Countering the myths spread by pro-Israel ideologues
Source: Dissident Voice
Monday, June 04,
2012
The intricate, sprawling architecture of deception that shapes
understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America is probably unique in
history. For over six decades, the U.S. Congress, successive presidents, media,
public opinion, all have supported a story which portrays Israel as
wholly good and innocent, while painting those resisting its violence and
injustice as anti-Semites, Nazis, and terrorists. The myth that Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks by
uncivilized Arabs persists, even in the face of Israel’s
brutality and violations of international law in its 44-year long occupation of
the Palestinian Territories.
The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects
a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the
proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle
East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt
for Arabs and Muslims.
Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish
establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone
who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and
human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a
deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of
“facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is
that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater
Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.
The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in
the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the
courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab,
Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit.
One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London
and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.
A smear campaign
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company,
2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an
accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It
refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s
actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in
Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.
The book has been well received by Middle
East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to
give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz,
founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission
statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist
allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist
offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center
protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”
Last November, an article in the web FrontPage
Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign
against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of
Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article
appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an
organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of
Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.1
Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies
Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a
blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being
told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to
judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”
As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and
who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of
a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that
defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both
immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s
treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to
show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel
and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only
for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.
The Arabs and the Holocaust
In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar
described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the
West and Israel,
of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and
historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of
beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as
in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of
millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes,
do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”2
The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when
Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s
foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a
strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab
nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and
opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only
among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant
anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.
Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book
quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv
University, who wrote
that in the 1930s: the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political
arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle
classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism
both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”3 [a
reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some
support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and
British colonization.]
Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one
particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad
“pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists
led a coup against Iraq’s
pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the
presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling
in Baghdad.
British forces invaded Iraq,
put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on
the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated
British.
There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews
were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished
order, killing many of the mob.
Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the
violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own
lives. Looters from Baghdad’s
slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action.
With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the
families of Jewish victims.
Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that
of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi
origin.4 There
is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of
widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab
world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country
during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.
In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler,
a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn
of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free
French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to
the liberation of Europe. They fought
alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily
in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany
in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free
French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in
November 1944 were North African Muslims.5
The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism
in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western
anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the
fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public
discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores
the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of
the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the
Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are
absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance,
writes: Neither their religious culture nor their historical record
lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the
kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other
Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical
perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.6
And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish
political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their
expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s
infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able
to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”7
Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today
than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons”
[emphasis mine].8 These
historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again
obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of
750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418
Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more
Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by
continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian
populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.
Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic
hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and
destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a
pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the
cause.”9 Remove
the cause—that is, end Israel’s
ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.
Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and
changeable—dependent on Israel’s
actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the
particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim
countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still
is typical of European racists.”10
I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was
written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has
been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build
bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes: It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what
counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation
wall, will not forever count as error on the other.11
In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one
face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward
persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to
the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other: Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and
the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.12
Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of
thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic
mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and
psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the
shallow, warped views of U.S.
main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the
Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.
Hasbara
The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon
Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context.
They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote,
then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter
Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g.,
Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while
confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle
East studies establishment.”
The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus”
(hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”),
published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to
score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s
arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible
whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a
dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something
often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the
writing of most FrontPageMag articles.
Nakba vs. Holocaust
Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an
asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’
the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah
ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”
In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized
the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of
ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace
requires the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without
putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot
be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the
importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the
Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of
experience just recently in Gaza
in the winter of 2008-2009.
In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between
colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole
population.”13 He quotes Edward Said: “Who would
want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”14 But he also
states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.
In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the
ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of
either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which
Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and
dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At
present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned
behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache
helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the
West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli
settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being
“judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.
This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?
Anti-Arab racism in Israel
Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab
world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’
are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and
other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab
feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in
January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to
live next door to an Arab.15 Racism
is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported
that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent
anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.16
Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author
of a book on Israeli school books,17 thinks
“state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian,
she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal,
people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t
want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and
terrorists.”
She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you
explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an
indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the
major reason for that is education.”
“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that
are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952
Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and
become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians
who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have
made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when
the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded
almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it
is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.
More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly
institutionalized in Israel.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports
that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and
discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating
in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed
“unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural
fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”18
Holocaust denial, Nakba denial
Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively
forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN
secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with
Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then
Israel’s
foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day
if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”
Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially
telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even
Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of
1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”19Because
she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military
and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.
Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all
its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are
increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an
oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined
must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being,
for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s
communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by
converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the
spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild
of a Jew.”
Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned
…
Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article,
waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial
project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinians.’”
That Israel
was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for
“ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the
Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate
Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect
on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”20
In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of
refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as
“infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night.
Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’
return.
Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually
take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew
who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,”
concludes his remarkable 1967 essay: … the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the
culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American
movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was
to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically
and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken
so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that
have been made to conceal it.21
Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by
“atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review22 takes
up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism
and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas,
Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and
Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis;
jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world
today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted
together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”23
In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel
conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs: … it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has
given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to
the escalation of the Middle East conflict –
again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology
in a new garb.24
This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts
only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land
and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted
great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those
living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to
Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred
to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan
Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response
to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese
deaths, almost all of them civilians.
One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited
the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed
unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,25 calls upon Israel to withdraw from
all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a
Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its
capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations
with Israel
and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to
“[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good
neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and
prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian
refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and
Palestinians.
It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.
All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an
equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s
beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of
a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.
The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses
Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry
little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors
in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They
use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of
public discourse.
They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which
especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites
telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get
harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.
Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating
disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was
curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk
at UC, Davis: … challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A.
I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr.
Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a
minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told
me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.
In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane
Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no
relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the
Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and
offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David
Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that
in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question.
She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was
stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.
In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich,
Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that
if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in
academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the
scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors;
instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East
experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to
withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with
accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.
Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center
are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating
on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no
less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or
Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The
coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues
affecting Israel, and to
create positive campus change for Israel.”
Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is
straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring
that “effective support for Israel
thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a
successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress
and campus leaders.”26 To-morrow’s
leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached
by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.
Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are
Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net,
a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young
men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at
the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who
Palestinians are?”
Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young
woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to
her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer
her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the
answer.’”
For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come
as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and
demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in
larger public arenas.
Annette Herskovits, a holocaust
survivor and the daughter of holocaust victims, holds a PhD in linguistics from
Stanford University and is the author of Language and Spatial Cognition (Cambridge
University Press, 1987, 2009). She has written a couple of dozen published
articles on Palestine/Israel and is a Palestinian rights activist. Read other articles
by Annette.
1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in
America, Center for American Progress, August 2011. [?]
2. Achcar, The Arabs and
the Holocaust, p. 33. [?]
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond
Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the
1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6. [?]
4. Nissim Rejwan, The
Jews of Iraq:
3000 years of history and culture. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985. [?]
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée
d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ?Volume 692 of Textes et
documents pour la classe TDC. ?C.N.D.P., 1995. [?]
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs
aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000. [?]
7. “Israel
Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs,
January/February 2005. [?]
8. Achcar, The Arabs and
the Holocaust, p. 274. [?]
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites
and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new
afterword. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259. [?]
10. Achcar, p. 275. [?]
11. Achcar, p. 273. [?]
12. Achcar, p. 291. [?]
13. Achcar, p. 130. [?]
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust,
p. 26. [?]
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on
the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011. [?]
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet
Magazine, January 19, 2011. [?]
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine
in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in
Education. Library of Modern Middle East
Studies, 2012. [?]
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah,
March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June
2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah. [?]
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,”
with ?Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1,
Winter 2004. [?]
20. Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5. [?]
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler
State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973. [?]
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the
website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the
boycott Israel
campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin
Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008). [?]
23. Achcar, p. 169-170. [?]
24. From a talk given at Yale
University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic
Antisemitism in the Middle East.” [?]
25. Arab Peace Initiative. [?]
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