----- Original Message -----

"I tell you, this new anti-Semitism, no one is immune from it."

-Canadian playwright Jason Sherman ironically summing up the present,
allegedly virulently, anti-Semitic climate where even some dedicated
anti-anti-Semitic Jews reveal telltale signs of an anti-Jewish bias

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December 6 / 7, 2003

CounterPunch Special

Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of Anti-Semitism"

Hello, CounterPunch,

I was asked to write a review of two recent books on anti-Semitism for
Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper. The two books are The Politics of
Anti-Semitism and Phyllis Chesler's The New Anti-Semitism. I filed the
review a week ago, and was sent an email earlier this week from the editor,
who expressed "real problems" with the review. The "real problems" seem to
stem from the fact that I didn't slam The Politics (and its "out of the
same litter contributors") but instead praised it while ridiculing
(justifiably, I believe) the Chesler book. I have written many reviews for
the Globe, as well as for the Toronto Star and other publications. (My day
job is writing plays.) They have never spiked a review of mine before. I
should add that I approached the Globe with the idea of reviewing The
Politics (before I'd read it), and that they agreed, but only if I would
also consider the Chesler book.

I wonder if you'd be interested in looking at the review, as well as the
correspondence relating to it.

Yours, Jason Sherman,
Toronto.

[The review, filed Thursday, Nov 13.]

You're Either Against Us, or You're Not For Us

By Jason Sherman.

The Politics of Anti-Semitism
Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
AK Press, 178 pgs. (US$12.95)

The New Anti-Semitism The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It
By Phyllis Chesler Wiley, 305 pgs, $38.95

It doesn't take much to get yourself called an anti-Semite these days. A
few years ago I wrote a play that questioned some cherished notions about
Israel. My "self-hating Jew" badge arrived in the next edition of the
Canadian Jewish News. Not that I was surprised. After all, Noam Chomsky
once wrote that "Left-liberal criticism of Israeli government policy since
1967 has evoked hysterical accusations and outright lies." Oppose the
Israeli occupation and its treatment of the Palestinian people, he noted,
and you risked being labeled "a supporter of terrorism and reactionary Arab
states, an opponent of democracy, an anti-Semite, or if Jewish, a traitor
afflicted with self-hatred."

As two new books make clear, little has changed in the last 35 years,
except perhaps that the mud is thicker, the slinging fiercer, the cry of
"anti-Semite!" louder (and less credible) than ever. Muckraking journalists
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair co-edit a newsletter and website
called CounterPunch (I visit the latter daily, and twice on Sunday), from
the pages of which they have gathered eighteen brilliant essays on the
Middle East. It's a sort of greatest hits package, called The Politics of
Anti-Semitism. Among its short, sharp blasts are those by Robert Fisk,
foreign correspondent for The Independent, a fierce critic of authoritarian
rule wherever he finds it [but a rock-solid believer in the holocaust lie, AI],

 who expresses genuine disgust over the hate mail he regularly receives ("Your 

mother was Eichmann's daughter" is among the most pleasant); American writer

 Norman Finkelstein, whose trip to Germany to promote his controversial book The 

Holocaust Industry leaves him not a little soiled; and American economics 

professors M Shahid Alam, whose call for a "moral stand against the oppressive and

 unjust behaviour of Israel" leads the Boston Herald to claim: "Prof Shocks

 Northeastern with Defense of Suicide Bombers."

The editors contribute a couple of memorable pieces. Cockburn, easily the
sharpest and funniest political commentator around (among other things, he
regularly makes mincemeat out of the pompous Christopher Hitchens),
recounts the morality tale of Cynthia McKinney, a black congresswoman who
made the mistake of calling "for a proper debate on the Middle East," after
which "American Jewish money [was] showered upon her opponent." St. Clair's
brilliantly retells the tale of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty,
which killed 34 Americans and wounded 174 others, and which more and more
evidence suggests was not an accident but a deliberately planned operation
ordered by war hero Moshe Dayan, and covered up by American Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara.

St Clair's is one of many pieces that look at Israel's influence on
American politics. This is not an issue over which every contributor
agrees. Jeffrey Blankfort, a radio show host at KPOO in California (would I
make that up?) does something, for example, that not every leftist does: he
takes on Chomsky. 95% of Chomsky's critics seem to think he goes too far in
his arguments. Blankfort argues that Chomsky doesn't go far enough, at
least when it comes to assessing the power of the famed Jewish lobby.
(Chomsky prefers to go after the corporate elite, no matter their faith.)

Blankfort seems obsessed with proving that the Jews, and ultimately Israel,
control America's wealth, media, and policy decisions. He is joined by
Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA officers, who point fingers at a
Bush administration "peppered with people who have promot[ed] an agenda for
Israel often at odds with existing US policy." There's no question that the
American administration is full of "Israelists" (the Jerusalem Post
recently named deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz its "Man of the
Year"), and it's important to discuss the underpinnings of the US-Israeli
relationship, but it's quite a leap to suggest that the man behind the
curtain wears a felt hat and yarmulke and wants all the world to dance the
hora.

Just when the collection is beginning to sag under the weight of some
arcane arguments, two pieces bring it to a powerful close. Israeli peace
activist Yigal Bronner's memoir of helping to bring food and medicine to a
Palestinian village does more than a hundred essays in evoking the tragedy
of the Middle East war. And no other essay quite rises to the level of
Edward Said's angry and hopeful j'accuse about what has happened to his
people, and what may yet become of them: "The official Israeli policy, no
matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word 'occupation' or not or whether or
not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to
accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals or even to admit
that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a
few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this
otherwise concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority
of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the
Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace."

Phyllis Chesler begs to differ. In The New Anti-Semitism (a phrase she
claims to have coined, though it's been around for decades), the American
psychotherapist and author of Women and Madness sets out to warn the world
about "a virulent epidemic of violence, hatred and lies that are being
touted as politically correct." Touted by who, she doesn't exactly say,
except to point to an amorphous group of "Islamic reactionaries and western
intellectuals and progressives." (Everyone in the The Politics of
Anti-Semitism would make her list.)

Perhaps this "epidemic" explains the "fever [that] burned" in Chesler as
she wrote: "Everything had to happen at once: reading, supervising the
research, writing." There's little evidence of any of that in these
overwrought pages: it's poorly researched and horribly written, sounding
for the most part like an earnest book report by an over-achieving fourth
grader. "The world--including many people in the Jewish world--still seems
to have one standard for Jews and for the Jewish state (and it's a high
standard) and another, much lower standard for everyone else," she laments,
without resorting to facts to support her argument, and failing to
recognize that she herself holds Israel and the Jews to that very high
standard. But don't take my word for it, take hers (please, take hers).
Certain "Arab-Muslims," she writes, are "barbaric and primitive; they do
not hide their joy when they kill but I do not think that most American or
many Jews delight in the death of their enemies in quite the same way."
That's us, still chosen after all these years.

Instead of argument, Chesler prefers to intuit her way through a debate.
After citing a Chomsky essay which quotes Moshe Dayan saying that
Palestinian refugees should be told they will "continue to live like dogs,"
Chesler decides that the attribution "does not sound right or in context to
me."

She proves equally adept at trying to take down the rest of her targets,
which include Said, the American and European Left, refuseniks, the media,
feminists--all of them out to get little Israel, that David among Goliaths.


Not wanting to leave any doubt in the minds of her readers, the feckless
Chesler resorts to an argument as old as the Jerusalem Hills to prove, once
and for all, that the Jews have the ultimate claim to Israel, for "God
promised the land to the patriarch Abraham and to all the other Jewish
patriarchs and matriarchs."

At this point, I began to understand just how high a fever Chesler must
have had when she scribbled this nonsense; automatic writing, from God's
mouth to her hand. A book like this always ends up biting the hand that
writes it. Everyone is an anti-Semite--including, it would appear, Phyllis
Chesler herself. Pg 245: "Anyone who does not distinguish between Jews and
the Jewish state is an anti-Semite." Pg 209: "Each Jew must think of
himself or herself as the most precious resource that Israel has at this
moment."

I tell you, this new anti-Semitism, no one is immune from it.

Jason Sherman's plays include Reading Hebron, The League of Nathans and,
most recently, Remnants.

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[E-mailed response from the book review editor:]

From:"Levin, Martin"

Sent:2003/11/18 Tue PM 05:17:25 EST

To:'Jason Sherman'

Subject: Re: review

Hi Jason: I have some real problems with your piece, largely because it
seems more like a lecture from someone who is parti pris than it does any
sort of moderately objective review. And it's not because I suspect that I
disagree with you about some aspects of the Middle East. for the record, I
think Sharon is almost every bit the disaster for Jews (and not just in
Israel) that Arafat has been for the Palestinians, that the Palestinians
deserve a viable state, that the settlement policy is egregious and that
one has the right to be as critical of Israel (but not more so) as of any
other state, person or institution.. But I do not feel these two books,
especially the Cockburn book, have really been reviewed, For one thing, the
title is very misleading; it's not about anti-Semitism, but what seem like
a series of exculpatory screeds about anti-Israel criticism being labelled
as anti-Semitism. It also seems, partly because of your set-up, that you
are predisposed to like the first book, indeed came at it with a some
predetermined position, and to dislike the Chesler. (As far as I can tell,
you're probably right that it's hysterical, but sarcasm is not evidence,
and I doubt whether her entire focus is, as you seem to suggest, on Israel
and its critics/enemies). I have no sense that the first book really
engages the issue of anti-Semitism at all, other than to brush it off as a
cynical political tool. Yet there's no mention at all of the
anti-Jewishness worthy of the volkische beobachter now being taught as
gospel in Arab schools, or of fundamentalists making no distinction between
Jews and Israelis (witness the synagogue bombings in Turkey) or of the
preoccupation of people such as Fisk with Israel to the virtual exclusion
of other issues. And then there are Fisk and Finkelstein. From your
throwaway mentions of their travails, a reader would have no sense that
Fisk is, to put it mildly, a very contentious figure (and I think at least
arguably anti-Semitic; why else the Jenin obsession when it's clear there
was no massacre). Finkelstein is trotted out by Arab media as a "good" Jew,
son of a Holocaust survivor. But you'd get no sense in the review that he
serves that role or that he is opposed to the existence of Israel. There is
a real "usual suspects" element to them. Finally, I have no sense that you
have really broached the topic of anti-Semitism, no sense of whether it's a
worrisome trend outside the jaundiced (in some ways, perhaps rightly
jaundiced) purview of the out of the same litter contributors to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. best wishes martin.

[Quick back-and-forth:]

From:Jason Sherman

Sent:Tuesday, November 18, 2003 5:33 PM

To:Levin, Martin

Subject:Re: review

Hi martin. You forgot to mention that I'm a self-hating Jew. Yours,

Jason.

From:"Levin, Martin"

Sent:2003/11/18 Tue PM 05:35:34 EST

To:'Jason Sherman'

Subject:Re: review

Jason: Did I say that? I don't even think it.

[My response, sent Thursday, Nov 20:]

Martin,

You're right, it wouldn't make sense to call me a self-hating Jew, but it
would be in keeping with your other ad hominem attacks-against not only
Fisk and Finkelstein, but against me as well (ie, that I was "predisposed
to like the first book, indeed came at it with a some [sic] predetermined
position, and to dislike the Chesler," a ludicrous charge. My review is
based on what I read, not on what I wanted to read. But your response is
very illuminating, and tells me that what you were really hoping for was an
ideologically correct review that would have unequivocally condemned those
"out of the same litter contributors to The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
(Surely not a sign of a predetermined position on your part?) You say you
"do not feel these two books, especially the Cockburn book, have really
been reviewed." You then demonstrate what a proper review would have looked
like. It would have included a denunciation of Fisk as "arguably
anti-Semitic," without a shred of evidence, and a personal attack on
Finkelstein as a favourite "son" of the "Arab media." In fact, Martin, I
did review the two books. I did "broach" the topic of anti-Semitism-as
defined and explored by the works under consideration. So why, then, did
you decide to kill the review? I won't question your motives, as you have
mine, but I find it telling that you haven't read either book yourself, yet
feel free to write about them as though you have-which, curiously, is an
approach to criticism you share with Chesler. You might want to ask
yourself which of us delivered the real "lecture." Yours, Jason Sherman

Alexander Cockburn writes,

Dear Jason, Thanks so much for this. Amazing how the venom suddenly seeps
from his letter. Your responses are excellent. Of course we'd love to
publish this on the website, but probably you don't want to burn all boats
with Globe and Mail, right? If you are in boat-burning mood, all the better
for us.

On Wednesday, December 3, 2003, at 07:27 AM, shermlit@rogers.com wrote:

Dear Alexander, I think the Globe scuttled those boats. So please publish away.

Yours, Jason.

 <end>

http://www.counterpunch.org/alam12042003.html

December 4, 2003

Image and Reality
An Interview with Norman Finkelstein
By M. JUNAID ALAM

M. Junaid Alam, co-editor and webmaster of the new leftist journal for American youth, Left Hook, recently had the opportunity to interview Norman Finkelstein, prominent and outspoken critic of Israel and son of Nazi holocaust survivors. Mr. Finkelstein is a professor of Political Science at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of the authoritative and controversial books Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and The Holocaust Industry.

Alam: Mr. Finkelstein, thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Israel was an enthusiastic supporter of America's war on Iraq, and the Sharon government viewed the removal of Hussein as complementary to his own efforts to topple Arafat. During the war, the New York Times ran an article about the sense of imminent victory over the Palestinians displayed by Israeli military leadership. Now, intense resistance has emerged in Iraq, the Abbas government has fallen apart, Arafat still controls the security forces, and a top Israeli officer admitted that Israeli tactics are only stiffening Palestinian resolve. Do you think this qualifies as a new political situation, and what does this mean for the US-sponsored 'road map'?

Finkelstein: The important thing about the roadmap was the symmetry. Right after the first destruction of Iraq in 1991 the US launched what eventually became known as the Oslo peace process; after the second destruction of Iraq, the US launched the roadmap. In both cases the hope and expectation was the same: Palestinians (and the Arab world generally) would be so "shocked and awed" by the massive display of US firepower that they would bow to US-Israeli diktat. The first time around it seemed to be going according to script, Arafat accepting his designated role as tribal chief. But in July 2000 at Camp David, when Arafat refused to sign on the dotted line for the Bantustan that he was offered, he was immediately branded a "terrorist" once again. Realizing that Arafat was hopeless, after the second destruction of Iraq, the US and Israel replaced him with Abu Mazen, who was just as corrupt and stupid as Arafat but, crucially, wasn't elected. Polls showed that he would get 3-5% of the vote in a Palestinian election--which means he was for the United States the perfect democratic leader of Palestine. But the Abu Mazen gambit also failed.

Alam: The 'road map' is widely seen as a watered-down version of the Oslo initiative, which culminated in failure in 2000. Many US commentators blame Arafat for rejecting what they term "a generous offer" by Israel's then-Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. How would you describe the plan put on the table then, and how is does it differ from the current one?

NF: The reports conflict on what happened at Camp David, and subsequently at Taba. An important account by Robert Malley, one of the U.S. negotiators at Camp David, suggests that Arafat held out for a settlement along the lines of the international consensus--i.e., a full Israeli withdrawal from West Bank and Gaza, but allowing for Israel to keep most of its settlers in the West Bank with a land swap of "equal value and equal size" from Israel. Israel refused this offer, wanting instead to fragment the West Bank and offer minimum land swaps for the settlements it sought to retain.

Alam: In American discourse the fact that Palestinians have lived for decades under Israeli military occupation is obscured and shoved under mountains of condemnation over Palestinian tactics. As someone who has visited the Occupied Territories, can you describe what life under occupation is like, what hardships and obstacles people face?

NF: I cannot claim any special expertise in "life under occupation." I would urge readers to simply consult the multiple mainstream human rights reports--Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights--Israel, Public Committee Against Torture, etc.--which do an excellent job of cataloguing the multiple human rights abuses and crimes Israel commits daily in the Occupied Territories.

Alam: In defiance of international law and even the principles of the 'road map', Sharon and the Israeli military have continued and expanded construction of a separation wall surrounding the West Bank. Do you consider this another step in increasing settlements? Does this kill the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state on 22% of historical Palestine?

NF: I am just now beginning to read the details about the wall. As of current plans, it will disrupt the lives of some 600,000 Palestinians. Some will be trapped between the Green Line (pre-June 1967 border) west of the wall, some (like the residents of Qalquilya) will be trapped on all sides by the wall, and several hundred thousand Palestinians will be cut off from their agricultural land and places of work. If hints from the Sharon government are correct, the wall will also run along the Jordan Valley, and cage Palestinians into less than half the West Bank. The eminent Hebrew University sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, has called Gaza "the largest concentration camp ever to exist." Once the wall is complete, Gaza will rank only the second largest concentration camp ever to exist.

Alam: As a critic of Israel, you have confronted pro-Israel commentators, including Alan Dershowitz, whom you recently took to task for lifting sections "From Time Immemorial" a book by Joan Peters which you and other scholars have exposed as a hoax. How does a Harvard professor get away with lifting quotes from an already-discredited text?

NF: It's simple: he knows that he will never be called on it. Keep in mind that even after I showed the massive plagiarism and demonstrated that multiple claims in the book are simply preposterous, the book received rave reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The reviewers surely knew the book was a completely fraud. But it makes no difference: he's Harvard, he's defending Israel, so everything else--i.e., the facts--is beside the point.

Alam: In the last twenty a years a group of historians inside Israel, equipped with declassified archives, have criticized and exposed the traditional pro-Israel historical narrative. Can you briefly explain what the basic points of these 'new historians' are in reference to the creation of Israel and its constant expansion since its inception?

NF: Most (but not all) of what's called the "new history" has focused on the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949. Its main findings are that, militarily, Israel was better prepared, and the neighboring Arab states worse prepared, than in conventional accounts; that the only serious fighting force on the Arab side, the Arab Legion of Jordan, had pretty much reached an agreement with the Zionist leadership before the war broke out not to fight the Zionist forces but rather to divide Palestine with the newly-declared Jewish state (which is basically what happened, Jordan occupying the West Bank); that the Palestinians didn't flee on account of Arab orders but were "driven into exile" (Benny Morris) by the Zionist armies; and that after the war there were opportunities for peace which Israel rejected because they would have required Israel to accept a return of at least some Palestinian refugees and a return some of the territory it illegally conquered during the 1948 war.

Alam: The US has offered Israel unswerving support since the 1967 war. Can you describe how this contrasts with international opinion, especially within the UN General Assembly?

NF: Since 1967 there have been basically two approaches to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict on the diplomatic table. From the late 1960s Israel has attempted to impose an Apartheid solution on the West Bank and Gaza, keeping large swathes of land and crucial resources like water, while confining Palestinians in a territorially fragmented, unviable Bantustan. Beginning in the early 1970s, the US basically supported this. On the other hand, the international community has favored a two-state solution, basically outlined in UN Resolution 242 and subsequent resolutions affirming the right of Israel and a neighboring Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza to exercise self-determination and statehood. In 2002, the vote on a 2-state settlement was 160-4 (US, Israel, Micronesia, Marshall Islands), and this year 159-2 (US and Israel).

Alam: There has been serious debate and controversy about Israel's role in the project for American hegemony recently. Noam Chomsky has described Israel as America's offshore military base, a client state which serves the purpose of quelling Arab nationalisms. But Jeff Halper, co-ordinator of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, contends that Israel manipulates the United States and that it is irrational for the US to support Israel in a post-Cold War atmosphere because it aggravates the entire Islamic world. What is your take on this? Does a sense of a common enemy and shared 'Judeo-Christian' values drive the US-Israeli alliance, or does it boil down to real politik?

Finkelstein: There have always been two competing interpretations of why the US supports Israel: strategic interest vs. the Jewish/Zionist/Israel lobby. I don't think there is one definitive answer to this question. Sometimes the Lobby manages to trump US national interests, sometimes the US administration puts Israel in its place. It should be remembered, however, that from the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were debates about whether a Jewish state would facilitate or undermine Western domination of the Arab world. When the British issued the Balfour Declaration the reasoning was that, although a Jewish state would alienate much public opinion in the Arab world, it would still be a dependable--because dependent--base of Western power in the region.

Alam: Having spoken at colleges in the US and Canada in the past few months, can you describe what kind of reaction you get among students and people in general when presenting a pro-Palestinian viewpoint?

Finkelstein: Apart from a smattering of hard-core pro-Israel fanatics, audiences have generally been very receptive and intelligent. It used to be quite disorderly, but nowadays the "other side" doesn't bother coming out, because they know that Israel's case is indefensible if the speaker is even marginally knowledgeable about the facts. I think there's excellent reason to be optimistic--Muslim students, especially Muslim women, have been doing a terrific job organizing, alongside many Jews--and we can begin to really affect public policy if we continue on this course.

Alam: Your book Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict has been widely praised and lauded by respected scholars and left-leaning publications for its scathing and hard-hitting critique of the official Israeli narrative. Recently, you've put out a second edition. What's been added?

Finkelstein: A long new introduction in which I suggest a general framework for understanding Zionist/Israeli policy the past century, an essay comparing Israel's strategy for the Occupied Territories with the South African Apartheid experience, and a critical analysis of a recent best-seller on the June 1967 war, which I think is mostly nonsense.

Alam: In the introduction to the second edition, you describe Zionism as a response to "the reciprocal challenges of Gentile repulsion, or anti-Semitism, and Gentile attraction, or assimilationism..." Zionist philosophy accepted repulsion as a natural impulse among Gentiles and, as you write, believed that the creation of "an overwhelmingly, if not homogenously, Jewish state in Palestine" was the solution to the Jewish predicament. The "obstacle" to this solution, you add, was "the indigenous Arab population". Today, Jews are accepted, flourishing, and protected in the multicultural West-Gentile attraction-while in Israel they face the blowback from the people they dispossessed-the "obstacle". Do you think Zionism as an ideology has failed and expired? Or will it continue fighting the war of 1948 to its desired conclusion?

Finkelstein: It's an interesting question, which would require a quite subtle answer. Some original aims of Zionist--e.g. reviving the Hebrew language--plainly succeeded, and probably wouldn't have succeeded absent a Jewish state. On the other hand, it's also true to say that, far from providing a safe haven for Jews, Israel is probably the least safe place for Jews to be in the world today. Likewise, especially in recent years, the Jewish state, far from resolving the "Jewish Question," has plainly exacerbated it, by associating Jews with, and by mainstream Jewish organizations associating themselves with, Israel's brutal occupation.

Norman Finkelstein's website: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com
Norman Finkelstein's New and Revised Edition of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is available here:

M. Junaid Alam, 20, is a co-editor and webmaster of the new radical youth journal Left Hook