Criticism of Israel and antisemitism

[psychomath]

This is not a TAAT - it's something I've been thinking about recently anyway with the accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party, and after reading this article in Spiked magazine. The thread about Israel killing a journalist reminded me that I'd been intending to post it, but it's not a response to that thread in particular or any posters in it. Just wanted to get that out of the way before anyone thinks I'm having a passive-aggressive go at them personally.

I do think there's a disproportionate focus among parts of the left on criticising the actions of the Israeli government compared to those of (other) oppressive regimes, both in the Middle East and across the world. I'm sure that the vast majority of individuals involved in this criticism are not remotely antisemitic, and in fact I'm not entirely convinced that antisemitism is the main root of the issue at all. On the other hand, it does seem like there's something strange going on in the wider picture.

It's a tricky issue to discuss because, obviously, criticism of Israeli foreign policy doesn't in itself make you antisemitic, and a lot of it is valid. In addition, everyone has their own particular areas of interest, and it would be ridiculous to require that people know about every single global conflict before being allowed to comment on the Israel-Palestine one specifically. It's also perfectly reasonable for people to want to be able to discuss Israel without others immediately jumping into the conversation to say 'why do you only ever talk about Israel and not Saudi Arabia/ISIS/whoever?' So no individual is doing anything inherently wrong by having these conversations, and in and of themselves they're good and important conversations to have.

However, if it were simply a case of people having different interests, you would expect to see a number of groups devoted to criticism of various regimes - some people would be interested in Israel, but there would be similar numbers whose biggest concern was the Saudi bombing of Yemen, or Turkish attacks on Kurdish regions of Syria. Instead, there's a huge amount of support among the left generally for the Palestinian cause - numerous student unions officially support BDS, for example, and Israeli Apartheid Week is often marked by events on campus - whereas there seems to be (comparatively) far less attention drawn to or even understanding of the other issues. Among the left-wing people I know personally, everyone has an opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but very very few are even aware that there is a civil war in Yemen, never mind angry about the Saudi involvement in it and our own continuing ties with the Saudi government. That's anecdotal of course, but from reading left-wing pages and blogs it seems to be reflected in wider society as well.

So when people complain about 'whataboutery' in conversations about Israel, or how they should be able to discuss the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of antisemitism, I don't think they're entirely wrong to be annoyed by it. But at the same time, I think people need to understand that these conversations don't happen in a vacuum. When you're confronted by what feels like a constant steady drip of anti-Israel sentiment, and simultaneously see very little criticism of other countries' policies even when they're arguably as bad or worse, it's hard not to feel under fire sometimes. And because it's such a widespread and decentralised phenomenon, there's often no place to direct this frustration except (perhaps unfairly) at the individuals participating in these conversations. AIBU to see it this way?

And then...you have to ask why.

WHY are so many more journalists sent to cover Israeli actions? Is it that they are keen to see fair play in the region??

Is it hell:

"What Is Important About the Israel Story, and What Is Not

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters
.
Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)

Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.
What Else Isn’t Important?

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like."

So: coverage of the Israeli and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vastly disproportionate. And it is wholly negative to Israelis.

Which begs the question: Why?

And Who?

Well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Who do you think is pushing a wholly disproportionate and entirely negative focus in the media against the world's only Jewish State?

[Clue: It's not 'a worldwide Jewish conspiracy' , that's for sure.]

people on this thread seems to think israel is a jewish country its not its the only democracy in the me with all faiths as citizens under attack from a terrorist group called hamas.

*Turkey is a democracy with elections and changes of government for the past 30 years.

Lebanon is a democracy with elections and changes of government for the past 25 years. Although Lebanese democracy was interrupted by the 1975-1990 civil war, it was also democracy before that all the way back to 1943.* turkey is not normally considered middle eastern but erdogan is an dictator. no freedom of speech and Lebanon last had an election 9 years ago dont let facts get in the way of your narrative though

What always drives me a bit nuts about this is that the left are all banging on about how wonderful immigration is, but they support Palestinians who want the forced repatriation of immigrants to their county.

It’s also the terms it’s talked about in. Calm conversations about moving along the peace process - good. Pictures of hook nosed money grabbing Jews - bad.

I don’t think the left are doing anybody any favours at the moment because peace isn’t going to happen until people sit down and talk. The sort of inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the left at the moment encourages the opposite.

There is a hell of a lot of hypocrisy going on too. The left is asking all white British people to take on collective responsibility and guilt for slavery and empire which happened before they were born. And for the most part our ancestors would have had zero political power, couldn’t vote or do anything about it and were being treated badly themselves. But they ignore that the Arabs have treated Jews pretty dreadfully over the years and just s couple of hundred years earlier than Empire expelled the Jews and left them stateless.

I don’t know why that collective responsibility and duty to welcome immigrants is only something westerners can do.

I'm Irish traveller and to be honest, I am far far more terrified of a backlash from the far -right 'Anglo-Germanic' sort. They've collaborated with the Saudis, they run the corporations and actually, they all collaborate pretty much - it's all a business/ geopolitical deal. Jews can go to Israel, where do we go?

I have said this on another thread but being anti Israel and anti Semitic are two separate issues which shouldn’t be conflated yet regularly are. My DF is Jewish but he is anti Israel and anti Zionism. He supports Palestine whilst also being a practicing Jew. Can a Jewish person really be accused of anti-semitism? He isn’t alone with this either. He believes Israel gives Judaism a bad name which is the last thing the faith needs as it has never been particularly favoured...

And the far right are definitely using this issue to forward their genocidal fascist agenda. Most of us are in trouble.

DolorousEdd - I'd hardly call Lebanon a shining bastion of Palestinian rights. Refugees and their descendants (they're the only group to have hereditary status) living there, 70 years after the creation of Israel, are still in dire camps, barred from working in many professions, owning property, attending state schools and much more:

www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/palestinians-lebanon-living-prison-171215114602518.html

I think the issue is massively complex with right and wrong on both sides but I do feel that some people only see one side as being in the wrong.

People say that the holocaust or the persecution against Jewish people that has existed for centuries shouldn’t come into to it but I think it’s a relevant part of the story especially when you have people and states who think Israel shouldn’t exist at all. Maybe this patronising and I apologise if so but I think it’s important for Jewish people to have a place where they know their lives don’t have to rely on the current feelings and opinions of the ruling party or majority population at the time.

I think you can be critical of policies of Israel and not be anti-semetic but sometimes there is a crossover.

I am so unsure of what the actual situation is re Israel/Palestine due to biased reporting of the conflict over the years, to the point that I don’t know what to think about either government.

I’m Jewish Orthodox by birth but atheist as are the rest of my family. At surface level I see an oppressed minority oppressing the Palestinians and am appalled and angry. Digging under the surface it’s clear the situation has many layers and that what is reported is biased In that the majority of antagonistic and barbaric actions and unwillingness to engage in a peace process, on the part of Palestine go unreported.

I think there may be a good deal of perception bias at play regarding what actually is and isn't reported about whom.

Basically, I've heard the exact same argument about underreporting of Israel's crimes from Palestinians - and the arguments are as convincing or unconvincing as those coming from the Israeli side are.

And please don't throw a multitude of studies at me now, everyone. I've read most of them and virtually none come from an unbiased source. So, as a passionate empiricist, I'll reserve the right to remain uncertain what actually is the case because that's what the data available lead me to believe I should be.

DolorousEd

Ah. Competitive victimhood. I've been wondering when this would come up. Usually, tho', it's the BAME line. People like Jackie Walker complaining about the Jews hogging Holocaust Day. Slavery was much worse. Seguing into Jewish bankers financing the slave trade. She's twice been suspended from the LP and removed from her position as Vice Chair of Momentum, but, like Livingstone, hers is one of the cases that the LP is dragging its feet over.

It's the first time I've come across the Irish leaping on the bandwagon. How many Irish playgroups, nurseries and schools have permanent security guards, I wonder? All the Jewish institutions in London, not just those involving children, but care homes, too, that I know of are on full alert.

For example, only last month, well known Jewish Times columnist Melanie Phillips, who complains incessantly about how much anti-semitism there is is in the U.K. said the following about my country, Ireland: “The claim to unite Ireland is tenuous since Ireland itself has a tenuous claim to nationhood, having seceded from Britain as the Irish Free State only in 1922.

That is indeed a shocking and hypocritical comment, assuming she supports the existence/nationhood of Israel, which I assume from your comment that she does. I also think anti-Irish discrimination is something that's very much minimised in Britain today, particularly among people my age who aren't old enough to remember the events you mention. (Coincidentally, I happen to have a vested interest in the politics of both countries, despite being neither Jewish nor Irish.) However, I'm not sure Melanie Phillips is really representative of 'British Jewry' - I'm not sure I've ever actually heard any of the British Jews I know express any opinion whatsoever on Irish unity. I'm also not sure what the treatment of other religious/ethnic minorities has to do with antisemitism, unless you're saying no-one is allowed to discuss antisemitism until all other racism/bigotry is dealt with.

(Not that it's relevant to the thread, but as a side anecdote one of the more anti-Irish - or at least ignorant -
things I've heard recently was from an ardent Labour supporter complaining about Theresa May cosying up to the DUP, whom he claimed had IRA backing When I pointed out that the DUP were most certainly NOT backed by the IRA I may have got a little sarcastic, his response was 'okay so I got some letters confused, why are you making such a big deal out of it?' )

Hi all,
We have already deleted a thread on a similar subject this morning, as it had descended too far to be rescued by deletions. Can we ask you all to bear this in mind on this thread, and to try to keep the tone elevated and demonstrating the intelligence and understanding for which Mumsnet is rightly famed?

Basically, I've heard the exact same argument about underreporting of Israel's crimes from Palestinians - and the arguments are as convincing or unconvincing as those coming from the Israeli side are.

I broadly agree with this, actually - I've heard it said that the BBC tries for an equal number of complaints about its pro- and anti-Israel bias, and if it achieves that assumes it's striking about the right balance I'm not convinced the mainstream media as a whole is biased one way or another, though subsections often are. (That said, I haven't read cuisant's article yet, so that might change my mind.) It's more within left-wing groups and publications that I see this disproportionate focus.

I think that our dealings with Saudi Arabia are a disgrace, but the media don’t report on Saudi, I may be wrong but I think that’s got a lot to do with lots of money being made from Saudi relations. I’d love for that to be given more coverage, it’s very worrying how much money is flowing here from there.

I think the view that Israel shouldn’t exist is very much minority opinion and not held by JC or any other LP politicians that I’m aware of. What is regrettable is the treatment of the Palestinian people, a solution to this seems far off.

When I was at university sanctions against Iraq were a big focus of the left, years before that SA was a focus. I don’t think it’s racism that draws people to protest about Israel but people naturally are drawn to a cause of the moment and Israel seems to be a cause of the moment, something people feel they are able to effect through support for change.

I also think the media are whipping up anti JC at every opportunity, he’s a terrorist sympathiser, a communist, a pacifist, a threat to national security.. I personally think lots of this is driven by various media owners fear of paying more taxes should he come to power.

Clearly there are issues in the Labour Party and the left are not immune to racism which is an issue on all sides imo. TMs hostile environment, threatening deportation to scores of commonwealth migrants and denying them access to benefits including the nhs doesn’t seem to attract the charges of racism across the right of uk politics.

I find it all very sad. I feel that the Tory government are doing huge damage to the UK, that a left leaning party is needed to improve the lives of so many people suffering. Politics is such a mess and JC is extremely problematic but where is the alternative?
Labour lost my support at the invasion of Iraq. But actually I think that our political system is the problem, it hands too much power to the hands of too few people. I feel thoroughly disinfranchised.

I found this handy guide.

I thave said this on another thread but being anti Israel and anti Semitic are two separate issues which shouldn’t be conflated

I agree wholeheartedly that criticism of Israeli policy is not in and of itself antisemitic, as I said in my OP. I don't think anyone (apart from a few fringe weirdos who exist in every political issue) thinks it is. What people do struggle with, I think, is the sheer volume of criticism directed at Israel compared to other 'bad' countries, and as there's no particular leader or figurehead for this criticism, there's also no-one at whom we can direct our frustration apart from the ordinary people who just happen to be discussing the issues. Thus the people who want to legitimately criticise Israel feel they're being jumped on with accusations of antisemitism, when a lot of the time the pro-Israel people's problem is with the wider trend in discussion rather than specifically with the individuals involved in one particular conversation. Does that make sense?

I think the reason there's a lot of discussion is that in almost every other case where there is a country with a national policy that kills or oppresses a particular group, it tends to be a given that it's wrong, most people will be in agreement so there winds up being not a lot to discuss.

In Israel's case, it has a huge amount of support and justification given for it's actions and there are plenty of narratives presenting such as "only democracy in the Middle East" and how gay-friendly it is, which others will view as being starkly at odds with it's treatment of Palestinians.
This is obviously going to lead to a lot more lively debate than, say, whether or not North Korean policy is acceptable.

Criticism of, for example, Turkish persecution of the Kurds or Saudi-backed actions in Yemen don't tend to get as much airtime because those governments and their supporters don't immediately accuse their critics of racism/Islamophobia or whatever.

Just because other governments' misdeeds aren't being debated all over the media and the internet doesn't mean they're not being being talked about, just that there's little argument about them, at least in Western Europe.

I also don't think anti-semitism is a left v right thing. It's more complex than that. Historically, there have been plenty of prominent anti-semites on the right.