Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Conjoined Forces in the War Against Arab Sovereignty

image of Samira, a Iraqi-Palestinian Muslim woman with her partner Edit, an Argentinian-Israeli Jewish woman is from here. They appear in the documentary film Zero Degrees of Separation

A few facts get muddied in many discussions about what is generally termed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Here are some of those facts: one can be Jewish and Arab. The Mizrahim are Arab Jews. Their language is often a combination of Hebrew and Arabic, as the language of the Sephardim is often a combination of Spanish and Hebrew, as the language of the Ashkenazim is often a combination of German and Hebrew, or Yiddish.

There are Palestinian Jews. There are Palestinian Arabs who have been forcibly removed from Israel, but who are, in fact, just as Israeli as any other Israeli citizen. To be Muslim doesn't tell us much about whether one is Arab or not Arab. Being Arab is not synonymous with being Muslim, nor is being Palestinian.

The people of the land of Palestine and the people of the land of Israel are of the same people, historically. This was the case, generally, until the Middle Eastern people of the region were invaded by a displaced and terrorised people, likely to die if not let in: European Jews in the era of WWII. The problem with accepting into the land so many Europeans was two-fold.

1. It made the population whiter, and brought with it an ideology of white supremacy, which has since taken root producing a deeply racist state called Israel.

2. To bring into a land mass so many non-Arab people means many non-Jewish Arab people had to be displaced, forcibly, out of Israel. This is what happened to non-Jewish Palestinians.

The current conflict is not mutually terroristic. Israel has resources Palestine does not have. Israel occupies Palestine, not the other way around. Palestinians, generally, are poorer people than Israelis. And given that so many white Jews have moved to Israel in the last sixty years, class, race, and ethnic hierarchies are now infused into the political landscape, along with misogyny and heterosexism.

For some perspective, see the documentary, Zero Degrees of Separation.

If it were possible, a far less violent solution would have been to find land--I don't know where; in Switzerland, perhaps?--to make a safe zone for the persecuted Jews of Europe. The land of Israel has significant meaning for Jews, but so too does it have religious meaning for Muslims and Christians.

The issue at hand is not what could have happened, but what is happening now and how best to resolve it without pursuing on-going bloodshed and occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government's military forces. At issue, now, is liberating Palestine and Palestinians from Israeli occupation and terroristic activities.

Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, are, in fact, often part of the same families. Jews and Muslims who are Arab are involved in intimate relationship and always have been. "Whiteness" does not belong to the region, and has no place in the region. How to transform Israel into an anti-Apartheid, anti-racist, pro-Muslim, pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Jewish State is one challenge before us.

U.S. radical feminist Flo Kennedy coined the term "horizontal hostility" to describe the phenomenon of oppressed groups continually fighting each other rather that addressing those who oppress them all. U.S.-Caribbean radical feminist Audre Lorde spoke eloquently of the Master's Tools, and how they will not likely construct anything other than a Master's House.

I offer the above as a preface to what follows.

What follows is from *here* @ Muzzlewatch.

Fighting Anti-Semitism with Islamophobia at Yale

Posted on September 3 2010 by Jesse Bacon

Audre Lorde used the metaphor of the masters tools not being able to dismantle the masters house to explain why racism could not be used to fight sexism. Unfortunately, no one told many of the scholars who attended the recent Yale conference Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity. In no case can one oppression effectively or ethically used to combat another, but particularly in the case of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, where one is threatening to take the place of the other.

Yaman Salahi writes about the virulence of many of the speakers. First up

Among the many anti-Arab and anti-Muslim speakers was Itamar Marcus, a member of the Israeli settler movement who offered a keynote speech on “The Central Role of Palestinian Antisemitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity.” The title alone reduces an entire people and its history to irrationality and hatred; worse, it was but one of dozens of talks with a similarly problematic theme.

It is hard to imagine any other conflict where Yale would allow a front line and privileged member of a conflict to hold forth on their opponent. Would Yale invite Chinese settlers in Tibet to hold forth about the inferiority and irrationality of Tibetans? Members of Sudanese militias to criticize the perfidity of people of Darfur? Salahi gives several other examples of speakers’ problematic past records and then points out to the larger problem.

The center’s failure to adhere to consistent anti-racist principles makes it vulnerable to the charge that it is motivated by a political agenda. Indeed, many of its speakers hailed from partisan, right-wing, pro-Israel organizations including NGO Monitor, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Palestinian Media Watch — not to mention the Israeli government. In addition, many talks functioned as apologia for recent controversial Israeli actions, including an attack that killed nine civilians on a humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza this summer that one speaker called “the Jihad flotilla.”

Using Arabic terms as a slur does not seem like an effective way of combating Anti-Semitism, to say the least, but hardly surprising from this crew. And neither is their rigid view of acceptable Judaism.

In addition, speakers at times seemed to conflate anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Semitism. For example, in a plenary about anti-racist Jewish critics of Israel titled “Self Hatred and Contemporary Antisemitism,” Richard Landes’ speech asked, “What Drives Jews to Loathe Israel Publicly?” as if those dissidents’ claims were based not on merit but on some pathological psychosis. Landes and others were not speaking about radical organizations but rather reputable human rights organizations, prominent Jewish dissidents and international student activists — exactly the kind of people a center purporting to fight bigotry should celebrate.

Instead Jews who differ from these groups view of Israel are marginalized and their Judaism question.

the same logic, inverted, often provides a pretext for racist ideas about Jews around the world, for those who imagine that Jews, no matter where they are or what they say, form a monolithic body that can be blamed for Israel’s actions.

Of course, Arabs and Muslims are the primary targets of Islamophobita, but Salahi also realizes the cost to Jews of this kind of mindset.

While the center’s failure to abstain from inflammatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric is offensive and dangerous, the real tragedy is its failure to recognize that a successful and principled stand against anti-Semitism requires a principled stand against all kinds of racism, including anti-Muslim/anti-Arab bigotry in America and anti-Palestinian racism in Israel.

So Jews who have differing views on Israel cannot count on these self appointed fighters of anti-Semitism, We would not be welcome at such a conference, and such bigotry will not protect us. Fortunately we have allies like Salahi who we can partner with to fight both our oppressions together.

Magnes ZIonist also reporting on the conference, asks where were the progressive Jews who study Anti-Semitism?

Do only hard-line Zionists care about anti-Semitism? No, not really. But the study of anti-Semitism has gravitated in that direction because it has been taken over by Israelis and Zionists, and is supported mostly by hard-line Zionist money. Sorry to be blunt, but I can think of no other explanation.

–Jesse Bacon