[R-G] Israel, apartheid, anti-Semites

[Anthony Fenton]

Israel, apartheid, anti-Semites
By Rick Salutin
| March 6, 2009
http://rabble.ca/columnists/israel-apartheid-anti-semites

What is the sound of one side condemning? It's the media rendering of  
Israel Apartheid Week, now under way. B'nai Brith ran full-page  
newspaper ads asking universities to "prevent" it and the attendant  
"anti-Semitism on campus." There were no ads from organizers, so we  
didn't hear them being anti-Semitic in their own words -- or denying  
the charge.

Here's the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno: "That detestable, despicable  
annual campus hate-fest ... Jew-bashing cloaked in self- 
righteousness ... students who don't recognize racism when they're  
spewing it."

I don't know if she meant to be ironic, spewing hate at the spewers.  
But I've talked with friends, Jewish and non, about these claims.  
They're disturbed, they don't want to witness the rise of a new  
horror. Here's my take.

Cabinet minister Jason Kenney calls Israel Apartheid Week "a  
systematic effort to delegitimize the democratic homeland of the  
Jewish people" by linking it to racism, a line virtually mouthed by  
Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff. That is way too cute. Any  
"settler state," such as Canada, which took someone else's land, can  
be seen as illegitimate. But it's an abstract point. "Apartheid"  
became widely used in this context only when Israel began building  
what came to be called an apartheid wall, looming over Palestinians,  
sequestering more land, cutting them off from each other.

The usage grew as Israel expanded settlements, built Israeli-only  
roads and set up checkpoints so Palestinians would at best be left  
with "Bantustans," such as those that apartheid South Africa offered  
blacks, rather than a true state of their own. A small but real  
Palestinian state would be accepted by almost everyone. The Arab  
League has offered peace in return for Israel just leaving the West  
Bank. Even Hamas has a (nuanced) position on living with Israel. You  
can look it up.

What of the "new anti-Semitism" that Jason Kenney says is "based on  
the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland"? Well, who  
are these new anti-Semites? I never see names or quotations. Canada  
has always had anti-Semites, but they've felt no need to hide their  
hate behind a screen of anti-Israel criticism. Think of David  
Ahenakew. A cartoon banned from hallways at the University of Ottawa  
showed a helicopter marked Israel rocketing a kid in Gaza holding a  
teddy bear. It's crude, but that's cartooning. There's no anti- 
Semitism in it. A front-page National Post cartoon showing CUPE  
Ontario's Sid Ryan offering David Ahenakew a job was far more  
scurrilous. No one can say Sid Ryan embraces anti-Semites, though he  
criticizes Israel strongly. Opposition to Israel seems well delineated  
from anti-Semitism to me.

Most of the specifics come down to shouts at protests. As in: "Cries  
of 'Die, Jew' and 'Get the hell off campus' were heard." The Canadian  
Jewish Congress's Bernie Farber says he's "never" seen it this bad "on  
the streets of Toronto and university campuses." Well, I spend lots of  
time on streets in Toronto and it doesn't look like Kristallnacht to  
me. But wait, that's glib. It's these images that scare my friends:  
They evoke Nazi Germany. I know that.

But Nazi Germany wasn't about name-calling and group hate. Those will  
persist, perhaps always. The Holocaust occurred largely because anti- 
Semitism was historically rooted and respectable there: religiously,  
socially, intellectually, politically. Writers and politicians were  
proudly anti-Semitic. Here, anti-Semitism is unacceptable in all those  
ways. This whole debate proves it. We should be glad for that, and  
keep it in perspective.