Lawrence Davidson
Redress

Lawrence Davidson unpicks the subtext behind the current emphasis by Zionists on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which he says is aimed primarily “at undermining the growing boycott movement that seeks to isolate Israel and call into serious question the legitimacy of a state designed exclusively for one ethnic or religious group”.

“...it is the practice of Zionism, and not lack of recognition of its alleged Jewishness, that is causing Israel’s legitimacy crisis. Demanding that the Palestinians, or indeed the whole world, call Israel the Jewish state cannot mask its real nature.”

Michael Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This means he stands in a line of foreign diplomats who are often quite out of the ordinary. For one thing, they may well be ex-Americans.

Oren (né Bornstein) was born in upstate New York and grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. He switched countries in 1979. For another, Israeli ambassadors do not hesitate to engage in public debates aimed at swaying American public opinion. Actually, this is very un-diplomatic behavior and you don’t see the ambassadors from China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay or Liechtenstein, ad finem, doing that sort of thing. Yet, Oren has done this several times by sending op-eds to the New York Times. On 13 October he did so again with one entitled, "An end to Israel’s invisibility".

It is an odd title, for if there is one thing Israel is not, it is invisible. But the ambassador is arguing from a peculiar point of view. Essentially, he claims that the Palestinians have yet to officially acknowledge that Israel is a "Jewish state". For Oren, it is the Jewish aspect of Israel that remains "invisible". As odd as this sounds, the ambassador’s complaint echos a current theme across the political spectrum in Israel. At the same time that he put out his op-ed, Ari Shavit, the centre-right contributor to Ha’aretz, published a piece that made a similar argument but extended the failure of recognition accusation to Europe and beyond. It appeared on 14 October and is entitled “The core of the conflict". All of this might appear as something of a mystery.

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Lawrence Davidson
Redress

2006 © Carlos Latuff

Lawrence Davidson considers a recent Yale University conference on anti-Semitism which, instead of engaging in an objective discussion of an age old form of racism, ended up tying itself to an ideological view of the world that is itself racist and dedicating itself to the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Between the 23 and 25 August, Yale University in the USA held a conference entitled ‘Global anti-Semitism: a Crisis of Modernity’. It was sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Therefore, this was a university event and not one brought in from the outside to use Yale facilities.

On the surface there is nothing wrong with this. Anti-Semitism is an age old form of racism and it calls for ongoing academic study. The problem is that this particular conference approached the subject from the ideologically driven position of radical Zionism. In other words, many of the assumptions upon which the conference was built were unfortunately tainted with bias. Indeed, in at least one instance (a panel on the "self-hating" Jew), one might suggest that the event was itself promoting a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism. Very odd indeed.

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Lawrence Davidson

Deliver Us from Ignorance: Freedom’s Higher Meaning

The cases of Omar Khadr and Bradley Manning

Lawrence Davidson shows how popular apathy and parochialism, combined with control of the information flow by the US government and its allied mass media, has led to a situation whereby the American public views injustice and illegality with complete indifference.

At present there are two men sitting in prison who have never met but are nonetheless intimately connected. One is 23 year old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was with a group of Afghan resistance fighters attacked by US troops in 2002 (when he was 15). The second is Private First Class Bradley Manning, the man who blew the whistle on the barbaric tactics used by the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is their different forms of resistance to a war sold to the US public as "necessary" and defensive that binds their fate.

Omar Khadr – child prisoner

Omar Khadr was taken prisoner in 2002. The United States claimed he was a member of Al-Qaeda and said he met Osama bin Laden when he was 10. This made him an "intelligence treasure trove". Al-Qaeda obliged the US by describing Omar as a "lion cub" defender of the faith. In truth, neither claim is real evidence of any definite organizational connection. The number of distinct resistance groups in Afghanistan runs into the dozens and Al-Qaeda will breezily claim every one of them. According to General James Jones, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, the number of actual Al-Qaeda operatives at any one time in Afghanistan is under 100 individuals. The assertion that 15-year-old Omar was one them is problematic. But it was enough for the American government that he was with the resistance. Having complete power over both him and his media image, he could be made into anything the American government wanted. For instance, he is accused of throwing a grenade at American troops despite the fact that the reports of the 2002 action are confused and contradictory. There is no eyewitness evidence of Khadir’s actions during the fighting. Nonetheless, one American soldier died at the time and Omar Khadr has been charged with his "murder".

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