NOVANEWS
By Michael Lesher
If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. – Umberto Eco
Who knew what secret evils have threatened the beleaguered Jewish State?
Actually, a lot of people – or so it would seem. Here in the United States, the professional plot-hunters who can sniff out the faintest hint of honesty about Israel are so numerous, and so creative, that hardly a day goes by without the detection of one more nefarious scheme to treat Israel like any other country, or to hold it accountable to international law.
Theirs is no easy task; Israel’s crimes have swollen to such proportions that its critics are invulnerable to anything resembling truthful debate. But no matter. Each day the plot-hunters roll up their sleeves and do what they must: attacking democracy, subverting American foreign policy, even encouraging anti-Semitism – all to save Israel.
Take President Barack Obama – yes, the same Barack Obama who egged Israel on in its murderous assault against Gaza in 2014. Late last month, Obama announced that his administration is “aggressively opposed” to any and all boycotts of Israel by U.S. trading partners, even if such boycotts are mandated by democratically enacted law.
Or take the ranking legislators from Obama’s own Democratic Party, who joined with their Republican opponents (you know, the fellows who are incubating Donald Trump as a presidential nominee) to insist that the President must punish not only boycotts of Israel but boycotts of products issuing from Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Those Democratic senators went so far as to stigmatize such attempts to enforce international law as “anti-Semitic.”
You’ve got to admire the zeal of a political culture that can sacrifice so many principles to the Jewish State. If a boycott of Israeli settlement products were enacted by, say, France or Germany, it would be the product of a democratic process – which means the new anti-boycott bill, championed by both major U.S. parties, runs counter to democracy. Official U.S. policy opposes Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory; that pits Congress’ initiative against the President’s constitutionally-mandated power to conduct foreign affairs. And if the bill condemns as anti-Semitic any attempt to enforce international law against Israel’s illegal settlements, then the law has the effect of making anti-Semitism respectable – thus encouraging bigotry while purporting to fight it.
But what’s democracy, or the U.S. Constitution, against a witch hunt?
And it isn’t only American lawmakers who are tearing down their ideals to silence any discussion of Israeli crimes. American rabbis have done the same. In June 2014, the Rabbinical Alliance of America – described in the Orthodox Jewish Press as “a major American mainstream rabbinic organization” – declared that anyone who supports the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel is an accessory to Biblically-defined theft and murder.
Here the logic of witch-hunting trumps reason itself: it’s not Israel’s occupying army that is stealing other people’s land and regularly killing off civilians, including children – no, it only looks that way. The real trouble is those cunning BDSers who seem to be defending two great values of Jewish law by exposing Israeli theft and murder. But the obvious can’t be true, so the rabbis obligingly turn Jewish law on its head: BDS is condemned, and the sins of the Holy State are abetted. Judaism goes the way of the Constitution under Israeli tank treads.
The witch-hunters’ intellectual gymnastics can be as breathtaking as their moral absurdities. When Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti was about to deliver a keynote address at a BDS conference in Nazareth, Israeli legislator Nava Boker called on Israel’s Interior Minister to boot him from the country. After all, claimed schlock-Jewish-writer-turned-plagiarist Naomi Ragen in Boker’s support, Barghouti can’t really be Palestinian in the first place, because his parents were expelled from their West Bank home and he himself was born in Qatar. Well, Ragen should know: she was born in New York City, of Eastern European extraction – but somehow she manages to qualify as Israeli. Barghouti’s long family history in Palestine (not to mention his truth-telling) makes him a troublemaker who deserves to be expelled. Ragen’s virulent Islamophobia makes her – well, just one of the gang.
Or how about National Lawyer’s Guild attorney Jordan Kushner, who faces criminal charges in Minneapolis for questioning a police officer who arbitrarily expelled a woman from a lecture given by an Israeli apologist, Moshe Halbertal? Kushner – who was bound, jailed until 2 in the morning, and now charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and obstruction of the legal process – is being called an enemy of “free speech” by officials at the University of Minnesota Law School, where Halbertal’s lecture took place.
And Halbertal? Although he is a co-author of the IDF’s most recent “ethics” code, and a defender of Israel’s vicious assaults on Gaza, he’s just an “outstanding scholar,” according to the law school’s dean. It takes real mental discipline to find a threat to “free speech” in an arbitrarily jailed civil rights lawyer, while an apologist for mass murder stands undisturbed at the speaker’s dais. But the witch-hunters can manage even that.
In fact, their hypocrisy can border on the delusional. When I posted a few words on a Jewish newspaper’s website to mention Israel’s 2014 slaughter of some 1,600 civilians in Gaza, a woman reproached me for ignoring “The REAL victims, JEWISH innocent men, women & children.” And to prove Jewish superiority to Palestinian barbarism, she offered me a piece of practical advice: “please cut off your fingers.”
Umberto Eco had it right. When you’ve got a guilty conscience, you need to invent a plot. The guiltier Israel’s conscience, the more witches its apologists will have to find – until they finally look at themselves in a mirror.
