In anticipation of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research’s upcoming Sunday, 6 November 2011 International Conference, “Combatting the Delegitimation of Israel,” this week’s Daily Briefings will focus on the global effort to demonize the lone democracy in the Middle East. The series will provide insight into the pervasive, “soft war” being waged against the Jewish State—in the media, in Europe, at the UN, on and off North American campuses, and in Israel itself. It will also convey relevant ways of combatting, and ultimately defeating, this dangerous propaganda campaign.
Highlighting each Briefing will be a selection of articles written by participants in CIJR’s International Conference. A video of the Conference will be posted on CIJR’s website, www.isranet.org. (For registration information call [514] 486-5544 or write Yvonne@isranet.com.)
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DELEGITIMATION
OF ISRAEL TO GO GLOBAL
Mike Cohen
Jewish Tribune, October 11, 2011
During the past two decades the Montreal-based Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) has attracted a following around the world. Its Daily Briefings on Israel are sent out to more than 40,000 subscribers worldwide. So, with the help of today’s internet technology, a much anticipated all-day international conference in Montreal on Combatting the Delegitimation of Israel, will not only be held on Sunday, Nov. 6 at Congregation Chevra Kadisha B’nai Jacob Beit Hazikaron (5237 Clanranald Ave.), but also will be viewable online at http://isranet.com.
“We have just revamped our website and added new video components,” said Professor Fred Krantz, director and founder of CIJR.… “We will have it [the Conference video] uploaded and ready for viewing. People should check our website closer to the date to learn more.”
A number of internationally renowned academics and specialists on Israel will be presenting papers including: Daniel Pipes (Hoover Institution/MEF); Efraim Karsh (U. London/Middle East Forum); Catherine Chatterley (U. Manitoba); Barbara Kay (National Post); Richard Landes (Boston U./Paliwood); Mordechai Nisan (Hebrew U.); Asaf Romirowsky (Middle East Forum); Charles Small (New Haven); and Sally Zerker (York U.)
“The delegitimation of Israel is a key weapon in the ongoing pro-Palestinian struggle against the democratic Jewish state,” Krantz explained. “It is occurring in Europe, at the UN, on and off campuses in North America, and in Israel itself.”
Bankrolled by Saudi Arabian and other Arab sources, West European governments, and various church and NGO groups and foundations, the campaign is affected by anti-Israel NGOs, anti-Zionist academics and left-wing student groups, including some Jewish students.
“There are Israeli Apartheid Week activities on many university campuses. This is all done to try to weaken and destroy Israel. Why is this not happening to places like Syria and Sudan?”
Krantz notes that the hallmark of this propaganda campaign is its inverted use of traditional human rights, free speech, and democratic-liberal language and values, as well as the misrepresentation of Holocaust memory and historical truth generally.
Founded 23 years ago, the CIJR is an independent Israel—and Jewish—issues-centric think-tank, focused on Middle Eastern foreign policy and international relations. Current topics studied include Judaism, Islam, the Arab world, antisemitism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran and nuclear weapons, Holocaust and Holocaust denial, and Egypt and the Arab rebellions.
CIJRalso works closely with students on and off campus, supporting their unique Dateline: Middle East journal and administering the innovative Student Israel-Advocacy Program, training students in responding to anti-Israel and antisemitic issues and events on campus.…
“CIJR’s Student Israel-Advocacy Program is designed to take back the campus by empowering Jewish and interested non-Jewish students through the acquisition of crucial historical-political knowledge concerning the Jewish people, Zionism and the state of Israel in its Middle East context,” said Joseph Shier, national CIJR chair.
To register for the Nov. 6 conference, visit www.isranet.org, call (514) 486-5444 or email cijr@isranet.com.
ISRAEL AND THE APARTHEID SLANDER
Richard J. Goldstone
NY Times, October 31, 2011
The Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure.… So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.
One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies.… While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.
I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black had no rights to vote, hold political office, use “white” toilets or beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a “pass.” Blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. “White” hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.…
In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs—20 percent of Israel’s population—vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.… In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal; inequities are often successfully challenged in court.
The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction.… South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.…
The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.
(Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court,
led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-9.)
A HAUNTING VOTE AT THE UN
Joseph Klein
FrontPage, November 1, 2011
In its own special version of a Halloween “trick or treat,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) became the first UN agency to admit Palestine as a full member since the Palestinians launched their full court press for total recognition as a UN member state. The final UNESCO vote tally was 107 votes in favor, 14 against and 52 abstentions. The United States, Canada and Germany voted against Palestinian membership in UNESCO. France joined the countries that voted in favor. Britain abstained.…
The Palestinian bid for full membership in the United Nations as a whole is currently before the Security Council, where it is not expected to succeed this year. However, by piling up individual UN agency memberships, which can be approved by those agencies even for non-members of the entire United Nations system, the Palestinians are hoping to create momentum towards achieving their ultimate objective. The chain reaction will start with Palestinian bids to gain membership in the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UN Industrial Development Organization (in which the United States is not a member), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development, which admit entities that belong to another specialized UN agency such as UNESCO.
Sabri Saidam, adviser to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, declared: “This is a historic moment, a moment of jubilation on route to full recognition of Palestinian independence and self-determination, that’s equally a call for reconsideration of positions to those wavering on the Security Council vote. It is also a foundation stone for what’s to come at the (Security Council) and other international organizations.”
UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, speaking after the vote, said the “admission of a new member state is a mark of respect and confidence.” Bokova falsely believes that a government which lacks the basic prerequisites of statehood under international law deserves membership in her organization.… Abbas’s government does not control all the territory it purports to represent, and there are no internationally recognized borders negotiated with Israel in accordance with Security Council Resolution 242. Moreover, a government contemplating “unity” with Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of a member state of the United Nations, deserves neither the respect nor confidence of the international community.
UN Ambassador Susan Rice, piercing through the nonsense coming from UNESCO, tweeted: “Today’s vote to grant Palestinian membership in UNESCO is no substitute for direct negotiations, but it is deeply damaging to UNESCO.” David Killion, the U.S. permanent representative to UNESCO, said the United States “cannot accept the premature Palestinian admission for membership in a United Nations specialized agency such as UNESCO.” Under U.S. law, the Obama administration must cut off funding for UNESCO, as acknowledged by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.
“The United States will refrain from making contributions to UNESCO,” Nuland said. This action stems from a provision of the U.S. code that states: “No funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act or any other Act shall be available for the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states.” The Palestine Liberation Organization is technically the Palestinian entity that represents the Palestinians in the United Nations.
The U.S. cut-off of funding will blow a big hole in UNESCO’s budget since the U.S. has been paying 22% of its budget—approximately $80 million in annual funding. A $60 million payment to UNESCO due in November will be the first casualty of the cut-off.…
UNESCO is reverting to the same kind of irresponsible behavior that led to a U.S. boycott for almost two decades until it was finally ended by President George W. Bush in 2003. In November 2010, UNESCO had already foreshadowed its pro-Palestinian agenda by adopting several proposals by Arab states reclassifying Jewish historical landmarks as “Palestinian sites.” This attempt to use the UN’s cultural agency to blur or obliterate the Jewish people’s historical connection to their homeland reinforces Abbas’s oft-repeated refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. A little more than a week ago, he proclaimed that “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state, or a ‘Jewish state.’” Yet he points to the UN General Assembly partition resolution (Resolution 181), which explicitly recognizes a “Jewish State,” as a legal justification for his bid for Palestinian UN member state status.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had it right when she said the UNESCO cut-off of funding should be just the beginning. “Congress must pass pending U.N. reform legislation to cut off funding to any U.N. entity that grants any upgraded status to ‘Palestine,’” said Rep. Ros-Lehtinen.…
Rash actions must have significant consequences or the rash actions will simply multiply. The United Nations has been misusing American taxpayers’ money for too long. It is time to push back.
NOT JUST ANY CELEBRATION
Jason Edelstein & Naftali Balanson
Jerusalem Post, October 25, 2011
On Tuesday, October 18, as Gilad Schalit returned home, Israelis took to the streets in a bittersweet celebration—the joy of a son coming home tempered by the release of convicted murderers and other terrorists. Similar to the annual transition of Remembrance Day to Independence Day, the Schalit celebrations felt uniquely Israeli.…
At the center of the five-year ordeal to free Schalit was an abject failure of justice and international law. The hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate in this region—and claim in some manner to promote human rights—never adopted the Schalit cause as a raison d’etre. On the contrary, since his captivity began, organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Gisha, and Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) did not conduct sustained, coordinated campaigns on his behalf. Gilad Schalit was simply not a priority for these NGOs.
Instead, NGOs used this issue to condemn Israeli responses to terror from Gaza. The few statements released by NGOs in the past five years drew moral equivalence between Schalit, who was illegally held incommunicado and without access to the International Red Cross, and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisoners according to international legal standards.
During the week preceding Schalit’s return, these same NGOs continued to display moral bankruptcy. Not a single NGO condemned the extortion exacted by Hamas on Israel, resulting in freedom for hundreds of terrorists who were tried and convicted according to due process of law.…
The failure is particularly severe for Israeli NGOs, which proudly claim to uphold human rights for all Israelis and frequently appear before the Supreme Court in pursuit of their own agendas on Gaza. In contrast, they were nowhere to be seen when the families of the terror victims made their case in court.
Similarly, if they had acted with moral consistency, B’Tselem, similar NGOs, and foreign governments, would have used their close connections to UN and other bodies to make Gilad Schalit’s case a serious issue internationally, as they did regarding both the blockade of Gaza and Palestinian prisoners. Would Schalit have returned home sooner if Israeli NGOs had used their influence in these forums? Or if Human Rights Watch had held a press conference in Jerusalem’s American Colony hotel, as they have done for so many reports critical of Israeli policies?…
(The writers are communications director and managing editor of NGO Monitor.)
THE REVISIONIST HISTORY OF SARI NUSSEIBEH
Efraim Karsh
Jerusalem Post, October 10, 2011
Sari Nusseibeh has done it again. In an article titled “Why Israel Can’t be a ‘Jewish State,’” published on the Jewish New Year of all dates, the supposedly moderate president of al-Quds University goes to great lengths to explain why Jews, unlike any other nation on earth, are undeserving of statehood.
“[T]he idea of a ‘Jewish State’ is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications,” he wrote. “The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people—and most Israeli citizens, we trust—will not accept these implications.”
Not that this should have come as a surprise. For decades, Nusseibeh has tirelessly advanced the “one-state solution”—a euphemistic formula that proposes the replacement of Israel by a country, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority.
This advocacy of the destruction of a long-existing state, established by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination, has hardly dented Nusseibeh’s “moderate” credentials. That can be partly explained by the desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for Palestinian and Arab peace partners. That desire dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s, despite countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the “noble savage” in general, and the Westernized native in particular. With his posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard degrees and impeccable western demeanor, Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before him, represents the ultimate product of the “white man’s civilizing mission.…”
I was personally privy to this feting during a London meeting in the spring of 1989. I was then a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Jafee Center for Strategic Studies, and like many well intentioned Israelis at the time and since, we aspired to lay the ground for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation through secret talks with Palestinian interlocutors, including members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then an outlawed organization in Israel. The group we met was headed by Faisal Husseini, then the PLO’s most senior official in the disputed territories, flanked by Nusseibeh and a few prominent London-based Palestinian academics.
The meeting was pleasant and informative enough, with the courteous British hosts going out of their way to keep their Palestinian guests sweet. Yet I was taken aback when Nusseibeh, the celebrated epitome of Palestinian moderation, turned out to be the most extreme member of the group. Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution—Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—he sang the praise of the “one-state paradigm,” demanding the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to be followed by Palestinian “refugees” from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.
In subsequent years, Nusseibeh would pay customary lip service to the two-state solution while consistently questioning the very legitimacy of the state with which he ostensibly wished to make peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop, unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for example, he told an old Oxford friend that “one day, in the near or further future, all this [Israel and Palestine] will be one binational state. It’s just a question of how we get there.”
In an April 2005 debate at Dartmouth College, Nusseibeh advocated the creation of a bi-national state as the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.… In a 2007 political memoir Nusseibeh missed no opportunity to denigrate and delegitimize the Jewish state through sharp, short, often subtle yet always false readings of history.
He does this in spades in his latest article. A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because “no state in the world is—or can be in practice—ethnically or religiously homogenous.” But the Jewish state that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally homogenous: unlike the Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s to date, has insisted on a Judenrein Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for nearly 20 percent of its total population.
As David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own (Mapai) party in 1947, the non-Jews in the Jewish state “will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will be their state as well.”
Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition be either a theocracy or an apartheid state, and that its Jewish nature opens the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority (whose very existence he previously denied) “to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights).” This, too, flies in the face of Israel’s 63-year history, where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law, and have been endowed with the full spectrum of democratic rights—including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
In fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective communities, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.
Small wonder that whenever an Israeli politician proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-Arab settlements in the future Palestinian state, as part of a land exchange within the framework of a peace agreement, the residents of these localities immediately voice their indignation. Moreover, recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across Israel’s pre-1967 borders, would rather become citizens of the Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.
But Nusseibeh is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the misconception, prevalent among Arabs and Muslims, that Jews are a religious community and not a nation deserving of statehood. Hence, instead of insisting on being accepted for what it has been for 63 years, or what the UN partition resolution envisaged it to be, Israel should shed its Jewish identity and become “a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism” like many of its Arab neighbors which have Islam as their official religion “but grant equal civil rights to all citizens.” This of course is the complete inverse of the truth.
The Jewish state is a civil, democratic and pluralistic society, something that none of its Arab neighbors can stake a claim to. On the contrary, precisely because Islam is enshrined as state religion throughout the Middle East, the non-Muslim minorities have been denied “equal civil rights” and have instead been reduced to the historic dhimmi status whereby they can at best enjoy certain religious freedoms in return for a distinctly inferior existence, and at worst suffer from systematic persecution and oppression.
And this is the “one-state paradigm” offered by Nusseibeh to Israel’s Jewish citizens.
(Efraim Karsh, a professor at King’s College London and director of the Middle East Forum,
is presenting a paper in Montreal at CIJR’s November 6th International Conference.)
