Defending Israel: shit just got impossible

30Oct09

So far this term the Cambridge Union debates have seen a bust-up between Edwina Currie and, well, everyone in the room and Michael Savage being disinvited after the “the socialist Brown regime” threatened to exile Julien Domercq to Glasgow. Against this background, and on the basis that calm, rational, good-natured disagreements about the Israel/Palestine conflict don’t exist, I snuck in to yesterday’s debate – on the motion, ‘This House believes that Israel demands too much and gives too little in the peace process‘ – expecting the fireworks to fly.

What transpired was an unimpressive and not particularly informed debate that rarely stuck to the topic, in the course of which the basic factual record was repeatedly shot in the face (metaphorically speaking) without so much as a hint of protest from those defending the motion. This was partly due to poor performances on the part of some of the debaters – I have a lot of respect for Jeremy Corbyn, for example, but he kept conspicuously diverting the issue from Israel’s political demands to its war crimes in Gaza without making a convincing connection between the two – and partly due to the limitations of the format, which doesn’t allow for a detailed ‘fisking’ of the other side’s factual claims. Even so, the motion was carried by a substantial margin, and although the audience was overly appreciative of the boilerplate ‘both sides are to blame’/'cycle of violence’-type narrative, prevailing sympathies were clearly with the Palestinians.

Lord Hannay and Jeremy Corbyn, speaking for the motion, gave an effective and vivid outline of life under military occupation, and the arbitrariness of repressive Israeli measures (although Corbyn described ‘Operation Cast Lead’ as a “disproportionate response” to the Qassam rockets, rather than as a straightforward massacre). What the motion cried out for was a Norman Finkelstein-style summary of what Israel and the Palestinians are respectively entitled to under the virtually unanimous international political and legal consensus, the latter determined by no less an authority than the International Court of Justice, followed by a brief account of the negotiations process up to this point. Michel Massih QC, who has been involved in efforts to prosecute Ehud Barak for war crimes, looked as though he was going to take this approach, opening with a statement about the importance of the law (which received much applause). Unfortunately he then veered off course to talk about falafel and the need for war crimes trials, which is a shame, because had he continued pulling at that thread, he could have very easily shown that Israel has never, in the history of the occupation, offered the Palestinians a state on the terms of the international consensus, and indeed that the only side ever to have offered to compromise on any of its rights is the Palestinian side.

Bar the representative of the Israeli government, Ran Gidor, the ‘pro’-Israel side was a shambles, reduced to trotting out the standard tired rhetorical tropes and tricks knowing full well – surely – that they stopped being effective a long time ago, at least since the attacks on Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza earlier this year. It was all there: the emphasis on Israel as a liberal, democratic paradise for gays and women (‘gaywash’), the portrayal of Israelis as Westernised and secular like us (‘we read the same books as you, watch the same TV shows’, as the Israeli representative put it) – and, implicitly, unlike the Palestinians, who are alien to us both; the regurgitation of the myth of Barak’s ‘generous offer’ (the two authorities cited were – who else? – Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross); the use of the treaty with Egypt to demonstrate that Israel seeks peace with its neighbours (ignoring the fact that Israel only withdrew from the Sinai after Egypt went to war to reclaim it); the insistence that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and got nothing but rockets for its trouble; the long quotes from Hamas’s charter, despite the fact that that document no longer forms the basis for the movement’s policies, and despite the fact that Hamas now explicitly accepts a two-state settlement based on the pre-June 1967 borders; the baseless dismissal of human rights reports – in this case that of the Goldstone commission – as ‘biased’; the repeated references to the “two-state solution” Israel generously offered back in 1947, to which the Palestinians and the Arab states responded by trying to, as one panelist put it, ‘finish what the Nazis began’; and so on and so on. One panelist even mentioned “Palestinian textbooks”, the I/P equivalent of cracking a “you are the Weakest Link” joke – no doubt if he’d have had more time he would have gone on to decry those dreaded “Arab radio broadcasts”.

Of course, no panoply of cheap rhetorical devices in the service of an expansionist Israeli state would be complete without the use of the ‘antisemitism card’ to disparage the Palestinian cause and justify Israeli violence. Serial ‘new antisemitism’-monger Denis ‘Gandalf‘ MacShane was there to oblige, delivering an incoherent rant that culminated in a demand from the audience that we accept the ‘right of gays to exist’. In his defence, MacShane was obviously drunk – he had to be escorted off the premises midway through the debate after accusing an Arab student in the audience of representing Hamas. When the student requested an apology, MacShane demanded, to loud boos from the audience, that he first apologise for the ‘deaths of all the Jews’ killed by Hamas.

MacShane’s racism aside, the ‘pro’-Israeli panelists clearly had their strategy worked out: they acknowledged that Israel had made some “errors”, solemnly declared every Palestinian death or injury to be a “tragedy” (while at the same time, disgustingly, berating Palestinians for having a ‘victimhood’ mentality), acknowledged that the occupation was “wrong” and professed a sincere desire for an “independent, viable Palestinian state”. Those words came from Ran Gidor, employee of Israel’s racist, expulsionist foreign minister, who was forced to pretend that Netanyahu, his explicit and oft-repeated rejectionism notwithstanding, actually favours a two-state settlement. When asked how he could reconcile this claim with Netanyahu’s refusal to halt settlement construction, Gidor responded that the settlements are Israel’s ‘bargaining chips’ not to be given away without a price. It is unlikely that anyone was fooled by this – one of the few advantages of having a Likud government in power is that people are much more aware of its rejectionist stance – and the fact that even the Israeli government representative felt obliged to express support for a two-state solution and opposition to the settlements reflects the significant improvement in discussion and awareness of the conflict in Britain. Israeli representatives don’t dare defend Israel’s actual position on the conflict anymore, because they know that that position is now widely viewed as indefensible. As I’ve written previously, the momentum of public opinion is swinging decidedly against Israel, a fact that this debate encouragingly, if frustratingly, affirmed.

In the spirit of which, another milestone in the improving discourse on this topic in the US was reached yesterday when Jon Stewart hosted Mustafa Barghouti and the Jewish-American peace activist Anna Baltzer on ‘The Daily Show’. Stewart stuck, as one would expect, to standard liberal pieties throughout – adopting the ‘both sides’ paradigm, taking Israel’s claimed ’security needs’ at face value, etc. – but the very fact that Baltzer and Barghouti were invited on in the first place is hugely encouraging. You can watch the full, unedited interview here, and help counter the inevitable backlash from the ‘lobby’ here.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  17 Comments
Tags: "peace process", Cambridge, Cambridge Union, debate, Denis MacShane, Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Stewart, Michel Massih, Mustafa Barghouti, Ran Gidor, The Daily Show