I didn't know until the venerable Harry's Place mentioned it that greying glam rocker-cum-U2 producer Brian Eno is co-sponsoring the latest attempt at a "boycott" of Israeli culture. (He joins the even hoarier British novelist John Berger, who announced the intention in the Guardian a few weeks ago.) Eno's best song is "Needle In the Camel's Eye," which has, to my stardust-starved mind, very little to do with the odds of rich men getting into heaven, though one nonetheless appreciates the violent inversion of Biblical metaphor.
Anyway, the odds of a Palestinian intellectual speaking out against a stupid and highly suspect attempt to isolate all arts and letters from the Jewish state, and speaking out against it in the Jewish Chroncile, seemed pretty slim. Until now. Here is Samir El-Youssef (the Chroncile is pay-only, but HP helpfully reprints the op-ed):
Many Israeli writers, artists and scholars have, in various ways, supported negotiations and peace. Some have bravely embraced the Palestinian right of self-determination and statehood — and been branded “bleeding hearts” and “Arab lovers”.
To boycott such individuals would certainly not force the Israeli government to loosen its grip on the Palestinians. The Israeli government is not in the habit of listening to “bleeding hearts” and “Arab lovers”. Nor would it help Palestinians to face up to the reality of their internal conflicts. If anything, it would only weaken a constituency which, more than any other in Israel, has been committed to the cause of peaceful co-existence.
Good for Samir. The biggest irony of anti-Israel activism has long been that the best of it comes from within Israel itself. (A smaller one would be that hard-core leftists, forgetting their Marxism all over again, confuse the state with the people and come off sounding anti-Semitic, which is what quite a lot of them of course are.)
Samir's point is especially well taken now that the grim innuendo that Jews are able to "silence" all criticism of their behavior has once again found a foothold in U.S. foreign policy circles and Tony Judt's outbox. (To cite just one example of flouting the "not in front of the goyim" rule in the land of milk and honey, the great Israel Shahak would have had Abe Foxman holding self-pity tele-a-thons on PBS had Shahak written about the dark history of Judaism on these shores.)
Not sure whether "Arab lover" or "bleeding heart" is worse than "Palestinian Uncle Tom," but you can bet your bottom dollar that that is what brave Samir will be called, probably behind his back, by Peace Now types suffering from a with-us-or-against-us mentality.
More like him, please.
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