FEBRUARY 5, 2020
Senior BBC news reporter Orla
Guerin has found herself in hot water of an increasingly familiar kind. During
a report on preparations for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, she made a brief reference to
Israel and an even briefer reference to the Palestinians. Her reporting
coincided with Israel hosting world leaders last week at Yad Vashem, its
Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem.
“In
Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young [Israeli] soldiers troop
in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is
now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But
some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and
survival.”
British Jewish community leaders and former BBC executives leaped on her
“offensive,” remarks, even accusing her of antisemitism. Guerin had dared,
unlike any of her colleagues in the western media, to allude to the terrible
price inflicted on the Palestinian people by the west’s decision to help the
Zionist movement create a Jewish state shortly after the Holocaust. The
Palestinians were dispossessed of their homeland as apparent compensation – at
least for those Jews who became citizens of Israel – for Europe’s genocidal
crimes.
Guerin’s was a very meek – bland even – reference to the predicament of
the Palestinians after Europe’s sponsorship, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration
onwards, of a Jewish state on their homeland. There was no mention of the
Palestinians’ undoubted suffering over many decades or of Israel’s documented
war crimes against the Palestinians. All that Guerin referred to was an
indisputable occupation that followed, and one could argue was a legacy of,
Israel’s creation.
Holocaust
weaponized
In fact, as we shall see in a moment, Israel’s establishment is today
invariably and necessarily justified by antisemitism and its ultimate,
horrifying expression in the Holocaust. The two are now inextricably
intertwined. So Guerin’s linking of these two events is not only legitimate, it
is required in any proper analysis of the consequences of the Holocaust and of
European racism.
In fact, the furor among Jewish groups in Britain seems all the more
perverse given that the Israeli media have extensively reported on Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit efforts to weaponize the current
Holocaust commemorations to harm the Palestinians.
He hopes to leverage sympathy over the Holocaust to win assistance from
western capitals in bullying the International Criminal Court in the Hague into
denying that it has any jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories Israel is
occupying. That would prevent the court from enforcing international law by
investigating war crimes perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. (In
fact, aware of the diplomatic stakes, the ICC’s prosecutors have so far shown
zero appetites for pursuing those investigations.)
This extract from a
commentary by noted Israeli human rights activist Hagai El-Ad, published in the
liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Israel’s version of the New York Times),
gives a proper sense of how inadequate was Guerin’s solitary reference to the
Palestinians – and how her colleagues are actually complicit through their
silence in allowing Israel to weaponize antisemitism and the Holocaust to
oppress Palestinians:
“How
dehumanizing [of Netanyahu and the Israeli government], to insist on denying a
people’s last recourse to even an uncertain, belated, modicum of justice [at
the ICC]. How degrading to do so while standing on the shoulders of the Holocaust
survivors, insisting that this is somehow being carried out in their name. …
“It
remains in our hands to decide if the past’s painful lessons will be allowed to
be turned on their head in order to further oppression – or remain loyal to a vision of freedom and dignity, justice and rights, for all.”
History
in the shadows
By not echoing the rest of the western media in entirely airbrushing the
Palestinians out of Europe’s post-Holocaust history, Guerin stood isolated and
exposed. None of her colleagues – supposedly fearless, muckraking journalists –
appear willing to come to her aid. She has been made a scapegoat, a sacrificial
victim – one that will serve as a future reminder to her colleagues of what
they are permitted to mention, which parts of Europe’s history they may examine
and which parts must remain forever in the shadows.
Guerin’s comment
was denounced as “offensive” by her former boss, Danny Cohen, who was
previously the director of BBC television. No one, of course, cares that the
Palestinians’ experience of being wiped out of recent European history and its
legacy in the Middle East is deeply offensive. The Palestinians are what
historian Mark Curtis refers to as “Unpeople”.
What he and others meant by “offensive” was made explicit by the
Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which argued that Guerin’s statement was
antisemitic.
The CAA is one of the groups that, using similarly twisted logic, led
the attacks on the British Labour party over claims of antisemitism in its
ranks under leader Jeremy Corbyn. It helped to foist a highly problematic new
definition of antisemitism on the party that downgrades concerns about racism
directed at Jews to prioritize a supposedly bigger crime: criticism of Israel.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition offers 11
examples of antisemitism, seven of which refer to Israel rather than Jews.
Preposterously, the CAA alleged that Guerin had violated one of these
examples. It said her report had included “drawing comparisons between Israeli
policy and the Nazis”. Very clearly, she had done no such thing.
Erasing
the record
The most that could be inferred from Guerin’s extremely vague, overly
cautious remark was two things. First, that Israel justifies the need for a
Jewish state on the threat to Jews posed by antisemitism (as evidenced by the
Holocaust). And second, that the resulting state of Israel has inflicted a very
high price on the Palestinians, who had to be displaced from their homeland to
make that state achievable. At no point did Guerin make a comparison between
the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians.
She simply, and rightly, hinted at a chain of related events: European
racism towards Jews culminated in the Holocaust; the Holocaust was used by the
Zionist movement to justify European sponsorship of a Jewish state on the ruins
of Palestine; Palestinians and their supporters feel aggrieved that the
Holocaust has become a pretext for ignoring their plight and suppressing
criticism of Israel. Each of those links is irrefutably true. And unless the
truth is now antisemitic – and there is mounting evidence that it is being made
so by Israel, its lobbyists and western governments – what Guerin said was not
conceivably antisemitic.
It may seem obvious why Israel and its lobbyists would want to silence
criticism, or even a basic historical understanding, of the context and
consequences of Israel’s founding. But why are western officials evidently so
keen to aid Israel in this project of erasing the historical record?
Israel could never have been established without the expulsion of
750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and the destruction of hundreds of
their villages to prevent any return. That is why a growing number of
historians have risked the wrath of the Israel lobby to declare these events
ethnic cleansing – in other words, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Western
hypocrisy
Let us note that the circumstances in which Israel was created were not
exceptional – at least, from the point of view of recent western history. In
fact, Israel is an example of a typical settler-colonial state. In other words,
its creation depended on the replacement of the native population by a group of
settlers, just as occurred when Europeans founded colonies in the United
States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
The difficulty for Israel and its western allies have been that Israel’s
crimes are being committed in the modern era, at a time when the west has
claimed to have learned the lessons both of its colonial past and of the Second
World War. In the post-war period, the west promised to change its ways, with a
new commitment to international law and the recognition of human rights.
The shameful irony about the west’s complicity in Israel’s creation is
that Israel could only have been established through the dispossession and
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Those outrages occurred in the very
same year that, via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, western states
pledged to create a different, better world.
In other words, Israel was launched as an old-style western colonial
project at the very moment when the western powers promised to decolonize,
giving their colonies independence. Israel was embarrassing proof of the west’s
hypocrisy in promising to break with its colonial past. It was evidence of bad
faith from the outset. The west used Israel to outsource its colonialism, to
bypass the new limitations it claimed to have imposed on itself.
A
colonial spin-off
So committed were the western powers to Israel’s success that France and
Britain helped it from the late 1950s to build a nuclear arsenal – the only one
in the Middle East – in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Predictably,
that further destabilized an already highly volatile region as other states,
especially Iraq and Iran, considered trying to level the playing field by
developing their own nuclear weapons.
In another sign of the west’s commitment to this colonial spin-off was
its determination to turn a blind eye in 1967 to Israel’s greedy expansion of
its borders in conquering the rest of historic Palestine. For more than half a
century Israel has been given free rein to entrench its occupation and to build
settlements in violation of international law. All these decades later the
International Criminal Court is still dragging its heels – indefinitely, it
seems – rather than prosecute Israel for settlements that are irrefutably a war
crime. And more than 50 years on, Europe continues to subsidize the settlements
through trade agreements and a refusal even to label settlement products.
Rather than account for these outrageous violations of an international
order the west founded, Israel’s allies have helped to obscure or pervert this
real history. Israel has developed a whole industry, hasbara, to try to prevent
outsiders from grasping what has happened since 1948.
It is therefore important for Israel and its western allies to promote
justifications for Israel’s creation that appeal to emotion, not reason, as a
way to dissuade observers from delving too seriously into the past. In fact,
there are only three possible justifications / explanations for the
transformation of what was once Palestine into Israel, a state created by and
for European Jews on the ruins of Palestine. Two of these rationales play
extremely poorly in the modern west.
That leaves only the third justification, as Guerin intimated in her report, and one that resonates well in an age saturated with identity politics.
A
Biblical promise
The first justification says that the Zionist movement was entitled to
rid Palestine of the overwhelming majority of its Palestinian natives because
God promised Jews the land of Palestine thousands of years ago. This argument
tells Palestinians: Your family may have lived for centuries or even millennia
in Nazareth, Nablus, Bethlehem, Beersheba, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, Haifa but
that counts for naught because God told Abraham the land belonged to the Jews.
Let us not discount the continuing power of this argument. It was what
inspired the 19th century, apocalyptic movement of Christian Zionism – a
longing for the “restoration” of Jews to the Promised Land to bring about an
end-times in which only true Christians would be saved.
Later, Christian Zionism was repurposed and adopted by small numbers of
influential Jews like Theodor Herzl who realized they needed the support of
Christian Zionist elites if they were ever to build a Jewish state. They
finally found a sponsor in colonial Britain. In part, it was an appetite for The biblical prophecy that guided the British cabinet in approving the Balfour
Declaration.
Today, much teaching in Israel depends on unspoken, unexamined claims in
the Bible that Jews have a superior right to the land than Palestinians.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials know that nowadays Biblical arguments hold
little sway in much of the west. Outside Israel such claims play well only with
evangelicals, mostly in the US, and have therefore been deployed selectively,
targeted chiefly at US President Donald Trump’s base. For the rest of us, the
Biblical rationale is quietly set aside.
White
man’s burden
The second justification, frequently resorted to in the early years of
the Zionist project, was a fully-fledged colonial one and closely tied to ideas
about a superior Judeo-Christian civilization.
Colonialism assumed that white westerners were a biologically separate
race that had to assume responsibility for taming and civilizing the savage
nature of inferior peoples around the planet. These inferior beings were
treated like children – seen as impulsive, backward, even self-destructive.
They needed a role model in the white man whose job was to discipline them,
re-educate them and impose order. The white man was compensated for the heavy
burden he had to shoulder by awarding himself the right to plunder the savage
people’s resources. In any case, it was assumed, these barbarians were
incapable of managing their affairs or putting their own resources to any good
use.
If all this
sounds improbably racist, remember that Trump right now is proposing a
variation of the same idea: Mexicans must pay for the wall that keeps them out
of a white America, even as US corporations continue to exploit cheap Mexican
labor; and ungrateful Iraqis are threatened with being
made to pay for the soldiers that invaded their country and the US military
bases that oversee their occupation.
Liberals are no less averse to colonial ideas. The white man’s burden
underpins the “humanitarian intervention” project and the related, endless “war
on terror”. It has been easy to paint other states and their peoples negatively
as they continue to reel from centuries of colonial interference – the theft of
resources, the imposition of artificial borders that stoke internal, tribal
conflict, and western support for local dictators and strongmen.
Developing states have also struggled to prosper in a world dominated by
western colonial institutions, whether NATO, the World Bank, the IMF or the UN
Security Council. Doomed to failure by the very rules rigged to ensure the
western powers alone prosper, developing states find their dysfunctional or
authoritarian politics turned against them, used to justify continuing
invasion, plunder and control of their resources by the west.
‘Death
to the Arabs’
Whatever Zionism claims, Israel was not an antidote to this “white man’s
burden” ideology. It was an extension of it. Much of Europe may have been
deeply racist towards Jews, but Europe’s Jews were usually viewed as higher in
the racial hierarchy than black, brown or yellow people. Typically Jews were
despised or feared by antisemites not because they were seen as backward or
primitive but because they were presented as too clever, or as manipulative,
secretive and untrustworthy.
The Zionist movement sought to exploit this racism. Its founders, white
European Jews, impressed on potential sponsors their ability to help colonize
the Middle East on behalf of the European powers. After the Balfour Declaration
was issued, the British government put the Colonial Office in charge of shaping
a Jewish “home” in Palestine.
An indication of the degree to which European ideas of racial categories
polluted the thinking of the early Zionist movement can be gauged by the
treatment of the Mizrahim – Jews from neighboring Arab states who arrived in
the wake of Israel’s creation.
The Ashkenazi
(European) Jews who founded Israel had no interest in these Jews until the
destruction of large parts of European Jewry in the Nazi death camps. Then the
Mizrahim were needed to bolster Jewish demographic numbers against the
Palestinians. Founding father David Ben Gurion was disparaging of the
Mizrahim, terming them “human dust”. There were vigorous debates inside the
Israeli army about whether the supposedly inferior, backward Arab Jews could
ever have their savage natures tamed sufficiently to serve usefully as
soldiers.
Israel launched
an aggressive campaign to de-Arabise the children of these Jews – so
successfully that today, even though Mizrahim constitute half of Israel’s
Jewish population, less than 1% of Israeli Jews can read a book in Arabic. So
complete has their re-education been that Mizrahi supporters of the Beitar
Jerusalem football club lead chants of “Death
to the Arabs” at the ground, apparently unaware that their grandparents were
Arab in every sense of the word.
Virus
of hatred?
Again, Israel and its western allies understand that few observers will
accept overtly colonial-style justifications for Israel’s creation, except of
the vague, war-on-terror kind. Such arguments run counter to the spirit of the
times. Nowadays western elites prefer to pay lip service to identity politics,
intersectionality, native rights – at least if they can be used to provide
cover for white privilege and to disrupt class solidarity.
Israel has proven particularly adept at inverting and weaponizing this
form of identity politics. Now deprived of traditional Biblical and colonial
rationales, Israel has been left with only one palatable argument to justify
its crimes against Palestinians. A Jewish state is supposedly needed as
inoculation against a global plague of antisemitism. Israel, it claims, is a
vital sanctuary to protect Jews from inevitable future Holocausts.
Palestinians are not just collateral damage to the European project to
create a Jewish “home”. They are also presented as a new breed of antisemite –
their anger supposedly is driven by irrational, inexplicable hatred – that Jews
need protecting from. In Israel, the roles of oppressors and victims have been
reversed.
Israel is only
too keen to extend the accusation of antisemitism to any western critic who
champions the Palestinian cause. In fact, it has gone much further. It argues
that, whether consciously or not, all non-Jews harbor the virus
of antisemitism. Other Holocausts have been averted only because of nuclear-armed
Israel behaves like “a mad dog, too dangerous to bother”, as Israel’s most
famous military chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, once declared. Israel is designed
as a garrison state for its Jews, and an impregnable bolt-hole in time of
trouble for any Jews who foolishly – Israeli leaders simply – have not
understood that they face another Holocaust outside Israel.
White
European racism
This is the self-rationalizing appeal of antisemitism for Israel. But it
has proved the perfect weapon too for western elites who wish to besmirch their
opponents’ arguments, like Corbyn, Labour’s outgoing leader, found to his cost.
Just as the Zionist movement and its Jewish state project were once the
favored vehicle for spreading British colonial influence in the Middle East,
today Israel is the favored vehicle for impugning the motives of those who
criticize western imperialism or advocate for political alternatives to
capitalism, such as socialism.
Few outside Israel understand the implications of the mischievous,
self-serving antisemitism rationale crafted long ago by Israel and now embraced
by western officials. It assumes that antisemitism is a virus present in all
non-Jews, even if it often lies dormant. Non-Jews must remain vigilant to prevent
it from reviving and infecting their thinking.
This was at the heart of the claims against the British Labour party.
So-called “extreme leftists” like Corbyn and his supporters, so the argument
goes, were so sure of their anti-racism credentials that they dropped their
guard. Largely free of fear of immigrants and non-white populations, they
mixed with British Muslims and Arabs whose attitudes and ideas were easily passed
on. Arab and Muslim resentment towards Israel – again, presented as
inexplicable – supposedly provided fertile soil for the growth of antisemitism
on the left and in Corbyn’s Labour party.
Guerin’s mistake was to hint, even if briefly and vaguely, in her report
at a deeper, even more, discomforting recent history of European white racism
that not only fuelled the Holocaust but also sponsored the dispossession of the
Palestinians of their homeland to make room for a Jewish state.
The connecting thread of that story is not antisemitism. It is white
European racism. And the fact that Israel and its supporters have signed up as
cheerleaders for that kind of racism makes it no less white and no less racist.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human
Despair”
(Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
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