As Israel ‘staggers toward the abyss,’ criticizing it is now ‘the most fashionable cause’ on the left

First, from “How to Lie to College Students About Israel,” by Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

In recent years in North America and elsewhere, as Israel’s image has staggered from trough to abyss, damage control has turned into a growth industry of Israel advocacy organizations. Though avowedly non-partisan, most have a definite if unacknowledged rightist orientation. For many of the groups, Jewish college students have become a primary target audience.

“There may be nothing more important to the future of the U.S.–Israel relationship than young American Jews,” wrote Israel advocate Eric R. Mandel in a recent guide to listening and speaking and listening to Jews on campus.

Dr. Mandel is correct. But there may be one thing even more important to the future of the relationship: Not lying to young American Jews.

Next, above is video for a panel on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the other night featuring Bob Carr, the former Australian foreign minister who wrote that the country has subcontracted its Middle East policy to the rightwing Israel lobby. The panel has an extensive discussion of Carr’s allegations, beginning at minute 9, and Carr holds his own. But I found the segment remarkable for others’ comments: first, violinist Nigel Kennedy’s heartfelt endorsement of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) as the only way to counter the publicity machine that portrays Palestinians as violent and subhuman, and second, rightwinger Brendan O’Neill‘s vehement critiques of Carr’s Israel lobby analysis and Kennedy’s endorsement.

It is hard to imagine Kennedy getting such a platform to promote BDS on a US broadcast– let alone the lobby issue being discussed so vigorously– though I’m sure this will happen here before long, and I will stop complaining.

The segment goes from Minutes 9 to 26. The transcript is at the link.

Carr explains that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not allow him to criticize Israel’s bursts of settlement building though it goes against international law, the peace process, western policy, etc. And Carr was an Israel supporter; he set up “Labor Friends of Israel in the 1970s” and was “the first on his feet to say that Israel had a right to defend itself” from rocket attacks from Gaza.

O’Neill says that it is anti-Semitic to criticize the Israel lobby. (I disagree entirely, but here’s his case.)

Well, the suggestion in your book is actually that foreign policy was effectively outsourced to these groups and that’s something slightly different than what you’re saying now because what that echoes, in my mind, is this old, quite ugly prejudice about Zionist groups or Jewish groups being the puppet masters of politics and that is a prejudice that has…

[I]t’s always the Jewish lobby or the Israel lobby that is depicted as being particularly sinister, blackmailing politicians, controlling politicians, making politicians fall at their feet and I think that’s a real double standard on Israel at the moment. Not only is their lobby group treated as uglier than every other lobby group but also Israeli artists are the only ones who are generally boycotted by trend westerners. Israeli academics are boycotted, whereas other academics from very authoritarian countries are not…

I come from a continent where there is a long history of blaming Jewish or Israeli groups when political things don’t go your way. There is a long history of that and it has – and it’s an ugly history and I would just say if you failed to convince Julia Gillard to go with your view of what happened to the Middle East, that’s your fault. Don’t blame these lobby groups.

Audience member Jessie Tu then stands to speak of her Palestinian solidarity work, and the bullying that she gets for it:

How can a logical dialogue even begin when the belief in the equality of all humans is met with such aggressive defensiveness?

Nigel Kennedy responds from the heart:

[I]t’s quite close to my heart, this subject as well, having had a long-term Palestinian girlfriend when I was a teenager and I couldn’t believe the stories she was telling me. And having been to Palestine and having played with Palestinian musicians, I think if we’re talking about boycotts we might think about how many Palestinian musicians get to play all over the world or in what is known as Israel itself. You know, Palestinian meetings and cultural gatherings are frequently broken up by the police. Women are dying trying to give childbirth, getting across the checkpoint because they haven’t got a pass for the particular day, and I really think that a cultural and sporting boycott is the only way to make any difference with this issue because then the world will take notice and the publicity machine which portrays Palestinian people as terrorists will be slightly frustrated. Palestinian people are wonderfully cultivated people in the same way that everybody from the Middle East is. If, you know, everyone – we’ve gone so far in this world and we can’t treat people equally and when there is an apartheid system working in any country, I think the South African case has proven to be successful, that a boycott of some type produces results.

Later O’Neill makes this statement about BDS:

When [Israelis] come to Britain to do Israeli performances, they are jeered off stage. They are booed off stage. An Israeli violinist was booed out of the Proms. So that is what the BDS is about. It’s about censoring Israeli voices and it’s a very authoritarian approach. I don’t think people who criticise Israel are anti-Semitic at all but I am concerned about the way in which criticizing Israel has become the most trendy, fashionable cause amongst every lefty in the West, above everything else. People now define themselves through their loathing of Israel. You’re basically not allowed into polite society these days unless you’re a, you know, signed-up critic of Israel and that I think is damaging because it imbues the conflict in the Middle East with this kind of great western culture war. It turns an ordinary war into a culture war, it entrenches both sides, and it makes a solution actually more difficult.

Ann El Khoury directed me to this exchange. She noted, “Kennedy effectively steers the focus back to the plight of Palestinians as the ontologically affirmative focus of BDS, rather than reflecting O’Neill’s selectively negative framing of BDS as censorship and exclusion of Israeli artists.”