Noam Sheizaf (photo: Yossi Gurvitz)
Michael Oren is a master hasbarist. Albeit, nowhere as proficient nor eloquent as the first Mr. Hasbara, Abba Eban, but a master none the less. He’s creepy, slick and peddles himself off as a scholar.
When I first read Oren’s recent Op-Ed on Foreign Policy’s blog, it made me cringe, literally. For starters I was appalled that a site I respect and use as a frequent resource would stoop so low as to function as a blatant propaganda outfit for the Foreign Ministry of Israel (but that’s another matter altogether). Merely the title itself, “Israel’s Resilient Democracy,” made me want to gag. It starts out with this allegation:
The Jewish state, moreover, belongs to a tiny group of countries –…– never to have suffered intervals of non-democratic governance.
And then it just gets worse with every sentence.
972’s Noam Sheizaf takes him on, chews him up and spits him out. Heaven! Sheizaf says he will go “in depth”, and he does. In “Omissions, half-truths, lies: Ambassador Oren in Foreign Policy” Sheizaf completely eviscerates Oren over and over and over.
Here’s one example:
Ambassador Oren writes:
In fact, Israel has tolerated acts that would be deemed treasonous in virtually any other democracy. Ahmed Tibi, who once advised PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat and recently praised Palestinian “martyrs” — a well-known euphemism for suicide bombers — serves as a member and deputy speaker of the Knesset.
Context: Knesset Member Ahmad Tibi (Raam-Taal / United Arab List) was recently accused by a rightwing watchdog group of giving a speech more than a year ago in which he praised suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. When the full video of the speech was released, it turned out that Tibi was referring to Palestinians who were killed in protests and to civilians who lost their lives. The version released by the watchdog group was heavily edited to create a false impression.
As a result, journalist Ben-Dror Yemini of Maariv and The Jerusalem Post, a well-known critic of the Arab Knesset members and one of those who broke the shahid (martyr) story, retracted his accusation both on his blog and in the printed paper. Yemini even went on Israeli public radio, saying: “I admit I was wrong. We owe an apology to [MK] Tibi.”
The leading Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth also published an apology for running this story in its printed edition.(correction/update: Yedioth apologized for the same accusation but on a different occasion, not the affair mentioned here. Mr. Tibi claimed that Dan Margalit, senior pundit for Israel Hayom, also backed down from these accusations, but I wasn’t able to find a link )Not only did MK Tibi never praise suicide bombing, he is extremely consistent in denouncing the killing of Israeli civilians. Tibi is also a passionate critic of Holocaust denial in the Arab world, and can often be heard saying that “there is nothing more immoral than Holocaust denial.” There are two options here: Either Prof. Oren knowingly repeated a blood libel against the deputy speaker of his own Knesset, or he failed to fact check the issue before repeating those accusations. Both cases say something of the nature of Prof. Oren’s work, and demonstrate how easy it is to demonize Palestinians in Israel today.
Sheizaf neither begins or ends there, he goes after Oren for perpetuating the myth of Israeli Arab parties calling for the “dismantling the Jewish state” when in fact they repeatedly call for a “state for all its citizens.” He rips Oren over the British Mandate’s emergency regulations and administrative detention, the NGO fiasco, the boycott law, the Nakba Law, the erosion of democratic rights of Israeli citizens, and then skewers him over his condescending critique of Peter Beinart’s assertion that Israel bars Palestinians from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.
Sheirzaf asserts the heart of Oren’s text “intends to portray Israel as a tiny America, a bastion of civil rights in a hostile and strange environment,” and counters:
Let’s imagine those citizens surrounded by walls and fences and a system of dozens of roadblocks, some of them permanent with many appearing and disappearing every day, between the various suburbs and towns, so a route that could take 10 minute to drive regularly turns into a journey of hours. Let’s imagine them unable to relocate or travel abroad without a special permit, notoriously hard to obtain, from the military authorities.
And on top of this, they can’t vote.
And now let’s imagine this unique situation applied to a third of the population under the United State’s control – say 100 million – for two-thirds of the country’s history, meaning over 150 years. This would be the proper analogy, if we were to follow Ambassador Oren’s logic. It doesn’t sound very democratic.
Not very democratic indeed.
Sheizaf slays him at the end, it’s so much fun to read. Thank you Noam, fabulous.
Annie; I won’t comment on the above since Michael Oren makes my skin crawl every time i see him or read anything he writes. It surprises me that any american with any degree of intelligence actually pays attention to this guy. Eban on the other hand was a master.
However, i am taken by your comment; “For starters I was appalled that a site I respect and use as a frequent resource would stoop so low as to function as a blatant propaganda outfit for the Foreign Ministry of Israel”, .
I am surprised and shocked that you still regard FP as a source for any kind of open and intelligent op eds. The site has long been taken over by blatant liars and twisters of events that I for one have taken them off my list of trusted links, just like i did with Al Jazeera sometime ago. FP has become a dumping ground for neocon ideology that is counting on the “OLD” reputation of the site to peddle their twisted interpretation of events and generally mislead readers.
I have kept up with FP for sometime and when the Syrian crisis started (a country i devoted years in learning and monitoring) I noticed the outright manipulation and dumping of garbage on the site by several op eds and was shocked as to why FP was allowing this on their site. My coup de grace came when they published an op ed by France’s FM Juppe who had the gull of peddling “France” is Syria’s friend and will always protect the christians in this region. That was enough for me.
FP has joined the compost bin of rotted journalism that seeks to mislead and misinterpret events so future historians are not able to balance what really took place. In this bin you will also find, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, WP, NYT, Canada’s National Post and on and on ….
“Michael Oren is a master hasbarist”
For me it all seems to be falling apart. You can only see the shtick so long before you see how hollow it has become. So morally vapid. Even the Government of Israel stuff is see through. It’s all ideological, not rational and the ideology is no longer fit for purpose. Zionism has to live in the world and the world has moved on.
The end of the 2SS is a massive moment. All the Zionist garbage about peace means nothing. It never meant anything.
This was always the plan :
http://www.haaretz.com/misc/iphone-article/israel-palestinian-economy-not-stable-enough-for-independent-state-1.419358
It goes way beyond cynicism. It’s some sort of mental disorder.
Bad faith is only the beginning. Washed in years and years of bad religion. I presume Yiddish has something that gets to the point faster. Ziobots are moral zombies who keep coming back to a well that is now empty of meaning.
“State for all its citizens” is code for “dismantling the Jewish State”. Since it calls for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to be made citizens and thereby put in a position to vote Israel out of existence as a Jewish state. That isn’t “shredding” his position, it is merely willfully failing to understand it.
Sorry, but the only reason you see it as “shredding” his position is that you agree with Sheizaf’s position before hearing him speak. I see his comments as specious and deliberate distortions of what is really going on. Which is that the unrelentingly hostile Arabs are trying to destroy Israel.
“the “dismantling the Jewish state” when in fact they repeatedly call for a “state for all its citizens.” ” BUT TO BE FAIR, these hard-line right-wing anti-democratic Zionists want a “Jewish State” as they understand that term and they understand that term as the state of the Jewish People and NOT the state of the citizens. so
{ Democracy == DISMANTLE J.S. }.
How about we Americans ask our government (for which WE get to vote) to withhold all monies and cooperations and UNSC vetoes for Israel UNTIL Israel becomes adequately democratic IN ACTIONS and legislates that it is the country of its citizens and not of the Jewish People.
Right, no chance of it, because our government (for whom we vote) is ALSO not democratic but is, rather, oligarchic, with BIG-ZION as a major oligarch.