Matar, both tenured professors at Tel Aviv University, as part of that group.
Second, all Israeli universities depend on public funds for about 90 percent of their budget. This has been identified as an Achilles heel. The idea is to exploit the firm alliance those right-wing organizations have with government members and provide the ammunition necessary to make financial support for universities conditional on the dissemination of nationalist thought and the suppression of “subversive ideas.” Thus, in the eyes of those right-wing Israeli organizations, the universities are merely arms of the government.
And, yet, Im Tirtzu and other such organizations would not have been effective on their own; they depend on financial support from backers in the United States. As it turns out, some of their ideological allies are willing to dig deep into their pockets to support the cause.
The Rev. John C. Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, has been Im Tirtzu’s sugar daddy, and his ministries have provided the organization with at least $100,000. After Im Tirtzu’s most recent attack, however, even Mr. Hagee concluded that it had gone overboard and decided to stop giving funds. The Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank that helped shape the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Institute for Zionist Strategies over the past few years, and was practically its only donor. For Christians United and the Hudson Institute, the attack on academic freedom is clearly also a way of advancing much broader objectives.
The Hudson Institute, for example, has neo-imperialist objectives in the Middle East, and a member of its Board of Trustees is in favor of attacking Iran. Christian United’s eschatological position (whereby the Second Coming is dependent on the gathering of all Jews in Israel), includes support for such an attack. The scary partnership between such Israeli and American organizations helps reveal the true aims of this current assault on academic freedom: to influence Israeli policy and eliminate the few liberal forces that are still active in the country. The atmosphere within Israel is conducive to such intervention.
Nonetheless, Im Tirtzu’s latest threat backfired, as did that of the Institute for Zionist Strategies’ report; the assaults have been foiled for now. The presidents of all the universities in Israel condemned the reports and promised never to bow down to this version of McCarthyism.
Despite those declarations, the rightist organizations have actually made considerable headway. Judging from comments on numerous online news sites, the populist claim that the public’s tax money is being used to criticize Israel has convinced many readers that the universities should be more closely monitored by the government and that “dissident” professors must be fired. Moreover, the fact that the structure of Israeli universities has changed significantly over the past five years, and that now most of the power lies in the hands of presidents rather than the faculty, will no doubt be exploited to continue the assault on academic freedom. Top university administrators are already stating that if the Israeli Knesset approves a law against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine, the law will be used to fire faculty members who support the movement.
More importantly, there is now the sense among many faculty members that a thought police has been formed—and that many of its officers are actually members of the academic community. The fact that students are turning themselves into spies and that syllabi are being collected sends a chilling message to faculty members across the country. I, for one, have decided to include in my syllabi a notice restricting the use of recording devices during class without my prior consent. And many of my friends are now using Gmail instead of the university e-mail accounts for fear that their correspondence will in some way upset administrators.
Israeli academe, which was once considered a bastion of free speech, has become the testing ground for the success of the assault on liberal values. And although it is still extremely difficult to hurt those who have managed to enter the academic gates, those who have not yet passed the threshold are clearly being monitored.
I know of one case in which a young academic was not hired due to his membership in Courage to Refuse, an organization of reserve soldiers who refuse to do military duty in the West Bank. In a Google and Facebook age, the thought police can easily disqualify a candidate based on petitions signed and even online “friends” one has. Israeli graduate students are following such developments, and for them the message is clear.
While in politics nothing is predetermined, Israel is heading down a slippery slope. Israeli academe is now an arena where some of the most fundamental struggles of a society are being played out. The problem is that instead of struggling over basic human rights, we are now struggling over the right to struggle.
Neve Gordon
Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation, for more information click here. Neve’s website is www.israelsoccupation.info.
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[Thanks to Eldad for forwarding]
Henry SiegmanPresident, U.S./Middle East Project
Posted: August 16, 2010 09:12 AM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers’ Index
Since the Goldstone report, Israel’s political leaders and public have been agitated over what they claim to be a worldwide effort to “delegitimize” the Jewish state. A recent study by an Israeli policy institute warning of a looming global threat to the country’s legitimacy was discussed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, whose members concluded that this threat, believed to be motivated by anti-Semitism, is a greater danger to the country’s existence than the nuclear threat from Iran.
Most Israelis, particularly the present government, have been blithely indifferent to repeated international condemnations of Israel’s systematic theft of Palestinian territory on which it has been settling its own Jewish population in blatant violation of international law. Yet their reaction to what they see as an attack on the “legitimacy” of the State of Israel, a concept foreign to international law, seems to bring them to the edge of hysteria.
In fact, Israel’s legitimacy within its 1967 borders has never been challenged by the international community. It is its behavior on territory beyond its own borders to which the international community – including every U.S. administration – has objected. To construe the condemnation of violations of international law as anti-Semitism is absurd.
It was not an anti-Semite seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state, but Theodore Meron, an internationally respected jurist and the legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who following the war of 1967 conveyed the following legal opinion to Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban: “[C]ivilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” to which Israel is a signatory. That Convention’s ban on population transfer is “categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its objectives. [The Convention’s] purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the occupying state.”
Existing states do not lose their legitimacy because their governments engage in illegal behavior. There is a presumption in international law of state continuity even if the central government collapses and the state becomes a failed state, as has been the case with Somalia. For all of the international condemnations of the behavior of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the governments of Iran and North Korea, no one ever questioned those countries’ legitimacy.
There is therefore something bizarre in Israel’s insistence that condemnations of its violations of international law are not intended to challenge the illegality of its settlements and continuing occupation but the legitimacy of its very existence. If Israel keeps it up, that insistence may well turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Perhaps Israel’s right wing government believes that by accusing the international community of seeking to undermine its existence it will distract attention from an increasingly untenable claim that Israel is a model democracy that also enshrines Jewish values. Both claims have been undermined by its settlements policy and its determination to maintain the status quo, bringing into question the very foundation of America’s “special relationship” with Israel.
When a state’s denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent – a permanence that has been the goal of Israel’s settlement project from its very outset (and that many believe has been achieved) – that state ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population’s ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid or racism. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizenry cannot hide its changing (or changed) character. A political arrangement that limits democracy to a privileged class and keeps others behind military checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls does not define democracy. It defines its absence.
The claim that Israel is the incarnation and defender of Jewish values is contradicted by its treatment of an Arab population that has now lived for over two generations under Israel’s military subjugation – treatment that Moshe Arens, a former Likud Defense and Foreign Minister, has warned is turning that population into a permanent underclass of “carriers of water and hewers of wood.” It is entirely at odds with Biblical admonitions and Prophetic exhortations warning against injustices committed by the privileged and the powerful against the stranger and the powerless.
Israel’s problem is not the Palestinian or Arab refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state. It is, rather, the increasing difficulty of Jews familiar with Jewish values to recognize it as a Jewish state. Rather than demanding that Palestinians declaim on Israel’s democratic and Jewish identity, or conjuring non-existent threats to Israel’s existence, Netanyahu and his government would be better advised adjusting Israel’s policies toward a people that has lived under its unforgiving military occupation in a way that honors their country’s democratic and Jewish beginnings. That would contribute far more to its “legitimacy” and to its long-range security than its present undemocratic and very un-Jewish course.
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
