After a weekend of fighting in and around Gaza, and a weekend of heated, deeply personal argument on this site, I realize that a lot of people do not understand how and why American Jews can react so vociferously and defensively when we read what we regard as over-the-top bias in anti-Israel diaries.
After an hour of listening to a call-in program on Washington, DC's Pacifica network station, WPFW, during which I heard nothing but distortions and untruths, barely layered over even deeper ignorance, I think I can provide real-world examples of why American Jews respond as we so often do to criticism of the Israeli position and actions, with our antisemitism sensors on high alert. For those of you who are agog at the ferociousness of the debate, I think if I share with you what I heard in this hour, you might better understand why the arguments get so heated.
Washington, DC has one of the five Pacifica network stations -- a radio network that is renowned for being the strongest voice for the American left within the American media. The flagship program is Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, but much of the other programming is locally based. In the 10-o'clock hour, the Washington, DC station, WPFW, has a talk program. Today, the hour was devoted to listener's calls regarding the situation in Gaza.
The hour did not get off on a good foot, as the host expressed his own deeply misinformed, and decidedly slanted view of the situation. Things would only get worse when the callers began to express their opinions, which revealed great ignorance and barely concealed their bigotry. It was the listeners whose comments I found the most disturbing, but I feel it's important to set the stage with the host's own commentary, which I believe signaled his willingness to accept the more hateful comments that soon followed.
The host spoke of Hamas as having been funded by the U.S. government, and tasked with assassinating Yasser Arafat. One can see where such nonsense might come from, if one understands that Hamas began as an Islamist movement, growing out of various institutions that Israel was funding to counter the PLO's influence in the occupied territories. The Israelis had been shaken by the first intifada, which showed that the PLO could organize and encourage a resistance movement in the territories. After decades of regarding the PLO as a foreign enemy, Israel wanted a homegrown counterpoint that might weaken the PLO's growing strength in the territories.
One could argue about Israel's motives -- whether Israel merely meant to divide and conquer, or hoped that Hamas might mature into a more reliable, less corrupt partner -- but there is a undeniable factual basis to Israel's involvement with Hamas, in the early days of the organization. However, there is not a grain of truth to what this radio host was saying about Hamas being a client of U.S. policy.
The significance of this fantasy about America's alleged involvement with Hamas is significant because it feeds into a long strain of conspiracy-based thinking that implies all sorts of venality in our policy. This feeds into a belief that the U.S. is manipulating these events for our own reasons -- no doubt, to the detriment of the locals on both sides. Perhaps, even more noteworthy is it suggests that events in the region really are within our control. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The host then found it very important to mention the "so-called Hamas rockets". These rockets are so-called rockets, because that is what they are. Referring to them as "so-called" rockets does a great disservice to the truth, and immediately gets my antisemitism radar going. The host followed up by noting that the "so-called" rockets caused only limited damage to humans -- apparently killing a few people, and maiming others, is only limited damage because it's not as awful as the hundreds of Palestinians killed in Israel's ongoing strikes -- and almost no damage to property.
Of course, this ignores the reality of life in Israeli towns within range of the Q'assam and Katyusha rockets. Schools are regularly interrupted, and the people sleep in bomb shelters, rather than their beds. It dismisses the fear they live under, and it devalues the horror of those who have been killed or maimed. The fact that Israel's retaliatory strikes may cause more casualties only means Israel has greater firepower. If Mexican terrorists were shelling El Paso or San Diego, I don't think Americans would be so nonchalant about any loss of life, as this host was with respect to the Israelis killed by missiles fired every day from Gaza.
The host concluded with two further misperceptions of reality. He asserted that the timing of these attacks was politically motivated, with the purpose of hemming in Barack Obama -- taking away any room for maneuvering and bringing peace to the region. I would agree that political considerations played a part, but they had little to do with the U.S. Israel is in the midst of an election campaign that could well determine the future of the region. The ruling coalition between the centrist Kadima and the left-wing Labor Party is trailing in the polls., to the right-wing Likud-led coalition, which is headed by the same Benjamin Netanyahu who sank the Oslo peace process during his tenure as Prime Minister a decade ago.
Hamas also has its own political reasons for provoking a confrontation, as the Presidency of the PLO's Mahmoud Abbas nears an end, five days before George W. Bush's term ends. A confrontation with Israel reinforces the Hamas position against negotiations. It also reinforces Hamas' claim to represent the Palestinian cause against the Israeli enemy, while the PNA-led West Bank sits out the fight on the sidelines. The timing of the fighting was chosen largely by Hamas. They were quite public in allowing reporting of their use of a network of tunnels to smuggle in large caches of weapons from Egypt. When Israel tried to stop the inflow of weapons by blowing up one of these tunnels, Hamas accused Israel of breaking a cease-fire -- a cease-fire that was never reflected in reality. Rockets continued to strike Israel throughout the 6-month "cease-fire", and Israel tried to force Hamas to knuckle under with a vast blockade of food and energy. By announcing last week that it would no longer respect the cease-fire, Hamas was essentially telling Israel to "bring it on". Israel may seem indifferent to the civilian casualties, but Hamas must be thrilled by the escalation of hostilities. No doubt, they are bracing for the Israeli ground assault that they have spent 2 years preparing to resist, using the pages from Hezbollah's playbook in Lebanon.
The radio host said it's "time to stop killing and have peace" in the Middle East. I doubt anyone here would disagree with that statement, but anyone with any understanding of the political dynamics would also understand that we here, in the U.S., cannot mandate peace. The implication that we could snap our fingers and and the fighting feeds into the anti-Semitic canard that American policy is currently driven by Jewish right-wing, "pro-Israel" interests.
While the host revealed a very superficial understanding of the situation, he opened the floor to a disturbing display of disinformation and barely-concealed prejudice amongst his listeners. These listeners debated back and forth whether we were heading towards the end times, or whether the "so-called" Bible has anything to do with a conflict started by Europeans who stole the Palestinian's land.
While few of these people would regard themselves as anti-Semitic, their prejudice was apparent to anyone with a little discernment. One listener was almost totally incoherent as he spouted phrases rather than sentences, but references to "Joe Lieberman" and the "Council of Foreign Relations" made clear this was a believer in Jewish conspiracies. Another listener thought it was important to quote something said last month by Louis Farrakhan, which she found "relevant".
Whatever one might feel about the listeners' prejudices, their ignorance of reality was on display, but went unchallenged by the program's host. Yet another listener spoke out about Joe Biden, who she asserted is Jewish. [Reality check -- Biden is a Roman Catholic, and no known Jewish ancestry, unlike several other leading Democrats who learned of Jewish ancestry when they were thrust in the limelight]. The host thanked her for her comments, without any comment on her bigotry and ignorance.
One listener, who sounded like he might be of European Jewish ancestry, railed on against the influence of folks like Richard Perle, and Americans with Israeli citizenship. He added that people didn't understand the significance of the new President having a Chief of Staff who served in the Israeli Defense Forces. [For those who don't know, Rahm Emanuel was born with Israeli citizenship through his father, who was an Israeli citizen -- but Rahm relinquished his Israeli citizenship, when he declined to fulfill the military service obligation that all Israelis must fulfill at 18 years of age.] Another caller spoke of our arms transfers to Israel, several times claiming that the arms flow now ran into "trillions of dollars". The host's only response was to wonder when we might stop sending so much weaponry over there.
The only caller who the host challenged in any way was the one woman who called in because she obviously was very upset by the distortions and ignorance she was hearing on the program. She wanted the listeners to understand the Jewish history of exile and persecution and exile, and how Jews were on the front lines of the civil rights movement and the effort to save Darfur. She wanted people to understand both sides. The host agreed it was important that people had a "balance of both sides, including the Palestinian side".
Given the way the host conducted himself during the hour, it seemed that "both sides" might mean the "Palestinian side" and the anti-Israel American side". He certainly had no interest in portraying anything resembling a "balanced" truth and did not choose to correct any of the blatant misstatements his listeners made about the backgrounds of highly-placed members of the Obama Administration, or the obscene exaggeration of the scope of American support for Israel. Indeed, many of the callers -- even those who did not seem hostile to Jews or Israel -- were deeply troubled by the U.S. involvement in this fight. The host agreed we should have a debate of that policy. While there might be legitimate reasons to have a debate over that question, it's impossible to have an honest debate when the "moderator" is allowing a listener to exaggerate that support by a factor of 1,000x.
Moreover, when we, as American Jews, hear such ignorance, resentment, and barely disguised prejudice, masquerading as fair debate -- when prejudice is peddled and not challenged -- it should come as no surprise that we are very defensive on this issue. It explains much of the intensity of our defense of Israel, even as we might have our own questions about the wisdom of the methods and even the motivations of Israel's leaders.
We feel the pain of the Palestinians' plight, and the vast majority of Jews would be delighted if the Palestinian leadership agreed to sign on the dotted line -- an agreement to live in peace, in two separate nations, with mutual cooperation. Do not mistake this fact -- if we point out that a diary or comment does not accurately portray either past or recent events, we are not denying the need to find a solution that respects both peoples' desire and need for some measure of self-determination. To the contrary, I believe that no solution can be found until each side respects the legitimacy of the others' needs and historical claim to nationhood. With the exception of a small number of American Jews, who believe in some religious claim to the entire territory, nearly all American Jews would agree that the best solution would be a two-state solution that offers each people a national homeland.
As for our seeming defensiveness -- so long as people fear Jews and believe we are behind some vast conspiracy that oppresses them in some way, we cannot react in any other way. We need a Jewish state, because it the one thing that makes this time different than the 30's and 40s -- the one thing that gives us strength and confidence that we shall overcome the bigotry and hostility of a world where Jews are a little more than one-tenth of one-percent of the population.