The Jewish Chronicle has long served as a vehicle for Zionist propaganda    By Mahir Ali

 

 

A British publication that takes pride in its status as the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world has lately faced enormous embarrassment after highlighting an “exclusive” investigative report that was dismissed as a fabrication by Israeli media as well as military and intelligence spokesmen.

The contention in The Jewish Chronicle, more or less continuously published since 1841, revolved around “evidence” that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned to escape to Iran via the Philadelphi corridor, taking with him the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. It was published, conveniently, on the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spun a similar yarn to explain why Israeli control of the corridor could not be relinquished under any circumstances.

His insistence on that score is among the biggest hurdles to the ceasefire that the US purports to be pursuing – often mainly for domestic consumption in an election year when much of the electorate is inclined towards some kind of peace deal, amid steadily mounting evidence of “ethnic cleansing” by Israel that is hard to distinguish from a genocide or a holocaust.

The offending article was credited to Elon Perry, who claimed to be a journalist of 25 years’ standing as well as an Israeli and international academic, and an Israel Defence Forces veteran who had participated in the 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda that rescued most of the Israeli hostages from a hijacked Air France flight. (The only Israeli fatality was Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan.)

This was Perry’s ninth article for The JC (as the Chronicle styles itself) in recent months, and the weekly had either never sought to corroborate his credentials, or simply ignored his largely fictitious CV. When confronted with the inconsistencies by a reporter for Hazinor from Israel’s Channel 13, Perry promptly denied his purported past, declaring: “I don’t go on my website. I didn’t check it.”

Ben Reiff at Israel’s +972 Magazine sees Perry’s article, alongside an almost simultaneous “exclusive” in the German daily Bild that claimed knowledge of content from Sinwar’s personal computer that tallied with the nightmares Netanyahu routinely conjures up, as part of “a pro-Bibi influence campaign” in European media outlets, intended to deflect growing criticism of the prime minister.

Exclusively targeting the Netanyahu administration’s violent obduracy has become part of the “soft” Zionist narrative since last October, in an effort to avoid any discussion of Israeli political trends since 1948 – and Zionist aspirations since the 19th century.

This tendency is reflected in the resignation statements of four of The JC’s most prominent contributors – Jonathan Freedland (columnist at The Guardian), Hadley Freeman (columnist at The Sunday Times, and previously at The Guardian), David Aaronovitch (columnist for The Times – and a Communist-affiliated president of the National Union of Students while I was at university in Britain in the early 1980s), and  comedian David Baddiel.

One of the aspects of The JC’s recent past that has escaped attention in any of the current coverage of its woes is its frontline role in the aggressive and ultimately successful effort to topple Jeremy Corbyn (a fellow JC) as Labour Party leader by falsely labelling him as antisemitic. The claim that the party had become more antisemitic under his leadership was equally absurd.

The truth is that Israel and its acolytes simply could not countenance the idea of a British prime minister who sincerely stood for Palestinian national rights, and they doubled down once the 2017 general election seemed to narrow the distance between Corbyn and 10 Downing Street. Much of the media, from The Guardian to Israel’s relatively respectable Haaretz, were complicit in this disgraceful campaign.

It is not particularly far-fetched to assume that Netanyahu adviser and spokesman Mark Regev (born Mark Freiburg in Melbourne) was appointed ambassador to London (2016-20) chiefly to coordinate this crusade. Coincidentally or otherwise, Regev was mentor to Freedland during the gap year he spent at an Israeli kibbutz; and Freedland spewed some of the vilest anti-Corbyn bile in his Guardian columns.

He wasn’t alone, of course, but his moral outrage over the Chronicle’s failures and directions rings hollow in the light of his own fakely balanced predilections. He proudly claims that the Freedland byline has appeared in The JC for 71 years (his father was a columnist before him, and infant Jonathan’s birth was announced in the paper), and he hopes to return to it once the publication irons out its issues.

These issues include the Chronicle’s opaque ownership structure since 2020, when it was rescued after supposedly COVID-inspired insolvency by a mysterious white knight (or knights) via a consortium led  by Sir Robbie Gibb, once a spin doctor for former Conservative prime minister Theresa May (who was unexpectedly thrust into minority government after the 2017 election) and currently a government-appointed BBC director. In the latter role, Gibb presumably subscribes to the BBC’s rules of impartiality (which have never been uniformly applied, and tend to go out of the window whenever Israel crops up), yet studiously ignores Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons’ ridiculous complaints about the BBC’s “Israelophobia” in its Gaza reportage and comments.

Former long-time Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has raised pertinent (and as yet unanswered) queries about The JC’s ownership in his Prospect magazine, lately updated in The Independent. No one, though, appears to have contemplated the possibility that it might, directly or otherwise, be a proxy for the abominable Netanyahu regime, and a vehicle for the toxic hasbara that contaminates discourse about Israel’s Nazi-like aspirations to Lebensraum across much of the West and particularly in the Anglosphere. It’s worth remembering that as far back as 1968, The JC’s claim of antisemitism about anti-Zionist Labour MP Christopher Mayhew led to a public apology from the Chronicle, and it has lost several libel suits since then.

Expecting Western media to adjust its moral compass in the Zionist context might be futile, but the Chronicle saga demands exploration that goes beyond the “one bad apple” trope. Mind you, holding your breath on that score might prove detrimental to your well-being.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-jewish-chronicle-has-long-served-as-a-vehicle-for-zionist-propaganda/

 

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Jewish Chronicle scandal: Why was there no uproar over past pro-Israel disinformation?

 

Jonathan Cook

 

Despite a deeply problematic track record, the paper's fake news is making waves only now, after it printed claims based on forged Hamas documents

Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of pro-Israel lobby groups.

It raises questions about the degree to which parts of the British media are - inadvertently or otherwise - colluding in Israeli disinformation. 

The 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it is now known, lost four of its big-name columnists on Sunday, after it was revealed that the paper had published a story based on a forged document concerning Israel’s war on Gaza. Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Hadley Freeman and David Baddiel swiftly quit the paper. 

The Chronicle, it emerged, had apparently failed to make the most rudimentary checks on Elon Perry, a mysterious British-based Israeli freelance journalist who has written nine stories for the paper since Israel’s war on Gaza began nearly a year ago. All have now been excised from its website.

Investigations by the Israeli media revealed that Perry’s CV, which included claims that he had been a professor at Tel Aviv University, a former elite Israeli commando and a longtime journalist, was a tissue of all-too-obvious lies. His only journalism appears to be the nine stories he published in the JC. 

The Chronicle similarly failed to check before publication the veracity of his most recent article, which cited a Hamas document supposedly in the possession of Israeli intelligence. But the Israeli military says it has never seen such a document. 

The forgery did, however, neatly bolster a narrative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been desperate to build - one that allows him to avoid engaging in negotiations with Hamas that could end the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, has ruled Israel’s actions there to be a “plausible” genocide. 

Netanyahu is under huge pressure - both from his own generals and from large sections of the Israeli public - to negotiate a ceasefire so that dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza can be released. Their families have been leading ever-larger protests in Israel against the government. 

'Wild fabrication'

According to Perry’s report for the Chronicle, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning, under cover of negotiations, to smuggle himself, other Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages out of Gaza through its border with Egypt. They would then have been spirited away to Iran. 

Happily for Netanyahu, the report closely echoed his own claims about Hamas’s intentions. 

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A few days after the JC’s article was published, his wife, Sara, reportedly met with the families of the hostages, citing the story as confirmation that Netanyahu could not compromise on his tough stance on negotiations. 

But the credibility of the Chronicle’s story fell apart the moment it was subjected to the simplest scrutiny. 

According to the Israeli media, Israeli intelligence and military sources describedthe story as a “wild fabrication” and “100 percent lies”. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s spokesperson, also discounted the story as baseless. 

As has been notedin these pages before, Israeli officials, including Hagari, are no stranger to falsehoods and deceptions themselves, especially during Israel’s nearly year-long war on Gaza. 

The reason this particular deception has come unstuck so quickly, it seems, is only because Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass have been feuding for weeks over the prime minister’s refusal to negotiate the hostages’ release and reach a ceasefire. 

The generals are reported to be increasingly incensed by Netanyahu’s intransigence, and his determination to widen the war on Gaza into a dangerous regional confrontation to save his own skin.

They believe he is putting his own narrow, selfish interests - keeping his ultra-rightwing coalition together and himself in power, thereby delaying his corruption trial - before national security.

The likelihood of a regional war increased dramatically this week when ordinary electronic devices exploded across Lebanon, killing more than 30 people and wounding thousands more. Israel has not admitted responsibility, but no one is in any doubt it was behind the attack. 

The Israeli military might have seen a chance to settle scores and embarrass Netanyahu by exposing the Chronicle’s report as fake news. 

Israeli disinformation

Military sources have also derided another, earlier report by Perry, calling it “bullshit”. That story claimed many of the surviving hostages were being used as human shields to protect Sinwar. 

And it is not just the JC peddling Israeli disinformation. The Israeli military criticised a report on Hamas published this month by Germany’s Bild newspaper, which alleged that another “Hamas document” - this one supposedly found on Sinwar’s computer - showed the group was negotiating in bad faith and “manipulating the international community”. 

Again, usefully for Netanyahu, this fabricated story suggested that any effort to secure the hostages’ release through negotiations was futile.

The JC’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, has responded to the spate of resignations at his publication by blaming Perry: “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist.” 

The issue, however, is not that Perry perpetrated a sophisticated deception on the JC. Rather, the paper apparently failed to make even the most cursory checks that his “exclusives” were grounded in fact. 

At the very least, a routine call to the Israeli military spokesperson’s office should have sufficed to discount Perry’s last two articles. 

It looks suspiciously like the Chronicle, which over the past two decades has been growing ever-more hawkish on matters relating to Israel, had no interest in checking the truth of the story, because it fitted its own preferred narrative. 

But potentially, the JC’s failings were worse. There is more than a suspicion that Netanyahu’s office was behind the forgeries, using them as part of an influence campaign. 

That is a conclusion reached by several senior Israeli analysts. 

One, Shlomi Eldar, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It was clear to me this was a leak from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which is using deception to manipulate the foreign press into further tearing apart Israel’s divided society and saving Netanyahu from the intensifying protests.” 

Lack of scrutiny

The question is: had the Chronicle grown so used to publishing as news what amounted to undeclared press releases from Netanyahu’s office that it had become largely indifferent as to whether the information it received was actually true? 

Given the lack of scrutiny from other British media outlets about the veracity of the JC’s stories, had it grown complacent, certain it could regurgitate Israeli government disinformation with no danger of being exposed?

It is unlikely we will ever know. But the implications were certainly troubling enough that four of its leading columnists felt that remaining with the paper would damage their reputations. 

Freedland, who is also a columnist at the Guardian, wrote an open letter to Wallis Simons on social media, in which he observed: “Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.” 

One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.” 

Freedland is certainly right that the Chronicle has long promoted a highly partisan, hardline, pro-Israel agenda - one that has helped stoke a climate of fear among British Jews and readied them to be more indulgent of Israel’s genocidal policies. 

Collapse of journalism

So why did Freedland find no reason to resign until now, if the Chronicle’s partisan journalism began long before the latest scandal?

I and others have been noting for some time scandalous breaches of both the law and media ethics by the JC. 

Over the past six years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the feeble “regulator” created and financed by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has repeatedly found the paper guilty of breaching its code of practice.

According to the research of journalist and academic Brian Cathcart, in the five years to 2023, the paper broke the code an astonishing 41 times. The Chronicle has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases. 

Writing about these failings, Cathcart called the large number of violations “off the scale” for a small weekly publication. He further noted that the spate of serious findings by IPSO against the JC should be seen in the context of the media regulator’s dismal record in upholding complaints - 99 percent are dismissed. 

Notably, despite the JC’s unprecedented violations of the code, IPSO has refused to launch an investigation or exercise its powers to fine the paper. 

The Chronicle subsequently went on the offensive against those it had defamed: “In a climate of rising antisemitism, we will never be cowed by attempts to bully us into silence.” 

A spokesperson for IPSO told MEE it was "carefully reviewing developments at the Jewish Chronicle", adding: "We have no further comment to share at this time."

Chief attack dog

There are reasons for the great latitude IPSO has shown the Chronicle. 

As Cathcart has noted, were the press “regulator” to investigate the JC for its journalistic failings, it would be hard to stop there. Other outlets, such as Rupert Murdoch’s titles, would have to be investigated too. 

Critics contend that the whole purpose of IPSO, established a decade ago, was to stop meaningful media regulation in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry into abuses such as the phone-hacking scandal.

But there is another reason for IPSO’s endless indulgence. The Chronicle played a critical role in advancing one of the British establishment’s most important recent disinformation campaigns: making former Labour leader Jeremy Corbynunelectable by smearing him and his supporters as antisemites. 

Notably, many of the JC’s press-code violations and libel settlements related to its false allegations against either Palestinian solidarity organisations or members of the Labour left. The Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and his allies, stoking fears among prominent sections of the Jewish community. It began that campaign early on, when Corbyn first emerged as a candidate for the leadership. 

Those fears were then cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities”. And in turn, the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be ascribed to its rampant antisemitism.

The more the left denied it was antisemitic, the more its denials were cited as proof that it was.

The four columnists who quit the JC on the weekend all actively contributed to fomenting a political climate in which Corbyn’s leadership could be depicted as an existential threat to British Jews. 

In 2019, Stephen Pollard, Wallis Simons’s predecessor as editor of the JC, was openabout his paper’s crucial role against Corbyn: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the antisemitism in the Labour Party and elsewhere.” 

A year later, as he stepped down as the paper’s chairman, Alan Jacobs made the same point. Wealthy donors who had been bailing the paper out financially “can be proud that their combined generosity allowed the JC to survive long enough to help to see off Jeremy Corbyn and friends”, he noted. 

Israeli meddling

There is already plenty of evidence that, during Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, Israeli officials were actively meddling in British politics to stop him from reaching power. 

Corbyn, as a longtime and vocal critic of Israel’s illegal occupation and an advocate of Palestinian rights, was seen as too much of a threat.

Shai Masot, an official operating out of Israel’s London embassy, was secretly filmed by an undercover Al Jazeera reporter orchestrating a smear campaignagainst Corbyn, using pro-Israel lobby groups inside the Labour Party.

Despite its devastating revelations airing in 2017, Al Jazeera’s four-part documentary was mostly ignored by an establishment media that was actively helping to propagate such smears. 

The JC played a critical role in all this. It led the pressure on British institutions, including the Labour Party, to adopt a new definition of antisemitism that conflated criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. Israel was the original driving force behind this new definition. 

Faced with a barrage of criticism from the JC and the wider establishment media, as well as from pro-Israel lobby groups inside his own party, Corbyn walked into the trap set for him. 

The new definition adopted by Labour made it impossible to engage in meaningful support for the Palestinian people without violating one of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s examples of antisemitism related to criticism of Israel. 

Despite this new skewed definition, the JC still felt the need to push further in advancing its smear campaign - the main reason it has been found by IPSO to have broken its code of practice so frequently, and been forced to settle libel cases in recent years. 

The JC had not responded to a request from MEE for comment by the time of publication.

Huge losses

The Chronicle was incurring huge losses even before it had to pay out large sums in legal bills. In 2020, the Kessler Foundation finally put it into liquidation. 

Since then, it has been unclear who owns the paper. Whoever it is, they appear to have very deep pockets. 

The consortium that acted as a front for the real buyer included a who’s who of public figures deeply opposed to Corbyn. 

The head of the consortium was Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative spin doctor who now sits on the BBC Board, overseeing editorial standards. 

Many observers are now, belatedly, pointing out Gibb’s deep conflict of interest. He is closely associated with the JC and its highly partisan, pro-Netanyahu agenda, while also holding a key position in guiding the BBC’s supposedly impartial editorial standards on Israel and Gaza. 

Gibb had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.

'Wrong sort of Jew'

Freedland and the other JC columnists who resigned last weekend expressed no public concerns earlier about the systematic editorial failings at the JC over many years because, it looks to me like those failings sat just fine with them - as they did with the British establishment.  

Getting rid of Corbyn was a goal shared across the narrow political spectrum of the two main establishment tribes in the Conservative and Labour parties. The means - any means, it seems - justified that end.

Freedland had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.

On Monday, after resigning from the JC, columnist Hadley Freeman expressed concern that the paper had become a vehicle for Netanyahu’s agenda and was now failing to represent much of the British Jewish community.

"I strongly want there to be a mainstream Jewish national newspaper in this country that represents the plurality of views of Jews in this country," she told BBC Radio 4. She went on to note: “That’s not why I joined a British Jewish newspaper, to represent the views of Netanyahu."

And yet, she and other JC columnists spent years denying that very same “pluralism” to the substantial number of left-wing Jews who supported Corbyn, including the group Jewish Voice for Labour. Their voices were either ignored, or dismissed because they were considered the “wrong sort of Jew”. 

Under Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, left-wing Jewish members of Labour have been almost five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism by the party than non-Jewish members. 

None of the JC’s columnists appear to have raised concerns about this pattern of discrimination, or the party’s institutional attacks on the rights of its Jewish members to express their political views. 

Over the past year, that trend has continued. The “wrong sort of Jews” have once again found themselves ignored by the establishment media when taking part by their thousands in marches against the genocide in Gaza, or helping to lead protests on British and US campuses. 

In an article published by the Times of Israel in June, Freeman asserted that “the progressive left hates the Jews”. She forgot to mention that the many Jews attending the Gaza protests and student encampments also belong to that progressive left.

Siding with the generals

The JC’s demonisation of fellow Jews in the Labour Party was not a red line for its celebrated columnists - nor was the paper’s cheering on of what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

In fact, it was precisely the relentless bullying and silencing of voices critical of Israel through the Corbyn years that helped pave the way for Israel’s current slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.

With almost any criticism of Israel denounced as antisemitism, Netanyahu’s ultra-right government was given a free hand to indiscriminately pulverise the enclave. 

It could rely on western politicians like Starmer, now Britain’s prime minister, to rewrite international law and defend as a “right” Israel’s decision to starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants through a blockade on food, water and power.

So why have the JC’s four columnists suddenly found a backbone and decided to quit? The answer appears to be far less principled than they would have us believe. 

The JC is finally in crisis, beset by scandal, only because the Israeli establishment is deeply split on negotiating a ceasefire and bringing home the hostages. 

Israel’s parade of lies as it carried out a genocide in Gaza disturbed no one in power; it passed without comment, prompting no significant investigations by the western media. 

The lies have registered on this occasion because Israel’s generals have decided that this one time, the truth matters - and only because the top brass have a score to settle with Netanyahu. 

Are the JC’s columnists really taking a belated stand for journalistic integrity? Or have they simply been forced to choose a side as the rift within the Israeli establishment deepens - on one side, the generals who carried out the slaughter of Gaza’s civilians, and on the other, a far-right prime minister who wants that slaughter to continue indefinitely?

The columnists might have changed camps, but both camps are led by monsters.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

 

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/jewish-chronicle-scandal-why-was-there-no-uproar-over-past-pro-israel-disinformation

 

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These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel    By Louise Adler

 

In recent years, I have been asked to comment on the Middle East “impasse”, though I am no foreign policy expert. I am merely one of many humanists who mourn this tragic history and rail against the failure of the international community to exert the great influence it has to bring peace and justice to innocent civilians in this area of the world.

Many Jewish supporters of peace have argued that it is precisely because of our own long history of oppression and discrimination that we must stand with the Palestinian people and support their right to self-determination. I have come to the point where I think differently. It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people, it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care.

Yes, my own family history has shaped my political views. If my mother and grandparents fleeing Berlin in 1938 had not been accepted here, they would have joined the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust. So, yes, I care deeply that asylum seekers should be met by our welcome embrace.

My father’s father was less fortunate. He was deported to Beaune-la-Rolande in the first round-up of immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and then sent to Birkenau, where he was murdered. My father, at the age of 14, joined the Jewish section of the communist resistance in Paris. This group of partisans, ordinary young men and women with nothing but courage and commitment, determined it was vital to urge French Jews not to report to their local police station, to encourage them to go into hiding, and to provide rations and places to sleep for young children abruptly orphaned.

My father, with his mother’s blessing, took a stand. In such moments, we all have choices, which is not to condemn those who focused on survival, sought ways to escape to Palestine, or took comfort in God’s protection. But it is to acknowledge that there was heroism in daily life, despite the great risks. My father’s exhortation “not to look away” was the lesson of his entire life after all that he’d witnessed and lost during World War II and then from the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and all the horrors since. And so, all these years later, the question remains: Who will bear witness if we don’t?

The lessons of my parents’ early years inevitably shaped my understanding of the world. To continue in a personal mode: my teenage years were spent in a socialist Zionist youth movement. I suspect my parents, who weren’t Zionists, simply appreciated two hours of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon without children. The movement’s intention was that at the end of school, we would spend a year on a kibbutz. My parents, entirely focused on education, weren’t having a year of picking oranges or plucking turkeys. So, it was agreed that I would spend Christmas in Israel and return to Australia for university. I arrived at the end of 1972. I imagined that I was landing in a socialist utopia. Instead, the reality of the Zionist project made itself explicit at the airport: European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels while Palestinians swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. So much for the socialist dream.

t was the beginning of my own education regarding the entrenched racism underpinning the establishment of the State of Israel. As Saree Makdisi has pointed out in his recent book, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial, Israel has long been hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East, which belies the fundamental contradiction: a Jewish state is by definition exclusionary and therefore anti-democratic for everyone who is not Jewish.

My education would continue as a postgraduate student of Edward Said’s in the late 1970s when he was being vilified as the “professor of terror”. In one conversation, he talked about the plight of the Palestinians as the victims of history’s victims. I felt uncomfortable when he talked about “Jews” rather than Israelis or Zionists. I suggested that his terminology left no space for progressive Jews like me who were not Zionists. We moved on to other subjects, but I realised afterwards that my naive plea for nuance was irrelevant to his struggle. It wasn’t Edward Said’s task to acknowledge this small group of dissenting Jews.

Why should Palestinians (or anyone) respect a distinction between Jewishness and Zionism when the Israeli state is founded on – and its continued existence justified by – precisely this conflation? When the Star of David is emblazoned on the uniforms of the IDF soldiers who humiliate, torture and murder Palestinians? When, as an Australian Jew, I can settle on a kibbutz in southern Israel that was once home to the family of a Palestinian – now confined in Gaza mere kilometres away, who have to break through a barbed wire fence to “return” – simply because I am a Jew, and he is a Palestinian?

My education continued when Mohammed el-Kurd, the much-vilified young poet and activist, wrote an essay on the connection between Jews and Israel. He argued: “Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives – by force – in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by ‘divine decree’. Many others reside – by force – in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorising or apologising for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarise. I’m tired of the impulse to pre-emptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretence that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.”

My education has continued, as it should. There have been deeply unpleasant encounters with family, friends and frenemies. I am not sharing these stories to elicit sympathy but rather to reveal how deeply fractured and fraught the issue of Israel and the war on Gaza has become. I have been repeatedly berated for mentioning the Holocaust and failing to refer to October 7 in an interview with Laura Tingle on the ABC’s 7.30.

I have discovered that it is impossible to ask, however hesitantly, whether anyone feels that the images from Gaza on our TV screens are reminiscent of the brutal and now iconic images from last century, of the photos of the Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto. That is to break a taboo. To compare the conduct of the IDF in prosecuting the occupation to the Nazi regime’s segregation, dispossession and persecution of the Jews in World War II is forbidden.

It seems, though, that I am not the only person who sees parallels. Masha Gessen, at the recent Festival of Dangerous Ideas, made the same point. Gessen rejected the notion that Gaza was an open-air prison and very precisely outlined the topographical parameters of a ghetto, be it in Warsaw or Gaza. The Kremlin critic, journalist and author had earlier been vilified and initially denied an important prize for making exactly this point. It seems that the Holocaust is an inviolable, sacred moment in history, forever beyond comparison. Which, for me, means that we can never learn the vital lessons we should draw from that catastrophe.

I have been told I am desecrating the memory of family who’d been murdered in World War II. As if many Jewish people of my generation in Australia have anyone much left by way of extended family. I have been asked how I felt on October 7 as if my empathy or indifference towards those Israelis murdered on that day was a sign of my loyalty, or lack of it, to Israel and, beyond that, testimony to my Jewishness. If it needs to be said, I watched in horror the coverage of that day and the days after. I had been sickened by the footage and frustrated by the mostly ill-informed and ahistorical reportage that followed.

I have been called a “kapo” (or collaborator), a “token Jew”, and received lurid messages: my parents would turn in their graves; I am a “denier of Judaism; the shame you wear is a suitable crucifix”; “shame on you and all you stand for”, and “there are those in the community who wish to do you harm”. I have been berated in Adelaide’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens by “disgusted” citizens. I have been glared at buying fruit. I have listened as a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant told me, “They” – the Palestinians – “are not like us”.

In this small corner of the world, there are 120,000 Jews. I have learnt that it is not acceptable to ask what is our relationship to the modern state of Israel. What is our response to the occupation of Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians?

And my response is to ask why empathy, an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, is such a risk?

A bright young lawyer tells me she’s been excluded from her family’s WhatsApp group for speaking out about the occupation. A 30-something academic has been attending pro-Palestine marches. For her entire life she has gone to Friday night family dinners, but she is refusing to do so now because discussing the war has become impossible. Her mother fears the family will split apart over the issue.

These are First World problems. Our individual or personal experiences are just that. It would be obscene to equate the pain engendered by the rifts tearing apart Jewish families in the diaspora to the suffering of Palestinian families literally torn apart by Israeli bulldozers and bombs. But it would be equally naive to imagine the two are not related. So the question remains – what is there about that place that engenders such passion and heat when we are so far removed from the region? What is this emotional attachment most Jews declare they feel for Israel? Why is Israel’s existence, the idea of it as a safe haven, so entrenched in their hearts and minds? How does a kind of collective amnesia take hold of people who know in their bones about persecution? Because it must be some kind of tacit shared forgetting that enables Israel’s zealous advocates in the diaspora to turn away from the reality of the occupation.

To state the obvious, centuries of persecution have left their mark. The Holocaust confirmed a collective psychic terror: the deeply ingrained fear that we can never be safe. However, the establishment of a Jewish state didn’t arise as a response to the Holocaust; it was a nationalist project of the 19th century, and its advocates set aside the fact that a Jewish state would entail the denial of an indigenous population. Think of the logic of “terra nullius” transported to the Middle East. The Holocaust has been written into history as a post facto rationale for the establishment of the State of Israel. Rewriting that history is now prosecuted relentlessly to assert that the cure for antisemitism lies in the State of Israel.

But 75 years later, a succession of wars, countless dead, displaced and deracinated people, the ever-increasing oppression of Palestinians’ lives, years of a reactionary government, and the moral, civil and political cost of denying the rights of another people have added up to what precisely?

It is incumbent upon us collectively to summon up the lessons of history as we contemplate the reality that successive wars in the Middle East have only produced a terrible loss of innocent lives, be they young people at a rave in Israel or 16,000 children now dead in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials. Shouldn’t our profound pity for the children stay our hands, stop us reaching for weapons of destruction? We don’t have to retrieve the scales of justice to measure man’s inhumanity to man, and we should not indulge in the obscenity of comparisons to declare these victims are more important than those victims.

The tragic lesson Israel failed to learn yet again on October 7 is that peace cannot be premised on the subjugation of a people. Violence invariably returns. Indeed, every attempt to cover it up – be it with the increasingly fascistic policies of the Israeli government, the ever-increasing restrictive conditions of the occupation, or the hysteria of the Zionist lobby in the diaspora in response to the mildest expression of solidarity with Palestinians – only reveals the terrible and inevitable persistence of violence.

The lesson of October 7 is that you cannot normalise and live peacefully in the context of a profound, ongoing injustice. Peace and justice will only come to the region when Palestinians are recognised as a people with the right to self-determination, sovereignty and their own state.

 

Louise Adler is a former Australian publisher and former board member of numerous arts organisations.

This is an edited version of a speech she is giving in Brisbane to mark the UN Day of Peace.

Republished from Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September, 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/these-are-the-things-ive-learnt-you-cant-ask-about-israel/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

University leaders’ failure to offer even feeble opposition to Netanyahu’s war crimes is among the most serious intellectual and moral failures in the history of Australian higher education. Nick Riemer with the story.

Last Monday, the University of Sydney’s new Chancellor, former Telstra boss David Thodey, opened his inaugural address to the university by criticising the ‘unacceptable rise of antisemitism’ in universities and society. Thodey committed to doing more to combat antisemitism – and, he added, ‘any form of discrimination’ – at the University of Sydney.

What this meant quickly became clear. The following day, university security shut down a campus bake sale by a student anti-racist group raising funds to support Gazans. Apparently, in 2024, with over 42000 killed in Palestine and Israel escalating its murderous spree into Lebanon,

the University of Sydney cannot tolerate a cake stall for people facing genocide.

The prohibition of the fundraiser was the latest in a series of repressive measures taken by the university, under its Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott, in response to the moral panic Israel lobbyists are generating over supposedly widespread antisemitism on campus. As in other institutions in Australia and around the world, these measures do not target antisemitism, but support for Palestine.

Palestine activism proscribed

Palestinian activism is being criminalised at the University of Sydney, just as it is around the country and throughout the Western world.

Student forums have been closed down or only allowed to proceed under intimidatory conditions of surveillance. The university’s disciplinary procedures have been weaponised against staff targeted by the Murdoch media for daring to oppose genocide.

In a move condemned by major civil liberties organisations like Amnesty, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and others, university management has even given itself the power to ban basic forms of political expression by staff and students. Meanwhile, the university continues to cultivate its links with the weapons industry, including with companies directly implicated in the war crimes being committed against Palestinians.

 

READ MORE: https://michaelwest.com.au/sydney-university-and-the-antisemitic-cake-stall/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without education…”

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