We’ve seen an uptick in attacks on minorities recently, especially following the election. At a time when Muslims have really been taking it on the chin the Senate tried to push through the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” an innocuous-sounding bill. But this legislation would have turned universities into censors by threatening “federal funding at colleges and universities where political speech against Israel occurs,” an expert on anti-Semitism and extremism wrote.
The bill would have required the Department of Education to alter the meaning of anti-Semitism to include “demonizing Israel” or “judging Israel by a double standard.” This new definition was adopted by the State Department under Hillary Clinton but was originally conceived in 2004 by Natan Sharansky, the founder of Israel’s Ba’Aliyah (immigration) party. Free speech advocates including the ACLU object to the political manipulation of a concept that has been around since 1879 – well before Israel was established.
While the bill’s supporters claim it was simply intended to shield Jewish students from hate, it was really just another attempt to censor debate over Israeli settlements and shut down the Boycott and Divestment (BDS) movement on college campuses, particularly student calls for university trustees to divest of Irael-related portfolios. With such legislation even progressive Jewish groups like JStreet-U, which is critical of Israeli policy without advocating BDS, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which does support BDS, could be subject to loss of their First Amendment rights.
According to Sharansky’s “3D Test” anti-Semitism is no longer simply the demonization of Jews. In fact, he doesn’t even bother to include this well-understood aspect in his definition. For Sharansky anti-Semitism is (1) demonization of the state of Israel; (2) holding double standards regarding the state of Israel; and (3) deligitimization = denying the right of the state of Israel to exist.
According to Sharansky “demonization” of Israel refers to unfair or exaggerated comparisons of Palestinian and Jewish suffering, or comparing Israel’s crimes with the Nazis. For Sharansky (and now the U.S. State Department) “deligitimization” refers to critics who refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Recognition of nations is a political function and one state can choose to recognize another any way it chooses.
Israel’s borders are contested by Palestinians, and land that Israel seized in Lebanon and Syria is also disputed. Neverthess, all U.N. members fully recognize Israel, and even the three with land disputes give Israel limited recognition. Israel, however, insists on being recognized specifically as a Jewish state. No nation seriously intends to erase Israel from a map – especially one with nukes. What Israel wants is the international seal of approval for Zionism.
Unfortunately for Israel, the world’s experience with Germany soured everyone on 19th Century ethno-nationalism. Zionism – any kind of ethno-nationalism – is incompabile with a pluralistic democracy. Israel’s occupation of 4.5 million Palestinians is brutal. Palestinians need their own state but Israel has effectively placed them in reservations or bantustans. This can’t g on. BDS is one way to exert a little economic pressure.
But this is a political discussion – one we should be free to have, on a street corner or a campus. Few Americans want the United States to become a Christian theocracy (I hope I’m right about this), and there are many Saudis, Pakistanis, and Iranians opposed to religious law in their own countries. Americans aren’t stingy with criticisms of Saudi justice and Americans have plenty to say about Cuba, China, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. It’s hard to see how Israel is being held to a different standard.
But whether Natan Sharansky or the government of Israel object to criticism. It’s a right to criticize a foreign country – or even one’s own – regardless of criteria. One doesn’t even need facts – like Republicans on climate change.
The injustice of Israel’s occupation is what the BDS movement hammers away at – martial law, settlements, selective application of laws, thirty-foot separation walls, private roads for settlers, checkpoints, settler violence, water theft, destruction of olive trees, night raids without warrants, prison sentences without trial, press censorship, gag laws for Israeli dissidents, “Judaizing” of both the West Bank and Arab communites in Israel proper. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documents a lot of it.
But a double standard does exist. Just not the one Mr. Sharansky wants to talk about.
Israel is not a western democracy in any recognizable sense. Democracies don’t maintain martial law for half a century over an ethnic and religious minority corraled into reservations. Democracies don’t legislate religious and racial laws that advantage members of a single group. We’d have a stroke if full legal rights in Germany were extended only to blond-haired, blue-eyed people in the year 2016.
Israel’s 1951 Law of Return permitted Jews (defined as having a Jewish mother) from any land to “return” to Israel, while millions of Palestinians have been permanently locked out of homes their parents lived in. As distasteful as it is to admit, eliminating Palestians by recognizing only Jewish blood is effectively a racial law. But the Law of Return was amended in 1971 to make it possible for non-Jewish relatives of immigrants to join their families in Israel, so the amendment took on an additional racial cast since mainly Ashkenazim (European Jews) were added to Israel’s population. Imagine if Britain offered automatic citizenship (along with settlement benefits) only to Anglicans and Episcopalians from any country (plus their blue-eyed descendants regardless of religion). We would wonder what kind of democracy it was.
And this is the real double standard – that Israel gets a pass for thumbing its nose at democratic norms.
Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner thinks he knows why Israel bothers western critics so much: “Western liberals – not to mention Israeli liberals – whose greatest moral outrage is reserved for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have nothing to apologize for. It’s a natural reaction, an inevitable one. As with apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, European colonialism and other examples from the West’s history, the occupation enflames leftists in a way that other, greater tyrannies in the world don’t, simply because this tyranny – the last of its kind still standing – is being perpetrated by their own side.”
Derfner has a point, but even with greater tyrranies I’m entitled to a little extra outrage over Israel. After all, I’m paying taxes to my “own side” to help Israel prolong the suffering of stateless Palestinians. I’m not providing aid to Assad to kill residents of Aleppo. And the hypocrisy of the double standard from my “own side” disturbs me the most because the link between foreign policy and domestic policy has implications which affect me personally. If politicians overlook war crimes in Israel, they’ll also overlook the abuse of civilians by police domestically.
Meanwhile, Israel has quite the enabler in the United States. American politicians pretend that Israel does not have nuclear weapons while other countries are punished if they spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does nothing. Israel receives massive aid packages every year – ones like no other nation on earth receives. Double standards.
Without doubt Israel is America’s favorite nation and is the beneficiary of a double standard – not because it has stood with the US in Afghanistan or Iraq like its NATO allies, but because many American politicians are evangelicals, for whom this little country is not just another nation – but the birthplace of Christ. For them Israel is not even Israel as a modern state. For evangelicals it’s a Biblical Disneyland. Israel’s substantial lobby operates as if represented domestic interests, while lobbyists for other nations have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. More double standards.
Yet is it a double standard to point out that maybe – just maybe – there should be a little daylight between our foreign policy and Israel’s – that our interests are not identical? This tired formulation (“no daylight”) is used repeatedly by politicians for no other country. And it’s just not true.
As he was leaving the presidency, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice – “honesty is the best policy” was one. But Washington also had something to say about permitting double standards for a favorite nation:
“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”
No one in modern times could say it any better.
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