Niv Horesh | January 09, 2009
AS an Israeli-Australian who has voted all his life for peacenik parties, even for non-Zionist ones at times, I thank Assa Doron for his opinion on Israelis who disagree with the Gaza operation (Opinion, January 7).
What Doron may not know is that in the late 1980s I was one of the few Israeli high-schoolers who had signed an undertaking to refuse any form of military service in the (then occupied) Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
I have stuck to my word and continually protested the expansion of Jewish settlements there. Like Doron, I am today following Operation Cast Lead with trepidation, and deplore the loss of life on both sides.
Yet I found Doron's argument disappointingly predictable on several counts.
Given the rabidly anti-Israeli climate that has become the norm in large quarters of the British and Australian academe, he should probably be able to score several brownie points at institutions such as the Australian National University.
Take China specialist Linda Jaivin, for example, who is no stranger to the ANU. I am sure she would have loved Doron's article, having just blasted Israel as no less than abominable. She happens to be Jewish, too, but Jaivin does not sound like a great maven in Middle East affairs.
She and her fellow Jewish petitioners are not merely bleeding-heart liberals, they lend themselves to reckless bias in that they did not even bother to call on Hamas to immediately halt its indiscriminate shelling of the civilian population that has brought southern Israel to a standstill.
Their mindset reads: Woody Allen and Allen Ginsberg are chic, yiddishkeit (jewishness) is tolerable, but please don't pollute our suburban plasma television screens with anything from that horrid place the Levant that might remind us of the complexities of Jewish sovereign existence.
Take, for example, Oxford professor Avi Shleim, who has called Israel a "rogue state" that "practises terrorism". In fact, there is a whole bunch of academics from Israel who thrive on delegitimising Israel's right to exist while retaining their Israeli passports. To me, this looks more like networking than dissent.
The catchcry is that Israel responded disproportionately to the Hamas shelling of its civilian population. But what is a proportionate reaction to an organisation that backs its rockets with daily radio messages calling for the destruction of Israel; that slaughtered moderate Palestinians by their dozens in a bid to extend its hold to the West Bank; that is instructed by Iran to carry out suicide bombings whenever peace negotiations make the slightest headway; an organisation that is hell-bent on imposing Sharia law in the region?
Disproportion, I argue, lies elsewhere, and more non-conforming academics are required to unmask it for the sake of pluralism. In this climate, where even moderate Muslim leaders such as Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assure the faithful that Israel is about to face "Allah's punishment" and "self-destruct", and where the President of nuclear-ambitious Iran raves at the UN about a powerful ethnic minority manipulating the world, I do not believe an article such as Doron's adds real value to the debate.
The fact of the matter is that more Muslims perished in 2008 due to internecine suicide bombings across the world than as a result of the Gaza conflict. But this is conveniently overlooked by much of the Western media, which has put Israel under the microscope for various reasons.
Similarly, coalition casualties in Afghanistan made up a small percentage of the horrific civilian death toll there during the liberation of the country from Taliban tyranny. The warped logic of Israel's media critics would suggest that taking on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11 was disproportionate.
Propagandists masquerading as journalists - such as Robert Fisk of The Independent - constantly assert that 9/11 happened only because of longstanding Israeli aggression. If so, how does one explain the internecine carnage in Iraq, Algeria, north Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Does this look like a crisis of modernity gripping the Muslim world? Or is it perhaps a Mossad conspiracy? Fisk would have us believe the latter.
Thomas Friedman would tell you, fairly and squarely, that Israel has never been squeaky clean, but it is naive or evil to blame it for all the region's problems. I tend to side with him. While Fisk is perhaps not himself an anti-Semite, he nevertheless abets classic anti-Semitism in his grotesquely disproportionate coverage of Israel.
Doron should not fool himself or The Australian's readers. He knows full well that some of the harshest criticism of Israel published anywhere in the world can be on a daily basis in Haaretz, where Ari Shavit works, among many other publicists. If Doron wrote his article because he was so concerned about the fallout from Shavit's piece in Haaretz about Israelis who blame Israel, why didn't he write a response in Hebrew and try to engage fellow Israelis on that level?
There are very few countries in the world that would allow demonstrators to denounce their government while hoisting enemy flags in the midst of war. Yet, this is precisely what happened last week in Tel Aviv: not a single Israeli flag was in sight amid hundreds of Palestinian, communist and anarchist banners.
Such is the strength of Israeli democracy that not a single incident interrupted the demonstration. The demonstrators' catchcry was "stop the war", but the real agenda was substituting Israel with a more benign, socialist state on all land west of the Jordan river.
This doesn't surprise me. On Sydney campuses one often bumps into Trotskyites and the odd Greenie chanting "free Palestine". It sounds very politically correct, but when you read their pamphlets and look at the maps, you see this has nothing to do with a West Bank pullout, relief for Gaza or dismantling settlements.
In recent years such activists have ominously teamed up with Islamist fanatics based in the West to dupe well-meaning peaceniks into campaigns that are supposedly about human-rights violations but are aimed at the elimination of the state of Israel.
Presumably, once this noble cause is achieved the people of greater Palestine will live in social-democratic, multicultural bliss.
But on the morning after, just like those well-meaning leftists who helped the ayatollahs eliminate the pro-Western monarchy in Iran in 1979, they would wake up to the nightmare of intolerance.
Niv Horesh is a lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of NSW.
AS an Israeli-Australian who has voted all his life for peacenik parties, even for non-Zionist ones at times, I thank Assa Doron for his opinion on Israelis who disagree with the Gaza operation (Opinion, January 7).
What Doron may not know is that in the late 1980s I was one of the few Israeli high-schoolers who had signed an undertaking to refuse any form of military service in the (then occupied) Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
I have stuck to my word and continually protested the expansion of Jewish settlements there. Like Doron, I am today following Operation Cast Lead with trepidation, and deplore the loss of life on both sides.
Yet I found Doron's argument disappointingly predictable on several counts.
Given the rabidly anti-Israeli climate that has become the norm in large quarters of the British and Australian academe, he should probably be able to score several brownie points at institutions such as the Australian National University.
Take China specialist Linda Jaivin, for example, who is no stranger to the ANU. I am sure she would have loved Doron's article, having just blasted Israel as no less than abominable. She happens to be Jewish, too, but Jaivin does not sound like a great maven in Middle East affairs.
She and her fellow Jewish petitioners are not merely bleeding-heart liberals, they lend themselves to reckless bias in that they did not even bother to call on Hamas to immediately halt its indiscriminate shelling of the civilian population that has brought southern Israel to a standstill.
Their mindset reads: Woody Allen and Allen Ginsberg are chic, yiddishkeit (jewishness) is tolerable, but please don't pollute our suburban plasma television screens with anything from that horrid place the Levant that might remind us of the complexities of Jewish sovereign existence.
Take, for example, Oxford professor Avi Shleim, who has called Israel a "rogue state" that "practises terrorism". In fact, there is a whole bunch of academics from Israel who thrive on delegitimising Israel's right to exist while retaining their Israeli passports. To me, this looks more like networking than dissent.
The catchcry is that Israel responded disproportionately to the Hamas shelling of its civilian population. But what is a proportionate reaction to an organisation that backs its rockets with daily radio messages calling for the destruction of Israel; that slaughtered moderate Palestinians by their dozens in a bid to extend its hold to the West Bank; that is instructed by Iran to carry out suicide bombings whenever peace negotiations make the slightest headway; an organisation that is hell-bent on imposing Sharia law in the region?
Disproportion, I argue, lies elsewhere, and more non-conforming academics are required to unmask it for the sake of pluralism. In this climate, where even moderate Muslim leaders such as Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assure the faithful that Israel is about to face "Allah's punishment" and "self-destruct", and where the President of nuclear-ambitious Iran raves at the UN about a powerful ethnic minority manipulating the world, I do not believe an article such as Doron's adds real value to the debate.
The fact of the matter is that more Muslims perished in 2008 due to internecine suicide bombings across the world than as a result of the Gaza conflict. But this is conveniently overlooked by much of the Western media, which has put Israel under the microscope for various reasons.
Similarly, coalition casualties in Afghanistan made up a small percentage of the horrific civilian death toll there during the liberation of the country from Taliban tyranny. The warped logic of Israel's media critics would suggest that taking on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11 was disproportionate.
Propagandists masquerading as journalists - such as Robert Fisk of The Independent - constantly assert that 9/11 happened only because of longstanding Israeli aggression. If so, how does one explain the internecine carnage in Iraq, Algeria, north Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Does this look like a crisis of modernity gripping the Muslim world? Or is it perhaps a Mossad conspiracy? Fisk would have us believe the latter.
Thomas Friedman would tell you, fairly and squarely, that Israel has never been squeaky clean, but it is naive or evil to blame it for all the region's problems. I tend to side with him. While Fisk is perhaps not himself an anti-Semite, he nevertheless abets classic anti-Semitism in his grotesquely disproportionate coverage of Israel.
Doron should not fool himself or The Australian's readers. He knows full well that some of the harshest criticism of Israel published anywhere in the world can be on a daily basis in Haaretz, where Ari Shavit works, among many other publicists. If Doron wrote his article because he was so concerned about the fallout from Shavit's piece in Haaretz about Israelis who blame Israel, why didn't he write a response in Hebrew and try to engage fellow Israelis on that level?
There are very few countries in the world that would allow demonstrators to denounce their government while hoisting enemy flags in the midst of war. Yet, this is precisely what happened last week in Tel Aviv: not a single Israeli flag was in sight amid hundreds of Palestinian, communist and anarchist banners.
Such is the strength of Israeli democracy that not a single incident interrupted the demonstration. The demonstrators' catchcry was "stop the war", but the real agenda was substituting Israel with a more benign, socialist state on all land west of the Jordan river.
This doesn't surprise me. On Sydney campuses one often bumps into Trotskyites and the odd Greenie chanting "free Palestine". It sounds very politically correct, but when you read their pamphlets and look at the maps, you see this has nothing to do with a West Bank pullout, relief for Gaza or dismantling settlements.
In recent years such activists have ominously teamed up with Islamist fanatics based in the West to dupe well-meaning peaceniks into campaigns that are supposedly about human-rights violations but are aimed at the elimination of the state of Israel.
Presumably, once this noble cause is achieved the people of greater Palestine will live in social-democratic, multicultural bliss.
But on the morning after, just like those well-meaning leftists who helped the ayatollahs eliminate the pro-Western monarchy in Iran in 1979, they would wake up to the nightmare of intolerance.
Niv Horesh is a lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of NSW.
Source: The Australian
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