Antisemitism: Real and Imagined

7/28/2019 Antisemitism: Real and Imagined

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M4TISEMVTISWREM. MID IMAGINED

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROMRima Berns-McGown, Karin Brothers, Edward C. Corrigan,Mohamed Elmasry, Yves Engler, Bruce Katz, Jason Kunin,

Lynda Lemberg, Joanne Naiman, Yakov M. Rabkin & Craig SmithAND POSITION PAPERS FROM

Canada-Palestine Support Network, Canadian Arab Federation, Canadians forJustice and Peace in the Middle East, Educators for Peace and Justice, Faculty for

Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices & Seriously Free Speech Committee


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ANTISEMITISMREAL AND IMAGINEDRESPONSES TO THE CANADIAN PARLIAMENTARY

COALITION TO COMBAT ANTISEMITISM

MICHAEL KEEFER

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROMRima Berns-McGown, Karin Brothers, Edward C. Corrigan, Mohamed Elmasry,Yves Engler, Bruce Kate, Jason Kurtin, Lynda Lemberg, Joanne Naiman,Yakov M. Rabkin & Craig Smith

AND POSITION PAPERS FROMCanada-Palestine Support Network, Canadian Arab Federation,Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East,Educators for Peace and Justice, Faculty for Palestine,Independent Jewish Voices & Seriously Free Speech Committee

THE CANADIAN CHARGERWaterloo, Ontario


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121

FACULTY FOR PALESTINE (F4P)SUBMISSION TO THE CPCCA

IntroductionFaculty for Palestine (F4P) formed in the spring of 2008 in response tothe increasing pattern of suppression of freedom of speech and freedomof assembly around the advocacy of Palestinian rights in Canadianuniversities. We have been particularly concerned about attempts to silenceIsraeli Apartheid Week, the main site of support for the Palestinian Boycott,Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement on campuses. Our broad mandateis to educate, inform, organize and advocate around these issues. In the pastyear, over 400 Canadian academics from 43 universities and 13 colleges acrossCanada signed our Open Letter to the university community regarding thedefense of Palestinian rights on Canadian campuses. This collective expressionof concern indicates broad-based acknowledgement that it is urgent to extendfree speech in post-secondary institutions in Canada regarding the conditionsfaced by Palestinians, and to protect the legitimate right to criticize and debatethe apartheid practices and policies of the Israeli state. As a committee of theCoalition Against Israeli Apartheid, our commitment to Palestinian rightsincludes a vision of equity and justice in the broadest sense. As part of thecoalition, we share the following statement:

We believe that justice will not be achieved without equal rights foreveryone in the region, regardless of religion, ethnicity or nationality.We understand Israeli apartheid as one element of a system of globalapartheid. To this end, we stand in solidarity with all oppressedgroups around the world, in particular, the indigenous people ofNorth America. We oppose all forms of racism, Islamophobia andanti-Semitism.

A copy of the Open Letter and further information about Faculty4Palestine isavailable at http://www.caiaweb.org/faculty.


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KEEFER: ANTISEMITISM IN CANADA 155radically other.32 Canadians might know them, from one of the most popularfictions of John Buchanthe imperialist ideologue, novelist, intelligenceofficer, popular historian and MP who ended his career as Lord Tweedsmuir,Canada's Governor-General from 1935 to 1940as ululating half-savages,exotic and bizarre, and as the endlessly gullible objects of imperial geopoliticalmanipulations.33 Or, if they had read T. E. Lawrence's best-selling Revolt inthe Desert, or the full-length book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, from which it wasabridged,34 they would know of Arabs, from Lawrence of Arabia's descriptionsof Bedouin warriors like the Howeitat war chief Auda abu Tayi, as more fullybarbaric and more completely manipulablebut as noble savages, with manyof the qualities of Homeric heroes. In a passage he later admitted was pureinvention, Lawrence reported that Prince Faisal, the physically slight militaryleader of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, had collapsed in battle-frenzy, foaming at the mouth, and had to be carried from the battlefield. Auda,more fully Homeric, delights in epic self-dramatization, and although he ismurderously efficient in his berserker heroism, his Howeitat tribe has beendepleted by his insatiable thirst for brigandage and war.Why would Canadian leaders whose understanding of the Middle Easthad to any degree been conditioned by fictions of this kind want to concededemocratic rights to such peoplewhether to the teeming urban populationsthrough whom Buchan's orientalist passes, or the Palestinian and Syrianpeasants whom Lawrence occasionally describes, and the Bedouins whom herepresents as resolutely simple-minded?35Did it perhaps occur to Canadian diplomats to think that the settlementhistory of North America tells us what happens when Europeans (evenpartially 'othered' Europeans) set their hearts on land that happens alreadyto be occupied by noble, or ignoble, savagessuch as those indigenous peoplewhom Duncan Campbell Scott, poet and Deputy Superintendent of theDepartment of Indian Affairs, had unsympathetically called "a weird andwaning race (...) ready to break out at any moment in savage dances; in wildand desperate orgies"?36Yves Engler observes that Canadian support for a partition plan opposedby all Arab states and organizations was not based on any concern fordemocracy: the UNSCOP plan gave more than half of Palestine to the proposedJewish state despite the fact that, as Ilan Pappe remarks, Jews made up onlyone-third of the total population and owned just six percent of Palestine, andeven within the areas assigned to them by UNSCOP Jews "owned only elevenpercent of the land, and were the minority in every district."37Engler quotes Elizabeth McCallum, the Department of External Affairs'only Middle East expert, and a dissenter from government policy, who claimedthat Ottawa supported partition "because we didn't give two hoots fordemocracy."38 He remarks as well that "The Canadian-backed U.N. partitioncontributed to the forced displacement of 700,000-900,000 Palestinians"


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KEEFER: ANTISEMITISM IN CANADA 163racial capacity to insinuate themselves through imaginative projection into thecultures and belief systems of other peoples. Buchan's protagonist, Dick Hannay,successively impersonates a South African Boer, a German intelligence agent, andan American civil engineer; and Sandy Arbuthnot, an orientalist and proto-T. E.Lawrence, vanishes into the bazaars of the Middle East, emerging as the leader of amystical Muslim secret society who becomes Greenmantle, the longed-for prophetof a movement of apocalyptic purification within Islam.T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert (London: Jonathan Cape, and New York:George H. Doran, 1927); and Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Private edition,1926; New York: George H. Doran, 1935). Revolt appeared in editions andmultiple reprints from five publishers in 1927; by the end of the 1940s, SevenPillars (a large-format and more expensive book) had appeared in fourteen distinctpublic editions and reprints from five publishers.Lawrence tells of performing for the Howeitat, at one of their communal feasts,a parody of Auda's mode of epic narration. His audience took some time to getthe joke: Lawrence wants us to believe that they had never previously imaginedthe possibility of parodic discourse. Fictive elements abound in Lawrence'smemoir: he took credit, for example, for the capture of Aqaba, a feat planned andcarried out by Auda and other Arab leaders (with Lawrence in attendance as anobserver).Quoted by Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistancein the Americas (1992; rpt. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 321. The firstphrase occurs in Scott's sonnet "The Onondaga Madonna."Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications,2006), p. 34; quoted by Engler, The Black Book, pp. 55-56.McCallum is quoted by Eliezer Tauber, Personal Policy Making: Canada's Role in theAdoption of the Palestine Partition Resolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),p. 94; quoted in turn by Engler, The Black Book, p. 56.Engler, The Black Book, p. 57. For evidence of clearly enunciated Zionist intentions,he cites Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp. 8, 29-38.The following examples are drawn from Engler, The Black Book, pp. 59-63.Linda McQuaig, "Media cheerleaders miss story: The US has succeeded in gettingCanada to take the lead in an unpopular counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan,"Toronto Star (8 April 2008); available online at http://www.lindamcquaig.com/Column.cfm?REF=68; quoted by Engler, The Black Book, p. 60.Franklin Bialystok, "'Were things that bad?' The Holocaust Enters CommunityMemory," in Menkis and Rawin, eds., The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader, p. 287.The figures published by the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada inits annual Audit o/Antisemitic Incidents are analyzed in the next chapter.As Shlomo Sand observes in The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Yael Lotan


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KEEFER: DATA AND DECEPTION 205The Honourable Roy McMurtry and Dr. Alvin Curling, The Review of the Rootsof Youth Violence, Volume 1: Findings, Analysis and Conclusions (Toronto: Queen'sPrinter for Ontario, 2008), http://www.rootsofyouthviolence.on.ca/englisg/reports/volumel.pdf, p. 381.


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KEEFER: DESPERATE IMAGININGS 241works to circumscribe the publicly acceptable domain of speech. Italso works to immunize Israeli violence against critique by refusing tocountenance the integrity of the claims made against that violence.One is threatened with the label, "anti-Semitic," in the same way thatwithin the US, to oppose the most recent US wars earns one the labelof "traitor," or "terrorist sympathizer" or, indeed, "treasonous." Theseare threats with profound psychological consequence. They seek tocontrol political behavior by imposing unbearable, stigmatized modesof identification which most people will want more than anything toavoid identification with.154Those who perform this labeling know very well how powerfully it canwork, in Butler's words, "to circumscribe what can and cannot be permissibly

spoken out loud in the public sphere," and to "decide the defining limits of thepublic sphere through setting limits on the speakable." The consequences ofa shrinkage of the public sphere through an exclusion of critical perspectivesare potentially dire:

The exclusion of those criticisms will effectively establish theboundaries of the public itself, and the public will come tounderstand itself as one that does not speak out, critically, in theface of obvious and illegitimate violenceunless, of course, a certaincollective courage takes hold.155That collective courage exists in this country, as does a generously shared

fund of common decency. This book goes out to the public in the hope thatwhat it offers in the way of critical analysis may help to facilitate an increasinglyfull and well-articulated expression of that decency and courage.

NotesSome historians and sociologists have used the term "new antisemitism" inscholarly studies of the receptions and mutations of traditional Christian andEuropean antisemitism in other parts of the world. My critique applies to theirwritings only to the degree that they deploy this same rhetoric, and therebyparticipate in this strategy of deception.James D. Besser, "A Chill in the D.C. Air as Obama, Netanyahu Meet," TheJewish Week (10 November 2009), http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c39_al7230/News/International.html."Survivors, liberators, leaders mark Auschwitz liberation," Channelneivsasia.com(28 January 2010), http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/1033527/l/.html. By way of contrast, on a similar occasion four years previously,Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert described himself as "prime minister ofthe state of Israel and the leader of the Jewish people here" (my emphasis); see


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KEEFER: DESPERATE IMAGININGS 257Massad, "Policing the academy," AlAhram Weekly, No. 633 (10-16 April 2003),http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/633/op2.htm.Goodyear does in fact have a well-earned reputation for being foul-tempered;see "Researchers fear 'stagnation' under Tories," The Globe and Mail (2 March2009, updated 10 April 2009), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article975257ece; and "Maybe a 'time out,' Minister?" Dawg's Blawg(2 March 2009), http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2009/03/maybe-time-out-minister.html.

122 "One size doesn't fit all," National Post (25 February 2010), http://www.nationalp6st.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2609507.

123 Kathleen and Bill Christison, Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the IsraeliOccupation (London: Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 136-37.

124 Ibid., p. 137, quoting Richard Falk, "Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,"ZNet (5 July 2007), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectiohID=134226.

125 Ibid., p. 137.126 Gideon Alon, "Lieberman blasted for suggesting drowning Palestinian prisoners,"Haarett (8 July 2003), http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtmPitemNo=315541.127 "LIEBERMAN, AvigdorIsraeli Politician and deputy prime minister," ElectronicIntifada, http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/people/658.shtml; JonathanCook, "Israel's Dark Future," Electronic Intifada (20 January 2007), http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6411.shtml.

Tim Butcher, "Israeli minister vows Palestinian 'holocaust'," The Telegraph (29February 2008), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1580339/israeli-minister-vows-Palestinian-holocaust.html; "Israel warns Gaza of 'shoah'," Reuters(29 February 2008), http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2868601720080029;James Hider, "Israel threatens to unleash 'holocaust' in Gaza," Times Online(1 March 2008), http://www.timesonlone.co.uk/toI/news/middle_east/article3459144.ece.It does not seem likely that Vilnai thought of the preceding days' events, in whichone Israeli was killed by rocket fire, and thirty Palestinians by Israeli attacks, as a"shoah." Perhaps he was using "shoah" to translate the Arab work "nakba," whichalso means "catastrophe," and also has a specific historical referenceto the ethniccleansing of Palestinians which accompanied the founding of the state of Israel in1948. But a "greater nakba" would also be a genocidal act.Juan Cole, "Harvard Professor's Modest Proposal: Starve the Gazans into HavingFewer Babies," Informed Comment (24 February 2010), http://www.juancole.com/2010/02/harvard-professors-modest-proposal.html.Martin Kramer, "Superfluous young men," Sandbox (7 February 2010), http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2010/02/superfluous-young-men/.


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Antisemitism: Real and Imagined

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