Right wing journalist Peter Oborne’s comment piece on his Dispatches programme on the pro-Israeli lobby said :
“It is important to say what we did not find. There is no conspiracy, and nothing resembling a conspiracy.”
Why say this unless he had pre-conceived ideas ? Did he expect to find a conspiracy , did he look in vain for one ? Or maybe Oborne is a conspiracy theorist.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown will be performing her one woman, Shakespeare inspired show about the challenges of belonging at Alyth Synagogue London, on Wednesday 18 November.
The event is a Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE) event.
JCORE : “works with the Jewish and wider communities to promote a positive multi-ethnic UK free from all forms of racism.”
JCORE also believes that :
“As Jews, we know what happens when others stand by and do nothing. That’s why our community needs to speak out – to help to bring about change and challenge racism at its roots.”
Perhaps JCORE would like to discuss with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Yasmin several comments she has made over the last few years.
Such as :
“The over-influential Friends of Israel”.
and ‘the wrath of Moses’ and ‘accusations of anti-Semitism because I dare to raise the question’.
Something on Greens Engage.
Some days ago I wondered whether a Norwegian university was going to force its employees to boycott Israelis. The answer turned out to be a no from the board, none of whom objected to a proposal to throw out the motion.
“Some of the people in attendance spoke in favor of scrapping the vote,”Alsberg told Haaretz. “The main arguments raised were that Norwegian universities should not [make] their own foreign policies, and that a boycott would be harmful to NTNU.”
According to Alsberg, who collected signatures from over 100 NTNU scholars against the boycott, the move was prevented due to “a combination of factors.” He said these included media attention; opposition to the boycott by the Norwegian Ministry for Higher Education; and petitions, including his own.
But Erez Uriely, director of the Oslo-based Center against Anti-Semitism, said the boycott was prevented largely thanks to Alsberg’s petition.
“Norwegian politicians often take anti-Israeli positions and then renege when this creates an outcry,” he said. “The petition against a boycott of Israel at NTNU is an unusual event which tipped the scale.”
Norway, Israel and the Jews note the disappointment of boycotters and predicts that they will return:
“For anyone in doubt, please observe that Mr.Lysestøl and his comrades are dedicated, hard working people who honestly believe they are engaged in a battle against ultimate evil. They will regroup and recover. If it had not been for the tremendous effort of people from around the globe in general and professor Bjørn Alsgaard* at NTNU in particular, the motion for boycott might have passed.”
Kudos to the academics at Trondheim who spoke out against the boycott by signing Bjørn Alsberg’s* petition.
*Strange mingled references to Bjørn Alsberg/Alsgaard – not sure why.
Ynet news reports :
Board of trustees at second largest university in Norway decides against academic boycott. Board Chairwoman: ‘I don’t think boycott will help, but will allow it to be openly discussed’
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the second largest university in the Scandinavian country, decided on Thursday not to impose an academic boycott on Israel, the university spokesman told Ynet.
The university rector, Torbjørn Digernes told Ynet that “according to my recommendation, the university’s board of trustees decided unanimously not to impose the boycott on Israel.
Read the rest of the article here.
“This is an essential history and so it’s fortunate it has been written by a man with the extraordinary fluency, staggering erudition, scholarly integrity, intellectual acumen, and moral discernment of Anthony Julius.” –Philip Roth
“Anthony Julius has produced a brilliant and readable account of a shameful stain on the national reputation. The best dissection I’ve seen of Britain’s oldest and least acknowledged racial prejudice.” –Nick Cohen
“Writing against a backdrop of rising violence and abuse directed at English Jews and the State of Israel, Anthony Julius insightfully and passionately traces antisemitism’s abject history in England from the medieval period until today. This eminently readable book is thoroughly researched and nuanced, and its take on contemporary antisemitism is a true tour de force.” –Jehuda Reinharz, Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and President, Brandeis University
Trials of the Diaspora is a ground-breaking book that offers the first ever comprehensive history of anti-Semitism in England. Anthony Julius identifies four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism, which he then proceeds to investigate in detail. The first is the anti-Semitism of medieval England, a radical prejudice of defamation, expropriation, and murder, which culminated in 1290, the year of Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England, after which there were no Jews left to torment. The second major strand is literary anti-Semitism: an anti-Semitic account of Jews continuously present in the discourse of English literature, from the anonymous medieval ballad “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter” through Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and beyond. Thirdly, Julius addresses modern anti-Semitism, a quotidian anti-Semitism of insult and partial exclusion, pervasive but contained, experienced by Jews from their “readmission” to England in the mid-17th century through to the late 20th century. The final chapters then deal with contemporary anti-Semitism, a new configuration of anti-Zionisms, emerging in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises. It is this final perspective which, in Julius’s opinion, now constitutes the greatest threat to Anglo-Jewish security and morale. This book, the first history of its kind, is sure to provoke much comment and debate, and comes as a timely reminder that English culture has been in no way immune to anti-Semitism – and in certain ways is still not to this day.
Pre-order today for the reduced price of £17.50 in hardback on Amazon.co.uk
Here are some boycotters of Israel after a successful campaign to rid Sussex University Student Union’s shelves of all those mounds of Israeli produce which were there before. But what is this? The feet of our international conscience appear to be clad in Nike. Haven’t these people read Naomi Klein from back when she was good?
And here’s a plan, by the Socialist Action-pwned Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to smash Israeli growers and pickers on pretext of justice for Palestinians (who probably don’t want that kind of help).
Anybody who decides to participate in this boycott should understand that they are hurting modestly-remunerated Israeli growers and pickers.
The boycott can’t touch this Israel – the one with the population of 7m which attracts more venture capital than France and Germany combined. The very young country whose economically successful innovation and entrepreneurialism has, in these authors’ assessment, been largely motivated by adversity. The authors pass over it, but I’m guessing they mean the denial of Israel’s right to exist, the terrorism, constant threat of war, and the boycotting of Palestine’s Jews which hardly missed a beat in 1948 when it turned into a boycott of Israel.
They aren’t repeating Naomi Klein’s slanted and made-up doctrine that Israel manufactures adversity in order to profit from it; rather they are confirming the age-old proverb about necessity being the mother of invention.
How can this boycott, an act of aggression, change the international policy – or any policy for that matter – of a country so well equipped to thrive (economically) on adversity?
From an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg with one of the aforementioned authors:
“JG: Go to one final thing, something that struck me when I was reading this book. You have a boycott movement in Europe, but in the U.S., too, you have forces that want to delegitimize Israel. I realized in reading this that it would be quite something to go tell Intel or Google or IBM to divest from Israel.
DS: They’ll never do it. I mean, it’s impossible. What various companies told us is that if they had to shut down operations in India tomorrow, they could survive because it’s basically a lot of outsourcing and a lot of call centers. They said if we had to shut down our operations in Ireland, we could survive. But what one person after another told us is that the one place in the world that would devastating for them to have shut down would be Israel, because they put so much of their mission-critical work and R&D in Israel. The Intel story we tell is amazing, this key chip that was central to Intel taking off was designed and then manufactured in Israel, so it would be devastating to these companies to lose Israel. And one more thing — the most interesting data point on all of this is that European venture capitalists invest more in Israel than they do in any single European economy.
JG: Is that true?
DS: Yes and, to me, that says it all. For all the ranting from Europe about boycotts and attempts at boycotts, that’s not what European capital is doing. In terms of the U.S., this is even more true. I don’t want to oversimplify, but who do think is more important to Barack Obama: The head of J Street or Eric Schmidt at Google? And if Eric Schmidt said that his company would be devastated if Israel came off-line — and we interviewed Schmidt and he talked about the importance of Israel — then I think I know the answer.”
This boycott is blatantly destined to fail – not only in its stated aims of liberating the Palestinians, but in its unstated aims of crippling Israel and ending its existence. So why would somebody persist in turning their back on ordinary Israelis, far from power, with produce to sell? The only plausible reason I can think of is visceral animosity towards Israel.
If you hate the world’s only Jewish state then you’ll get a certain amount of personal satisfaction out of boycotting and calling for boycott. But if you want a real result, have a read of the rest of the Atlantic piece linked above, which tells you all you need to know. Basically, you need to send your pennies to Ahmadinejad and get that Iranian nuke off the ground.
Or if this makes you pause, then how about sending some money to one of the many organisations in Israel trying to bring about an end to hostilities, hold their government to account and protect the rights of Palestinians and Israelis. Gisha, B’Tselem, Machsom Watch. Help OneVoice fund youth leaders in Palestine and Israel. Contact the International Labour Movement and find out how you can strengthen the agreement between Israeli and Palestinian trade union movements. Send some money to Shatil, which supports Israeli social change activists (they need it!) and teaches strategies to grow their networks and stop them burning out. Write to your elected representatives insisting that they maintain efforts to facilitate the parties to the conflict from their self-serving conflict management routine into sincere conflict resolution activity. Don’t allow the Israeli right to marshall existential fear into votes for themselves – reinforce Daniel Gavron’s sense of Israeli self-confidence and vision for peace
Just do something constructive, and relevant. Don’t boycott Israeli herb farmers and their labourers.
Meanwhile I suppose I’d better develop a taste for thyme.
“In an extraordinary series of blog postings, British trade unionists visiting Israel and Palestine have learned that Palestinian workers and their unions are not enthusiastic supporters of the campaign for boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) targetting Israel.
In fact, they were told bluntly that the BDS campaign is bad news for Palestinians.
USDAW National Executive member Mike Dixon wrote:
“There was a discussion about the boycott and it is clear that Palestinians don’t want it – all they want is equal pay and a living.”
The communications director for the Advance union added:
“Listening to people from both communities on the subject of the proposed international trade union boycott, it is evident that all parties oppose this action. In a meeting with the Jerusalem Municipality workers, one view from the Palestinian contingent was that a boycott would be more detrimental to the Arab workforce than any other. The reason for this was that in the event of economic sanctions, it would cause a detrimental impact on the employment levels of their community.”
The entire blog should be required reading for trade unionists in Britain and elsewhere.”
Read it all, and wonder why British boycotting union activists (because theirs is an activist-led boycott, not a membership-led one) are so incredibly attached to the boycott idea. However, since there is a groundswell of support for Palestinians, it would be good to have a better understanding of the kind of support Palestinian trade unionists hope for from their international community of advocates.
HT Ben
Does anybody else find it repellent that Conservative Party leader David Cameron will be using “Never again“, a distinctly anti-genocide reference, in his general election campaign and manifesto as a slogan against the European Union?
