On Criticism of Israeli Policies vs. Anti-Semitism: They Are Not One and the Same
Dr. Common Good
The recent controversy surrounding comments made by new Congressional Representative Ilhan Omar about money and the influence of AIPAC once again raises a thorny issue – the political difficulty of criticizing Israel. To that, my response is the following: It is fair to criticize Rep. Omar’s clumsy use of money-tropes, which have a long history in anti-Semitic narratives. However, it is not fair to suppress and divert legitimate criticism of Israel or of those who support current Israeli policies by throwing up the smokescreen of anti-Semitism when it is not present. There are good reasons to criticize Israeli policy, together with the history of American unwillingness to seriously address or even rebuke Israeli actions when it has certainly been justified. AIPAC has clearly played a significant role in that strange reticence, a pattern documented in a number of serious works of scholarship, including John J. Mearsheimer’s and Stephen M. Walt’s groundbreaking 2008 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Criticizing Israel has become even more difficult under the current administration, which has leaned so far towards Netanyahu and the Israeli right that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has virtually been buried as a news issue, a pattern exacerbated by occasional attempts to minimize the significance of the longstanding dispute at all. Yet Israel, in ongoing defiance of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 446, has, for many years, “relentlessly” (a characterization by Thomas Friedman in an open letter to Trump) expanded settlements, often through intimidation, force, the abuse of the Planning and Building Law, and by other well-documented means, now even enshrining settlements as policy in the recently-passed Nation State Law (July, 2018). This is an abuse of human rights, plain and simple, and criticism should not be censored or hamstrung in any way. These policies have been and remain a danger to U.S. security and interests, and in fact undermine Israel’s own long-term security – a view held by this author and others who otherwise support Israel’s right to a secure existence. And at the extreme, to argue that God is something akin to a land-grant agency that assigns, by divine right, a specific piece of land exclusively to a specific people, even though that entire area has been home to many throughout history, is a dangerous fallacy that can only lead to abuse. Security is a legitimate issue, but it is inseparable from a just resolution of the allocation of land and the formalization of Palestinian self-governance through a two-state solution.
Last but not least, those who criticize Representative Omar for anti-Semitism yet remain silent about an egregiously racist and anti-Muslim campaign poster that links her to 9/11 have no right, no standing to level any such criticism, period.