Can Israel Really Serve as a Refuge?—An Analysis (27 August 2019) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I—Faulty Reasoning
The other day my wife and I had a meal with the person who represents our local district in the House of Representatives. My wife had previously told the representative that we thought she was insufficiently progressive and that we disagreed with her recent vote to suppress the boycott Israel movement (BDS) here in the United States. Instead of never hearing from her again, she invited us out for lunch.
It turns out she is a quite pleasant, intelligent, liberal-minded person on almost all subjects. She is particularly worried about the security of the voting system—and that is certainly warranted. However, in the July 2019 vote to suppress the BDS, she tossed liberality to the winds, turned her back on freedom of speech, and went “PEP”—“progressive except for Palestine.” We pointed out that repressing the right to advocate boycotts, a non-violent form of protest was the equivalent of suppressing part of the Constitution.
So, we asked, why did you do it? Her answer, at least in part, was because the Western world is full of anti-Semites—we could not determine how full is “full.” Regardless, we pointed out that the BDS movement here in the U.S. is led by Jews, and thus hardly an anti-Semitic effort. She agreed but mistakenly worried that it was anti-Semitic in Europe. In any case, how would the suppression the boycott bill here help there? It wasn’t making sense to us.
However, that turned out to be beside the point. The world needed a place of Jewish refuge come the next attempted Holocaust. This assumed next Holocaust seems to be taken for granted. And so, Israel, such as it is, needs to be protected from the good intentions of those concerned with such things as international law and human rights. Our otherwise delightful representative is not alone in this outlook. I have certainly heard the argument before—a lot. I have heard it from Jewish, as well as gentile, friends, family, intellectuals, professionals—intelligent folks who, nonetheless, are here indulging in faulty circular reasoning. Here is how it goes:
—Fear of resurgent anti-Semitism causes these folks to insist on the preservation of Israel as a “Jewish state” to serve as a refuge for Jews worldwide.
—Yet Israel, in its ideologically driven (Zionist) effort to create such a refuge, has made itself into an apartheid state. As such it treats non-Jews as subject people. Discrimination is rampant, the Gaza Strip is the world’s largest open air prison, Palestinian land is stolen and property destroyed on a daily basis on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
—This behavior on the part of Israel, the assumed refuge from anti-Semitism, has caused an increase in anti-Jewish sentiment throughout the Muslim world, and provided a context for indigenous Western ultra-nationalists who also harbor an anti-Semitic outlook, to go public with their anti-Jewish bigotry.
—The resulting increase in anti-Semitism makes more urgent the fear that demands the need for Israel as a safe haven.
This is flawed reasoning. In truth Israel is not a refuge from anti-Semitism, it is rather a generator of anti-Semitism. It is not really that place that Jews fantasize about in their worship, “next year in Jerusalem.” It is rather a place that threatens the ethical and moral well-being of the Jewish people as a whole.
Part II—Eyewitness Testimony
There is plenty of evidence that Israel is just such a negative place. But perhaps, like my congressional representative, you find that difficult to believe. Well, consider the recent observations of a couple of Israeli Jews who discuss the situation as insiders, and do so with eyes wide open.
On 12 June 2019 Amira Hass, who has served for 30 years as the Occupied Territories correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, gave an interview to Mari Cohen of Jewish Currents. Hass made the following points:
—There will not be a two-state solution. “The current reality is … one state, which is an apartheid state. This means there are two separate laws: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews. The Palestinian population is subdivided into groups and subgroups. … They’re disconnected from each other. … [This apartheid status has proved] sustainable because the world has accepted it. For Israel, this is the desired reality. …There is no desire on the part of Israel to reach a different reality.”
—In the diaspora, mainstream Jewish leaders “refuse to define these Israeli policies as a problem. It reminds me of Communists who refused to hear any criticism about the Soviet Union. … So anybody who dares criticize Israel is an antisemite, like Communists used to say, anybody who criticizes the Soviet Union is anti-Communist.”
—“Israel uses the Holocaust to justify everything it is doing to Palestinians. This is really the cheapening of the Holocaust. The cheapening of the memory of our grandparents who were murdered, when it [Israel] uses them to [justify] its own acts of oppression.”
It should be noted that Hass’s observation that “the world has accepted” Israeli apartheid has multiple widespread repercussions. It means that “the world” opens the door for all those others who are ultra-nationalists, racists, segregations, and the like to come out of the closet and start to agitate for similar political and social arrangements in their own countries. We have seen this in the U.S., in Myanmar, in various Eastern European locales, and in India. No doubt the list will grow.
On 24 July 2019 Gershon Baskin, an Israeli political and social commentator who has “dedicated his life to the State of Israel and to peace between Israel and her neighbors,” published a commentary in the Jerusalem Post. His subject was the broadcast video of the destruction by the Israeli army and police of “thirteen [Palestinian] residential buildings … in the Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood of Sur Bahir in east Jerusalem.”
He states that “as I watched the video … I wanted to bury myself in shame. When the building imploded and the soldiers laughed as we heard the screams and cries from the Palestinians who became homeless, my shame turned to pure outrage and the urge to be violent. … What we did, what the State of Israel did, what we do in the name of the Jewish state is becoming pure evil.”
He states that the settlers and the government “continue to falsely claim and use [the] Oslo [Accords] as justification for the criminal policies of Israel of removing Palestinians from their homes, demolishing others, strangling their economy, closing roads to them, stealing Palestinian land, burning Palestinian crops, cutting down Palestinian olive trees, chasing shepherds from their land, bulldozing water wells and working toward erasing entire villages.”
He states, “WE HAVE [capitals are in the commentary] no shame. But wait, Palestinians can go to court – there is a system of justice, right? A system of justice run by a military government with military courts under military law is not a system of justice. A Palestinian has little chance of getting justice in an Israeli military court. But wait – what about Israel’s Supreme Court? The High Court of Justice? This is the same court that, back in 1967, decided that international law does not guide its judgments. This is the court that ‘legalized’ illegal settlement building. This is the court that legalized house demolitions. This is one of the examples that former chief justice Aharon Barak said that he struggles with – the decision to ‘legally’ remove families from their home and demolish it. This is called a war crime in international law.”
He concludes, “You can’t keep a military occupation of millions of people going on for years without becoming the essence of evil. That is what we have become and now we don’t even have shame in what we do.”
Part III—More Evidence
The statements above are not mere opinions. They are accurate descriptions of reality. If one can get past Israel’s propaganda and a media in fear of the Zionists, and pay attention to the following sources, one can affirm the accuracy of the above descriptions:
- For the historical background and lead-in to this on-going situation, see the many works of Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris.
- For the context of law and justice see Noura Erakat’s recent book, Justice for Some—Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press)
- On Gaza, see Norman Finkelstein’s meticulously documented Gaza—An Inquiry into Its Martyrdom (University of California Press)
- For the workings of the American Zionist lobby, see John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- For learning about the day-to-day aspects of Palestinian life within an apartheid environment see the following on-line sources:
—Palestine Updates, http://palestineupdates.com
—If Americans knew, https://ifamericansknew.org
—U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, https://uscpr.org
—Electronic Intifada, https://electronicintifada.net
—Americans for Middle East Understanding, http:// www.ameu.org
—Palestine News from Al-Jazeera, https:// www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/palestine.html
Part IV—Conclusion
Within the modern context, Israel is an anachronism desperately, and with some seeming success, seeking to turn the clock back to a time when racism, segregation, discrimination, and indeed, imperialism and colonialism, were the Western legal, political, and social norms. To do so is the only way Israel can claim to be a “normal Western society.” In this effort to make a more barbaric and immoral old world into today’s real world, Israel cannot possibly, rationally, qualify as a safe haven for anyone. Only fear can drive otherwise rational people to accept it as such. That is, fear of the same anti-Semitism which Israel itself has done so much to generate.
