‘I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!’

Sixty-five years after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the young Anne Frank’s reflection on her aspiration to become a celebrated writer is tragically poignant. Tens of millions of people have now read her diary, which she started keeping as a schoolgirl on her thirteenth birthday and continued throughout her time in hiding in Amsterdam during the Second World War.

The first, edited version of Frank’s diary was published in 1947 under the title The Diary of a Young Girl. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a new version was published: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. This version is now the cause of controversy in the US, where it has emerged that a Virginia school district, which has 7,600 pupils, decided to stop assigning the diary to eighth-grade English students following a parent’s complaint that some of the sexual references in the book are inappropriate.

The definitive edition contains 30 per cent more material than the original one, including passages where Frank writes about her erotic feelings and expresses curiosity about sex and wonderment at the physicality of female genitalia:

‘There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!’

These most private and intimate thoughts of a teenager, along with some unflattering descriptions of her mother and other residents of ‘the secret annex’ where the Frank family hid, were originally excised by her father, Otto Frank. This was partly out of respect for the dead, and partly because of demands by the original publishers that the book be kept short.

Anne Frank herself edited, tweaked and redrafted her diary after hearing a radio broadcast from London, in which a minister of the Dutch government-in-exile urged his people to collect eyewitness accounts of the Nazi occupation. This gave Frank the idea of writing a book, which she provisionally titled The Secret Annex. At the same time, she kept up the original diary. These two versions are known as version A and version B, respectively. When Otto Frank decided to publish his daughter’s diary, he edited the two versions into a shorter book, version C, or The Diary of a Young Girl.

Today, Anne Frank’s diary, which is probably the most famous personal account of the Holocaust, has been translated into over 50 languages. There have been TV, cinema and theatre adaptations; it was even turned into a musical in Spain two years ago. It has become staple reading in schools across the world, and in Amsterdam tourists form constant ringlet-shaped queues outside the Franks’ hiding place, which has been turned into a museum. On the façade of the building there is plaque which reads, in Dutch, ‘Anne Frank Huis’, where visitors keenly pose for portraits.

Anne Frank has become the patron saint of the Holocaust – an ordinary, pure and innocent heroine. There’s no doubting, of course, that she was a victim of forces beyond her control. But in the context of the increasing tendency to teach schoolchildren, as well as the general public, about the Holocaust in an individualised and emotive manner, the life of Anne Frank has become the perfect snapshot story of an innocent victim from which we are meant to draw all sorts of moralistic lessons, not just about the Holocaust but also about life today. In this sense, she has become something other than just one of millions whose lives were destroyed by the Nazis. She has, in posterity, been turned into a symbol of all that is good and pure in the world and we are expected to draw numerous contemporary lessons from her diaries – about racism, anti-social behaviour, bullying, censorship, and so on.

The Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, for instance, includes an exhibition called Free2Choose, which encourages visitors to reflect on issues concerning human rights and freedoms, and there are various international projects and exhibitions, aimed primarily at young people, that use the story of Anne Frank to teach lessons about today, even if the issues dealt with had little, if any, bearing on her life in 1940s Europe. The presumption here is that young people can learn from her diary how to be good people.

So it is not surprising that many have reacted angrily to the idea that young people, as suggested by the parent who felt that Anne Frank’s diary is not suitable for schoolchildren, should be shielded from her writing – because her diary is seen as essential to young people’s social and individual development.

It was in November last year that Culpeper County Public Schools in Virginia decided to stop assigning the definitive edition of The Diary of a Young Girl to its students, but this only came to light at the end of last week after a local paper reported it. After the parent complained, school officials decided to use the earlier, vagina reference-free version of the diary. According to a Washington Post report, Culpeper’s own ‘public complaint about learning resources’ policy, which requires complaints to be submitted in writing and for a review committee to research the materials and deliberate, was not followed in this instance.

It appears that school officials acted pre-emptively. Based on the complaint of just one parent, they thought it would be better to avoid arguments and debates and just give students the ‘less offensive’ version of the diary. This decision is deplorable, treating young people as being incapable of focusing on anything other than Anne Frank’s sporadic ruminations on sex and romance.

Yet if banning the full version of Frank’s diary is daft, then so is the elevation of the diary into a kind of guidebook for life for young people across the Western world. Frank’s diary has been turned into a morality tale, to be fitted into any mould necessary to teach people of all ages how to behave.

Of course, we can learn a lot from reading Frank’s diary and from studying the fate of the Frank family. But the endless attempts to suck every kind of moral fable from the diary in order to lecture young people around the world about how to become model citizens do little to help remember the historically-specific circumstances of Frank’s life, to encourage readers to appreciate the flair of her writing or the courage of the people who helped her.

For instance, if children are asked to draw parallels between bullying victims and Anne Frank, they are in effect being encouraged to regard Nazism as severe teasing and to view the Final Solution as an extreme social exclusion policy. This is not serving the purpose of preserving history or respecting the memory of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Instead, it is serving very specific, contemporary agendas and only helps to skew history.

It is true that although, as her writing elucidates, the circumstances around Frank’s death were thankfully historically specific, many of the themes she explored in her diary are universal and timeless: growing up, falling in love, relating to your family, dreaming about the future. It’s all the stuff of teenage life. Her writing is captivating, her story fascinating, and her fate tragic. It is neither surprising nor wrong that Frank’s diary – which references not just the horrors of the German occupation of the Netherlands and the travails of Jews in Europe, but also the coming-of-age of a perceptive and articulate young girl – has captured the imagination of millions of children and adults. But just as Frank should not – regardless of what version of her diary we read – be seen as morally compromising for teenagers, who might be encouraged to become vagina-inspecting, sexual beasts, it is equally bizarre to expect that reading her diary can turn young people into politically correct saints.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

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However, this is no nostalgia trip or celebration of Jewish traditions. The suburban, 1960s Jew-dominated landscape of A Serious Man is a non-schmaltzy, sun-drenched flat landscape of ticky-tacky duplexes fitted with satellite dishes and identical square lawns and inhabited by bored housewives, country-club members and pot-smoking teenagers. It is an insular community, which looks at the outside world with nervousness and derision. The only non-Jews that our loser-hero, physics professor Larry Gopnik, interacts with are his white-trash, gun-toting ‘goy’ neighbours and a Korean student who tries to bribe his way to a passing grade.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Cohen brothers set Homer’s Odyssey in the 1930s deep south. Here, they put Larry Gopnik through a modern-day version of the trials of Job, in a time when America was about to be hit by winds of anti-conformism and social upheaval, where the certainties of old were questioned and turned on their heads. And so they are for Larry, whose trials and tribulations will have you squirming, cringing, gawping and guffawing.

Physics professor Larry Gopnik is a freier, a sucker, whose cushy life is shredded to pieces as his tzuris mount. (A Yiddish dictionary might come in handy when watching A Serious Man.) His hectoring wife demands a get, a ritual divorce, so that she can re-marry the smarmy Sy Ableman; Larry is forced to move into a Jolly Roger motel with his snoring brother, who nurses a sebaceous cyst and works on a ‘probability map of the universe,’ the Mentaculus; the Columbia Record Club is chasing Larry for a membership fee for a scheme he never signed up to; an anonymous adversary is sending letters to Larry’s tenure committee; Larry’s daughter is stealing money from him to fund a nose job; it’s only two weeks until the Bar Mitzvah of Larry’s truant son, Danny, who is more interested in getting stoned than in rehearsing his Torah portion; and as Larry’s legal bills pile up, resisting the temptation to pocket those hundred dollar bills that the Korean student indiscreetly left on his desk gets harder and harder.

‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ cries Larry. A friend tells him that while it’s not always easy to figure out what God is trying to tell us, at least as Jews they have a lot of wonderful stories and traditions to seek answers from. The friend wears leg braces.

Are the Coens laughing at the Jews? No, the Coens are laughing at Larry’s – and man’s – futile attempts to find answers to the riddles of the universe, whether it’s through consulting rabbis and folk tales or quantum mechanics. And the Coens are laughing at man’s inability to accept coincidence, an inability which leads us irrationally to cling to unearthly mysteries and conspiracy theories instead of, as the medieval rabbi Rashi, quoted with some irony at the start of A Serious Man, said: ‘Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.’

In other words, the Coens are still sardonically cynical. Yet there is a warmth and humanity to this film, too. After all, Gopnik, who struggles to be a good, responsible person, is also the only character with whom it is possible to sympathise. As the contemptuous, conniving Sy Ableman is described, in posterity, as a serious man, Gopnik, echoing Job, insists that he, too, is an upright person. But he is left to wrestle with the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.

While Larry seeks the council of rabbis – one tells him to take pleasure in the small wonders in life, like parking lots; a second recounts a fascinating but pointless story about a ‘goy’ with Hebrew letters imprinted in the back of his teeth; a third is unwilling to see Larry because he’s too busy thinking – his unemployable, unmarriable brother Arthur has reached an altogether more despondent state: ‘Hashem hasn’t given me shit!’ he cries.

‘Why’, Larry asks one of the clue-less rabbis, ‘does God make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give any answers?’. Larry seeks and seeks, tries and tries, but he is left with tortuous uncertainty – the theme which permeates A Serious Man.

The film opens with an epilogue set in the kind of shtetl in Eastern Europe in which the Gopniks’ ancestors would have lived. A couple is visited by an old man whom the wife, convinced the visitor is a dybbuk (a malicious spirit) stabs in the chest. Was it a dybbuk or a human? Did the woman kill him (the dybbuk/human staggers out of the house before we discover the extent of his injuries)? We never find out. Just like Larry’s students will never find out whether or not Schrödinger’s cat was killed by the poison.

Later, Larry illustrates Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on a gigantic, cluttered blackboard before telling his perplexed students they must memorise the equation for their mid-term exams. Meanwhile, Danny rehearses for his Bar Mitzvah from an LP version of the Torah, without knowing what the words mean because he spends his Hebrew classes stoned and listening to Jefferson Airplane on a transistor radio.

In a scene with the most wonderful depiction of a rabbi in cinematic history, Danny gets his confiscated transistor radio back, along with a lesson from the most wise and learned man known to Minnesotan Jews: ‘When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love?’

It could be as simple as that. But, in any case, it is a great fortune that humanity’s historical unwillingness to accept a state of not knowing, the itching curiosity which characterises the human species, leads to such wonderful explorations into the mystery of being as the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

The post The Coen Brothers’ Uncertainty Principle appeared first on Jewcy.

What is more surprising, however, is that a respected newspaper should publish an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory drawing tenuous links between Rosenbaum and 10-year-old accusations that the Israel Defense Forces routinely steal Palestinian people’s body parts.

In an article published on 17 August in Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest circulation tabloid newspaper, journalist Donald Boström linked the international organ trafficking scandal exposed by the FBI to claims made by Palestinians he met in the early 1990s about the IDF stealing organs from people in the occupied territories. The article, titled ‘“They plunder the organs of our sons”’, has caused a diplomatic row between Israel and Sweden. Sweden now finds itself charged with having a blood libel case on its hands.

Boström hooked his article off the case of Rosenbaum, who was arrested in July 2009 after offering to obtain a kidney from an Israeli donor for an undercover FBI agent. Rosenbaum allegedly told the agent that he has been involved in arranging kidney sales for 10 years and that all the donors come from Israel. Boström then says there have been ‘strong suspicions’ amongst Palestinians that young men captured in the occupied territories have been forced to give up their internal organs before being murdered by the IDF.

In classic conspiracy theory style, Boström draws tenuous links between separate alleged events, appears to accept rumours and suspicions as facts, and strongly suggests that unanswered questions equal evidence of foul play.

Boström and Aftonbladet have, understandably, been slammed by Israeli officials – but the Israelis’ over-the-top response doesn’t do them any favours, either. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that the Swedish government condemn Aftonbladet for publishing Boström’s article. Finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said that Swedish officials who refuse to condemn the paper would be unwelcome in Israel – an unsubtle hint to Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, who is due to visit Israel soon. Swedish leaders have said that, in the interest of freedom of expression, they will not dictate what the country’s media should or should not publish.

Israel’s interior ministry then announced that it is freezing the issue of entry visas to Swedish journalists, while the director of the Israeli government press office told his staff to delay the press accreditation process for two Aftonbladet journalists currently working in Israel. He undiplomatically joked that it could take some time to test the reporters’ blood in order to assess their eligibility for organ transplants.

The Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv published a statement on its website condemning the Aftonbladet article as ‘appalling,’ leading the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to hail the bravery of the Swedish ambassador to Israel. Displaying a total lack of historical perspective, Lieberman even likened the ambassador to Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. The statement on the website was later removed, however, presumably under pressure from the Swedish government. Lieberman then said that the Swedish government’s refusal to condemn Aftonbladet was reminiscent of its country’s ‘neutral’ stance during the Second World War. He also said that this latest scandal recalls the Dreyfus Affair – the historic and scandalous trial a century ago of a Jewish officer in the French army accused of treason.

So what did Boström actually say in the incendiary piece? After sketching the case against Rosenbaum, he argued that Israel has been accused in the past of turning a blind eye to illegal organ trafficking across its border and pointed out that there is a lack of organ donors in Israel. In the early 1990s, Boström writes, the Israeli government launched a relatively successful campaign to encourage Israelis to become organ donors, but the gap between supply and demand remained. Here, Boström’s article takes a sinister turn. He writes: ‘While this organ campaign went on, young Palestinian men were disappearing, returned five days later to their villages at night, dead and slit open.’

Boström spent time in the occupied territories in the early 1990s. That is when he heard rumours that the IDF was emptying Palestinian bodies of organs. The IDF says that autopsies of captured bodies are a routine procedure, in order to establish the cause and circumstances of death, yet one 19-year-old victim’s family interviewed by Boström were convinced that their son’s organs had been stolen.

Boström links together an ongoing legal case in the US with rumours from the occupied territories to tell an hysterical story about Israeli organ theft. There is a serious need for organs in Israel, he says; there is also an investigation into an illegal international kidney trade which goes back 10 years and involves some Israeli doctors; and there are some Palestinians who suspect that the IDF routinely steal organs. Thus, he concludes: ‘It is time to bring some clarity over this macabre operation, about what is happening and what has happened in the Israeli-occupied territories since the start of the Intifada.’

The only fact clearly revealed in Boström’s piece is that journalistic standards at Aftonbladet are very low indeed. A cobbled-together piece of hearsay and prejudices passed muster with the paper’s editors and is now defended by the paper as a valid piece of reporting. Unfortunately, the overreaction of Israeli politicians to this affair has only allowed Aftonbladet to claim the moral highground as some kind of free speech warrior when, in fact, its editors are defending the freedom to let conspiracy theories pass for serious journalism.

Of course, Israelis – and anyone else for that matter – have the right to think and say whatever they want about Boström’s article. But unfortunately Israeli officials’ clampdown on Swedish journalists, and their demands that the Swedish government meddle in press affairs, will likely only perpetuate today’s widespread mythical stereotype of Jews controlling the media and trying to puppeteer international affairs.

Moreover, although Boström’s piece bears clear resemblances to medieval anti-Semitic myths, to claim that this is a modern-day re-run of something like the Dreyfus Affair not only lends undue weight to what is essentially a shoddy piece of writing and an uncoordinated response from Swedish officials – it also misses the point about what is new about today’s incessant criticisms of Israel.

Although today’s widespread discomfort with Israel sometimes mutates into the expression of anti-Jewish sentiment, as witnessed on some of the protests against the Gaza War earlier this year, we are not experiencing a return to medieval Europe or to early twentieth-century France, where the Dreyfus Affair almost tore the French republic apart. Instead, what motivates the politics of anti-Zionism today, what drives the incessant focus on Israeli wickedness amongst European academics, political activists and media commentators, is not old-style anti-Semitism but a contemporary sense of distance from and loathing of Western values. Israel is seen as embodying modern values and ideals that are now widely held in contempt in the West.

Yes, there does sometimes seem to be a thin line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. At an anti-Israel demonstration in London in January, for instance, protesters evoked classic anti-Semitic imagery likening Israel to a blood-sucking, baby-killing monster, with one demonstrator wearing a hook-nosed mask and pretending to eat Palestinian babies. There were also widespread calls for boycotting Israeli shops, products and businesses which were, in fact, Jewish-owned rather than Israeli. Around Europe, some protesters chanted ‘death to the Jews’ and ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas’.

However, it must be reiterated that rational and passionate criticism of Israel does not equal anti-Semitism. There are a great many legitimate and genuine criticisms to be made of Israel’s politics and its continuing suppression of Palestinian people’s national rights. The deeply censorious impulse of those Israel supporters who rush to condemn all expressions of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic should be challenged.

More broadly, what we are witnessing today is not the revival of ancient hatreds but rather the singular demonisation of Israel as the embodiment of everything that is rotten about the modern world. At a time when national sovereignty is no longer seen as sacrosanct, Israel’s resistance of external meddling in its affairs is viewed as chauvinistic arrogance and as offensive to the sensibilities of many Western liberals who are quick to call for sanctions, boycotts and international intervention to correct Israel’s behaviour.

At a time when America has come to be regarded as the ultimate force for evil (well, at least until Obama stepped in), many find an outlet for their hatred of America by protesting against Israel. At a time when politicians and the media alike are regarded with cynicism and suspicion, both are blamed for being subservient to Israeli or Jewish interests. When anti-Israel protesters draw up lists of ‘Israeli’ businesses, call for boycotts of Israeli products and smash the windows of Israeli shops, it does indeed have strong historical resonances – but today this kind of Israel-bashing is chiefly a way of letting off steam about the supposed perils of consumption and Big Business.

Today, Israel has become a ready symbol for everything from the perceived harmful effects of consumer society to the shortcomings of international politics and the agenda-driven media. The Aftonbladet article is an isolated case which can easily be picked apart as an unsubstantiated, prejudiced conspiracy theory. At the same time, however, it is also the latest in a long list of disparate examples of how old anti-Semitic myths are resurfacing in rejumbled form as modern-day criticisms of Israel. That such myths can be deemed acceptable reportage by a national daily paper shows that, when it comes to criticising Israel, rationalism and accuracy count for little; rather, expressing one’s own angst and general kneejerk reaction against the ‘dark forces’ that rule over us is the key driver of mainstream anti-Israel sentiment today.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor at spiked. The above translations of sections of Boström’s article are by Nathalie Rothschild.

The post The Irrational Streak to Israel-Bashing appeared first on Jewcy.

Because in Oxford, Gore said that, when it comes to global warming, politicians should follow the lead of Winston Churchill, ‘who aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two’.

This is not the first time that Gore has evoked the spirit of Churchill and the threat of Hitler to describe world leaders’ apparent apathy in the face of climate change. In his acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, he said: ‘[D]espite a growing number of honourable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”’

As for his Oxford speech, it is not surprising that Gore’s insistence that world leaders DO SOMETHING about global warming and fight CO2 emissions as if they were bombs falling out of Luftwaffe aircraft became the headline grabber. ‘We have everything we need except political will’, said Gore, ‘but’ – as he has quipped many times before – ‘political will is a renewable resource’. (Gore sure knows how to recycle jokes. Another of his favourites is to introduce himself as follows: ‘Hi, my name is Al Gore. I was the next president of the United States.’)

In his Oxford speech, Gore also talked of the importance of entrepreneurs showing leadership in the fight against global warming and the steps that can be taken to ensure global energy efficiency. He told of how some countries have started constructing zero-carbon buildings, and warned of the dangers of deforestation, industrial emissions, soil carbon and more.

Still, nothing beats a not-so-subtle hint at the N-word to ram home an alarmist message about impending global climate chaos. In fact, though some environmentalists have argued that Gore’s shrillness in Oxford might have been counterproductive, the Nazi comparison is the green movement’s trump card.

Environmentalists constantly conjure up Holocaust imagery – on the one hand to stress that climate change is a simplistic moral issue, and on the other hand to shut down debate on the matter. We all know the Holocaust happened, we all know it was wrong, we all know who were the villains and who were the victims. Well, replace the Jews with flora and fauna, the Nazis with Big Business, and racist revisionists with ‘climate change sceptics’ and, voilà, you have a ready-made morality tale which will demonstrate the urgency of tackling global warming and the outrageousness of ever questioning the environmentalist agenda.

This twisted reasoning can even lead experienced scientists to compare coal-fuelled electricity generation to the systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis. The NASA climate scientist, James E Hansen, once said: ‘If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.’ Think of that next time you leave your television on standby – you might be implicit in killing off Jews, or some other ‘species’, just like the SS officers in charge of the mass transportations to the Nazi concentration camps.

If you question the severity of the climate threat, or argue that how humanity should handle it is up for debate, you are likely to be called a ‘climate change denier’. One green went so far as to advocate Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for those who question anthropogenic climate change. Another commentator wrote: ‘I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.’

So, contesting the irrefutable evidence that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis is put on a par with questioning events that have not even happened yet. To demand that policies which affect our everyday lives should be put up for critical inquiry and debate is likened to falsifying history.

In his Oxford speech, Gore admitted that it is difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change is as urgent as the threat from Hitler was in the 1930s. Yes, that’s because the majority of sensible people can tell the difference between the manageable challenges posed by changes to the environment and the global havoc wreaked by the Second World War, the rise of fascism, and the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate the Jews.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

The post Why Greens Love to Invoke the Holocaust appeared first on Jewcy.

Last Sunday, Shalit’s family set up a protest tent outside the outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s residence in Jerusalem, hoping their manifestation would put pressure on the government to reach a deal with Hamas over their son’s release before the government shift later this month. Yesterday, on the thousandth day of his capture, it became clear that the latest prisoner-swap negotiations for Shalit’s release had failed.

Just 19 years old and fresh out of school when he was kidnapped in June 2006, Corporal Shalit cut a scrawny figure in his baggy army uniform. In Israel, his image became ubiquitous and is now firmly imprinted in the national consciousness. Much like Ron Arad, the air force navigator who has been missing in action since 1986, became the human face of the conflict with Lebanon for Israelis, Shalit has come to embody a great deal. He is a symbol for Israeli humanitarianism, Palestinian barbarism, military weakness, and political impotence – depending on who you ask.

The fallouts over the latest stalemate in the Egyptian-brokered prisoner-swap negotiations between Hamas and Israel have laid bare some fractures in Israeli society. It is widely seen as the outgoing government’s latest – and last – failure. Many argue that Olmert’s inability to secure a deal for Shalit’s release will make the job harder for future negotiators. However, it is not simply Israeli officials’ bartering and diplomatic skills that have been found wanting in this process – so too has Israel’s political confidence. And it is questionable whether Olmert’s successors have any more of it than he does.

From Israel’s side, the objective of the negotiations is ostensibly to free Shalit, but of course much more is on the table here. Israel is also negotiating the extent to which it will appear soft on Palestinian militants, how well it respects the nation’s cherished ethos of ‘never leaving a soldier behind,’ and the feelings of the parents who offer their children to the service of the state vs the feelings of those who have lost relatives in violent attacks perpetrated by some of the prisoners Hamas is demanding in exchange for Shalit.

Olmert’s biggest legacy (in addition to his involvement in a series of corruption scandals) will be that of the Second Lebanon War of 2006: a conflict that turned sour after initial widespread national support for the government’s fight against Hezbollah turned into widespread national disappointment. That war was triggered by the abduction of two soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, on the Israeli side of the Lebanese border less than a month after Shalit had been kidnapped during an attack on an Israeli army outpost near the Gaza-Israel-Egypt border. 

In the eyes of the Israeli public, Olmert’s chances of ‘making good’ on the mistakes of the Second Lebanon War hinged, to a large extent, on striking a successful deal to free Shalit. While Goldwasser and Regev’s bodies were returned to Israel last year, in exchange for Israel handing over the remains of 199 Lebanese fighters and freeing five militants, Shalit is presumed to be alive and is still used as a pawn in prisoner-exchange barters. These barters have now come to a desperate gridlock, as Israel refused this week to agree to Hamas’s demand that it be allowed to select 450 prisoners for release in exchange for Shalit.

The Shalit family’s protest tent has become the scene of intense debate and emotion. It has turned into something of a pilgrimage destination for Israelis wishing to show their support for the soldier’s distressed family, and to express their frustration with an impotent Israeli government and their disgust with Shalit’s captors.

Yesterday, a group of Druze, Bedouins and Muslims, accompanied by Likud Knesset member Ayoob Kara, arrived at the Shalit family’s protest tent to express support for a deal securing Shalit’s release. At the site, visitors scribble messages on post-it notes and attach them to a wall. Unlike the personal prayer notes that visitors to Jerusalem’s kotel roll up and stick into the cracks of the wailing wall, the notes for Shalit are displayed openly for passers-by to read. The inside of the protest tent is adorned with posters and photographs of Shalit and slogans demanding he be brought home. One artist has donated a painting of Shalit in a soldier’s uniform and handcuffs. On a notice board, printed figures show the number of days Shalit has been missing in action.

But not everyone visiting the site is keen on the idea of getting Shalit back at any price. On Monday, families of fallen soldiers and victims of Palestinian violence set up a small tent of their own, next to the Shalit family’s tent, and held a silent protest against prisoner swaps. Shvuel Schijeveschuurder, who lost his parents and three siblings in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2001, told Haaretz: ‘I feel betrayed by the State of Israel and the court system.’ He vowed that if anyone involved in the attack that killed his family members were to be released, he would chase them down himself, ‘like [Simon] Wiesenthal tracked down the Nazis’.

The mother of a soldier killed in the Second Lebanon War visited the Shalit family to express her empathy, but told Haaretz she opposes prisoner exchanges. Admitting she would have done what the Shalit family is doing were she in a similar situation, she still added: ‘I wouldn’t want the government to listen to me. A government shouldn’t operate based on the weeping of mothers.’ During the Second Lebanon War, her son had told her that he would not want anyone released in exchange for him if he was kidnapped. ‘I agree with him 100 per cent’, the mother said. ‘Do what is good for the State of Israel – don’t operate based on tears.’

Perhaps in an attempt to prove why it was justified in drawing certain ‘red lines’ in the prisoner-swap negotiations, the Israeli government took the unusual step of publishing the names of some of the Palestinian prisoners that Hamas has demanded in exchange for Shalit. In total, Israel offered to release 325 prisoners, with the condition that 144 of them be sent to the Gaza Strip or abroad. The names of those Palestinians that Israel refused to release were published alongside the names of 10 of the prisoners it agreed to free with the condition of deportation.

The decision to publish these names looks like an effort on the part of Israeli political leaders to find sympathy amongst the public for their moral and political quandaries. In effect, the government is playing the feelings of bereaved relatives of the victims of Palestinian violence against the feelings of bereaved parents of dead Israeli soldiers, failing utterly, as the mother of that dead soldier urged, to avoid ‘operating on the basis of tears’.

In a press conference Olmert insisted that Israel ‘is not a defeated nation’, that it remains willing to negotiate over Shalit’s return but that it will not cross the ‘red lines’ set out in Cairo this week. Yet these red lines seem rather arbitrary. Israel is willing to release 350 prisoners, but apparently releasing 450 is ‘too high a price to pay’ and would unduly compromise Israel’s security.

The debate about how many Palestinian prisoners Shalit’s safe return home is worth masks some serious political failings. As Akiva Eldar points out in Haaretz, instead of admitting to their own failure in negotiating Shalit’s release over the past three years, Olmert and his partners have blamed everyone else – ‘the lobby that pressures, the ministers that identified with them, the media that reported, and especially the price-gougers in Hamas. The excuses and claims being scattered by government spokespeople, the heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad and emissary Ofer Dekel, reveal their failure in managing this crisis.’

For the Israeli public, the Shalit negotiations are not simply a political management issue. Instead, it appears that this single soldier has become a powerful symbol, a conduit for expressing people’s hopes and frustrations. As such, the Shalit debacle has contributed to recasting the conflict with the Palestinians in emotive and un-nuanced terms.

For instance, many claim that Israel’s willingness to swap soldiers – dead or alive – for Palestinian prisoners who have been involved in killing Israels is powerful proof of the Israeli people’s solidarity and their respect for the sanctity of life. This is widely contrasted with Hamas’s occasional suicide-bombing tactics and their supposed use of ‘human shields’ in the Gaza Strip. In this way, the conflict is lazily turned into a struggle between good and evil, between humanitarians and barbarians.

The Shalit family’s protest tent has over the past week provided a physical space for Israelis’ frustrations; it has become a site for emotional outlet, a place where one can try to redefine Israel’s purpose, whether it is to ‘hold the line’ or ‘show compassion’. Here, the clash between the old Israel and the new Israel, between an Israel that refused to negotiate with ‘terrorists’ and fiercely protected its sovereignty and an Israel that makes sacrifices in the name of existential security, is played out.

As for Olmert and his partners, publishing the names of prisoners whose release had been on the negotiating table in Cairo was a powerful show of weakness, a demonstration that they are pandering to emotionalism. Apparently they believe that the way to people’s hearts and minds is through their tear canals – and it is questionable whether the new regime, even if it is more skilled, will be able to fix the broader crisis of legitimacy underpinning the three-year Shalit debacle.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

The post Gilad Shalit and the Politics of Weeping appeared first on Jewcy.

‘Today the people chose Kadima… We will form the next government led by Kadima.’

Both Tzipora Livni of the ruling Kadima party and Benjamin Netanyahu of the opposition Likud party claimed victory in Tuesday’s Israeli elections, in which voter turnout was only slightly higher than the record low of 2006. With 99 per cent of the votes counted at the time of writing, of the 120 seats in the Israeli parliament – the Knesset – Kadima won 28 and Likud won 27. It is still unclear who will be Israel’s next prime minister, but the election results have shed light on the despondency that many Israelis felt for the politicians on the ballot.

Despite various Israeli politicians’ Obama-inspired rhetoric of change, the real shift in Israeli society, which this election has brought to the fore, is the decline of left-wing Zionism, and the prevalence of a politics of insecurity, which inspires defensive patriotism rather than ideological zealotry. The fall of the centre-left Labour party, which came fourth with only 13 seats, and the rise of the right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel our Home), which got 15 seats, encapsulate these two defining features: the death of grand-vision Zionism and the rise of a new politics of hiding behind walls.

According to one leading Israeli commentator, writing in Jewcy on the day of the election, ‘If Israel has voted for change today it is not for change of the political map – it’s for a change of the political system’. Admittedly, Israel’s is a messy political system. Unwieldy coalitions prevent coherent policymaking, necessitating constant compromises and negotiations which disempower the elected prime minister. But in a country that is under constant international observation, which has just come out of a war in Gaza, and which has seen 60 years of bloody conflict, one might expect ambition for political change to run higher. In reality, reports from inside Israel reveal a distinct lack of enthusiasm for this week’s election.

No mainstream politician managed to garner any groundswell of support or clear public mandate. Instead, the real talk of the Holy Land in recent weeks has been the 51-year-old Moldovan ex-nightclub bouncer Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu. In order to form a government, a party or a coalition of parties needs to have 61 seats. So Livni and Netanyahu, or Tzipi and Bibi as they are known, are desperately trying to woo ‘Avi’, who has been elevated to ‘kingmaker’ in this election, to form a coalition with them. Meanwhile, the biggest loser in the election was current defence minister Ehud Barak and his Labour party. Labour took a humiliating fourth place, winning only two more seats than the ultra-orthodox Shas party.

For Labour, this week’s election was a crushing defeat. This, after all, is a party which has held power for 50 out of 60 years of Israel’s short existence. Once headed by Israel’s founding father and passionate Zionist, David Ben-Gurion, Labour has been steadily losing ground over the past four decades.

Avigdor Lieberman’s political language has little of the PC, US-pleasing rhetoric of other Israeli politicians, such as Barak. With his Russian-accented, hard-line, straight-talking approach, Lieberman looks and sounds like change. He has proposed a mandatory loyalty oath to the Jewish state and has said that ‘Arab Knesset members who collaborate with the enemy and meet with Hamas heads should be dealt with sternly’. On the two-state solution, Lieberman has asserted: ‘Israel needs to explain that the demand for a Palestinian state and the refugees’ right of return is a cover for radical Islam’s attempt to destroy the State of Israel.’ By comparison, the heads of the mainstream parties sound like broken records, stuck in the old dichotomies of ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’, and regurgitating worn-out attitudes to the peace process.

However, while ‘Liebermania’ may have upset the intelligentsia and liberal commentariat in Israel and beyond, with a closer look it becomes clear that Lieberman’s anti-Arab rhetoric and attitudes to a two-state solution largely mirror the approach of the mainstream parties, not least the centre-left Labour party which initiated the peace talks under Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s. In demanding clear and implacable separation between Israelis and Arabs, even if that means giving up some of Israel’s current land, which Lieberman is prepared to do (in fact, he has said he is prepared to give up his own home), he is actually remaining true to the partitionist, separatist logic of the recent peace talks themselves.

Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, has been portrayed as a collection of right-wing, Arab-hating lunatics, but the rise of Lieberman primarily encapsulates the rise of a new politics of insecurity, rather than a politics of security, in Israel. Lieberman plays into the existential fears of Israelis and seems to present clear solutions to external threats. The fall of Labour, meanwhile, embodies the death of left-wing Zionism. The demise of the party that once had a grand vision for a land of Zion alongside the rise of a right-winger who is willing to give up bits of land if it means permanent separation from the Arabs captures the defining feature of contemporary Israeli society: a post-Zionist desire to batten down the hatches and hide from ‘externalities’.

A recent study of Israeli Jews’ attitudes towards the 60-year conflict with the Arabs concluded that their collective consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality and existential fear which tend to justify aggressive policies towards the Palestinians. Notwithstanding the study authors’ propensity to analyse the Israeli public through a psychological framework, and to present them as being collectively brainwashed by the ‘official version’ of history, they did reach some poignant conclusions. The strong victim mentality in Israel can easily be coupled with a politics of fear. Regardless of the objective reality of the conflict with the Palestinians, viewed through the prism of victimhood, aggressive tactics that carry great human costs can appear to some to be a justifiable response.

But Israelis’ victim mentality, and its realisation through policy, has changed very much over the years. In the past, it was accompanied by a confident, ideology-driven politics and, in times of conflict, by clear strategic aims. By contrast, the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the recent war in Gaza, or ‘Operation Cast Lead’, had no definable or achievable goals. These were violent, defensive statements of Israel’s ‘right to exist’, rather than ideology-driven, expansionist wars.

As Mick Hume pointed out on spiked last month, compared to the confident Zionism at the time of the founding of the state, ‘Israel today is a far more insecure and defensive society, concerned to bunker down behind its new security barriers and cut itself off from the Palestinians locked into Gaza and the West Bank, lashing out when it feels they won’t leave it alone’. In the run-up to the election, politicians played on the public’s fears and insecurities, competing over whom might best manage the country’s existential threats. For this, Palestinians – and a far smaller number of Israelis – have paid with their lives.

In recent elections, security has featured strongly in the sloganeering of the political parties. This time around, debate at first centred around honest leadership and transparency, following previous Kadima leader Ehud Olmert’s series of high-profile corruption scandals. Then, with the launch of Operation Cast Lead, the political debate turned to the question of which party could best deal with crushing Hamas and ending the steady rain of rockets in the south of Israel.

Many commentators have concluded that security is still high on the political agenda in Israel. True, the prospective leaders talked a great deal of Hamas’s qassam rockets, Hezbollah’s threat at the northern border, Iran’s nuclear programme, and Israel’s right to defend itself. But all of this talk has actually played on and perpetuated a sense of insecurity in contemporary Israel.

‘Just a few weeks ago, everyone was happily bathing in the pool of national consensus created by the operation in Gaza. How strong we are, everyone said, how united we are’, wrote Nahum Barnea in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper. ‘Now it becomes apparent that underneath this joyful power hides a frightened people, wishing for someone strong and forceful, who will miraculously fend off the people’s enemies, real and imaginary.’

Who precisely could that leader be? Rather than proving to the Israeli people that they can provide effective security, politicians spent the election campaign scrapping over who is most aware of, and sensitive to, Israelis’ fears. There were few rallies and little public engagement during the brief election campaign, and political leaders consciously steered clear of laying out any policy agendas. Seemingly resigned to the fact that there is little difference between the political candidates, some are now calling for a politics of pragmatism. Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Aluf Benn urged ‘for the sake of peace, Labour and Kadima must merge’. He argued that ‘there is no ideological difference between Labour and Kadima’ and that ‘differences of opinion mainly centred around personal differences between Olmert and Barak, not ideology’.

Labour, which is part of the current coalition government, has failed to distinguish itself from the right-wingers and there is little disjuncture between Kadima and Likud, either. After all, Kadima was formed by former Likud leader Ariel Sharon soon before he had a stroke and fell in to a vegetative state. In 2005, Sharon resigned from Likud (which he helped to found in 1973) over his decision to evict Jewish settlers from Gaza. He dissolved parliament and formed Kadima, meaning ‘forward’.

The diminishing support for Labour suggests that Israelis have lost faith in the self-described peace doves’ ability to deliver a stable, secure and lasting two-state solution. Not even the offspring of the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the interim peace accords with the Palestinians in the 1990s, has faith in Labour to lead the country to peace. Rabin’s son Yuval has vowed to vote for Labour, but he also accepted invitations to a series of meetings with Netanyahu and expressed support for the Likud leader’s commitment to establish a national unity government.

Labour is known as the party of the establishment and of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite, and it is now suffering precisely as a result of this fact. Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, once the party exclusively of former Soviet Union immigrants, is now a national player. Lieberman’s hardline take on how to deal with the Palestinians, his campaign for a compulsory national loyalty test for Arab Israeli citizens and his plans to transfer Arab-Israeli towns out of Israel, have struck a chord beyond the Russian constituency. His straight-talking, no-BS style appears comforting to many Israeli citizens who have become used to endless peace talks with no peace.

With his campaign slogan ‘No loyalty, no citizenship’, directed at Israel’s 20 per cent Arab population, Lieberman also alleviates fears around threats to the Jewish character of the Israeli state. His vision of a two-state solution is a land-and-population transfer. He has proposed that the heavily Arab triangle region of the Galilee, which borders the West Bank, should be traded for the Gush Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Lieberman may not be suggesting that Arabs be deported to Jordan, but he, too, is advocating getting Arabs out of Israel, cramming them into the occupied territories and sealing them off.

In other words, though Lieberman has been portrayed as a racist maniac, he shares much in common with the more mainstream parties who are equally keen to get the Arabs out of sight and mind rather than to realise the dead Zionist dream of a Greater Israel. The separatism that Lieberman advocates has underpinned the two-state solution peace talks since they were initiated by Labour over 15 years ago.

Tzipi and Bibi may be acting out the stereotypes of dove and hawk. But the more poignant symbols of this election are embodied in the ‘Liebermania’ phenomenon and the fall of Labour. These represent some big shifts in Israel in recent years, from Zionist dreams to a new kind of defensive nationalism, from national confidence to a dangerous desire for separatism.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

The post Israel and the New Politics of Insecurity appeared first on Jewcy.

Organisers of a London School of Economics (LSE) debate titled ‘Islam or Liberalism: Which is the Way Forward?’ came up with a Third Way last week: pre-emptive censorship. Douglas Murray, a self-described neoconservative and critic of Islam, was disinvited from chairing the debate between Dr Alan Sked, senior lecturer in international history at the LSE, and Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a Muslim writer and lecturer, on the basis that his presence might rile some students.

I know how he must feel. I was once turned down from a university debate on the basis that my surname – Rothschild – might upset sensitive attendees.

The decision to bar Murray from the debate, which went ahead without him last Monday, was not based on anything he had said or done. The Telegraph reported Dr Sked saying that Murray had ‘never said anything objectionable’ in previous appearances at the LSE. Instead, the LSE asked Murray not to attend ‘in the interest of public safety’. According to Dr Sked, ‘radical students’ have recently caused trouble, including by occupying LSE buildings. A one-week protest over Israel’s war in Gaza had just taken place at the LSE when Murray received notice that it was no longer appropriate for him to chair Monday’s event.

The purpose of the LSE debate was to evaluate ‘how far Islam and liberalism are compatible’. Perhaps the organisers should do a follow-up discussion on how far the LSE and liberal values are compatible. Free and open debate ought to be the mainstay of any university worth its name, yet the managers of this prestigious institution don’t seem to have the guts to uphold freedom of speech.

Two years ago, I spoke on a panel debate with Murray at the Battle of Ideas, looking at what lay behind ‘the veil row’ – that short-lived but incendiary controversy sparked by former UK foreign secretary Jack Straw’s description of the niqab as a ‘visible demonstration of separateness’. I didn’t find Murray’s warnings about the ‘Islamification of the West’ convincing, and neither did most of the audience, which included representatives of the radical Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. However, there was no global jihad at this heated debate; radical young Muslims simply challenged Murray from the floor, and he challenged them back. The idea that people will go berserk upon hearing controversial arguments – a fear that apparently haunts the imagination of LSE professors – is unfounded.

It is not just professors who feel the need to tiptoe around students’ supposed sensibilities. Shortly before that Battle of Ideas debate – in October 2006 – I had been recommended as a speaker for a panel debate at Greenwich University titled ‘Does the Veil Stop “Community Cohesion?”’. The event was organised by a Further Education Black Students Officer at the National Union of Students (NUS). Yet when this elected NUS representative, whose primary job was to deal with issues affecting ethnic minorities in Britain’s colleges, found out that my surname is Rothschild, he decided I was persona non grata. Apparently, it is not appropriate for a person with a Jewish name to sit on a panel discussing Muslim issues.

The organiser’s excuse for not inviting me to speak was that he feared the debate would turn into a discussion about Israel/Palestine on the basis of my name, instantly recognisable as Jewish. Yet when I saw the full outline of the event, it was clear that there was no reason why the debate would ‘descend into a row’ about the Middle East. The debate aimed to address four questions: ‘Is the veil stopping community cohesion and why will the Muslim community not integrate? Are the Muslim community intolerant of whether people find the veil uncomfortable? Does the war on terror have anything to do with this? What are Muslims doing to alleviate any fears of the wider non-Muslim community?’ These are all issues I have written on or spoken about, yet the organisers decided not to accept me as a recommended speaker because of the R-word: Rothschild.

Then, three days before the debate was scheduled to take place, they became desperate to find a final speaker. So desperate that they seemed to overcome their qualms about having someone with a recognisable Jewish name on the panel… They emailed asking me to take part, demanding ‘please get back to us ASAP!’. This time, I declined.

The whole saga was pretty insulting. But it wasn’t proof of some endemic anti-Semitism; it simply showed up the prejudice and cowardice of one individual. I quite easily brushed the incident aside. After all, with a name like Rothschild, I have been mistaken for everything from a global international conspirator and an ‘ally of genocidal communism’ to a multibillionaire playboy who hangs out with Russian oligarchs and Tories (also named ‘Nat Rothschild’). So what if some ignoramus deduced from my family name that I could not address a student union debate on Muslim veils without promulgating some ‘Jewish interest’? That was his problem.

However, both my experience and that of Douglas Murray point to the rise and rise of new forms of pre-emptive censorship – the curtailing of debate ‘just in case’. Both the NUS officer who declined me as a speaker and the professors at the LSE who disinvited Murray insulted their prospective audiences, presuming that they would be offended or incited by the presence of a Jew, in my case, or a neocon critic of Islam, in Murray’s case.

Students, professors, politicians and commentators increasingly feel the need to tiptoe around people’s perceived sensitivities, particularly in relation to the Middle East. Fearing complaints and controversy, they end up practising pre-emptive censorship in the name of ‘public safety’ or ‘avoiding offence’. This was also the case when Random House publishers pulled Sherry Jones’ novel, The Jewel of Medina, a Mills-and-Boon style story about the prophet Mohammed’s relationship with his 14-year-old wife Aisha. Random House said the book ‘might be offensive to some in the Muslim community’ and it could ‘incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment’. Again, the ‘just in case’ principle rules: withhold a novel from publication ‘just in case’ it incites anger.

Others argue that radical Muslims should be banned in case they offend Christians or stir young Muslims to become suicide bombers. Indeed, some of the right-wing conservative commentators who were up in arms about the LSE retracting its invitation to Douglas Murray, all self-proclaimed defenders of Enlightenment values, often call for censorship, too. For example, Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips has demanded the banning of Muslim groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance, called for the resignation of the LSE professor who took the final decision to disinvite Murray. Gabb was right to say that universities have a commitment to free speech and that the professor undermined this by disinviting Murray. However, his reaction also points to a censorious impulse simply to get rid of those who offend certain ideals rather than to challenge them.

As it happens, the NUS, through its censorious ‘No Platform’ policy, has managed to ban Hiz-but-Tahrir on many British campuses. Sensitivity censorship is rife in British universities: leftists try to ban fascists, right-wing groups oppose radical Muslims, and Muslims try to stop Jews from speaking. When I was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, a handful of students formed a Jewish society, yet the Islamic Society complained that the student union had allowed a ‘Zionist organisation’ to set up on campus. Recently, students in Oxford demanded the cancellation of a speech by Israeli president Shimon Peres. Elsewhere, students have campaigned to censor anti-immigrant professors, the youth wing of the British Nationalist Party, Christian Unions, the Daily Mail, and Eminem songs. One university recently banned political groups from participating in freshers’ week – the first week of the academic year when students normally get the chance to mingle and sign up to societies.

Rather than feeding into this bizarre game of ‘No Platform’ one-upmanship, professors, students, publishers and others should stand up for freedom expression for all – and that includes Muslim extremists, neocons, and people with famous surnames.

The post No Platform For Anyone Called Rothschild appeared first on Jewcy.

With estimates ranging between 20,000 attendees according to the police and 100,000 according to the protest organisers, Hyde Park was transformed into a sea of placards, banners, Palestinian flags and scarves. Some speakers called for support for Hamas, others – including Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Lauren Booth – attacked international politicians’ feebleness in negotiating a ceasefire. Later, during the march from Hyde Park to the Israeli Embassy in West London, protesters shouted chants like ‘Free, free Palestine’, La ilaha illallah (meaning, in Arabic, ‘there is no God but God’) and ‘end the siege in Gaza’.

The overall feeling at the demo was one of anger and frustration over the war and the lack of intervention from the international community. From veteran demo-goers to young children and pensioners, who do not usually take to the streets, attendees came in droves to condemn Israel and to show their solidarity with those besieged, wounded and dead Palestinians we have all seen in the news over the past couple of weeks. 

One woman told the BBC: ‘I haven’t been on a march for a very long time. About 25 years ago I was outside the Israeli embassy so nothing seems to have changed.’ Another young woman, wearing a keffiyeh as a headscarf, said that even if the London march won’t change the situation in Gaza, at least it will ‘make people aware of what’s going on’. Organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim Initiative and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the demonstration ended with some scuffles, flag-burning, ketchup-squirting, Starbucks-thrashing and (emulating the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoe at George W Bush) footwear-throwing by the Israeli Embassy.

It became clear at Saturday’s demonstration that Israel has for many become a vessel in which to depose pent-up anger. From the evils of Big Business to discrimination against Muslims, from disappointment with British political leaders to disgust with Western nations for failing the ideals of humanitarian intervention, the protest involved eclectic complaints. Israel is seen as the big bully that embodies and sustains all these malices. 

And while Israel-bashing has become a worthy cause for many, upholding Palestinians as ultimate victims is seen as equally honourable – even as a moral duty. Many pro-Palestine demonstrators around the world have been carrying fake blood-stained dolls; the image of the agonised and wounded Palestinian child has come to represent the situation in Gaza. The accompanying message is that the Palestinans – children and adults – need carers: enter ‘the international community’, which apparently has an obligation to shame the bully and correct its behaviour on behalf of the bullied.

With the temperature in London seemingly dropping by the minute, light snow dwindling over the determined marchers, the passion only seemed to rise. Breaking off from the main march, a group of a hundred-or-so mostly teenage, Muslim boys had to be contained by the police. Their dress and demeanour were like those of the young Palestinian men we have so often seen on the news confronting Israeli soldiers; their faces were covered by keffiyehs, they pumped their fists in the air and later on hurled stones and other spontaneous weapons at the police. It seems many on this protest felt the need to look like the Gazans they were expressing solidarity with. Some variation on Arabic scarves and other accoutrements, in the black, white, red and green colours of the Palestinian flag, were worn by most. This, along with the samba bands accompanying the marchers, made the event look like a fancy-dress carnival. But whereas for most people these ‘ethnic’ accessories were worn as symbols through which their solidarity could be more colourfully and graphically expressed, some of the carnivalesque elements at the protest were simply obscene. 

A group of performers wearing skeleton-costumes, wigs with yellow tentacles, and bullet chains around their necks walked around Hyde Park performing a ritualistic dance with a fake decapitated arm in front of a blood-splattered Israeli flag, a red skull covering the star of David. The dancers, representing the Israelis, acted as bloodthirsty vultures.

One protester wearing a big-nosed mask and biting into two red-stained dolls with black-eyes, told me: ‘I am Israel, I like to eat children.’ This man, who wanted to remain anonymous, and the skeleton-dancers were enacting a classic lie – that Jews are infanticidal bloodsuckers. The onlookers did not seem to mind – while some appeared bemused, others cheered and clapped this anti-Semitic spectacle.

In Hyde Park, rapper Lowkey’s three-minute rant on the insidious evils of Israel received rapturous applauds. He attacked companies with ‘Zionist’ links – including Marks & Spencer, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Huggies diapers – and told the audience: ‘You say you know about the Zionist lobby, but you put money in their pockets every time you’re buying their coffee.’ Apparently aware that such intonations might provoke complaints of conspiratorial prejudice, he added: ‘Nothing is more anti-Semitic than Zionism / so please don’t bring bad vibes when you speak to me / I know plenty of rabbis that agree with me.’

The main message at the protest was the urgent need for the West to intervene to stop the violence in Gaza. Anti-Semitic outbursts were rare, but where they occurred they represented the most degraded form of the anger which the London protest served to alleviate.

The demonstration attracted people of all ages, backgrounds and persuasions. So what motivates these disparate individuals and organisations – from anti-capitalists and trade unionists to young British Asians, British Jews and middle-aged women – to want to express their anger towards Israel? How come this particular conflict evokes so much attention, anger and emotion?

The answer cannot be found in the Middle East, but rather at home. This conflict has taken on an all-together symbolic meaning for many Westerners, which is quite separate from the facts on the ground. For many, Israel has come to represent all that is rotten in the West; their disdain for American foreign policy, the consumer society and modernity is projected on to this ‘shitty little country’, as a French ambassador once referred to it.

As for the young Muslims present at the march, their anger, too, seemed to spring from homemade trends. One blogger speculates that what ‘incites’ young Muslim and Arab pro-Palestinians who have been trying to shut down the Israeli embassy for the past couple of weeks is ‘the treatment of our/their Palestinian people in Gaza by Israel’. But how have these young people, born and raised in Britain, come to view the Palestinians as ‘their people’? Their adoption of the Palestinian cause looks more like a vestige of diversity politics. Having grown up in a society which encourages difference and cultural particularity, these young Brits – mostly, to judge from the protest, of Asian background – are now inclined to identify with ‘their Gazans’ because of some spurious cultural affinity.

There can hardly be a more narcissistic form of protest than this projection of the self on to a foreign conflict. Real solidarity involves learning about, and appreciating, another people’s history, hopes and desires, and supporting their pursuit of freedom. When the desire to express solidarity is motivated by a sense of disenchantment, cultural confusion and emotionalism – as was largely the case for many of those at the London protest – then it becomes little more than an outlet for personal frustration.

For the confusing mishmash of individuals gathering under the banner of putting an end to Gazans’ suffering, dressing, acting and talking like Palestinians has apparently become fashionable. But their keffiyeh-wearing and Arabic-chanting antics amount to little more than a new form of ‘blacking up’.

Israel’s violent war should be condemned, but it is doubtful whether the protest, as that young woman interviewed by the BBC hoped, ‘raised awareness’ about what is going on in the Middle East. Because it seems many Westerners on these marches are creating their own private Gazas – a place in which their disillusions are played out in the most nightmarish form possible.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked. (All photos in this article were taken by Nathalie Rothschild.)

The post Creating Their Own Private Gazas appeared first on Jewcy.

Rather than succumbing to a sudden urge to throw herself under the bus, Sherine sought guidance from that secular arbiter of right and wrong, the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA informed the comedienne that the Advertising Standards Code – which with its 10 sections of do’s and don’ts reads like a modern-day version of the ten commandments – does not prohibit advertising religious messages.Then, Sherine had a revelation. The brewer Carlsberg famously claims in its ads that its lager is ‘probably the best beer in the world’, so she, a devout atheist, should surely be allowed to claim that ‘there’s probably no God’. Under the influence of Carlsberg, Sherine decided to pen an article for the Guardian, urging fellow godless travellers to donate a fiver towards a counter-ad campaign on London’s red ‘bendy buses’.  There was a flurry of excitement around ‘the atheist bus campaign’, with nearly 1,000 individuals pledging money to counter what they see as a pro-religion bias in the advertising world. The British Humanist Association (BHA) agreed to administer donations and the distinguished British scientist and bestselling author of The God Delusion, Professor Richard Dawkins, agreed to match all contributions up to £5,500.

The atheist bus ad campaign is scheduled to run in London in January 2009. The rather timid poster will read ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life’. Observant London commuters will notice a web link to atheistcampaign.org, a rather slick and colourful website, adorned with pretty flowers and links to other god-unfriendly websites. Across the Atlantic, fellow atheist travellers have jumped onboard the atheist bus campaign, with the American Humanist Association (AHA) launching its own ads last month. Their rather uncatchy slogan ‘Why believe in god? Just be good for goodness’ sake’ can be seen on buses across Washington DC. The AHA, too, has a website (whybelieveingod.org) which apparently crashed twice – not because of divine intervention, but because of the huge media flurry around the campaign leading to a sudden, high volume of visitors to the site The question is, why do humanists feel the need to preach the (probable) non-existence of the Lord to the commuting masses of London, Washington DC and beyond? After all, ours has been hailed as a godless age and the influence of religion is, indeed, at a low ebb. The past couple of years have seen a steady stream of anti-religious books, many of which have topped bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, by a range of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists. The most prominent of them – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are now referred to collectively as ‘The New Atheists’. They have launched a zealous, no-holds-barred attack not so much on God as on the devout.

Dawkins, for example, demonstrates convincingly in The God Delusion that Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather than the Book of Genesis, provides the plausible answers to the emergence of human life on Earth. But as his books, as well as his television documentaries, The Root of All Evil? and The Enemies of Reason, have shown, in Dawkins’ mind, preachers and charlatans would not form such a threat to rational thinking if it weren’t for the gullible masses that apparently so easily fall for their quackery.  It is true that the forces of unreason are still very much in play today – as the widespread popularity of New Ageism, continuous environmental doomsday mongering and salience of scientific scare stories demonstrate. Yet The New Atheists on the one hand seem unable to explain just why religion continues to play an important role for many in the twenty-first century. (Dawkins for instance takes an ahistorical approach in explaining the salience of religion through evolutionary psychology.)  And on the other hand, they do not recognise that the celebrities, commentators, politicians and others who warn daily of climate chaos being visited upon Mother Earth are simply preaching a secular version of Kingdom Come – and, paradoxically, many of them would not hesitate to dismiss religious people as backward Bible-bashers. Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great, talks about imminent ‘heat death’ as a result of global warming, while denouncing religious ‘visions of apocalypse’.  It seems that the New Atheists, their fans at the British and American Humanist Associations, and others who fear the popularity of god, fall back on religion-bashing rather than trying to convince others that there is merit in their own secular values. Really, what irks them about the religious is that they have a grand vision and are committed to live by it – something that is sorely lacking in society at large. 

Sherine, writing in the Guardian, says that ‘there’s no doubt that advertising can be effective, and religious advertising works particularly well on those who are vulnerable, frightening them into believing.’ This assertion really brings what’s behind the atheist bus message to light: the secularists believe they must take it upon themselves to shine a guiding light steering the easily-duped masses away from the darkness of unreason.  In truth, the atheist campaigners, rather than trying to engage with the public, are simply preaching at us.

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