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Ελληνικά (english translation follows)

Διμοιρίες των ΜΑΤ έξω από συναγωγές, συσκέψεις σε εβραϊκά σχολεία – ενώ συναγωγές, νεκροταφεία και μνημεία γινόντουσαν στόχος βανδαλισμών και εμπρησμών. Αυτή ήταν η εικόνα που παρουσίαζε ο Ελληνικός Εβραϊσμός τους μήνες Δεκέμβριο και Ιανουάριο όταν το σύνολο της ελληνικής κοινωνίας αποφάσισε ότι ο καλύτερος τρόπος να στηρίξει τους «αγωνιστές της Χαμάς» (η γνωστή αντισημιτική εφημερίδα Αυριανή, 29/12/08) ήταν να ξεσπάσουν ενάντια στους έλληνες συμπολίτες που γεννήθηκαν με την λάθος θρησκεία. Αν και το είχα γράψει από μήνες είχα αποφασίσει να μην το δημοσιεύσω αλλά η πεποίθηση οτι στην Ελλάδα ο αντισημιτισμός περιορίζεται στο ΛάΟΣ του Γ.Καρατζαφέρη ή είναι μόνο λόγια οφείλει να αντιμετωπίσει τα γεγονότα.

Βίαια αντισημιτικά γεγονότα συνέβησαν 9 ελληνικές πόλεις: σε Αθήνα, Θεσσαλονίκη, Λάρισα, Βόλο, Ιωάννινα, Κέρκυρα αλλά και σε judenrein πόλεις όπως Κομοτηνή, Βέροια και Δράμα. Σε πανελλήνιο επίπεδο είδαμε εξοργιστικές δηλώσεις για «εβραίους που μυρίζουν αίμα» από τον ηγέτη της Ακρας Δεξιάς Γιώργο Καρατζαφέρη και που σιωπηλά επικροτήθηκαν από τον Πρόεδρο της Βουλης Δ.Σιούφα. Η Αριστερά καταδίκασε με την μέγιστη αυστηρότητα το Ισραήλ και ταυτόχρονα αρνήθηκε να καταδικάσει τα βίαια αντισημιτικά επεισόδια στην ίδια της την χώρα, ενώ τραγελαφική ήταν η χρησιμοθηρική αναφορά στο “Ολοκαύτωμα” στη Γάζα από ανθρώπους που ευτελίζουν ενσυνείδητα την Σοά και αρνούνται να συμμετάσχουν σε όποια τελετή μνήμης.

Στελέχη της Εκκλησίας της Ελλάδος όπως ο Μητρ.Πειραιώς Σεραφείμ μίλησαν για “σιωνιστικά τέρατα με γαμψά νύχια” που στηρίζονται από τις «μασονικές στοές» και κατηγόρησε ευθέως τους έλληνες εβραίους, (ο νεοναζιστικός Στόχος επικροτεί). Άλλοι όπως ο Μητροπ.Θεσσαλονικής Ανθιμος, (γνωστός για άλλες αμφισβητήσιμες δηλώσεις), είπε οτι οι εβραίοι τιμωρούνται γιατί “σταύρωσαν το Χριστό” και είναι θεοκτόνοι – άλλωστε την κάρτα των θεοκτόνων την έπαιξαν και πρωτοσέλιδα εφημερίδων όπως η Βραδυνή μιλώντας για «Σταύρωση» και «Πόντιους Πιλάτους».  Δεν αναφέρομαι καν στα πρωτοσέλιδα παρανοϊκών αντισημιτικών ορθόδοξων εφημερίδων όπως ο Ορθόδοξος Τύπος που μιλούσαν “ΣΙΩΝΙΣΤΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΜΑΣΩΝΟΙ ΣΤΗΡΙΖΟΥΝ ΤΗΝ ΣΦΑΓΗ”, αλλά θα περιορισθώ στην αντισημιτική εφημερίδα Αυριανή που στο πρωτοσέλιδο δεξιά κατηγόρησε τους αμερικανοεβραίους οτι έκλεψαν τον πλούτο, δημιούργησαν την παγκόσμια οικονομική κρίση μας πληροφορούσε για τις προσπάθειες των αμερικανοεβραίων να ξεκινήσουν τον Γ’ΠΠ (!!!), ενώ και αυτή μίλησε για «Ολοκαύτωμα». Μη ξεχάσουμε την Απογευματινή με πρωτοσέλιδο “Ολοκαύτωμα” και που είχε υποστηρίξει στο παρελθόν οτι οι ισραηλινοί κλέβουν τα όργανα των Παλαιστινίων και όλες τις υπόλοιπες εφημερίδες που αρνήθηκαν συστηματικά να αναφερθούν στο ρατσιστικό μίσος που κυρίευσε την χώρα.

Αξίζει να σημειωθεί το μένος που επιδείχθηκε από τηλεοράσεις και ραδιόφωνα – ξεχωρίζει η ραδιοφωνική εκπομπή του Τζίμη Πανούση που ξεκαθάριζε οτι δεν υπάρχει καλός εβραίος αλλά είναι όλοι γουρούνια και δολοφόνοι αλλά ευτυχώς οι μέρες τους είναι μετρημένες. Αλλά ας περιοριστούμε στις απτές εκφράσεις του εφιάλτη του ρατσισμού που εκφράστηκε από την Ακρα Αριστερά, την Ακρα Δεξιά και τις νεοναζιστικές ομάδες της χώρας μας.

Αθήνα

Αντισημιτικά γκράφιτι εμφανίστηκαν σε πολλούς δρόμους της πόλης – εδώ βλέπουμε σύνθημα στο εβραϊκό νεκροταφείο που μιλάει για “ΙΣΡΑΗΛΙΤΕΣ ΕΒΡΑΙΟΙ ΦΟΝΙΑΔΕΣ”. Αν υπήρχε κάποια αμφιβολία για την θρησκευτική δίασταση της αντίθεσης, οι δράστες φρόντισαν να το ξεκαθαρίσουν με το να προσθέσουν το εβραίος μετά το ισραηλίτης, αφού μάλλον το μπέρδεψαν με το ισραηλινός.

Μεταξύ των πολλών αντιπολεμικών διαδηλώσεων ξεχωρίζουν αυτές της Χρυσής Αυγής όπου η “Λευτεριά στην Παλαιστίνη” συνδυάζονταν αρμονικά με το “Τσεκούρι και φωτιά στα εβραϊκά σκυλιά” και το “Εβραίοι,Γουρούνια,Φονιάδες των Λαών”, (έχω και το βιντεο με την παρέλαση τους στο κέντρο της Αθήνας – σε άλλες περιπτώσεις αριστερές και αναρχικές ομάδες αντιστέκονται αλλά από ότι φαίνεται δεν πρέπει να διαφωνούσαν σε αυτή την περίπτωση). Στελέχη της οργάνωσης έδωσαν συνεντεύξεις σε πανελλήνιους τηλεοπτικούς σταθμούς όπως το Μέγκα – και γιατί όχι; Αλλωστε τα διάφορα ακροδεξιά κόμματα μάζεψαν περίπου 11% στην Αθήνα στις ευρωεκλογές που ακολούθησαν.

Βέροια

Άγνωστοι προσπάθησαν να πυρπολήσουν την Συναγωγή που βρίσκεται μέσα στην εβραϊκή συνοικία της Μπαρμπούτας μέσα στην πόλη της Βέροιας – ευτυχώς η φωτιά δεν επεκτάθηκε και μόνο η είσοδος και η βεράντα υπέστησαν ζημίες. Κατά διαβολική σύμπτωση πριν ένα χρόνο έγραφα για τις κατηγορίες οτι οι εβραίοι ενέχονται σε ανθρωποθυσίες που διατυπώθηκαν τον τηλεστάρ και επιτυχημένο συγγραφέα Ιωάννη Φουράκη, λόγω των ερευνών για την εύρεση του Αλεξ Μεσχισβίλι κοντά στην Μπαρμπούτα.

Βόλος

Η εβραϊκή κοινότητα της πόλης στοχοποιήθηκε από αριστερούς “ακτιβιστές” οι οποίοι έγραψαν συνθήματα στο τοίχο της συναγωγής της πόλης στις 31/12 απαιτώντας από έλληνες να απολογηθούν για το τι συμβαίνει σε ένα τρίτο κράτος και πιστοποιητικό κοινωνικών φρονημάτων στο χώρο όπου προσέρχονται για να προσευχηθούν – οι λειτουργίες αναβλήθηκαν και η συναγωγή έκλεισε μέχρι να περάσει η μπόρα.

Η αριστερή οργάνωση Αντιεξουσιαστική Κίνηση, που εμφανίστηκε ως υπεύθυνη για το γεγονός, με ανακοίνωση της αποποιήθηκε κάθε ανάμειξη αλλά ταυτόχρονα φρόντισε να  εμφανίσει την εβραίους σχεδόν σαν απόδημους ισραηλινούς με το να ταυτίσει την κατάσταση τους με την “τουρκική” μειονότητα της Δυτικής Θράκης.

Δράμα

Το Μνημείο του Ολοκαυτώματος καλύφθηκε με συνθήματα υπέρ της Παλαιστίνης. Δεν είναι προφανώς η πρώτη φορά – ξεχωρίζει η φορά που αριστερός “ακτιβιστής” είχε φροντίσει να ανακοινώσει την βεβήλωση που πραγματοποιήθηκε λίγο μετά. Πέρα από το ανορθόγραφο σύνθημα, οι επίδοξοι ειρηνόφιλοι διέγραψαν και τα ονόματα των εβραϊκών κοινοτήτων της Δράμας, της Καβάλας, της Νέας Ορεστιάδας, του Διδυμότειχου, της Ξάνθης, της Κομοτηνής, των Σερρών και της Καβάλας που δολοφονήθηκαν από τους ναζί Γερμανούς και τους Βούλγαρους σύμμαχους τους – το τι μήνυμα ήθελαν να περάσουν το αφήνω σε εσάς.

Θεσσαλονίκη

Ημερίδα του Εβραϊκού Μουσείου αναβλήθηκε μετά από “προειδοποιήσεις φοιτητών”, ενώ η Ομάδα για την Μελέτη του Ελληνικού Εβραϊσμού στο Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας έγινε δέκτης “προειδοποιήσεων”. Δεν θα αναφερθώ καν στα δεκάδες γκραφίτι που γέμισαν του τοίχους της πόλης ταυτίζοντας ισραηλινούς ή/και έλληνες εβραίους με τους ναζί.

Διμοιρίες των ΜΑΤ βρέθηκαν να φρουρούν τα γραφεία της Εβραϊκής Κοινότητας και την συναγωγή πολλές φορές κατά την διάρκεια διαδηλώσεων. Το ΚΚΕ για μια ακόμη φορά αποφάσισε να καταλήγουν οι πορείες διαμαρτυρίας στο Μνημείο του Ολοκαυτώματος, (υπενθυμίζω οτι το επίσημο ΚΚΕ το είχε βανδαλίσει το 2006 κατά την διάρκεια της πρώτης διαδήλωσης από το Ολοκαύτωμα και μετά ενάντια στην εβραϊκή κοινότητα της πόλης που είχε καταλήξει στον βίαιο αποκλεισμό των γραφείων της Κοινότητας). Ξεχωρίζει η άρνηση του Συριζα να συμμετάσχει στην Εθνική Ημέρα Μνήμης Ολοκαυτώματος στις 27/1 – όχι ότι έτσι και αλλιώς συστηματικά αρνείται να παρουσιαστεί αλλά αξίζει να σημειωθεί η απύθμενη υποκρισία των τοπικών αξιωματούχων του που δεν έχουν πρόβλημα να διαφημίζουν τις “ανθρωπιστικές” εκδηλώσεις τους πάνω από τα οστά των 350.000/500.000 νεκρών εβραίων που ακόμα βρίσκονται κάτω από το Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο. Άλλωστε γνωρίζω για μια περίπτωση “αντιρατσιστή” τοπικού στελέχους, του οποίου το σπίτι στην Ανω Πόλη “στολίζεται” από λεηλατημένες ταφόπλακες του εβραϊκού νεκροταφείου.

Για τα αντισημιτικά κηρύγματα του τοπικού Μητροπολίτη, που διακρίνεται για την εβραιοφαγία του, αναφέρθηκα πριν. Η ειρωνία οτι τα κηρύγματα έγιναν στο Ναό του Αγίου Δημητρίου  που έχει φτιαχτεί από κλεμμένες εβραικές ταφόπλακες προφανώς δεν ήταν εμφανής στο σεβάσμιο ιερέα.

Ιωάννινα

Για πολλοστή φορά τα τελευταία χρόνια άγνωστοι έσπασαν τάφους στο εβραϊκό νεκροταφείο της πόλης στις 19/1. Το φαινόμενο είναι, πλέον, τόσο αναμενόμενο που ο πρόεδρος της Ισραηλιτικής Κοινότητας Ιωαννίνων είχε ήδη ειδοποιήσει την Αστυνομία, χωρίς όμως αυτή να λάβει μέτρα. Το εβραϊκό νεκροταφείο Ιωαννίνων έχει γίνει μόνιμος στόχος τα τελευταία χρόνια μέσα στην γενική αδιαφορία της τοπικής κοινωνίας και την πιθανή εμπλοκή των τοπικών αστυνομικών αρχών. Έκτοτε από τον Ιανουάριο μέχρι σήμερα έχουν γίνει πέντε επιθέσεις και φτάσαμε στο επίπεδο να βεβηλώνονται τα ίδια τα λείψανα με σκοτωμένα ζώα για να υπάρξει κάποια μικρή αντίδραση , ενώ οι τοπικές οργανώσεις της Νέας Δημοκρατίας διακρίθηκαν από την άρνηση τους να καταδικάσουν το γεγονός.

Αξίζει να τονίσουμε αυτή η σειρά επιθέσεων μαζί με αυτή του Ιουλίου ήταν μια από τις χειρότερες αντισημιτικές επιθέσεις των τελευταίων ετών, (στην φωτογραφία οι σπασμένοι τάφοι του Ιανουαρίου).

Κέρκυρα

Βανδαλισμοί σημειώθηκαν στην συναγωγή της πόλης. Προφανέστατα καμμία αντίδραση σε μια πόλη με μια μακριά παράδοση αντισημιτισμού, (το πογκρόμ του 1891 – το χειρότερο στην ελληνική ιστορία, η συνεργασία με τους γερμανούς στην εξαφάνιση της τοπικής εβραικής κοινότητας…).

Λάρισα

Η Λάρισα υπήρξε η πόλη στην οποία η αντισημιτική παράνοια της Αριστεράς και της Δεξιάς εκδηλώθηκε με ιδιαίτερη μανία. Κατά την διάρκεια πορείας για τις συνθήκες στις φυλακές στις 17/1 αναρχικοί και παλαιστίνιοι διαδηλωτές επιχείρησαν να βανδαλίσουν την συναγωγή της πόλης. Αυτόνομοι από συγκεκριμένη ομάδα που συμμετείχαν στην πορεία τους απέτρεψαν, παρά τις αντιδράσεις λοιπών μερών της διαδήλωσης. Η Συναγωγή χρειάστηκε και άλλες μέρες την προστασία από διμοιρίες των ΜΑΤ, ενώ συνθήματα των διαδηλωτών επαναλάμβαναν τις γνωστές κατηγορίες οτι οι εβραίοι ελέγχουν την Ελλάδα και οτι η Αστυνομία προστατεύει “τους αφέντες” της.

Την ίδια μέρα ακροδεξιές οργανώσεις συνδεδεμένες με την Χρυσή Αυγή διοργάνωσαν συγκέντρωση έξω από τον χώρο όπου είναι συγκεντρωμένη η Συναγωγή και το Εβραϊκό Σχολείο με τίτλο “Εβραίοι Δολοφόνοι. Έξω από την Λάρισα!“, (στην φωτογραφία δεξιά screenshot από νεοναζιστικό ιστότοπο που ανακοίνωνε την νεοναζιστική σύναξη – η ανάρτηση σήμερα έχει διαγραφεί). Η συγκέντρωση κατέληξε στον βανδαλισμό του μνημείου για την εξόντωση των Λαρισαίων Εβραίων. Ταυτόχρονα κυκλοφόρησαν μηνύματα για μποϋκοτάζ των εβραϊκών καταστημάτων και μηνύματα για  μαζική συμμετοχή της Χρυσής Αυγής σε διαδηλώσεις της “ΠΑΝΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗ ΕΠΙΤΡΟΠΗ ΓΙΑ ΤΟΝ ΤΕΡΜΑΤΙΣΜΟ ΤΟΥ ΑΠΟΚΛΕΙΣΜΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΓΑΖΑΣ· ΣΥΝΔΕΣΜΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΟΠΑΛΑΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗΣ ΦΙΛΙΑΣ”. Ας μην ξεχνάμε οτι η Συναγωγή αποτελεί μόνιμο πέρασμα των νεοναζιστικών διαδηλώσεων της Χρυσής Αυγής μέχρι και σήμερα όπως μαθαίνουμε από την ίδια την Χρυσή Αυγή.

Δεν χρειάζεται να προσθέσω οτι η εβραϊκή κοινότητα της πόλης μετά από αυτή την συνδυασμένη επίθεση από Αριστερούς και Δεξιούς αντισημίτες αναγκάστηκε να διακόψει κάθε κοινοτική δραστηριότητα μέχρι να ηρεμήσουν τα πράγματα, ενώ αυξήθηκαν τα μέτρα προστασίας στο εβραϊκό σχολείο που βρίσκεται στην ιδια περιοχή.

Επιμύθιο

Είναι αδαής ή ανενημέρωτος ή κακόβουλος αυτός που πιστεύει οτι στην Ελλάδα δεν υπάρχει αντισημιτισμός και οτι οι έλληνες έχουμε κάνει το εμβόλιο κατά του ρατσισμού. Αυτό αφορά είτε πιθανούς ψηφοφόρους του ΛΑΟΣ, είτε υποψηφίους των Ο-Π που πιστεύουν οτι η ζωή των εβραίων στην Ελλάδα “δεν επηρεάζεται βαθύτερα” και τα κίνητρα της αντισημιτικής βίας βασίζονται στην “πολιτική του Ισραήλ”.

Πολύ χειρότερα γεγονότα συνέβησαν αλλού στην Ευρώπη όπως στην Ολλανδία, Γαλλία, Μεγάλη Βρετανία – η Ελλάδα δεν υπήρξε μοναδική περίπτωση. Πουθενά όμως δεν υπήρξε μια τέτοια εκκωφαντική απουσία αντιδράσεων από την κοινωνία και από τον πολιτικό κόσμο. Ευχαριστώ το Παρατηρητήριο των Συμφωνιών του Ελσινκι, τους terminal119 που υπήρξαν οι μόνοι που καταδίκασαν αυτές τις ενέργειες. Ολους τους υπόλοιπους τους ευχαριστώ για το διεθνιστικό τους ενδιαφέρον – τα εκατομμύρια των διαδηλώσεων για τις σφαγές των Κούρδων στο Ιράκ του Σαντάμ, τις σφαγές εκατοντάδων χιλιάδων μαύρων χριστιανών από άραβες μουσουλμάνους στο Νταρφούρ, την γενοκτονία στην Ρουάντα ή τις μαζικές σφαγές αλβανών από τους σέρβους αδερφούς στην γειτονιά μας σε Κόσοβο και Βοσνία ή ακόμα πιο πρόσφατα με τους Ταμίλ αποτελούν αποκαλυπτικές των κινήτρων τους πίσω από το όψιμο ενδιαφέρον τους.

Είναι γελοίοι και βαθύτατα υποκριτές αυτοί που ξέρουν να μιλάνε για καημένους επαγγελματίες αντιρατσιστές που δεν μπορούν να επικρίνουν το Ισραήλ χωρίς να κατηγορηθούν για αντισημιτισμό, ενώ στην πραγματικότητα κρατούν το στόμα τους ερμητικά κλειστό για τα όργια που συμβαίνουν στην ίδια τους την χώρα κάθε φορά που φουντώνει η κατάσταση στην Μέση Ανατολή. Οτι κάθε μέρα υπάρχουν δεκάδες άρθρα και τηλεοπτικές εκπομπές για τα δικαιώματα των παλαιστινίων, ενώ το γεγονός οτι στα Ιωάννινα κανείς δεν αισθάνεται ασφαλής για την τύχη των λείψανων της οικογένειας του – κατά τα άλλα ελλήνων πολιτών οι οποίοι είναι χρήσιμοι για φόρους, στρατό και για να λέμε πόσο ανεκτική είναι η χώρα μας – δεν ακούστηκε κουβέντα. Για να μην μιλήσω για την κατάσταση στην Θεσσαλονίκη με την οποία θα ασχοληθώ εκτενώς φέτος.

ΥΓ. Ξεχωρίζω την ανάρτηση του doctor που μόνο για φιλο-ισραηλινός δε μπορεί να κατηγορηθεί – με εκφράζει απόλυτα. Οσο για τους επαγγελματίες αντιφασίστες της Αριστεράς ξεχωρίζω τα σχόλια της antifa-area η οποία είναι ενδεικτική του αντιεξουσιαστικού/αριστερού αντισημιτισμού – δείτε και το About Us του ιστολογίου ενδεικτικό της πνευματικής τους ένδειας που ούτε να αντιγράψει παπαγαλία ένα κείμενο δεν είναι ικανή. Επίσης ευχαριστώ λ:ηρ, e-lawyer, plagal & G.Sarigiannidi.

English (photos from greek version)

Riot Police (MAT) guarding synagogues, meetings of anxious parents in Jewish schools – while synagogues, cemeteries and monuments became targets of vandalism and arson. This was the picture that Greek Jewry presented in December and January when the totality of the greek society decided that the best way to support the “champions of Hamas” (as infamous anti-Semitic newspaper Avriani put it, 29/12/08) was to burst against fellow greek citizens born with the wrong religion

Violent antisemitic incidents occurred in 9 greek cities: Athens, Salonica, Larissa, Volos, Ioannina, Corfu but also in judenrein cities such as Komotini, Veria, Drama. Nationwide we saw outrageous statements on “blood craving jews” by Extreme-Right leader Y.Karatzaferis, while Leftist leaders went overboard in condemning Israel but downright refused to condemn antisemitic incidents in their own home; especially their utilitarian reference to the Holocaust would have been tragic if not comic in front of their downright refusal to join the State Holocaust Memorial Day later in the month as they usually do. Members of the Greek Church like Metrop.of Piraeus Serafim spoke of “zionist monsters with sharp claws” being aided by “massonic lodges”. Metrop.of Salonica Anthimos, (already famous for other anti-jewish statements), said that Jews are being punished for killing Jesus Christ; the “Christ-Killer” card was also played by newspaper frontpages like Vradini speaking of “Crucifixion” and “Ponzio Pilates”.  I won’t even mention the paranoid  antisemitic Christian Orthodox newspapers like Orthodoxos Tipos who frontlined “Zionists and Massons support the slaughtering” but I will limit myself to the infamous antisemitic newspaper Avriani which spoke of American Jews stealing the money and causing the world economic crisis and warned us of American Jews plotting to set off WW3 (!!!) <photos in the left> while also frontlining “Holocaust”. Let’s not forget newspapers like Apogevmatini which frontlined “Holocaust” which had already accused Israelis of harvesting Palestinian organs long before the swedes ever discovering the rumor and all the other newspapers which refused to talk about the wave of antisemitic hatred that swept through Greece.

The Press and the TV did their best to exasperate the climate – a known liberal radio presenter, Jimmy Panousis, said it plainly: “There are no good jews” and that Jews are pigs and murderers but fortunately their days are numbered. But let’s limit ourselves to the tangible aspects of the racist nightmare that swept Greece and included Far Right, Far Left and neonazi groups in Greece.

Athens

Antisemitic graffiti appeared in many streets; in the photo we can see written on the walls of the Jewish Cemetery: “Israelites Jews Murderers”. In case the clearly religious aspect of the hatred went unnoticed, the perpetrators added “Jews” probably because they confused “Israelites” with “Israelis”.

Neonazi antisemitic march in Athens

"Israelites Jews Murderers"

Among the various antiwar protests, the one of neonazi group Chrissi Avgi gains prominence where “Freedom to Palestine” was combined with “Ax and fire to the jewish dogs” and “Jews, Pigs, Murderers of nations”, (Ι have the video of the march – usually they face leftist demonstrators but it appears that this time they were in agreement). Members of the neonazi group were interviewed by national TV stations like Mega TV and why shouldn’t they, Extreme-Right political parties managed to gather 11% in Athens in the recent elections.

Veria

Unknown perpetrators attempted to set on fire the synagogue of the city in the center of Veria, in the old Jewish Quarter named Barbouta – fortunately only the door and the patio suffered damage. Ironically a year ago I was writing about blood libel accusations from trash-TV star and successful author Ioannis Fourakis who accused Jews of human sacrifices during the search of hate-crime victim Alex Mechisvili in the Barbouta district.

Volos

"The State of Israel is murdering! What side are you on?"

The Jewish Community of Volos was targeted by leftist protesters which sprayed graffiti on the exterior wall of the synagogue and against the community itself on 31/12 demanding greek citizens apologizing for what is happening in a third country and asking for loyalty credentials in the place they go to worship;  the synagogue remained closed and services were suspended indefinitely.

The leftist organization Antiexousiastiki Kinisi, which appeared responsible for the act, denied in a statement any involvement after presenting Greek Jews almost as Israelis in exile when drawing a parallel with what the situation of the “turkish” minority of Western Thrace.

Drama

The Holocaust Monument was vandalized with pro-Palestinian graffiti. Of course it wasn’t the first time happening, with the most famous vandalism being the one by a leftist activist some years ago who announced his intentions amidst general indifference to the act he proceeded to do. Besides the wrong spelling the would-be peace activists also erased the names of the murdered, by the nazi Germans and their Bulgarian allies, Jewish Communities of Serres, Drama, Kavala, Nea Orestiada, Didymoteicho, Xanthi, Komotini. What was their message I leave it up to you to interpret.

Salonika

A seminar of the Jewish Museum was postponed after “warnings” of students, while a meeting of the Study Group for Greek Jewry also received “warnings”. I won’t even comment on the tenths of graffiti appearing all over the city equating the Greeks Jews and/or Israelis to the Nazis.

Riot Police (MAT) were often found guarding the offices of the local community and Synagogue. The greek Communist Party once again decided to end its protests in the Holocaust Memorial that had vandalized in 2006, (only to top that with a demonstration against the Salonican Jews themselves the following day ending in the blockade of the communal offices), while leftist parliamentary party Syriza declined to participate in the Holocaust Memorial Day, as it has done frequently the past years. I won’t comment on the bottomless hypocrisy of the local party officials which on the other hand have no problem hosting their “antiwar” rallies on the University which lies on top of the remains of 350.000/500.000 Jews which were never removed from the destroyed, by Greek Authorities during the Holocaust, Jewish Cemetery of Thessaloniki. Indicative is the case of an “anti-racism” activist whose house in Ano Poli district is “adorned” with looted Jewish gravestones.

We have already mentioned above of the antisemitic sermons of the local Metropolite. The irony that the sermon took place in the St.Demetrious Church which is constructed by looted Jewish gravestones was probably lost on the elder priest.

Ioannina

Broken tombs in January

For yet another time the local Jewish Cemetery was vandalized and some tombs were broken on 19/1. These incidents are so common that the president of the community had already warned the Police which declined from taking preventive measures. The Jewish cemetery in Ioannina is a permanent target of extreme-Right vandalism the past years amids the general indifference of the local society and suspicions for possible local Police involvement in the vandalisms. Since January we have had 5 attacks and we’ve reached a level of the remains themselves being desecrated with smashed animals to have any kind of reaction, while the local organization of ruling conservative party Nea Dimokratia refused categorically to condemn the incident.

It’s worthy to point out that these attacks, together with the one of July are probably the worst antisemitic incidents in recent years, (in the photo the broken graves of January).

Corfu

The city Synagogue was vandalized. Of course there were no reactions in an island with a strong antisemitic tradition, (the 1891 pogrom – worst in greek history, local cooperation with the Germans during the Holocaust etc).

Larissa

The town in which the antisemitic madness of both Left and Right was emblematic. During a protest on 1/17 anarchics and Palestinians tried to vandalize the Synagogue. Other autonomous protesters from a specific group managed to stop them despite the general resentment. Riot Police protected the Synagogue for several days, while protesters suggested that Jews rule Greece and thus the Police was protecting “it’s masters”.

The same day FarRight and neonazi groups linked with Chrissi Avghi also held a protest near  the Synagogue and the Jewish Elementary School; the main theme was “Jewish Murderers – Get out of Larissa”.  <screenshot of the invitation in the left – they have removed any trace since> The protest resulted in vandalizing of the Holocaust Monument for the  murdered Jews of Larissa.  Contemporaneously messages circulated calling on the boycotting of Jewish shops and the participation of Chrissi Avghi in protests of the “Paneuropean Comittee on ending the Gaza boycott – GreekPalestian Friendship committee“. Let’s not forget that still today neonazi marches do not fail to pass in front of the Synagogue and shout antisemitic slogans.

Needless to add that the Jewish Community of Larissa after these combined attacks by Leftist and Rightist antisemites was forced to suspend all communal activities until things calmed down, while security measures were increased in the Jewish School which is found in the same area.

Aftermath

He is either ignorant or not-informed or malicious anyone who thinks that in Greece there is no antisemitism and greeks have taken the immunization shot against racism. This includes the possible voters of antisemitic political party LàOS and the Green’s candidates who think the life of Greek Jews “is not deeply affected” and the motives of antisemitic violence are based “on the policy of Israel”.

Much worse happened in Europe like the Netherlands, France or Great Brittain – Greece was neither an isolated case, nor would it qualify as the worse offender. Still, nowhere in the world did we see such a deafening lack of reactions by the greek political parties and society in general. I would like to thank Helsinki Monitor, terminal119 for they were the only ones to condemn these acts. Concluding I would like to thank everyone else for the famous greek international solidarity – the innumerable protests for the slaughter of Kurds in Saddam’s Iraq, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black christians by muslim arabs in Darfur, the genocide in Rwanda or the mass murders of albanians by our serb brothers in our own back yard or even more recently for the Tamil massacres are immensely revealing of the real motives behind their interest.

I would also like to add that they are ludicrous and deeply hypocritical those who cry over poor professional antiracism activists in Greece who cannot judge Israel without being accused of antisemitism, while they keep their mouths hermetically shut over the orgies that take place in their own country every time the situation in the Middle East gets heated. That every single day there were articles and TV shows on the Palestinian rights while on the fact that in Ioannina no one is was feeling secure even for the fate of the remains of their loved ones – greek citizens useful for taxes, the army and saying how tolerant Greece is – wasn’t being said anything.

Last year Matt Seaton, the then new editor of ‘Comment is Free’ stated “I can’t promise you that antisemitic comments and other instances of hate speech will disappear from the site overnight, but (from early June) I think you will notice a progressive improvement.”

In an article a few months later highlighting hate speech in the mainstream media, Matt Seaton was quoted as saying “[w]e do not tolerate any hate speech, and our moderators will delete comments which are antisemitic or Islamophobic or otherwise racist , as soon as they are reported to us or when we see them ourselves. That happens in minutes rather than hours or days.”

While for a short period last year there was some improvement, antisemitism is again prevalent and thriving both “above the line” in the articles and “below the line” in the comment threads. We therefore decided to establish CiF Watch dedicated to monitoring and exposing antisemitism on the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Comment is Free’ blog.

On the following pages of CiF Watch, we have assembled a wealth of information that builds upon the report submitted to the UK Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism on antisemitism at ‘Comment is Free’ compiled by Jonathan Hoffman.

In About Us you can learn more about how antisemitism manifests itself on ‘Comment is Free’ and what our mission is. In How We Define Antisemitism you can learn about how we rely upon the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism as our metric for tracking antisemitism on ‘Comment is Free’.

In CiF Contributors, you can click on the name of your favorite ‘Comment is Free’ contributor and view examples of incendiary and antisemitic commentary “in their own words”. Similarly, in CiF Commenters, we have created a repository of comments posted by various commenters on ‘Comment is Free’ which either individually or in the aggregate are antisemitic, and most of which to this day have not been deleted!

In CiF in the Media, you can read what others are saying about ‘Comment is Free’ and in Resources we created a list of helpful links so that you can learn more about the issues. Finally, after all of this rather than muttering under your breath “those Guardian 8@57@rds” and moving on, please visit How to Get Involved and make your voice heard!!

Here at CiF Watch, we intend to regularly post articles exposing the bigoted and one-sided nature of the Guardian’s obsessive focus on Israel and by extension the Jewish people. We invite you to comment on our threads, send us copies of antisemitic articles and comments that you come across on ‘Comment is Free’ as well as “pro-Israel” comments that are deleted by the moderators. Most importantly, please tell your friends to visit CiF Watch.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the different areas of the blog and share with us your feedback.

A cultural highlight at the ECAS conference in Leipzig happened to be the vernissage of a cartoon exhibition by Zapiro. South Africa’s ‘funniest philosopher’ (SA Times) opened the show himself and entertained the scientists with eloquent remarks about the different trajectories of people who were once united in their fight against Apartheid. He’s really good in mimicking Madiba. My favourite piece had the headline ‘Mugabe: SADC leaders apply pressure’, the picture shows Bob getting a relieving massage from African leaders (‘A bit lower … Aaah, that’s the spot!’). The one to the left on anti-Semitism isn’t bad too.

I look out the window at night with my host mother as the sound of gunshots echoes from the sea. Lights line the horizon – at least 50. Israeli navy ships. They fire randomly at fisherman, arbitrarily. Somtimes when they are 100m from shore, sometimes at 1 km, sometimes at 3km. Apparently they have been waging this campaign of fear against the fisherman for years but recently its escalated. The 1994 Oslo accords gave the fisherman 12 miles legally, but the navy recently stated 3 miles only no-shoot zone. Unfortunately they don’t even respect that. We watch as one navy ship comes in close to shore – maybe 200m out. It shines a bright spotlight across the waters, searching for fisherman. Unverified reports are that 14 fisherman have been killed since January and many more have been kidnapped for several days at a time. This brutal harrassment has meant that those remaining in the industry are forced to over-fish the spawning grounds close to shore – these days the fish are getting smaller and less plentiful.

I ask my host mother if its ok to take a photo. Reluctantly she agrees but no flash. “They are watching, they see everything at night”. She looks nervous as i get my camera out and fiddle around. She starts explaining that during the last attacks her relative, a photographer, was doing exactly this – he was taking photos out his apartment window and was targetted by a sniper, killing him and his mother-in-law. Shocked, I gasp and cover my mouth. My camera goes back in its bag.

I decide to stay a few days longer than planned, in part because a friend is hosting a hip hop show with live video link-up to Ramallah. 15 palestinian hiphop crews will rap 1 song each and 2 breakdancing crews will compete for the gig. We arrive and 2 laydees are on-screen rapping live from Ramallah. They are awesome, and the rest of the shows are too, i wished i understood the lyrics! The crowd’s pumped and as Gaza takes over, city-pride erupts in chants with the MC at the lead. The shows kick-off on stage with a 4-man crew, arms go up, applauds, whistles. Some technical difficulties interrupt the second show, and half-way through the third people start exiting in droves. A photographer pretends to take a photo of the rapper up close and then swiftly shifts his camera to the crowd, taking quick snaps of those in attendance. Noone around me really knows whats going on, the rapper keeps rhyming, people keep leaving, quickly, quietly, eventually only our side of the stage is still seated. Before the rapper can finish the sound is cut, video out, we get up and move out. 9 people have been killed in the last few days from infighting in the West Bank and we’re not sure if its about to start here, or if the show is somehow politically aligned or what. My 12 year old host sister is scared. We stand out front waiting for the taxi, Hamas men on the edges, watching. A uni student who’s friends with my host family tells us in hushed voice that Hamas don’t like rap shows, they regularly shut them down. I tell my host sister not to worry, its fine, theres no problem, we’re just going to go home now. She smiles, unconvinced. My heart is racing. We make it home. The next night we go to visit Black Unit Band – one of the crews that rapped along with Aiman who hosted, he’s a member of PR – the most famous Gazan rap crew. We talk politics for several hours. They explain how they’ve been invited to rap overseas but can’t get out, how one of them was arrested and badly beaten after a show, accused of touching a girl’s shirt. How the seige has meant that PR make songs now via the internet – 1 member in the US unable to get in, 2 stuck in Gaza unable to get out, and another in Egypt. How Aiman lost his father in the last attacks – their apartment targetted and completely burned out. But how despite all this, even if he had the choice theres no way he would live anywhere but Gaza. Asked why Hamas don’t like hiphop he replies “because they see it as an intrusion of  American culture, they dont understand. But we don’t rap about ‘bitches’, we rap about our country and whats happening here. I bet if i could sit down and explain it to them, then they’d probably like it.” And Khaled from Black Unit, less certain that they would come around, tells me “words can destroy more than bullets or rockets, words are our nuclear weapon”.

I wake up late. As i walk into the kitchen sleepy-eyed, i see my host father on the phn worried, trying to get information while the family stand around tense – listening in and watching nervously. They tell me their sister’s father-in-law was shot while working his land close to the border. The father rushes off to hospital. When he gets back a few hrs later he explains how lucky he was – the exit wound was millimeters from the spine. He says the hospital is terrible – lack of nursing care, no pillows, no aircon in Gaza’s 35 degree sticky summer-heat. He dressed the wounds himself. Israel dropped flyers a few wks back stating that anyone within 300m of the border was within firing range. That 300m zone comprises about half of Gaza’s most arable farmland. Now farmers and landless labourers working for as little as $5 a day are forced to chose – abandon your livelihood and relinquish your land or risk being shot. A group of internationals doing farmer accompaniment work tell us 3 farmers have been killed and 15 injured just since the “ceasefire”.

The time comes for me to leave despite ongoing protests from my host mother convinced i should marry and stay in Gaza : ) I am eager to join the push of Israeli and American peace activists who will try to get through the Israeli crossing and the ‘10 Days Against the Seige’ convergence near the border that will follow. Its funny, untill a couple of months ago i never imagined i would ever go to gaza and now i’m definate that i’ll come back. With that in mind goodbyes aren’t so hard. But i still have to get out and thats not as easy as i naively thought. I arrive at the border at 12.30pm after a Gazan freind who does youth peace organising arranged my crossing from the Palestinian side. There are 2 french people also trying to exit. Our passports are stamped immediately and we sit on the surprisingly plush couches in the palestinian terminal with 5 Hamas security for several hours waiting for the other side. They keep assuring us that the egyptians have agreed that we can cross, they just told us to wait. The clock ticks over. One security guy begins telling us how he thinks many people misunderstand islam, so he explains in a somewhat perverse tone about how having boyfriends or girlfriends is not permitted, “you know what i’m talking about” over and over with much eyebrow-raising, “they should be killed if there are enough witnesses, but here in Gaza we just put them in prison”. I think he’s on the wrong path to alleviating misconceptions. More hours pass. He keeps reassuring me personally not to worry, asking if i’m ok, telling me i look nervous. yes he is making me a little nervous. he wants my email address, i refuse. more nervous, very releived by the presence of the frenchies. Its very strange, there is no phone calling happening, they all just sit around and (thankfully) give us tea for hours. At 6 they get out some phn numbers and tell us to call them – some egyptian beuraucrats, too late for them to help. 6.30pm the borders will not open, we return to Gaza city hungry, frustrated and enraged by the egyptians abuse of power & process. Perhaps a very minute taste of what its like for a Gazan. My host mother laughs and tells me again that i shouldn’t leave. She says she did the same for 4 days before she could go to egypt to see a specialist, forced to wait for the entire day at the terminal with no gurantee of passage, no food, while the egyptians know in advance full-well who you are and whether they will let you pass.

The next day i have more luck. The french embassy in egypt applies pressure, we all pass in less than 3 hours despite a cpl of hiccups by way of my non-french presence. The australian embassy does nothing despite my repeated requests – “the process for us to intervene generally takes 2 weeks… don’t hold your breath”. They report me to the emabassy in israel who call after i’m thru and tell me i shouldn’t have gone to Gaza, never to go back “because, because, [thinking of PC reason] because you might get stuck there for a very long time. And I suggest you read the Australian government travel guidelines”. thanks mate.

I arrive at the camp 2 days late – about 60 American and Israeli peace activists in large meetings & eating vegan food amoungst rammed-earth shacks and composting-toilets. It reminds me of home. They have already been refused entry for the last 2 days but the morning will see joint demos on both sides of the erez crossing calling for the borders to be opened. I dress as a clown and take on my character along with my clown army friend from tel aviv-jaffa, we can’t fly our kites properly and make even the border guards smile. We blow up baloons and give them to the 2 children, really sick, who enter from Gaza today to receive medical treatment. We write letters and tie them to the fence. We imagine our friends on the other side and wish we could see their faces, or atleast their kites flying high over the walls.

Greetings. Today I have come across a very briliant speech, not simply in it’s excelence as a speech but in the content and the one speaking the words. The name George Galloway is a name that must be heard and heeded more often. The one bearing this name has spent a lifetime in the cause of liberating the Palastinian people, under constant deprivation, occupation, marginalization, and torture by the Zionist Regime created in 1948 and turning the territory from one in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted to a racist, prejjudiced, Zionist society that has among many things as Mr Galloway puts it, Created the world’s largest refugee camp in Gaza.
Galloway’s latest work has consisted of sending convoys of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He points out in his video among other things that the humanitarian chrisis in Gaza is not only due to the Zionists but their colaborators in Egypt. Those who close the Raffa Crossing in order to colaberate with the so-called Democratic nations who support and fund the Zionists in their bloody and destructive military masakers that kill thousands and cause direct damage to hundreds of thousands. Those very same people reject a democratically elected government just because it resists the opression and at the same time wants to re-establish the government of those who do not resist and directly colaberate with the agressors under the guise of a peace treaty while not planning resisting even if peace talks fail and attempting to overthrow the government of freedom fighters! Many oppose the freedom fighters favoring instead the unjust military masakers. One who dares to speak out is George Galloway. He speaks out against the unjust agression but most importantly acts by sending humanitarian aid in truckloads to Gaza by on one occasion travelling from Britain to the area. He is now planning on going on the fourth of July with 500 cars and trucks. Eventually he hopes to cause the opening of the Raffa crossing. Here is the link to his video.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22785.htm
May the video inlighten you. I post the link as a gift to the peeacelovers and freedom advocates in the world. To all those and anyone reading this who will contribute to the effort, God be with you!

Three foundational myths underlie Israeli culture to this day. These are the ‘negation of exile’ (shelilat ha-galut), the ‘return to the land of Israel’ (ha-shiva le-Eretz Yisrael), and the ‘return to history’ (ha-shiva la-historia). They are inextricably intertwined in the master-narrative of Zionism, the story that explains ‘how we got to where we are and where we should go henceforth’. The negation of exile establishes a continuity between an ancient past, in which there existed Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, and a present that renews it in the resettlement of Palestine. Between the two lies no more than a kind of interminable interim. Depreciation of the period of exile is shared by all Zionists, if with differing degrees of rigidity, and derives from what is, in their outlook, an uncontestable presupposition: from time immemorial, the Jews constituted a territorial nation. It follows that a non-territorial existence must be abnormal, incomplete and inauthentic. In and of itself, as a historical experience, exile is devoid of significance. Although it may have given rise to cultural achievements of moment, exile could not by definition have been a wholesome realization of the nation’s Geist. So long as they were condemned to it, Jews—whether as individuals or communities—could lead at best a partial and transitory existence, waiting for the redemption of ‘ascent’ (aliyah) once again to the land of Israel, the only site on which the nation’s destiny could be fulfilled. Within this mythical framework, exilic Jews always lived provisionally, as potential or proto-Zionists, longing ‘to return’ to the land of Israel. [1]

Here the second foundational myth complements the first. In Zionist terminology, the recovery by the people of its home promised to deliver the normalization of Jewish existence; and the site designated for the re-enactment of Exodus would be the territory of the Biblical story, as elaborated in the Protestant culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Zionist ideology defined this land as empty. This did not mean Zionist leaders and settlers were ignorant of the presence of Arabs in Palestine, or mulishly ignored them. Israel was ‘empty’ in a deeper sense. For the land, too, was condemned to an exile as long as there was no Jewish sovereignty over it: it lacked any meaningful or authentic history, awaiting redemption with the return of the Jews. The best-known Zionist slogan, ‘a land without a people to a people without a land’, expressed a twofold denial: of the historical experience both of the Jews in exile, and of Palestine without Jewish sovereignty. Of course, since the land was not literally empty, its recovery required the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy—sanctioned by Biblical authority—of its historic custodians over such intruders as might remain after the return. Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Pentateuch, and Palestinian Arabs treated as part of the natural environment. In the macho Hebrew culture of modern times, to know a woman, in the Biblical sense, and to know the land became virtually interchangeable as terms of possession. The Zionist settlers were collective subjects who acted, and the native Palestinians became objects acted upon.
The third foundational myth, the ‘return to history’, reveals, more than any other, the extent to which Zionist ideology was underpinned by the emergence of Romantic nationalism and German historicism in nineteenth-century Europe. Its premise is that the natural and irreducible form of human collectivity is the nation. From the dawn of history peoples have been grouped into such units, and though they might at one time or another be undermined by internal divisions or oppressed by external forces, they are eventually bound to find political self-expression in the shape of sovereign nation-states. The nation is the autonomous historical subject par excellence, and the state is the telos of its march toward self-fulfillment. According to this logic, so long as they were exiles, the Jews remained a community outside history, within which all European nations dwelt. Only nations that occupy the soil of their homeland, and establish political sovereignty over it, are capable of shaping their own destiny and so entering history by this logic. The return of the Jewish nation to the land of Israel, overcoming its docile passivity in exile, could alone allow it to rejoin the history of civilized peoples.

Cleansing Palestine

Metaphorically empty, factually inhabited by Arabs, how was Palestine ‘emptied’ to enable the creation of Israel? Recently, long overdue controversies have broken out over the origins of the present state, prompted by the work of historians who are not committed to its founding myths. This is a welcome development: much hallowed mystification has been cleared away. But there is a danger that debate could become too narrowly focused on the single issue of whether or not there was an Israeli master plan to effect a comprehensive expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948. [2] The moral pressure behind this obsessive question is understandable, and should be respected. But it is also true that it takes for granted that what matters is the framework of the perpetrators, not the perspective of the victims. The existence or otherwise of an explicit Zionist intention to unleash ethnic cleansing, under cover of war, poses problems that Israelis certainly need to confront. But to Palestinians who lost their homes, their goods, their rights and their identities, it matters little whether the disaster that befell them resulted from decisions taken by military commanders and local bureaucrats on the spot, or from an implicit understanding that this was the wish of the Zionist political leadership, or through a diffuse atmosphere and ideology that treated massive expulsions as desirable—or any combination of the above. What counted for the Arabs driven off their lands was the fact of their dispossession and transformation into refugees. Retrospective rituals of bad conscience risk becoming luxuries that only the victor can afford, without consequence for the victims who have had to live with the results.

The reality is that the eventuality of massive expulsions was inherent in the nature of Zionist colonization in Palestine long before war broke out in 1948. Consideration of notions of population ‘transfer’ ceased to be just an abstract idea after the report of the Peel Commission in the late 1930s. After all, as Zeev Sternhell correctly observes, Zionism was in many ways a typical example of the ‘organic’—as distinct from ‘civic’—nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe. [3] This kind was feral in its demand for ethnic homogeneity, ruling out from the beginning any possibility of the Zionist movement accepting a bi-national state in Palestine. Given the demography of Palestine in 1947, the establishment of a Jewish state inexorably required the removal of Palestinians from their farms and towns. However, the form that this ‘population transfer’ was to take did not need a premeditated plan of expulsion by the Israeli government (as distinct from the calculation of individual officials and bureaucratic agencies). Rather, the crucial decision was to prevent Palestinian Arabs at all costs from returning to their homes, regardless of the circumstances in which they had ‘left’ them, and no matter how plainly their ‘departure’ had been envisaged as a temporary move made under duress, in the midst of war. There were, of course, deliberate and massive expulsions. The infamous Operation Danny of July 10–14, 1948, which resulted in a massacre at Lydda and the forcible transfer of the entire population of the townships of Ramlah and Lydda—ten miles south-east of Tel Aviv—to Jordan, is a well-known case in point. [4] But the really crucial decision, which was fully conscious and explicit, was to make sure that the collapse of the Palestinian community that unfolded under the pressures of all-out war between Israel and the Arab states would be irreversible.

For what followed, we are indebted to outstanding recent research by Haya Bombaji-Sasportas of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. [5] In April 1948, Haifa fell to an Israeli assault. In June, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett—a darling of Israeli ‘moderates’ to this day—said to his colleagues:

To my mind this is the most surprising thing: the emptying of the country by the Arab community. In the history of the land of Israel this is more surprising than the establishment of the Hebrew State itself . . . This has happened amidst a war that the Arab nation declared against us, because the Arabs fled of their own accord—and their departure is one of those revolutionary changes after which history does not revert to its previous course, as we see from the outcome of the war between Greece and Turkey. We should be willing to pay for land. This does not mean that we should buy holdings from each and every [Arab]. We shall receive assets and land, which can be used to help settle Arabs in other countries. But they do not return. And this is our policy: they do notreturn. [6]

A day before, in a letter to an important official in the Jewish Agency, Sharett defined the emptying of the land of its Arab inhabitants as ‘a wonderful thing in the history of the country and in a sense even more wonderful than the establishment of the State of Israel.’ [7]

‘Retroactive transfer’

Bureaucrats everywhere have particular ways of thought and forms of expression, which sometimes produce chillingly apt terms. Yosef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department, and one of the most relentless proponents of transfer, serves as an outstanding example. As early as May 28, 1948, when he headed the semi-official three-member Transfer Committee, he noted in his diary a meeting with Sharett. On this occasion, Weitz asked Sharett whether he thought orderly action should be taken to ensure that the flight of Arabs from the war zone was an irreversible fact, and described the aim of such action as a ‘retroactive transfer’ (transfer be-di ‘avad). Sharett said yes. [8]

Weitz’s term underlay the confidential discourse of Israeli officials and politicians of the time. Probably from the seizure of Haifa, and with increasing intensity and ferocity during the autumn of 1948, Palestinian territories conquered by Israeli arms were voided of Arabs, without a master plan being needed to remove them. There was a range of ways in which the land became ‘Arabless’: flight of the wealthy; temporary escape of civilians from areas under threat of heavy fighting; encouragement of panic by Israeli military violence, terror and propaganda; and full-fledged expulsion. [9] What is amply documented and demonstrable is the cold deliberation of the policy of ‘retroactive transfer’ which issued from these movements. This was the fundamental decision that was systematized, bureaucratized and legalized in the 1950s, with far-reaching consequences for both Palestinians and Jews, within Israel and without. To this day, what structurally defines the nature of the Israeli state is the return of Jews and the non-return of Arabs to Palestine. If this dynamic of return/non-return were to disappear, the Zionist state would lose its identity.

Official narratives

The physical implementation of the policy of non-return meant the brutal wartime demolition of occupied villages, and in some cases of urban neighbourhoods; the confiscation of lands and properties; the settlement of Jews in places rendered Arab-free. The results were completed with systematic legal measures in the 1950s, affecting both refugees outside Israel and those within, whom the state defined as its (second-class) citizens. But the erasure of Arab existence in Palestine was not just physical. It was also discursive. A group of officials in command of what was considered expert knowledge of ‘the Arab question’ was responsible for this side of the operation. It comprised two distinct types of functionary. One had come through the foreign-policy department of the Jewish Agency or the intelligence unit of Haganah, in the pre-state period. These could speak Arabic, had experience of dealing with Arabs, took pride in being field-experts, and were known as Arabists (Arabistim). The other contingent were the better educated products of European—mostly German—universities, and/or the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; they knew written Arabic (fusha), believed they had a wider and deeper understanding of the enemy than their field counterparts, and were known as Orientalists (mizrahanim). Once the state was established, most of them held posts in its intelligence machinery, or in the research and Middle East departments of the Foreign Office, or were advisers on ‘Arab affairs’ to the Prime Minister. [10]

After the war, an early key move of this apparatus was to define the plight of Palestinian refugees as a ‘humanitarian’ issue tied inextricably to an overall resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict, in the full knowledge that such a resolution would not be forthcoming. Bombaji-Sasportas correctly observes that this strategy was instrumental in cancelling the subjectivity of the victims of Israeli expansion: ignoring their identity, memory and aspirations in favour of a deliberately constructed Gordian knot that has been accepted as a fact of life ever since by Israeli scholarship, whether mainstream or critical. [11] In his own way, Asher Goren—an official in the Israeli Foreign Office—also noticed this. In a memorandum of September 27, 1948, summarizing the refugee problem, he concluded, after reiterating that it was pendant on the conflict with the Arab states as a whole: ‘The compromise-seekers [among Arab statesmen] want return [of the refugees to their homes]. The warmongers object to it. The will of the refugees is unknown nor does anyone ask them.’ [12]

It was the semi-official Transfer Committee headed by Weitz, which submitted its first report in November 1948, that formulated what would later become the official Israeli narrative of the ‘refugee problem’. [13] The Committee’s main function was to execute and oversee the policy of non-return by systematic demolition and erasure of Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods, and then the systematic seizure of land and property owned by Palestinians. The report was a massive document containing much detailed information on the Palestinians and the activities of the Committee. Its textual purpose was to enforce the conclusion, laid out with every appearance of authority and objectivity, that the only solution for the refugees was their resettlement in Arab countries. In hindsight this report may be seen as the Ur-text of all Israeli discourse—academic, bureaucratic, political—on the fate of ‘those who left’, at least until the publication of Benny Morris’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. It supplied the account that became the standard version of history for propaganda and foreign-policy purposes.

The narrative was fraudulent, and there is reason to believe that it was consciously fraudulent. [14] Its burden was that the Palestinians themselves, their leaders, and accomplices in the Arab states bore sole responsibility for the creation of the ‘refugee problem’. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, had advised the Palestinians to leave their homes in order to return with the victorious Arab armies, and claim not only their property but also that of the defeated Jews. It was therefore the responsibility of the Arab states to see that the refugees were resettled there—not just because they had incited their displacement but also because it was a ’scientific fact’ that Arab societies were now the only appropriate home for such people, since the map of Palestine had been transformed and Israel had its hands full with the absorption of Jewish refugees driven out of the Arab world.

The disappearance of Shaykh Mu’nis

A logical concomitant of this schema was a sustained campaign to wipe out any traces of the Palestinian past on conquered soil. A striking example of how this policy worked in practice is offered by the recent memoir of Zvi Yavetz, Professor Emeritus of Roman History, a founder of Tel Aviv University and a powerful kingmaker in its Faculty of Humanities for three decades. Reminiscing about his role in the early negotiations with academics, politicians and bureaucrats to set up the university, he describes how a decision was taken to move the nascent campus from provisional quarters in the heart of Tel Aviv to Shaykh Mu’nis. [15] It so happens that Golda Meir (then Myerson) also mentioned Shaykh Mu’nis, in early May 1948—just after the fall of Haifa. Speaking to the Central Committee of Mapai, she said she wished to raise the question of what was to be done with locations that had become substantially Arab-less. A distinction, she told her colleagues, should be drawn between ‘hostile’ and ‘friendly’ villages. ‘What do we do with the villages that were deserted . . . without a battle by [Arab] friends?’ she asked. ‘Are we willing to preserve these villages so that their inhabitants may return, or do we wish to erase any trace [limhok kol zekher] that there was a village in a given place?’ [16] Meir’s answer was unequivocal. It was unthinkable to treat villages ‘like Shaykh Mu’nis’, which had fled because they did not want to fight the Yishuv, in the way that hostile villages had been treated—ie, subjected to ‘retroactive transfer’.

But the inhabitants of Shaykh Mu’nis did not gain much from their classification as ‘friendly’. Until late March 1948, the leaders of this large village north of Tel Aviv had prevented Arab irregulars from entering it, and even loosely collaborated with the Haganah. Then, however, the Irgun abducted five of the village notables. Thereupon the population fled en masse, and Shaykh Mu’nis literally vanished—a disappearance confirmed three months later by IDF intelligence. Golda Meir’s seemingly poignant question in early May, in other words, was asked in the full knowledge that it had ceased to exist at the end of March—a typical soul-searching in the manner of Labour Zionism: crocodile tears over a fait accompli. What was once Shaykh Mu’nis became part of an affluent neighbourhood in northern Tel Aviv, which took the name of Ramat Aviv. There, in the 1960s, the University of Tel Aviv was built on the site where Shaykh Mu’nis had been less than twenty years before. Yavetz, a well-known ‘leftist’ veteran of the war of 1948, not to say an eminent historian, utters not a word of this. Shaykh Mu’nis was no longer there, and for thirty years it could not be remembered. But eventually there was one twisted, colonial exception. In the 1990s, as the university grew larger and wealthier, a luxurious VIP club was built on the campus, called the Green House. Its architecture is an Orientalist Israeli version of an ‘Arab mansion’, and its location is the hill where the house of the mukhtar of Shaykh Mu’nis once stood (it is a VIP club, after all). The information on the site’s past, and who owned it, may be found in the menu of the Green House.

From the start, Israeli officials were well aware of the significance of memory and the need to erase it. Repression of what had been done to create the state was essential among the Jews themselves. It was still more important to eradicate remembrance among Palestinians. Shamai Kahane composed one of the most striking documents of the official campaign to this end. A high-ranking functionary in the Foreign Office, Kahane served as personal and diplomatic secretary to Sharett in 1953–54, and was instrumental in the creation of the huge bureaucratic archive known as ‘Operation Refugee File’. [17] On March 7, 1951, he made a proposal to the Acting Director of the Middle East Department of the Foreign Office, Divon. Here is the text of his memorandum:

PROPAGANDA AMONG THE REFUGEES IN ORDER TO SOBER THEM FROM ILLUSIONS OF RETURN TO ISRAEL

You should be efficiently assisted by propaganda of photos that would very tangibly illustrate to them [the refugees] that they have nowhere to return. The refugees fancifully imagine that their homes, furniture and belongings are intact, and they only need to return and reclaim them. Their eyes must be opened to see that their homes have been demolished, their property has been lost, and Jews who are not at all willing to give them up have seized their places. All this can be conveyed in an indirect way that would not provoke feelings of vengeance unnecessarily, but would show reality as it is, however bitter and cruel.

Ways of infiltrating such material: a brochure or a series of articles accompanied by photos published in Israel or abroad, in a limited circulation that would not make waves in the non-Arab world, but would find its way to Arab journalists who by prearrangement would bring the pertinent materials within it to the notice of the refugees. Another way: to print the photos with appropriate headings (the headings are what matters!) in a brochure that was supposedly published in one of the Arab countries. The photographic material should draw a contrast between Arab villages in the past and how they look today, after the war and the settlement of Jews in the abandoned sites. These photos ought to prove that the Jewish settlers found everything in ruins and have put a great deal of work into restoring the deserted villages, that they tie their future to these places, look after them and are not at all willing to give them up.

There is a certain risk in this proposal, but I think that its benefits would be greater than any damage it could do, and we should consider very carefully how to carry it out efficiently. [18]

Kahane’s memorandum is a faithful illustration of the ruthless state of mind of the Israeli establishment as it set out to transform the consciousness and memory of its victims. It can be seen as a preamble to a thorough report on every imaginable aspect of ‘the refugee problem’ that Kahane prepared later that year, with an eye to the activities of the UN Appeasement Committee and a conference it was sponsoring in Paris. [19] This is a remarkable document in a number of ways: evidence of how swiftly the Arab heritage of Palestine had become a transient episode in the official mind; and of how completely any return by the refugees was now presented as an objective impossibility, rather than as an eventuality that the state itself was resolved at any cost to block. Reaffirming the familiar thesis that Arabs were the culprits of their own displacement, Kahane revealed the extent to which Palestine had already become Arab-less for him. ‘Nationally’, he wrote, ‘the growth of an Arab minority will hinder the development of the state of Israel as a homogeneous state.’ Repatriation, he added altruistically, would be a misfortune for the refugees themselves:

If the refugees had returned to Israel they would have found themselves in a country whose economic, social and political structures differed from those of the country they left behind. The cities and most of the deserted Arab villages have since been settled by Jews who are leaving their ineradicable imprint on them . . . If the refugees had come back to the realities that have developed in Israel, they would have certainly found it difficult to adjust to them. Urban professionals, merchants and officials would have had to wage a desperate battle for survival in a national economy within which all the key positions are held by Jews. Peasants would have been unable, in most cases, to return to their lands.

Here Kahane was rehearsing the argument of an earlier Foreign Office report, of March 16, 1949, also composed with a view to the Appeasement Committee which had just been set up under UN Resolution 194. Its authors seem to have been Michael Comay, director of the Commonwealth Department in the Foreign Office, and Zalman Lifshitz, former member of the Transfer Committee and adviser to Ben-Gurion on land issues. Written in English and entitled ‘The Arab Refugee Problem’, this document too emphasizes the impossibility of any Palestinian ‘repatriation’ in a detached, reality-has-changed, rhetorical register. [20] It adds, however, a tragic emplotment. In this narrative the plight of the refugees is depicted as if it were the result of a natural disaster, whose outcome is mournful, but inevitable and irrevocable. The perpetrator of expatriation, the state for which the document speaks, and which the authors serve, has nothing to do with it. Note the use of impersonal constructions and of the passive voice:

During the war and the Arab exodus, the basis of their [the refugees'] economic life crumbled away. Moveable property which was not taken away with them has disappeared. Livestock has been slaughtered or sold. Thousands of town and village dwellings have been destroyed in the course of the fighting, or in order to deny their use to enemy forces, regular or irregular; and of those which remain habitable, most are serving as temporary homes for [Jewish] immigrants . . . But even if repatriation were economically feasible, is it politically desirable? Would it make sense to recreate that dual society, which has bedevilled Palestine for so long, until it led eventually to open war? Under the happiest of circumstances, a complex and uncertain situation is created where a single state must be shared by two or more people who differ in race, religion, language and culture.

‘Present absentees’

Weitz’s chillingly precise administrative term, ‘retroactive transfer’, tells the story of the Israeli drive to transform Palestine into an unreturnable and irrecollectible country for the external refugees who lost their homes during or after the war. Another term, of similar administrative and legal effect, and moral bearing, was coined for internal refugees within the borders of the state. These became known as ‘present absentees’ (nokhehim nifkadim). [21] Of course, as Bombaji-Sasportas amply demonstrates, in this context ‘external’ and ‘internal’ are further markers of the determination of the Israeli establishment to objectify, control and dispossess the refugees. [22] If we use them here, it is to show the realities behind them. What the term ‘present absentees’ designates is the history of the dispossession and displacement of those Palestinians—their number is estimated at 160,000—who found themselves within the state of Israel between 1948 and 1952. It tells of the tacit axis of apartheid that defines the state of Israel to this day: the interplay between the formal inclusion of Palestinians as citizens and their structural exclusion from equal rights within the state. This is the particular dialectic of oppression—of a population formally present but in so many crucial ways absent—that makes the legal-administrative definition of these Palestinians so coldly accurate.

The category of ‘absentees’ was originally a juridical term for those refugees who were ‘absent’ from their homes but ‘present’ within the boundaries of the state as defined by the Armistice Agreements of 1949. The vast majority of the Palestinians so classified were not allowed to return to their homes, to reclaim their property, or to seek compensation. Instead the state promulgated the Law of Absentees’ Properties in 1950, which legalized the plundering of their possessions. The looting of Arab property was given the guise of a huge land transaction that the state had conducted with itself. A thinly disguised official entity called ‘The Custodian’ was authorized to sell absentees’ land (defined in Clause 1[b] of the Law) to the Development Agency, a government body created specifically to acquire it. This agency then sold it on to the Jewish National Fund. At the end of the chain these lands were privately farmed out to Jews only (this was the procedural significance of the JNF), and gradually became de facto private property, while remaining de jure in the keeping of the state. [23]

Cultural obliteration

If such was the outcome of the legal status of absentee, the fully dialectical notion of ‘present absentees’ was devised in more literary fashion by yet another high-ranking bureaucrat in the Foreign Office, Alexander Dotan. In the early summer of 1952 he was working in its Department for International Institutions when UNRWA wound up its activities in the country and passed responsibility for ‘internal’ refugees to the Israeli government. In July, Dotan was appointed inter-ministerial coordinator and chair of the Advisory Committee on Refugees. After some research, he then wrote a series of memoranda that offered background briefing and solutions for ‘the refugee problem’. The first document, dated November 9, 1952, was specifically concerned with those refugees within Israel who had not been allowed to return to their homes, and many of whom dwelt in other Palestinian villages and towns. Dotan identified and defined these people—for the first time, it would seem—as ‘present absentees’. [24] The literary features of the memorandum are striking. Tragic emplotment, ostensible empathy and anthropological detachment are all deployed to generate a Realist depiction of the way ‘present absentees’ are likely to remember the past:

The fundamental problem of the refugee, who is wholly dependent on government policy, is land. The current position is that a refugee will often live in a village in Galilee, adjacent to his deserted lands and village, as if at an observation post. The distance is usually just a few kilometres and, in most cases, the refugees would have been able to cultivate their land from their present place of residence, if they had been allowed to do so, even without returning to the deserted and destroyed village. From his place of observation and present shelter the refugee follows what is happening on his land. He hopes and yearns to return to it, but he sees the new [Jewish] immigrants who are trying to strike roots in the land, or those who have farmed it out from the Custodian, or the way the orchards are gradually deteriorating because no one looks after them. The refugee desires to return to his land, if only to some of it when it is mostly already settled by Jews, and he therefore usually seeks to farm it out from the Custodian, something that is denied to him.

Dotan was adamant that prolongation of these conditions was politically and culturally impossible. His conclusion, however, was not to return the properties and grant real citizenship to the ‘internal’ refugees, at least. The foundational myths of Zionism made—as they still do—any conjunction of the words ‘return’ and ‘Arabs’ or ‘Palestinians’ unthinkable. What Dotan had in mind was something else: a comprehensive assimilation (hitbolelut) of these Palestinians into the Jewish state and society of Israel by obliterating their memory, identity and culture. Dotan deliberately used the very term that was pivotal in the self-justification of the Zionist movement: hitbolelut was the disaster that recovery of the land of Israel would prevent—the disappearance of the Jewish people through assimiliation in the Diaspora. Such was the future now to be benignly extended to the Arabs within Israel. In a second memorandum, of November 12, 1952, Dotan warned that current state policies could induce the Palestinians within Israel to feel that they were ‘a persecuted national minority that identifies with the Arab nation.’ [25] To avert this risk, he proposed a new strategy that would aim on the one hand ‘to integrate the Arabs into the state’ by ‘opening the gates of assimilation to them’, while on the other it would ‘fiercely combat those who are unwilling or unable to adapt to the [Jewish] state’. Dotan was aware of the likely objections to such a policy, and met them head on. ‘It may rightly be asked: what are the prospects that the Arabs would assimilate? This can be answered only through experience, but if one wished to draw a lesson from history one could say that assimilation has been a very common feature in the Middle East since time immemorial.’

The colonial logic of this conception was spelt out with arresting clarity, as Dotan went on to explain how an irreversible obliteration of Palestinian identity might be achieved:

The realization of such a new policy requires a comprehensive onslaught upon the Arab minority by both the state and the Jewish public in the country, and it seems that an important instrument of it might be the formation of a secular Jewish cultural mission. The mission would act as the emissary of the Jewish people and Israeli progress in the Arab village. Under no circumstances should party politics be allowed within or through it. This mission would establish special training seminars for Jewish counsellors to operate in Arab villages, on the lines of our counsellors in the ma’abarot or in the new settlements, and like the missions to the Indian villages in Mexico. [26] These counsellors would infiltrate the villages together with the refugees, who would begin to settle them, and would accompany the refugees from the first day of their installation . . . Missions of two to three male and female counsellors for every twenty to thirty villages should suffice to effect agrarian changes within them. Such a mission would reside in a village; teach Hebrew; offer agricultural instruction, medical assistance and welfare; supply social guidance; act as natural mediator between the village and the authorities and the Hebrew community; and keep a security check on everything that happens in and around the village. Such a mission could acquire influence on all village matters and fundamentally alter them within a few years.

Dotan’s proposal incurred the wrath of Ben-Gurion’s powerful and ruthless adviser on Arab affairs, Josh Palmon, who favoured the continuation of a notoriously oppressive military government in the hope that this would extend the process of ‘retroactive transfer’—ie, de facto expulsion—to the ‘internal’ refugees as well. But Dotan reiterated his argument undeterred. His next report, of November 23, 1952, warning that outside powers might otherwise try to impose ‘cultural autonomy’ for the Palestinian minority on Israel, pressed home his scheme for an Arab hitbolelut. There could hardly be a more tangible example of the deliberate attempt to erase the very memory of an Arab Palestine than the final brick of Dotan’s assimilationist edifice. This is what he wrote to the Foreign Minister:

An important tool for us is accelerated reconstruction of ancient geographical names and Hebraicization [shi 'abur] of Arabic toponyms. In this respect the most important task is to disseminate the practical use of the new names, a process that has run into difficulties among Jews too. In Jaffa the name ‘Jibaliyya’ is still current, although ‘Giv’at Aliya’ is gradually disinheriting it. By contrast, a Hebrew name has not been found yet for ‘Ajami’, and some new immigrants still incorrectly call the Arab neighbourhood within it the ‘Ghetto’ or ‘Arab Ghetto’. It is possible, by being strictly formal and with adequate indoctrination, to make the Arab inhabitants of ‘Rami’ [in the Upper Galilee] get used to calling their village, in speech and writing, ‘Ha-Rama’ (Ramat Naftali), or to make the inhabitants of ‘Majd al-Krum’ [also in the Upper Galilee] become used to calling their village ‘Beit ha-Kerem’. From the inhabitants of what the Arabs called ‘Shafa’amer [near Haifa], I have already heard the [Hebraicized] name ‘Shefar’am’. [27]

Dotan described his second memorandum as a ‘Final Solution of the Refugee Problem in Israel’. The easy use of the term is striking. Here lie the historical roots of the obsessive refusal to concede to the Palestinians the right of return, which—more than the unity of Jerusalem—is the widest consensual basis of Israeli politics today. It is this which explains the genuine—preposterous—belief that withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and dismantling of the settlements would be a painful compromise.

[1] This article is based on part of a longer essay, entitled ‘Can The Subaltern Remember? A Pessimistic View of the Victims of Zionism’, to appear in a volume edited by Ussama Makdisi and Paul Silberstein on memory and violence in the Middle East and North Africa. My definition of the foundational myths is obviously critical. It is informed by Boas Evron, National Reckoning [Hebrew], 1986; Yitzhak Laor, Narratives with no Natives: Essays on Israeli Literature [Hebrew], 1995; David Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, Oxford 1995; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Exile within Sovereignty’ [Hebrew], 2 parts, Theory and Criticism, 4, 1993, pp. 23–56 and 5, 1994, pp. 113–32; see also my ‘Domestic Orientalism’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 23, 1996, pp. 125–45.

[2] The literature on this question is substantial. For notable examples, see Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The Transformation of Palestine, Evanston 1971; Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said, eds, Blaming the Victims, Verso: London and New York 1988; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–49, Cambridge 1987 and 1948 and After, Oxford 1990; Yigal Elam, The Executors [Hebrew], 1990, pp. 31–53; Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought 1882–1948, Washington, DC 1992, and ‘A Critique of Benny Morris’, in Ilan Pappé, ed., The Israel/Palestine Question, London 1999, pp. 211–20. For a recent and qualitative addition, see Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, Cambridge 2001.

[3] Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, Princeton 1998, pp. 3–47.

[4] Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, pp. 203–12.

[5] Haya Bombaji-Sasportas, ‘Whose Voice is Heard/Whose Voice is Silenced: the Construction of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the Israeli Establishment, 1948–52′, unpublished MA thesis, 2000. I am deeply grateful to the author for making the documents available to me.

[6] Elam, The Executors, p. 31; emphasis added.

[7] Elam, The Executors, p. 43.

[8] See Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 89–144.

[9] See especially Morris’s careful attempt to classify each and every case on which he could gather information, in the maps, appendix and invaluable index to the maps, in Morris, Birth, pp. ix–xx.

[10] See Bombaji-Sasportas, ‘Whose Voice is Heard’, pp. 17–22; Joel Beinin, ‘Know Thy Enemy, Know Thy Ally’, in Ilan Pappé, ed., Arabs and Jews during the Mandate [Hebrew], 1995, pp. 179–201; Gil Eyal, ‘Between East and West: The Discourse on “the Arab Village” in Israel’ [Hebrew], Theory and Criticism, 3, 1993, pp. 39–55; Dan Rabinovich, Anthropology and the Palestinians [Hebrew], 1998.

[11] Bombaji-Sasportas, ‘Whose Voice is Heard’, pp. 31–3.

[12] Israeli State Archives/Foreign Office/Corpus of the Minister and Director General 19–2444, vol. II, p. 6: henceforth SA/FO/CMDG.

[13] SA/FO/CMDG, 3/2445. This particular file contains documents of the period August–November 1948, including the report of the Transfer Committee, so named by Weitz.

[14] Comparison between the official narrative and the confidential papers of the period strongly suggest deliberate deceit; Yaacov Shimoi, a high-ranking functionary of the time, admitted in 1989 that a ‘fraudulent version’ had been concocted. See Elam, The Executors, endnote 17, pp. 48–9.

[15] Zvi Yavetz, ‘On the First Days of Tel Aviv University: Memories’, Alpayim, 11, 1995, pp. 101–29.

[16] See Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 133. The translation of Meir’s words is mine, from the 1991 Hebrew edition of Morris’s book, p. 185.

[17] For more details on Shamai Kahane, see Bombaji-Sasportas, ‘Whose Voice is Heard’, pp. 100, 119 and 163–8.

[18] SA/FO/CMDG 18/2402.

[19] SA/FO/CMDG 18/2406.

[20] SA/FO/CMDG 19/4222, vol. II; for the identification of the authors, see Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 255 and Bombaji-Sasportas, ‘Whose Voice is Heard’, p. 148.

[21] The haunting nature of this term was also noticed by David Grossman, who duly entitled his Hebrew book on the Palestinian Israelis Present Absentees (1992). The English translation is Sleeping on a Wire.

[22] See especially her discussion of ‘the construction of a body of knowledge and the framing of the refugees as a scientific object’, and ‘the categorization of the refugees’, pp. 44–99.

[23] The text of this law is rather long, but is accessible in any official collection of Knesset legislation. For critical comments on the law, see Alina Korn, The Arab Minority in Israel during the Military Government (1948–1966), unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991, pp. 91–6, and Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, Jerusalem 1984, pp. 93–5 [both in Hebrew].

[24] SA/FO/A/2/2445 (a-948 II).

[25] SA/FO/CMDG 2/2445 A (a-948 II).

[26]
Ma’abarot: the transition camps built for the massive Jewish immigration of the 1950s—transitory for Ashkenazi arrivals, less so for Sephardi; emphasis added.

[27] Cited in Yitzhak Laor, Narratives with no Natives, p. 132. Laor’s critical work is the most sensitive attempt to date to show how the literary establishment has been co-opted by the Israeli state to write the hegemonic script that deletes the memories of the Palestinians. See especially ‘The Sex Life of the Security Forces: On Amos Oz’, and ‘We Write Thee Oh Homeland’, pp. 76–105, 115–71.

Inserito da <http://www.newleftreview.org/A2331>

Stephan Grigat über rätekommunistischen Antizionismus in der Jungle World

Der Rätekommunismus formulierte nicht nur eine Kritik am bolschewistischen Parteiverständnis, sondern implizierte auch eine Absage an die mechanistische Erkenntnistheorie Lenins, die Widerspiegelungstheorie. Diese avancierte im Marxismus-Leninismus zur kanonisierten Erkenntnistheorie und wurde neben der Lehre von der Naturdialektik zum zentralen Bestandteil des auf Herrschaftslegitimation abzielenden Sowjetmarxismus. Die gesamte Ideologie-, Bewusstseins- und Erkenntniskritik von Marx schrumpft bei Lenin auf eine der Optik entlehnte, mechanistische Metapher zusammen. Eine frühe Kritik dieser Widerspiegelungs- und Abbildtheorie, wie sie sich in Lenins »Materialismus und Empirokritizismus« findet, lieferte der Linkskommunist Anton Pannekoek. Doch diese Kritik kommt ohne eine konsequente Rückbesinnung auf die Marxsche Wert- und Fetischkritik aus, in der thematisiert wird, warum das Bewusstsein nicht einfach ein Abbild der Wirklichkeit, sondern ein verkehrtes und damit als Praxis auch verkehrendes Bewusstsein ist, ein für die Subjekte selbst richtiges Bewusstsein von einer scheinbar naturgegebenen Gesellschaft, das als falsches Bewusstsein einer falschen Gesellschaft dechiffriert werden kann.

Zwar finden sich in Pannekoeks Schrift »Lenin als Philosoph« Hinweise auf die Marxsche Fetischkritik, in denen er darauf verweist, dass der Mensch sein Denken dem Glauben an mystische höhere Wesen unterwirft, wenn die Produkte seiner Arbeit über seinem Kopf emporwachsen »zu einer Macht, die er nicht beherrscht, die ihm als Ware und Kapital als ein eigenes gesellschaftliches Wesen gegenübertritt, das ihn beherrscht oder gar vernichtet«. Dennoch wäre es falsch zu behaupten, der westeuropäische Linksradikalismus, wie er von Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, Herman Gorter, Otto Rühle oder Rosa Luxemburg repräsentiert wurde, habe sich gerade bei der Rezeption der Marxschen Wert- und Fetischkritik, die konsequent fortgeführt bei einer Kritik der antisemitischen Ideologie landen muss und sowohl das leninistische als auch das rätekommunistische Klassenverständnis in Frage stellt, vom Leninismus grundlegend unterschieden. Die Differenzen zwischen Linkskommunisten und Bolschewisten lagen – von Ausnahmen wie Karl Korsch abgesehen, bei dem die Kritik Lenins und seiner Anhänger mit einer Rückbesinnung auf die Marxsche Kritik von Wert und Fetisch einherging – auf einer anderen, vor allem praktisch-politischen Ebene. In ihrer »Kapital«-Lektüre, mit ihrem Klassenbegriff und ihrem Unverständnis für die Gefahren eines aus der kapitalisierten Gesellschaft selbst erwachsenden antikapitalistischen Ressentiments sind sie über den so leidenschaftlich kritisierten Bolschewismus kaum hinausgekommen.

Die traditionalistische Marxinterpretation und der Klassenkampffetischismus enden in einem linkskommunistischen Antizionismus, mit dem die nachfaschistischen ebenso wie die gegenwärtigen Rätekommunisten ihre Unfähigkeit zu Ideologie- und Staatskritik dokumentieren. Der heute von diversen Zirkeln als Heilsbringer angepriesene Rätekommunismus steht für eine der übelsten antizionistischen Strömungen im gegenwärtigen Marxismus und bekämpft mit seinem Klassengetöse die Kritik der deutschen Ideologie.

Im Insistieren auf einem scheinbar überhistorischen »Grundwiderspruch« zwischen Kapital und Arbeit bei gleichzeitiger Ignoranz gegenüber der nationalsozialistischen Barbarei mit ihrer im Vernichtungsantisemitismus verwirklichten klassenlosen Klassengesellschaft in Form der »Volksgemeinschaft« ist der Linkskommunismus dem leninistischen Marxismus zutiefst verwandt. So verhält es sich auch in den Schriften prominenter Rätekommunisten in Deutschland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Willy Huhn, der sich bis zu seinem Tod 1970 an fast allen rätekommunistischen Diskussionen beteiligte, bringt ein zentrales Anliegen des Linkskommunismus zum Ausdruck, wenn er eine Äquidistanz bei »innerimperialistischen Konflikten« fordert – und als einen solchen betrachten die meisten rätekommunistischen Strömungen den Zweiten Weltkrieg. Diese Äquidistanz wird nur durch ein vollständiges Abstrahieren vom Antisemitismus möglich. Noch jeder Rätekommunist erklärt einem heute, jene Arbeiter in der US-amerikanischen Rüstungsindustrie, die während des Zweiten Weltkriegs an Streiks und Klassenkampf festgehalten haben, seien mit ihrer Weigerung, sich im »Krieg der Imperialisten« auf eine Seite zu schlagen, völlig im Recht gewesen.

Von solch einem Marxismus hat man sich heute nichts mehr zu erwarten. So wichtig und begrüßenswert der radikale Antinationalismus der Rätekommunisten in den zwanziger Jahren auch war, wer heute einfach an ihn anknüpft, landet zwangsläufig bei jenem Wald- und Wiesenantinationalismus, der mit einer Kritik der Nation schon deswegen nichts gemein hat, weil er die Spezifik des Zionismus nie begreifen kann, jede Fähigkeit zur Differenzierung eingebüßt hat und in seinen konsequentesten Ausprägungen den rechten Geschichtsrevisionismus nicht nur streift.

In Huhns Schriften finden sich abenteuerliche Ausführungen über das »Diktat« des Versailler Vertrags. Die heute in Deutschland aktiven »Unabhängigen Rätekommunisten« halten die Charakterisierung der Niederringung Nazideutschlands als antifaschistischen Waffengang für ein »alliiertes Märchen«, denn die Westmächte seien auch nicht besser als die Nazis gewesen: »Der Rassismus feierte auf allen Seiten Orgien« und war natürlich »ein Instrument zur Mobilisierung der Massen für das große Gemetzel«. Der Vernichtungsfeldzug der Deutschen und ihrer Helfershelfer verschwindet bei diesen Rätekommunisten in der Phrase vom »imperialistischen Krieg« oder dem »Massenmorden auf Kosten der Arbeiterklasse«. Kein Wunder, dass ihnen die Bombardierung der volksgemeinschaftlichen Festung Dresden zu einem Zeitpunkt, als die Deutschen mehr als deutlich gemacht hatten, dass sie sich auch durch Vernichtungskrieg und Massenmord nicht zum Widerstand oder auch nur Protest veranlasst sahen, als »Verbrechen« erscheint.

So wie damals wollen die proletarischen Recken sich auch heute nicht entscheiden müssen, denn der Krieg des Westens gegen die Taliban oder al-Qaida sei nun mal keiner zwischen »Zivilisation« und »Barbarei« und die einen seien nicht besser als die anderen. Solche Leute, die nicht in der Lage sind, zwischen einer wie auch immer kritikwürdigen Zivilisation und einer aus ihr zwar entspringenden, aber eben nicht mit ihr identischen Barbarei zu unterscheiden, sind sich natürlich sicher, dass »es nichts mit einer befreiten Gesellschaft zu tun hat, den Staat Israel und sein Handeln zu verteidigen«.

Die »Rätekommunisten München« haben dem entsprechend am Höhepunkt der islamisch aufgeladenen Terrorintifada zum Boykott israelischer Waren aufgerufen und Veranstaltungen mit der Killertruppe PFLP organisiert. Anhänger des italienischen Linkskommunisten Amadeo Bordiga sehen Auschwitz als einen Völkermord unter vielen und denunzieren den Hinweis auf die Besonderheiten der Shoah als Apologie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Einige französische so genannte Ultralinke, die sich auf Bordiga und die Links- und Rätekommunisten beriefen, sind seit Ende der siebziger Jahre gleich ins Lager der rechten Negationisten übergelaufen.

Leider können sich die heutigen Rätekommunisten auch in ihren faschismustheoretischen Auslassungen auf ihre historischen Stichwortgeber beziehen. Pannekoek schwieg sich über die freudige Beteiligung großer Teile des deutschen Proletariats am Vernichtungswerk aus und sah den Faschismus in der »Politik des Großkapitals« begründet. Die durch den Antisemitismus und das gemeinschaftlich begangene Verbrechen vollzogene Integration der Arbeiterklasse in die Gemeinschaft aller wahren Deutschen konnte ihm gar nicht Gegenstand von Kritik und Reflexion werden, da er nicht gewillt war, seinen an mystische Verklärung grenzenden Glauben an die emanzipativen Kräfte des Proletariats aufzugeben. So erklärt er denn auch die »Volksgemeinschaft« des nationalsozialistischen Deutschland zu einem »Trugbild« und die alliierten Bomber zu Vorboten einer präventiven Konterrevolution gegen den erwarteten »revolutionären Volksaufstand«.

Joachim Bruhn hat in einer »Nachbemerkung zum Rätekommunismus« darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass sich in Willy Huhns Nachlass Schriften aus den sechziger Jahren über »Rassismus und Faschismus in Judentum und Zionismus«, »Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in Israel« und ähnliche Scheußlichkeiten finden. Bruhns Charakterisierung des Rätekommunismus als linke »Avantgarde der antisemitischen Ideologie« mag angesichts des Ausmaßes und der Qualität des stalinistischen Antisemitismus übertrieben erscheinen; seine Einschätzung, »dass der emanzipative Gehalt des Rätekommunismus zur Neige ausgeschöpft ist«, stimmt aber allemal. Vor der nationalsozialistischen Aufhebung der Klassen in der »Volksgemeinschaft« hatte der Rätekommunismus seine Berechtigung. Doch nach Auschwitz ist er zu einer Strömung im Marxismus verkommen, die nur mehr Verdrängung der Katastrophe mittels Klassenkampfrhetorik betreibt – und daher auch zur Verhinderung der gegenwärtig drohenden Katastrophen nichts beitragen wird.

http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2008/30/22308.html

Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11

I have no problem agreeing with the author about his points about the Provocations as Pretext for attacking other nations, which it is obvious and clear from history that the US has been engaged in since its inception.

But when he starts claiming that “the Zionists” (Zionists is just a code word for Jews) planned and executed 9/11 he passes the line between reality and antisemitic bull-shit.

Like most Antisemites/AntiZionists he fails to make the distinction between Jews and Zionists (to be distinguished from zionists who support Israel’s right to exist) and Jews and Israel as a nation.

Conspiracy Theories are very nice in that they provide explanations to life’s hardships that provide the Conspiracy Theorists with a sense of control (“I know why this is happening to me”.)

Unfortunately for the Conspiracy Theorists all CTs at one point or other leave the realm of the plausible and enter the realm of implausible – which only leaves the CTists vulnerable to exposure as frauds and charlatans, which in the end are only serving themselves.

Israel, as the only Democracy in the Middle East, has a very precarious position (regardless of their relations to the Palestinians) because it is surrounded by nations that has only one wish and one goal for her in the end – total annihilation.

Claming, as the author does, that Israel is engaged in a war on Iran and Syria (and not the other way around) is ludicrous – especially since Israel has not threatened either Iran or Syria with “wiping them of the face of the earth”. If Israel and/or the Zionists had truly been behind the War on Terror, the US would not have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq – they would have gone after Iran and Syria. They didn’t.

Neither Iran, nor Syria care about the Palestinians enough NOT to make good their threats to nuke Israel.

It must be nice to live in a world where any evil in the world can be attributed to ONE source, instead of having to sort through the political and personal diversities that is a natural part of being human.

CWhen we speak against nationalism, we are obliged to talk against the nationalism of own country, in other case what we’re talking about is foreign policy.

F.Kyritsis

On May the 8th of 2005 AgitProp’s Niko Yenimakis had written a post on 7 reasons one should not be an antizionist. Personally I think I’m crucifying him and me together by bringing this up, since zionism is the absolute evil in Greece; on the other hand at some point one needs to state the obvious which is that both Israel and Palestine have a right to a homeland. The occasion are the 60 years from the founding of the State of Israel, the achievement of the goal set by the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in the troubled years of the Dreyfus Affair.

And just to repeat myself. Indeed anyone who criticizes Israel is not an antisemite; yes there have been, especially in the US, some people who have used the Holocaust as an excuse for Israeli disdainful acts. But this is not the case of Greece where “antizionists” do not even bother to cover themselves and march directly against the local Jewish Community¹ while not even bothering² to remember their compatriots who died in the extermination camps.

I am greek and proud of it. Jewish presence in Greece is more than 2.000 years old and has always been continuous and deeply rooted in this land we all call home. But this “antizionist” business in Greece has acquired a different meaning and while I do believe that many are sincere on their outrage towards Israel, they should hasten to reconsider if they are truly against the 2 people/2 states solution and how they take their rant against their local jewish community..

Anyone who believes in the right of both people, the Israelis and the Palestinians to live in their own land and by thus supports two independent States, is by definition a Zionist! Because Zionism is nothing more than a movement that aims at creating an Israeli State – nothing more and nothing else, while at the same time there tenths of different currents that claim the term. From the Socialist Zionism of the Kibbutz, to the Messianic Zionism that does not accept a State of Israel unless Messiah himself comes! Even the thousands of Israelis that actively oppose the occupation of West Bank claim to act in the name of Zionism!

In any case I wish a Χρόνια Πολλά Ισραήλ for it’s 60th birthday and hope that the 61th will find all the nations of the Middle East in peace and security in their own homeland.

¹[Marches against the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki during the Hezbolah-Israel war in 2006]

²[E.Karasavidou on the absence of the Left in the Memorial Day]

GreeK:

1. Γιατί δε λέει τίποτα για το ποιος είσαι. «Αντισιωνιστής» μπορεί να είναι:
   • κάποιος που αποδοκιμάζει την πολιτική του Σαρόν, και εσφαλμένα ταυτίζει το Σιωνισμό μαζί της,
   • κάποιος αφελής που έχει φάει το παραμύθι των «Πρωτοκόλλων των Σοφών της Σιών» και νομίζει πως ο Σιωνισμός είναι μια παγκόσμια συνωμοσία, ή
   • κάποιος επιτήδειος τηλεοπτικός πλασιέ που πουλάει στον προηγούμενο αφελή τα «Πρωτόκολλα», εμπλουτισμένα με τα αποκυήματα της δικής του νοσηρής φαντασίας.
2. Γιατί ο Σιωνισμός δεν είναι πολιτικά συμπαγής. Ο Σαρόν μπορεί να διαπράττ ει εγκλήματα στο όνομα του Σιωνισμού, έχει όμως και αντιπολίτευση που τον εγκαλεί, επίσης στο όνομα του Σιωνισμού. Για του λόγου το αληθές, διάβασε αυτή τη δήλωση αντιρρησιών συνείδησης της Ισραηλινής Πολεμικής Αεροπορίας.
3. Γιατί, έστω και άθελά σου, αυτοπροσδιοριζόμενος ως «αντισιωνιστής» διαιωνίζεις τις πλάνες που υπάρχουν γύρω από το Σιωνισμό, όπως τα διαβόητα «Πρωτόκολλα», που έχουν τις ρίζες τους στην αντισημιτική προπαγάνδα άλλων εποχών.
4. Γιατί σχεδόν όλοι οι νοσταλγοί και οι απολογητές του Ολοκαυτώματος υιοθετούν το προκάλυμμα του «αντισιωνιστή», και εσύ, έστω και άθελά σου, τους βοηθάς να υπεκφεύγουν.
5. Γιατί, πριν σπεύσεις να επικρίνεις τους Εβραίους που δημιούργησαν το κράτος του Ισραήλ, θα έπρεπε –τουλάχιστο– να προσπαθήσεις να βάλεις τον εαυτό σου στη θέση τους. Προσπάθησε να βάλεις τον εαυτό σου στη θέση κάποιου που επέζησε από τα στρατόπεδα θανάτου, όπου έχασε τους δικούς του, και γύρισε στον τόπο του για να τον βρει άδειο, κατεστραμμένο και γεμάτο από τραυματικές αναμνήσεις. Όταν και αν το καταφέρεις αυτό, προσπάθησε να αρνηθείς σε αυτόν τον άνθρωπο να πάει στο Ισραήλ.
6. Γιατί, ακόμη κι αν θεωρείς το Σιωνισμό απλώς συνώνυμο του ισραηλινού εθνικισμού, είναι τουλάχιστον οξύμωρο να είσαι επιλεκτικά ενάντια στον εθνικισμό των Ισραηλινών · κάτι τέτοιο φανερώνει προκατάληψη και πολιτική ένδεια. Με τη λογική του «σκέψου παγκόσμια – δράσε τοπικά» θα όφειλες να αντιπαραταχθείς στο δικό σου εγχώριο εθνικισμό πρώτα. Εξάλλου, θα έπρεπε να σε προβληματίζει γιατί πολλοί εγχώριοι «αντισιωνιστές» διατηρούν κάποια απωθημένα από τη συνθήκη της Λωζάννης…
7. Γιατί ο αγώνας για ειρήνη και δικαιοσύνη στο Ισραήλ, στην Παλαιστίνη και στον τόπο σου δεν μπορεί να νοθευτεί με κανένα «αντισιωνισμό», πεπλανημένο ή επιτήδειο!

CC 3.0

English:

1. Because it doesn’t say anything on who you are. “Anti-zionist” can be:
   • someone who frowns upon the policies of Sharon, erroneously identifying Zionism with them,
   • someone naive who has fallen for the fairy tale of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and thinks Zionism is a world conspiracy, or
   • a cunning TV salesman who sells the Protocols at the aforementioned “naive”, enriched with his own sick fantasy.
2. Because Zionism is not politically compact. Sharon may commit crimes in the name of Zionism, but he has an opposition who challenges him in the name of Zionism. Read this statement of israeli objectors of conscience.
3. Because, even unwillingly, by self determining one self as an “anti-zionist” you perpetuate the deceptions on zionism, like the infamous Protocols whose roots lie in the antisemitic propaganda of other times.
4. Because almost all of the nazi nostalgics and Holocaust deniers adopt the excuse of “antizionism” and you, unwillingly, help them out to evade.
5. Because before criticizing the Jews for creating the State of Israel, you should – at least – try to put yourself in their position. Try to put yourself in the place of someone who survived the death camps, who lost his family and returned to his land to find it empty, destroyed and full of traumatic memories. And when you do that, try and deny this man the right to go to Israel.
6. Because even if you consider that Zionism is the alternate name of israeli nationalism, it is an oxymoron to be selectively against the nationalism of the israeli; something like that shows prejudice and political indigence. Using the logic of “think globally – act locally” you should oppose to your own local nationalism. In any case you should be troubled by the fact that many local “anti-zionists” maintain complexes deriving the Laussane treaty…
7. Because the fight for peace and justice in Israel, in Palestine and your land cannot be adulterated by any “antizionism”, deceived or cunning!

CC 3.0

Yerushalaim shel Zahav:

The photos are respectively the official logo celebrating the 60 years, the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem and the Declaration of Independence of May 14th 1948.

PS. And just to finish you off here’s another post by termninal119, (in greek only):Για όσους δεν μπορούν να χαλαρώσουν με το Ισραήλ…

I am now ready to face the firing squad…

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A report from the U.S. State Department details “an upsurge” across the world of anti-Semitism — hostility and discrimination toward Jewish people.

A German police officer holds items seized from an extremist group in Goerlitz, Germany, in 2006.”Today, more than 60 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history, it is a current event,” the report says.The report — called Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism and given to Congress on Thursday — is dedicated to the memory of the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II.The report details physical acts of anti-Semitism, such as attacks, property damage, and cemetery desecration. It also lists manifestations such as conspiracy theories concerning Jews, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel.

“Over much of the past decade, U.S. embassies worldwide have noted an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, such as attacks on Jewish people, property, community institutions, and religious facilities,” the report says.

The report also deals with efforts to combat the bigotry, described by Gregg J. Rickman, the department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, as “one of the oldest forms of malicious intolerance.”

The report says violent acts and desecration of Jewish property happen whether there are a lot of Jews or only a few living in the region. Bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories regarding Jews, and anti-Semitic propaganda are transmitted over the airwaves and on the Internet.

It says that although Nazism and fascism are rejected by the West “and beyond,” blatant forms of anti-Semitism are “embraced and employed by the extreme fringe.”

“Traditional forms of anti-Semitism persist and can be found across the globe. Classic anti-Semitic screeds, such as ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ remain commonplace.

“Jews continue to be accused of blood libel, dual loyalty, and undue influence on government policy and the media, and the symbols and images associated with age-old forms of anti-Semitism endure.”

New forms of anti-Semitism are reflected in rhetoric that compares Israel to the Nazis and attributes “Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”

This kind of anti-Semitism, the report says, “is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations.”

The report says various U.N. bodies are regularly asked to launch “investigations of what often are sensationalized reports of alleged atrocities and other violations of human rights by Israel.”

“The collective effect of unremitting criticism of Israel, coupled with a failure to pay attention to regimes that are demonstrably guilty of grave violations, has the effect of reinforcing the notion that the Jewish state is one of the sources, if not the greatest source, of abuse of the rights of others, and thus intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism.”

The report gives examples of leaders and governments that “fan the flames of anti-Semitic hatred within their own societies and even beyond their borders.” It cites Syria, Belarus, Venezuela, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

“Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has actively promoted Holocaust denial, Iran’s Jewish population faces official discrimination, and the official media outlets regularly produce anti-Semitic propaganda,” the report adds.

It notes “societal anti-Semitism” in places where there have been efforts to fight the problem. Among the countries are Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

“Recent increases in anti-Semitic incidents have been documented in Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and beyond,” the report said.

The report is a follow-up to the State Department’s January 2005 “Report on Global anti-Semitism.”

For instance the almost complete indifference towards OTHER human rights violations, than those of Israel, in the general media, most Human Rights Groups and among those who traditionally have stood for the fight against violations of human rights.

One such example is the fact that the issue of Israel/Palestine covers discussions threads in the double numbers in a Discussion Group with more than 66.000 members, while f.i human rights violations in China, Burma or several African Nations together doesn’t even get to 10… In all fairness it has to be said that Israel doesn’t top the list of issues discussed in this Group – the USA is – but if we say that the US covers 50%, Israel 40% and the rest of the world 10%, we are not very far off. I know this because I happen to be one of the Admins of that specific Group. Over the years I have, together with my wife, had to work hard to balance out the “Anti-Israel Lobby”, and in doing so having been dubbed Extreme Zionist, NaZionist and other epithets simply for saying that the criticism has to be balanced, truthful and fair and that Israel has a right to exist. I have met all kinds of Antisemitism in this specific work, everything from blatant hatred for everything Jewish and honest belief that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an authentic document that proves a Jewish World Conspiracy, to Antisemitism cloaked as Antizionism and Antiisraelism, where Israel and Mossad is being equated with Jews in general.

What has been a red thread through all of this is the idea that Israel, Zionists, and Jews do what they do because they are Jewish, the innate reason for any action by Israel, Zionists and Jews is believed to be their Jewishness. This is Antisemitism at its very core.

Of course people may live in denial, claim that Antisemitism is a thing of the past and that today’s Antisemitism is “just” a reaction to the actions of Israel, and not Antisemitism at all but justified criticism of a Jewish State. However the disproportionality, the lack of objectivity and reason, does beg the question.

SoB

“Wenn man den Zionismus kritisiert, dann meint man die Juden!”     Martin Luther King Jr.