Palestinian rights and Israel’s agenda

John Stillwell PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved.You can watch the Jewish American academic Norman
Finkelstein on YouTube taking a
question from the audience after one of his lectures in 2013.

The questioner asks why the Arab world failed to establish a Palestinian State when they had the opportunity to do so after the UN mandate to partition Palestine in 1947. Finkelstein’s lengthly and eloquent response makes four salient points.

First, realising
immediately that the question had been prepared beforehand since it had nothing
to do with the topic under discussion, and was consequently not asked in a spirit of genuine
inquiry, Finkelstein urges the questioner to open his mind and listen and think
for himself since he was not listening to an enemy.

Second, the question was completely irrelevant because of the progress that has been made since 1967 when the Arab countries came to accept the two-state settlement which is the basis of what we have today.

Third, in returning to a time before 1967 the question was clearly motivated by an agenda which needed to avoid mention of this progress towards a negotiated settlement in order to maintain the status quo.

Fourth, the Arab nations could not accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel in 1947 because, reasonably, they could not accept a movement (Zionism) which, according to Finkelstein, citing leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, had territorial dispossession and dislocation built into it.

As with Finkelstein’s questioner, Dave Rich’s new
book, The Left’s Jewish Problem. Jeremy
Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, also has an agenda. Rich attempts to argue that the British
Labour Party has a systemic problem with anti-Semitism under Corbyn’s
leadership as the title implies.

But since there is little or no evidence to support
this view, the real purpose of the book is to suggest that since Israel’s
critics are motivated by anti-Semitism their criticisms of Israel’s policies
and actions are simply a pretext for the expression of their anti-Semitism
which then renders all such criticism invalid.

The all-too-evident and depressingly familiar tactic
here – weaponising anti-Semitism in order to distract attention away from
Israel’s serial violations of international law by turning the tables on those
who criticise it (effectively, shooting the messenger) – has a predictable
effect on Rich’s thinking since the book is an object lesson in evasiveness, making
false claims, distorting the facts or ignoring them entirely.

The results of a remarkable piece of investigative
journalism using undercover reporting and secret filming was recently broadcast
by Al Jazeera to uncover the extent of the influence of the
Israel lobby on British political life.

The investigation created a scandal when a senior
political officer at the Israeli embassy, Shai Masot, was filmed discussing with
Conservative ministerial aid Maria Strizzolo, ‘taking down’ prominent British
politicians like Deputy Foreign Minister Alan Duncan.

Even Conservative MP’s were outraged by this attempt
by a foreign power to interfere with and even subvert the political process by
clandestine means. The government’s response was feeble. Israel’s apology,
Masot’s recall and Strizzolo’s resignation was sufficient for Theresa May to
regard the matter as closed.

As the investigation made clear the scandal was
connected to the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis which had begun earlier in
February 2016 with allegations of anti-Semitism in the Oxford University Labour
Club based on little more than the organisation of Israel Apartheid Week. Club co-chair
and former intern with the prominent lobby organisation British Israel
Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), Alex Chalmers, resigned in protest.

The affair was investigated by then Labour Students
National Chair Michael Rubin who figures significantly in the Al Jazeera
investigation as a Parliamentary Officer for Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).

Rubin is seen on camera admitting that the LFI works
closely with the Israeli embassy while maintaining the appearance of
independence. The Chair of LFI MP Joan Ryan was said to be in almost daily
contact with Shai Masot.

In a conversation between Ryan and Masot recorded
at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool in September Masot makes
clear that £1 million is available from the embassy to support the activities
of LFI including taking MP’s to Israel.

Masot was also working hard to establish a young LFI
group with Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter ‘Robin’. He admits on camera
that money would be available from the embassy to help set up this group.

We can only conclude that a range of supposedly independent political organisations in the UK are receiving help and financial support from the Israeli embassy in exchange for promoting a favourable view of Israel.

We can only conclude, because the evidence is
overwhelming, that a range of supposedly independent political organisations in
the UK including LFI, the Jewish Labour Movement, and the Young Fabians are
receiving help and financial support from the Israeli embassy in exchange for
promoting a favourable view of Israel as well as combatting those who criticise
it.

Israel’s most effective weapon in the campaign against
Palestinian activism and the BDS movement is to equate them with anti-Semitism.
Israel was bound to turn its attention to the Labour Party when it elected long-time
supporter of the Palestinian cause Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

Undercover filming at the Conference of the smearing
and wilful misrepresentation of critics of Israel with the bar of anti-Semitism
set so low as to be virtually impossible to avoid reflected the wider
circulation of unsubstantiated allegations of anti-Semitism in the Party both
to undermine Corbyn and stifle criticism of Israel.

Through the summer and into the autumn the search for
anti-Semites in the Labour Party continued in a manner that can only be
described as a McCarthyite witch-hunt with lurid headlines and dramatic ‘exposés’
in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel press and on television.

But as the Al Jazeera investigation helps make
clear, the Israeli embassy had a hand in the whole affair and were working
strenuously behind the scenes through their front organisations and with the
help of right-wing Labour MP’s keen to topple Corbyn to make the label stick in
spite of there being little or no evidence to support it.  

These manoeuvrings exemplify the kind of self-interested
or instrumental thinking that the German Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer
thought had come to dominate liberal democracies at the expense of its more
public and objective counterpart after the war.

For Horkheimer, because it pursues only the interests
of the part and not the whole, instrumental reason loses contact with the world
where the truth lies and so remains rational only in its own terms while
becoming increasingly irrational in relation to the whole.  

Deprived of its rational foundation in the world instrumental
reason becomes imprisoned by the interests of those who bind it to their
immediate aims and objectives. It offers no check to those who might wish to exploit
other human beings as no more than a means to achieve whatever end they deem
fit.

The situation is much worse today than it was just
after the war since post-truth politics which seems to be everywhere gaining
ground is instrumental thinking taken to an extreme. Because self-interest has
swallowed up the world and deprived it of any independent existence there can
be no appeal to some outside other that might arbitrate against it and hold it
to account.

For the government of Israel, whose skilled use of instrumental
reason is second to none, that outside other is Palestine and the Palestinians
who make up the whole – Israel/Palestine – which can never be discussed except
as a security risk.

Israel/Palestine can never be discussed because it is
true in two fundamental senses. First because of the shameful truth of the
effects of occupation in the West Bank and siege in Gaza both ruled illegal
under international law.

Second because of the truth of Israel’s unstated
ambition, based on the belief according to Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad
Erdan, who was secretly recorded
 in London in 2016, that, ‘The
land of Israel totally belongs to the Jewish people. Not any compromise
morally, biblically…The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people’.

A mind-set which allows you to see only half the world
because the truth of the other half is either unbearable or impossible to admit
becomes binary in all its aspects. Whether
things are right or wrong comes to depend on the speaking subject rather than
independent evidence. Hence those who speak against Israel cannot be other than
anti-Semitic. Even Jews cannot escape being drawn into this binary logic.

Norman Finkelstein’s response to being described as a
self-hating Jew is again instructive. Suppose, he argues, if, instead of being
a self-hating Jew he became a self-loving Jew, how would this change materially
affect the facts on the ground?

He, of course, rightly concludes that it would have no
effect whatsoever. It is precisely the denial of the facts on the ground that
allows the notion of the self-hating Jew to function.

The Israeli government and its supporters need to
break out of the prison house of their own thinking by taking a broader and
more inclusive view of things. Above all they need to listen to and reflect on rather
than dismiss what others have to say since, as Finkelstein says, they are not
listening to an enemy.