Crying 'antisemitism' is Israel's comfort blanket

1) Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, +972, 2) Mazal Mualem (who is not sympathetic to the BDS movement), Israel Pulse

An Israeli policeman attempts to repress a joint Palestinian-Israeli demonstration against the occupation, Gush Etzion junction, November 9, 2012. Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org

BDS-mania takes over Israel — for a week

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, +972
June 05, 2015

Boycott is all anybody can seem to talk about this week in Israel. But neither side should rush to declare victory quite yet: Israel still refuses to see that the occupation is the problem, and boycotters have yet to make any real gains.

If you got your news exclusively from the Israeli media over the past two weeks it would be entirely reasonable to wonder if the sky is falling. It seems like there has been near-24-hour coverage of the attempt to boot Israel from FIFA, university presidents warning that the academic boycott is snowballing toward a point of no return, a boycott endorsement by the UK’s largest student union, and now, international telecom giant Orange announcing that it will pull its brand out of Israel.

We have seen similar moments in recent years — when Stephen Hawking announced he would stay away from Israel, for example — but there is something that feels more serious this time around. The country’s best-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, announced it was enlisting in the war against boycott (a rather cynical considering the Israeli news media is probably the only industry that actually profits from BDS via increased ratings). Israeli President Reuven Rivlin described BDS as a “strategic threat of the first degree,” saying that he is a soldier in the fight against it. And just weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed a senior government minister, Gilad Erdan, as the country’s anti-boycott csar.

So what is happening? You wouldn’t know it from the internal Israeli discourse but the writing has been on the wall and the font has been getting bigger and bolder over the past year. With the collapse of the U.S.-led peace process, Netanyahu’s repeated disavowal-turned-indefinite-shelving of a two-state outcome, and the election of Israel’s most right-wing government ever, the world — and Europe in particular — has simply run out of patience.

The European Union in particular has been making regular warnings, spelling out the consequences for perpetuating the occupation. During the final throes of the latest peace process, EU officials in Brussels were telling Israeli diplomats and journalists alike that there would be “no more business as usual” should the peace process finally be allowed to die — if the occupation is not given an expiry date. Europe-based international companies have been receiving warnings from their home countries about doing business in or with Israeli settlements. (The European Union, like most of the world, considers settlements to be illegal under international law.)

News that Orange intends to pull its brand from the Israeli market demonstrates just how painful European disengagement from settlements could be for Israel. Europe’s strategy thus far has been to try and halt financial and business relationships with Israeli entities beyond the Green Line, all while maintaining close ties with Israel proper. The problem is that no such distinction exists in Israel anymore. Companies like Partner Communications, the Orange franchisee in Israel, do not think twice about operating in the settlements — it’s not even a question. Israel’s major banks do not hesitate to finance the construction of settlements and to give mortgages to settlers, despite international consensus on the illegality of the entire enterprise.

The Orange case also shows how seemingly uninvolved companies can be directly complicit in the displacement of Palestinians, the theft of their land, and supporting illegal settlers — all while making a healthy profit. As reported here on +972 earlier this year, for 12 years Orange franchisee Partner paid rent to Israeli squatters — who stole privately owned Palestinian land to build an illegal settlement — for the rights to operate cellular antennas. The Israeli military has also given Israeli cellular companies a monopoly on cellular data services, making operating in the West Bank all the more more profitable.

And yet, the excitement surrounding Orange, FIFA, and the warnings of Israeli university presidents is largely sensationalism. The FIFA challenge never had a very high chance of success, the university presidents were simply sounding an alarm, and Orange and the French government both rushed to clarify that they oppose the boycott of Israel and that they support Israel. The non-stop media coverage will soon subside.

But soon enough there will be another crisis, another sense of looming isolation and a new string of boycott successes. And once again, instead of acknowledging that the occupation is inviting disaster on Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and others will continue to deflect blame onto antisemitism.

Responding to Yedioth’s anti-boycott campaign this week, Dr. Tomer Persico wrote:

It is a dynamic that is as predictable as it is depressing: a country suffering from negative international treatment entrenches itself in self-righteousness and sees any criticism as illegitimate. That is not to say that there exists no antisemitism or unfair criticism of Israel. Both exist — but they always did. Today, the problem is only consolidating: the occupation, which is approaching its 50th year, does not allow Israel to present itself as having clean hands.

Until we reach an agreement with the Palestinian people, criticism of Israel will be considered legitimate and deserved, along with the sanctions that will be placed on the country.

“The international community does not believe that Israel is serious about a two-state solution,” U.S. President Obama said this week in an interview on Israeli television. What Obama was warning of but didn’t actually spell out, is that boycotts and international pressure campaigns do not aim to punish Israel but rather to exert enough pressure so that it changes its calculus so that it gets serious — serious enough to end the occupation.

Netanyahu derails debate on boycott, occupation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the boycott campaign against Israel through a prism of antisemitism and is avoiding public debate over the BDS movement’s motives, namely the occupation.

By Mazal Mualem, trans. Ruti Sinai, Al Monitor / Israel Pulse
June 05, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with visiting Canadian Foreign Minister Rob Nicholson on June 3 and used the photo op at the start of the meeting as an opportunity to attack the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students. On the evening before the meeting, that group decided to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and adopt the principles of the wide economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. In the position paper it issued, the organization explained, among other things, that the decision stemmed from “Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine.”

Thus, standing alongside the senior representative of one of the world’s friendliest countries to Israel, buoyed by his sympathetic presence, Netanyahu used his usual arguments to attack the decision by the British student organization and wondered how it was possible that just a year ago, it had refused to condemn the Islamic State.

A few days earlier, Netanyahu was asked about the failed Palestinian attempt to suspend Israel from FIFA, and he attacked the unilateral Palestinian initiatives that he said hurt the prospects of promoting an arrangement in the region.

To add to it all, that night, the Orange storm erupted, after the CEO of the telecommunications giant, Stephane Richard, declared that he would be willing to cut ties with Israel “tomorrow morning.” The next day it turned out this was no bluff, and Orange issued a statement backing his declaration. Despite Israel’s demand that the French government, part owner of the company, condemn his words, it did not. The French Foreign Ministry issued a short declaration on the issue.

On June 4, Netanyahu took part in a ceremony commemorating the victims of the Altalena Affair* and called on the French government to renounce the boycott and once again attacked Israel’s critics with the usual rhetoric.

On June 5, Yedioth Ahronoth published an interview with Richard, who appealed to Israelis and claimed he’d been misunderstood. But those comments are not compatible with his words in Cairo, where Richard linked the Palestinian issue with his desire to sever ties with Israel. This means that more commercial firms may sever ties and boycott Israel in the very near future, citing business interests without officially announcing their support for the BDS movement.

Amid all the excitement, Israel’s Channel 2 aired a scathing interview with US President Barack Obama, who warned that the United States would be hard pressed in the future to defend Israel at the United Nations, given the continuing occupation.

For now, this was the finale of a grim week for Israeli diplomacy. Netanyahu, for his part, ignored Obama’s comments, taking care in all his public reactions to the growing boycott tide to address the Israeli public — the same public that just three months ago handed him a fourth term in office as prime minister. In Netanyahu’s narrative, the story is black and white, one of the new antisemitism and the world’s hypocrisy toward Zionism and the Jews.

This one-dimensional narrative, with Netanyahu as its most prominent and articulate storyteller, deliberately ignores the complexity of the boycott issue. The industry of lies spread by the BDS movement and the sweeping delegitimization of Israel, tinged with a new brand of antisemitism, is nurtured by the diplomatic freeze and the fact that Israel under Netanyahu is perceived as a peace refusenik. The narrow right-wing government is perceived by the world as colonialist.

Until less than a year ago, Netanyahu still conducted a semblance of diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians and his government included centre-left parties headed by Hatnua’s Tzipi Livni and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid. The diplomatic negotiations orchestrated by US Secretary of State John Kerry protected Israel and delayed the diplomatic tsunami. Israel failed to correctly assess its scope and speed. The BDS movement, which until two weeks ago was largely unknown to most Israelis — and those who knew it considered it an esoteric movement of radical Israel-haters — caught Israel unprepared, almost surprised, even though the writing had been on the wall for some time.

Netanyahu continues to fight this phenomenon using the antisemitism narrative to prevent a substantive public debate in Israel on the reasons for the boycott. He is afraid that this debate could, heaven forbid, expose the correlation between the diplomatic tsunami and the fact that the world, even while supporting Israel, cannot accommodate the occupation, especially when the nation in question is a democratic one ruling another people, and even if these people are aggressive and receive Iranian money to carry out terrorist attacks.

While Israeli politicians on the centre-left are hesitant to react, afraid to arouse suspicions of being overly leftist, billionaire Haim Saban, who has the controlling interest in Partner, which operates the Orange franchise in Israel, best explained the complexity of the situation. Saban, one of the biggest supporters and funders of the US Democratic Party, attacked Orange in a June 4 interview on Israeli Channel 2, accusing it of giving in to antisemitic entities. But when asked about the link between this situation and the absence of an Israeli diplomatic initiative, he answered forthrightly that the current government has well-known views and if it acts according to these views, “then we’re in enormous trouble.”

Over the weekend, Saban is scheduled to hold a summit with another Jewish billionaire, gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu’s greatest supporter and a major backer of the US Republican Party. On the agenda: forming a united front to fight the anti-Israel boycott. The meeting was scheduled even before the storm over Partner, and the two are expected to allocate money and express their commitment to help Israel in its fight.

This is undoubtedly a state of diplomatic emergency. But in the very week that Israel marks the 48th anniversary of the Six Day War, the debate in Israel has to be deeper and more nuanced than slogans such as “The whole world is against us” and “antsemitism is raising its head.”

It’s no coincidence that Netanyahu has refrained this week (so far) from referring to the anniversary of the Six Day War. Netanyahu does not want to provoke a debate among the Israeli public about the link between the long occupation, the absence of a diplomatic initiative and the boycott. It does not provide any justification for the story he has been telling Israelis. If he can, he will probably soon try to expand his government and bring in the Zionist Camp to calm the diplomatic storm and prop up his shaky coalition.

Netanyahu, too, knows that most Israelis, as illustrated by public opinion polls in recent years, support the two-state solution and do not want to keep seeing themselves as occupiers. But in as much as the other side is perceived as a recalcitrant terrorist entity rejecting the generous proposals by former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, it is easy to deny the occupation and the settlement enterprise, which pushes a solution further and further away the more it flourishes. And on this Netanyahu has built his career.

Notes and links

*Israel’s Altalena ship

From BBC Raising Israel’s Altalena ship ‘a lesson for the future’

EXTRACTS
Just a month after the State of Israel declared independence, it was still fighting hostile Arab armies and the [Altalenƒa] was bringing in badly-needed weapons.

The commander of the Irgun at the time was Menachem Begin. The man who gave the order to attack the Altalena was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. He saw Begin’s militia as a threat to the new Israeli government and was willing to spill Jewish blood to establish his authority.

‘Jews killing Jews’

Jews killing Jews. That is what makes the Altalena affair such a painful one for Israelis….
In the confusion, Yehiel Kadishai, an Irgun fighter on board the Altalena, and the rest of the men on the beach took cover. Some grabbed weapons. Mr Kadishai started firing back, but he had no idea who – or where – he was firing at…

Over the next day or so, the violence continued. Begin got back on the Altalena and it moved south, near the Tel Aviv beach. That is where the IDF shelled the ship and scored a direct hit. One of the Israeli commanders directing fire at the Irgun men was Yitzhak Rabin, who would later go on to become Israel’s prime minister.
When the shooting finally stopped, 16 Irgun men were dead along with three IDF troops.

The ship was in flames, much of its cargo lost. Mr Kadishai says the idea that Irgun men would be shot at by members of the IDF was unthinkable. It is still difficult to talk about.

The Altalena Affair – 66 years later, Israel State Archives blog