The Shapes of Casual Western Anti-Zionism

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, Gen. Rehavam Zeevi (R), Gen. Narkis, in Old Jerusalem
(ILAN BRUNER 7/6/67, GPO; shared under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Those that criticise Israel particularly harshly over the Jewish State’s handling of the conflict, often argue that ‘Jews should know better’ or words to the same effect. This stance appeals to a protracted history of persecution and genocide in Europe, which reached a peak with the Holocaust.

This seemingly reflexive bias can find expression in some unexpected places. Godfrey Graham, a seasoned cameraman who worked in current-affairs programming at RTE, since the early period of the Broadcaster’s transmission service, described several filming engagements in Israel for his memoir ‘Forty Years Behind the Lens at RTE’, published by Ashfield Press (Dublin).

This relatively detailed article focuses on a number of paragraphs in Graham’s memoir — a book that was clearly not intended to be an exposition of the conflict. There does not appear to be a substantive animus held by the author toward Israel, for he describes his general experiences in quite positive terms. Yet the relevant paragraphs present a clear narrative, which forcefully asserts that the Jewish people of Israel are morally blameworthy, while the Arabs of the region are not. Thus, it represents a good example of the commonplace casually anti-Zionist views often expressed in the West today.

What Israeli-Jews ought to do

Of a visit to Israel in the early 1980s, Graham described (pages 142–144) a pleasant meeting with Chaim Herzog (President of Israel between 1983 and 1993), who was born in Belfast and had strong links with Dublin which were discussed in a convivial atmosphere. However, Graham’s tone darkened when it came to the matter of the conflict:

“We visited refugee camps, where Arabs had been moved to temporary camps in 1944. There is a picture of a very dignified gentleman living in appalling conditions, who made wooden farm instruments and had a philosophical approach to being in the camp but hoped that one day he would have his home and his land back.

The fact that Jerusalem has a strong Arab quarter and that all the great religions are represented there with some important shrines, seems to point to the fact that, ultimately, it must be a capital city that represents all the great religious traditions and not just the city for one dominant tradition. This would seem to me the only fair way forward. Just as the Jewish people longed for a homeland, they should be the first to see the need Palestinians have for a homeland, too.”

In what sense did Graham deem Judaism to be the “dominant” religious tradition of Jerusalem? Clearly he views Judaism’s apparent dominance to have been instituted illegitimately under Israeli rule, rather than being as a consequence of Judaism’s greater ties with the city than that of any other faith, where, for example, the Torah mentions Jerusalem hundreds of times, while it is not named at all in the Koran. Graham’s stance naturally leads to the conclusion that Israel is trying to “Judaise Jerusalem” as many anti-Israel activists allege.

The Jewish populace of East Jerusalem (including the famous Jewish Quarter of the old city) was ethnically cleansed in 1948 by Jordan. The Christian populace of East Jerusalem declined dramatically in the following decades, choosing to emigrate to other parts of Jordan and abroad. We can see that a “dominant” Islamic “tradition” can abuse its power, but, after the Six Day war the Arab populace of Jerusalem has grown at double the percentile rate of the Jewish populace (155% Jewish and 314% Arab) between the years 1967 and 2010. The Christian populace has only grown marginally, and in view of the rapid growth of the Arab-Islamic populace now just represents 2% of Jerusalem, but the dramatic decline under Jordanian rule has been reversed.

While Graham was active in the media, he would have surely been aware that Old (East) Jerusalem was off-limits to the regional Jewish populace because Jordan, which occupied the territory until 1967, prevented Jewish people accessing religious sites (including the Wailing Wall, which is one of the last structural remnants of the Temple Mount compound), in contravention with the Armistice Agreement of 1949 between the two nations. Under Jordanian rule, many Jewish religious sites were repeatedly desecrated and destroyed in violation of Article 8 the agreement, as repeatedly brought to the attention of the United Nations.

After East Jerusalem’s recapture, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime-minister of the time, promptly declared that the holy sites of all faiths in Jerusalem would be protected, as would their freedom to worship at such sites. Moshe Dayan famously ceded control of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif to the Islamic Wafq, and established the precedent of giving Muslims exclusive rights of worship on the Temple Mount Compound. This is a matter of the utmost sensitivity to the Islamic faith — hence the rioting when Ariel Sharon visited the site, a visit that was used as an excuse by Arafat for the commencement of the Second Intifada, which was still a major news story at the time of the publication of the memoir.

Therefore, under the rule of the Jewish State there is a seemingly unique situation where the leaders of the “dominant tradition” actually repress their own religious rights to placate another religious grouping, which has a longstanding hostility toward the “dominant tradition”. This Islamo-supremacist denial of the most basic of Jewish religious rights also extends to attempts to claim the Wailing Wall for the Muslim faith, an effort that began in the 1920s to the present. Historically, related Islamic conspiracism surrounding the Temple Mount has led to acts of genocide (1929), and the continued incitement thereof. Yet the accusations that Israel is an “apartheid” nation continue unabated with the anti-Israel movement.

It is difficult to see how Graham can suggest that the Jewish people of Israel have not attempted to facilitate an Arab-Palestinian homeland. This stance would necessitate ignoring such well-established facts as Arafat walking out of the Camp David talks (2000), the Taba talks of 2001, etc., which offered all of Gaza, almost all of Judea and Samaria, and a large swathe of East Jerusalem with substantive control over the Temple Mount. It should be noted that Jordan/Transjordan already constitutes more than three-quarters of what was originally envisaged to be the “Jewish National Home” and as such represents the established nation for the Arabs of the region. When speaking of a “homeland” for Arab-Palestinians, Yasser Arafat’s assertion, when he spoke to reporter Arianna Palazzi in 1970, is relevant:

‘From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it… The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.”’

Criticism of Jewish-Israeli morality

When visiting Israel to film a Gate Theatre production of iconic Irish play ‘Juno and the Paycock’, Graham decided to again focus on supposed Jewish-Israeli immorality in relation to the plight of the Arab-Palestinians (page 226):

“While in Israel, our team got an opportunity to visit the profoundly moving sculpture depicting the Holocaust. That image will remain with me forever. We visited a refugee camp where Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period. The tragedy of the displacement of the Arab people is something the Israelis should understand, given the Jewish experience and their long journey to find their homeland. We met one man (his picture is presented on previous page) who had spent most of his life in this ‘temporary’ refugee camp. He had tremendous dignity and lived in just two very small, bear rooms but, despite his horrible experience, retained a gentleness of spirit that inspired all of us who met him. I often wonder whether he is still alive.”

This paragraph begins with a rather detached image evoking the subject of the Holocaust, which is contrasted with another image of an Arab-Palestinian refugee, before expounding on the latter subject. Graham seems to be intentionally reinforcing his point with this juxtaposition — that there is a lacking in the substance in the national morality of the Jewish-Israeli populace, since they, of-all-people, should understand the suffering of another group, given the way in which Jewish people were persecuted.

Graham fails to explain why “Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period” to a refugee camp, He appears to refer to the many Arab-Egyptian and Arab-Palestinian people who left a newly independent Israel at the instruction of Arab invaders so the Jewish State could be more easily destroyed, with the promise that they could soon return (within a few weeks) once the deed was done. Others left out of fear of reprisals once the Arab forces began to fail in their objective. This is a crucial point that goes to the very heart of pan-Arab aggression and existential rejectionism. Graham’s assertion may be indicative of perceptive bias, where vital facts are disposed because they do not comply with a certain narrative, or the omission may be more intentional, because it would greatly undermine attempts to hold Israeli-Jews responsible.

Graham described an Arab-Palestinian refugee in understandably sympathetic terms but this man, and his contemporaries, suffered because the Arab-Islamic world refused to accept Israel’s existence, and instead chose to wage a war of aggression. It is their misfortunate that the sole Jewish State in existence was not destroyed, and that the Jewish people did not face genocide — a very real threat made by Azzam Pasha in 1947. The so-called “Nabka” (Catastrophe), where between 472,000 and 650,000 Arab-Palestinians were displaced, could have been avoided if the Arab world recognised the right of Jewish independence with UN Resolution 181, in what constituted just a small portion their ancient ancestral homeland, in a rather small fraction of the original British Palestine Mandate, instead of waging an unofficial sectarian war from 1947 to 1948, and invading one day after Israel declared its independence in 1948, with a coalition of seven armies.

The Arab states refused Arab/Arab-Palestinian refugees citizenship, and curbed their basic rights. Israel feared they would become a fifth column in the absence of peace, but still offered to take back 100,000 at the Lausanne talks of 1949, to which the Arab nations refused. Nevertheless, 50,000 refugees did return under a family reunification programme, as well as a further 75,000 displaced by the Six Day War. Israel also absorbed vast numbers of Jewish people fleeing persecution in Arab lands. Thus, if Graham wants Jewish people to accept the notion of an Arab-Palestinian homeland (which they have), then that request must be justly conditional upon Arab-Palestinian society accepting Jewish self-determination in Israel. Otherwise, strife is merely continued, albeit at a higher intensity a la the defacto nation of Gaza.

Graham only mentions Arab-Palestinian terrorism in passing, when relating Chaim Herzog’s humorous remark that the SAM rockets fired by “Palestinian factions” (pages 143 – 144) were in range of his Tel Aviv home: “He said that a SAM could make a huge mess of your fruit trees if you were not careful.”

Paradoxically, Graham criticises the now-independent Jewish-Israelis who have a homeland, for not understanding the displacement of the Arab-Palestinians from the 1948-49 War of Independence. Yet it has long been a key demand of Yasser Arafat’s PLO to push for a so-called “right of return” to nullify Israel’s existence as a principally Jewish State. The two conditions are mutually exclusive so it seems Graham is indirectly criticising Israeli-Jews for not seeking a loss of their own homeland, their own self-determination, and religious freedom, free of the persecution visited upon them by the Islamic world for over a millennia, which peaked with their oppression, genocide and expulsion from the Arab-Islamic world between the 1920s and 1970.

An authentic homeland?

Graham appears to doubt the strength of the historic links between Israel and the Jewish People, since he describes the re-establishment of Israel as their “long journey to find their homeland”. In an earlier paragraph Graham talks of “the Jewish people” having “longed for a homeland” [emphasis added].

Graham may have in mind Theodore Herzl’s early flirtation with the idea of establishing a Jewish safe-haven in South America, because it was further away from the locus of the imperialist ambitions of the Western powers, which saw opportunities to carve up the territories of the ailing Ottoman Empire, and also avoided Palestine’s geographical proximity to the Russian Empire which had brutally oppressed its quite large Jewish populace. However, the defacto Zionist movement’s return to Palestine preceded Herzl. It seems the secular-minded Herzl may not have fully appreciated the scale of the importance of Palestine to the Jewish people — an importance that led to migration back to the homeland hundreds of years earlier, long before the Zionism movement was devised, and so Herzl’s idea was abandoned.

A passing knowledge of Jewish culture and history demonstrates that the Israeli State is located on part of the ancient homeland of the Jews. They constitute an indigenous people, which numerousobjective genetic studies have demonstrated. It explains the fact that Jerusalem features so strongly in the Torah, in prayer and in sayings, and, as such, are morally entitled to live in a region from which their ancestors were displaced, by successive pagan, Christian and Islamic empires. This is rather more than merely “a” homeland, that the Jewish people journeyed to “find” after fleeing the Christian West.




Published at Crethi Plethi.

Dervla Murphy seeks the dissolution of the Jewish State – Part 1

 

Part One: The issues raised

On the 9^th of February 2012 the Irish Examiner featured an extraordinary article by Dervla Murphy calling on Irish President Michael D. Higgins not to visit Israel. Like many news outlets, the Irish Examiner is slanted against Israel but the intellectual dishonesty of Ms. Murphy’s article stands out, as does the extremism of purposing a one-state solution.

Part one of this article looks at the broad issues surrounding Dervla Murphy’s open letter. Part Two is a lengthier article analysing the views of the critics that Ms. Murphy quotes prolifically.

Staged image al-Dirat, Jan 25 (AFP).

A photograph of dubious origin

A large image of a Palestinian man in intense agony is the first thing that greets the reader of Dervla Murphy’s article. It is a particularly emotive image to lead an article with. Beneath are the words:

Palestinian worker screams after an Israeli driver drove a trailer over his legs, as Israeli forces stopped workers building at house at al-Dirat on Jan 25.

Interestingly, this photo is only one of several libellous images that surfaced recently. It was published by the international media outlet AFP. CAMERA pointed out that the event was likely to be staged due to a number of obvious inconsistencies, in terms of the visuals of the event, subsequent accounts, and the absence of the relevant local Palestinian and UN agencies reporting a serious casualty. The controversy erupted at the end of January, after a number of mainstream news outlets ran the same image. The issue continues to rumble on so it is telling that the Irish Examiner chose to run it at this stage, when there are a vast number of alternative photographs at their disposal.

The image is part of a recent rash of staged photographs, including one of a supposed Israeli soldier with his boot planted on the chest of a girl lying on the ground, while he points a rifle at her. It turned out to be from a piece of street theatre staged in Bahrain, which pro-Palestinian activists attempted to turn viral. Such images are a key part of a demonising campaign to delegitimise Israel’s very existence.

The cynicism of this behaviour is illustrated by the all too common use of children as a pro-Palestinian propagandistic tool because it is such an understandably emotive subject. The 2000 Al-Dura case is the most famous of these proven mainstream media hoaxes. Recent fabrications were made about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children in the judicial system which caused a great deal of diplomatic damage in Australia.

Murphy’s open letter as published in the print edition of the Irish Examiner

 

Who is Dervla Murphy?

Dervla Murphy is a well known Irish travel author, who has been writing about her experiences since the 1960’s. She is a distinctly left-wing author, who expressed support for the oppressive communist regime in Cuba. Considering her ideology, it is fitting that she is also a seasoned pro-Palestinian. She spent an extended period of time in the West Bank, where she visited the “sinister” settlement of Kirya Arbat.

Ms. Murphy planned to travel on the Gaza Flotilla in 2011, despite her advancing years, although it appears she didn’t attempt it in the end but features in a rather insulting promo where the Irish Ship to Gaza campaign urge people to “stay human”. She subsequently visited Gaza in 2011, and is currently writing a book about her encounters with Israelis and Palestinians, which looks set to be a piece of intensive pro-Palestinian propaganda if her article in the Irish Examiner is any indicator.

When Murphy was twelve, her family took in Charlie Kerins, the then IRA Chief of Staff, for several weeks in 1943 when he was on the run. As a leading member of the IRA, Kerins can be considered a Nazi collaborator because the IRA was co-operating substantively with Nazi intelligence at a time, and they believed the Reich would install the IRA as the government come an invasion. Many in the IRA were interned as a result. Thus harbouring Kerins could be seen as an act of treason at a time when the Irish State was attempting to stay neutral during World War II. Interestingly, she describes his subsequent execution for killing a policeman in rather heroic terms, as recounted in her book on Northern Ireland, entitled “A place apart” (1979).

Why an open letter?

Ms. Murphy’s article is extraordinary for several reasons. Firstly, it proports to be an open letter to beseech President Michael D. Higgins not to visit Israel. Open letters are an interesting facet of the publishing world because they have a sense of independence from the publication that carries them, whilst op-eds (opinion pieces) have a stronger association with the publication itself. Thus, there is essentially no requirement for any sort of journalistic ethics since an open letter is still a mere letter.

One purpose of open-letters is to challenge the stance of the person to which it is addressed. Even though the piece is addressed to Michael D. Higgins, his own views are not addressed. Rather the letter treats a number of appalling things Israel has supposedly done as a given, and quotes the views of a large number of extreme anti-Israel activists. This is an odd approach to pursuasion because Higgins is certainly no stranger to these accusations or the stances of anti-Israel activists. If anything he would be far more familiar with them then Ms. Murphy herself. Higgins is commonly seem as Ireland’s most senior anti-Israel politician.

Higgins has done vastly more to criticise Israel than Ms. Murphy has over the years. Higgins’ own stance is ignored and the piece simply advances a particular solution to the conflict, namely the nullification of Israel as a Jewish state. As a result it would seem this “open letter” is in essence a further effort to delegitimse Israel, with zero requirement for journalistic ethics as befitting the format.

By your quotes we shall know thee

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Dervla Murphy’s relatively lengthy article is the large number of anti-Zionist Jews she cites. She quotes Tony Judt, Judith Butler, Vitzhak Laor, Udi Aloni, and the Olga Document, the culmination of meetings by a group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli academics.

Through a patchwork of selective quotes, Murphy uses their words to make more of the points than she actually does herself. Three non-Jewish people are quoted. These are two Palestinians and an Arab man, two of which are quoted very briefly. It is surely an odd way to construct a letter or article.

Indeed Murphy disingenuously ties up her article by asserting a concern for Israeli citizens themselves:

For the President of Ireland to visit Israel as a state guest would contribute to block that road to peace. By condoning the actions of a government that consistently flouts international law, you would be betraying the citizens of this country, the defenceless Palestinians and the many non-Zionist Jews who are so deeply ashamed of the state of Israel as present constituted.

Jewish anti-Zionists like Tony Judt and Ilan Pappé are cited by pro-Palestinians more commonly than non-Jews. A notable feature of the pro-Palestinian movement is the prolific use of Jewish critics, whether they are academic or not, to publicly attack Israel. These critics include victims of the Holocaust. This is surely an odd fact since the pro-Palestinian movement is a vast international phenomenon, in which a limited number of anti-Israeli Jews would represent a very small minority.

While some Jewish people attack Israel on their own initiative, there seems to be a ploy of promoting Jewish critics in the movement because, although related to the issue, they appear to be greatly over-represented given population size. An example of this phenomenon is the common mischaracterisation by pro-Palestinians of the Neturei Karta, as representative of mainstream Judaism, when in fact they are a small group of Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist extremists.

Considering the extreme sensitivity of the pro-Palestinian movement to accusations of anti-Semitism, it does seem that the prolific use of Jewish critics is intended to deflect accusations of racism. Using such sources targets the common belief amongst some that anti-Semitism is behind the intense criticism of the Jewish State. It also allows the pro-Palestinian critic to go further in their demonisation of Israel for the simple reason that a number of Jewish people are doing it too.

Using Jewish and Israeli-Jewish critics also undermines understanding of why Israel, as a Jewish state, ought to exist. The rebuttal of the right of a Jewish state to exist is a recurrent feature of Ms. Murphy’s article. Consequently, her article is a highly manipulative work, advancing an extremist agenda, whilst disingenuously inferring or proclaiming a concern for Jewish welfare in virtually every paragraph.

Have Jewish people stopped supporting Israel?

Murphy repeatedly cites numerous Jewish people to suggest the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is some sort of solidarity movement. Her stance infers that there is a very substantial support among Jews for this campaign, and the one-state solution. This is total nonsense.

Many Jews and non-Jews alike have refuted the precepts of the BDS movement. It includes 41 Nobel laureates who affirm the BDS movement is:

• antithetical to principles of academic and scientific freedom,
• antithetical to principles of freedom of expression and inquiry, and
• may well constitute discrimination by virtue of national origin

Her article invokes what academic Ted Lapkin refers to as “the meme of the ‘disaffected Jew’”, which has been greatly exaggerated in the media. The fact remains that the great majority of Jewish people the world over support Israel, as surveys attest.

In a 2010 annual survey of Jewish American opinion, when asked “Should the Palestinians be required or not be required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement?”, no less than 94% of those asked said it was required. This survey was taken by moderates that identify as Democratic Party supporters. Jewish support for the dissolution of the Jewish State is marginal at best.

Another study in 2011 by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, found that 63% of American Jews still feel connected to Israel, and 75% said that caring about Israel is a significant part of their Jewish identity. This was affirmed by younger and older people surveyed. Despite many being exposed to intense pro-Palestinian activism on US campuses, surveys indicate Jewish students still support Israel.

A survey of Jewish people in the UK found that “British Jews strongly identified with and supported Israel, with nine out of 10 having visited it.” Regarding strength of opinion, 72% agreed Israel’s action in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 was “a legitimate act of self-defence” and 77% favoured the two-state solution as the only solution to peace.

A survey of Israeli citizens, taken a few months ago by the Brookings Institute, showed that most Israeli citizens want the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, with 2/5^ths wanting it as a precondition for future negotiations. The survey included Arab-Israeli citizens, and interestingly, a significant number believed Israel was an apartheid state a la BDS propaganda but at least 60% thought Israel was not apartheid.

Black und White pro-Palestinianism

Before getting into the substance of the points in the article, Murphy starts off appropriately enough by leaving the reader in no doubt as to where she stands, when she addresses Higgins:

Were you, as President, to visit Israel, you would be signalling to all the world that this country approves of a truly vicious regime.

Such a black and white stance, with no centre ground to speak of, is a common feature of the pro-Palestinian movement. The reality is that Higgins wouldn’t merely be visiting Israel. He would also be visiting the West Bank and Gaza, which would in effect be a telling expression of his interest in the Palestinians and a just solution to the conflict.

By using the phrase “pressing that button…” in relation to free-speech, Murphy insinuates that Israel somehow manipulated Irish government ministers into attending an Israeli film festival late last year:

Last November, to my Palestinian friend’s disappointment, we failed to organise a boycott of a four-day, state-funded Israeli film festival in Dublin….

Freedom of speech is a tricky one and the pressing of that button gained Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s attendance at the opening night.

This illustrates an all too common contempt for free speech amongst the pro-Palestinian brigade. Indeed, even a number of more moderate supporters of the Palestinians were angry that the IPSC, of which Ms. Murphy appears to be a member, attempted to prevent any showing of the films, and intimidated those that wished to attend. The IPSC has a right to protest but it has no moral right to shut down such an event.

Perhaps the Government is uninformed about “Brand Israel”. This global campaign, also launched in 2005, is funded by various Israeli government agencies and major pro-Zionist international (mainly US) groups. Its primary purpose is to promote Israel as a “normal” country involved in tourism, sports, innovative science, a vibrant youth culture, and so on. On its behalf, all Israel’s consulates and embassies are kept busy.

The “Brand Israel” campaign was in actual fact an attempt to present Israel as something more than a state involved in conflict. Perhaps all the nations of the world engage in such activity. Brand Israel is not an attempt to whitewash the conflict because the content rarely addresses such topics. Rather it was an effort to counter the continual coverage of the Middle East, which presents Israel in a one-dimensional way. Despite Ms. Murphy’s exaggeration over its scale, it could never be more than a modest response to continual high-level mainstream coverage.

As much as Ms. Murphy would like us to think otherwise, Israel is also a fairly “normal” country that functions “normally”, with many lives that are relatively untouched by the conflict. Ms. Murphy, and her pro-Palestinian associates, would have us turn away from and refute this obvious truth about Israel.

Israeli’s ain’t “normal”

One of the more absurd paragraphs illustrates the remarkable nerve of Ms. Murphy’s attitude on Israel:

Israelis have the power to oppose the occupation through BDS, the most powerful non-violent means available. Things change the minute you say “we cannot continue to act as normal”. To work to the side of the occupation is to participate in its normalisation. And the way that normalisation works is to efface or distort the reality of the occupation within public discourse. As a result, neutrality is not an option.

Bizarrely, Ms. Murphy believes any ordinary Israeli person is not entitled to live a normal life, even if they do not actively participate in the machinations of the Jewish State! Oh no, Israeli’s are not entitled to be “normal”, that particular reality, in which several million Israeli’s live is somehow bad or wrong since it represents complicity with the “occupation” to be involved in its apparent “normalisation”.

Ms. Murphy infers the reality of the “occupation” is somehow undermined in discourse because “normalisation” “distort[s]” or “efface[s]” the reality of the occupation. Quite how this happens is unclear. It is a particularly absurd argument, especially since there is prolific coverage of the conflict in Israel, perhaps more so than in any other nation of the world, and much of said coverage comes from distinctly left-wing sources like Haaretz that are very critical of the “occupation”. This bizarre theory does suggest that Murphy and associates want Israeli’s to simply stop functioning as human beings.

Oh wait, that is actually what they want! According to Ms. Murphy and her ilk, there can be no neutrality. Every Israeli must choose a side, and furthermore it must be Ms. Murphy’s side! All Israeli’s must advocate BDS strategies to bring the nation to its knees, even though they will no doubt harm their own lives in a very serious way, that of their families, their friends, those they love… It leads one to ask does working a job in Israel to feed one’s family also contribute to “normalisation”?

BDS and its link with the one-state solution

Almost without exception, the individuals Ms. Murphy quotes, strongly advocate both a BDS approach to bring Israel to heel, and then a one-state solution to the conflict! Murphy seeks a one-state solution, a la Rwanda, which Judith Butler cited as an example of such a bi-national solution. Murphy states:

BDS is the most powerful non-violent means available. If millions say, “we cannot continue to act as normal” while the repression continues, then things would change and everyone would be much closer to binationalism, which is the only solution.

The only solution to the conflict for these anti-Zionists is the creation of one state that in demographic terms would subsume the Jewish people under an Arab-Islamic majority regime. The remarkable fact is that the leaders of the broad Arab-Islamic culture of the region express considerably more genocidal intent toward the Jews than the National Socialists of 1930’s Germany did! Sadly, it seems people they represent have little objection to this approach, as suggested by independent surveys.

Omar Barghouti, a principle figure of the BDS campaign also advocates the one-state solution, which he understands to be the destruction of Israel:

It is not the occupation of the West Bank that is the problem, but the existence of Israel itself.

Blind to the blindingly obvious

Perhaps the most fundamental impression one gets of Dervla Murphy’s article, is its abject failure to address any of Israel’s worries or make any attempt to understand their perspective, however minimal:

For whatever reason, Ireland’s Government (and most others) choose to “continue to act as normal”. To maintain friendly relations as though Israel’s repression of the Palestinians were some isolated error of judgement, when in truth it is central to the state’s existence and has been since 1948. […]

…neutrality is not an option. We all have a moral duty to be hostile to a government that deliberately and relentlessly inflicts so much suffering on successive generations of a people who did nothing to deserve the Zionists’ colonisation of their territory.

The stark extremism of Ms. Murphy’s views are illustrated by the fact that she clearly thinks Israel ought not exist at all, and never should have. This is in part because she strongly advocates a one-state solution, which will nullify Israel, and also because she cites the year of 1948, when Israel came into existence, rather than 1967 when the “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza started.

Citing 1948 illustrates her profound bias over the conflict. Israel faced an existential threat from no less than eight armies attacking it within a day of its existence. The respected historian, Benny Morris, who has been cited prolifically by pro-Palestinians in the past, acknowledged the violence on the Israeli side but put it in the context of the times, namely a vicious sectarian conflict on both sides. Morris also acknowledges that Arab leaders told many Arabs to leave so the eight armies invading Palestine could wipe the region clean.

There was no doubt the Arab forces would do anything other than drive the Jews into the sea in 1948. Indeed the head of the Arab League openly threatened mass genocide of a future Jewish in 1947. At the time, the Arab nations of the Middle East initiated a move that would make the region Judenrein in two decades, other than a marginal Jewish populace in Tunisia. Massacres and expulsions were the order of the day for the ancient Jewish populace of the region. Israel had the generosity to take these people in, and now Ms. Murphy wants this state nullified.