Harry's Place

I would guess that at least a quarter of the fanatical, so-called pro-Palestinians are rabid anti-semites. Its just a cover. For instance, there’s this weirdo on the Independent Comment blogs who calls himself Errol Flynn, and has two main pre-occupation concerning world affairs. 1) Pro-Palestinain. 2) Apologist for Hitler.

Can anyone join the dots?

By the way. Calling this twisted malaise “fanaticism” is too kind. These are facists plain and simple.

British supporters of boycotting Israel are cunts.

The Palestinians’ problem is with Israel. The Westerners’ problem is with the Global Capitalist Hegemon, for which Israel serves as a vulnerable and convenient proxy.

I would endorse Minoan’s view entirely, except to guess the proportion is considerably more than a quarter.

What do you think of the PGFTU position, Modernity?

British supporters of boycotting Israel are cunts.

Don’t hold back, mate.

Most of the people I speak to who have strong anti-Israel feelings are ill-informed in proportion to the passion with which they identify with the cause. It is akin to racism because it assumes a stereotypical view of the situation that lacks nuance. This equation of ignorance and vehemence is recognised by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in their policy of shutting down dialogue. For example, a health food shop near where I live decided to “boycott Israel”. Initially they received a lot of communication from people seeking to dissuade them. Detecting a wobble in their position, the PSC activists who had got them to do the boycott then advised (or instructed) them to stop communicating with the opponents, on the basis that they were zionists so anything they said was invalid. This is a small example of the PSC recognising that support for its cause is based on ignorance. The “international socialist” use of anti-Israel is, if anything, even more cynical.

You’ve selected a somewhat misleading chunk of the report which the Engage site carries, but which is actually taken from the Jewish Chronicle.

It’s grossly misleading, because there was no official representative of the PGFTU at the meeting referred to, and the supposed position of calling only for the boycott of Israeli organizations and businesses associated with the occupied territories, settlements etc. The Palestinian who is supposed to have said that this is what Palestinians actually want is referred to as a legal adviser to the PGTFU, speaking to a Jewish Chronicle reporter, if that bit of report is reliable. He is not a representative or a spokesman, so his statements can’t really be taken as more than an expression of his own position. It’s rather like quoting Antony Julius as a representative of Princess Diana because he acted as an a legal adviser for her.

The call for the complete boycott of all things Israeli is promoted by its British and international supporters on the grounds that it is a call issued by what they call “Palestinian Civil Society”. What this amounts to is a large number of individual union, ngo and local cultural and community organizations, all of which have somehow managed to come up with identically worded resolutions. They are all Fatah organizations. The whole mode of action is derived from Stalinist “popular front” tactics. No Hamas controlled organization is a signatory.

The whole pro-boycott movement is a symptom of Fatah style totalitarianism.
The fact that this, that or the other individual can turn up at a fringe political meeting in the UK and make emollient statements is of no significance whatsoever, so I think that any excited HP and Engage supporters and JC readers should sit down in a quiet room and calm down about this development.

Here are some of the key bits your post left out from the original report:

From The Jewish Chronicle
Anshel Pfeffer
September 10, 2008
The Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) does not support a general boycott on trade and investment with Israel.

This position emerged at the annual TUC Congress in Brighton this week, where a heated debate took place over the question of whether Palestinian workers are in favour of the boycott.

At a fringe event on Tuesday, organised by the Trade Union Friends of Israel (Tufi), attended by Ambassador Ron Prosor and Avital Shapira-Shvirow, head of international relations at the Histadrut, it was claimed the Palestinian trade unions “are against the boycott of Israel as it harms first of all Palestinian workers.” Boycott supporters who attended the event claimed the opposite.

Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University, a key supporter of the boycott at the University and College Union, insisted: “It is our Palestinian colleagues who have called for the boycott, and the PGFTU have signed the petitions.”

No representative of the PGFTU was present at the event, but Fathi Nasser, legal adviser of the PGFTU and the main speaker at a Palestinian Solidarity Campaign fringe meeting, later told the JC that his organisation was not in favour of a general boycott: “We think there should be boycotts only of companies directly involved in building settlements and the apartheid wall.”

And of course Hamas has perfected the tactic of making appropriately emollient statements for the benefit of gullible western audiences whilst saying (and acting out) very different things for their home audience.

Judy, you are right that the PGFTU is not unambiguous. But there was also last month’s agreement between the PGFTU and Histadrut calling for “fraternity and coexistence between the two peoples”. Impossible in the circumstances of a total material and social boycott.

I would say that the signs point to PGFTU disaffection with the idea of a general boycott – they want to target the occupation.

What is it about Western pro-boycotters that makes them so fanatical ?
That certain political outlook, mainly left leaning, that sees the political problems in Western Asia as worthy of attention disproportionate to what it would merit in the global scheme of things. Many of these bring to the ‘party’ some combination of thinly veiled Jew hating, bend over backwards, self hating, knee-jerk sympathy white guilt, and the authoritarian sympathies of many on the left…elucidated by Orwell yonks ago, and more recently by former a goodly few former British lefties ….the likes of Oliver Kam, Nick Cohen, Chris Hithchens and David Aronovitch.

FFS – Israel is a tiny nation the size of Wales, with only 7 million people and no natural resources, it’s the only state in Western Asia and North Africa approaching liberal democracy and with western enlightenment values. It beats ALL other middle East countries on pretty much all social and economic indicators, and is on its own, orders of magnitude ahead of ALL Islamic nations in the World on intellectual, technological and scientific development. There are 15 million Jews in the World, 1.2 billion Muslims….Jews have been forced to flee great chunks of the middle east, some to Israel. In the mid 40s there were more Jews in Baghdad than in Jerusalem.

The reason for the massively disproportionate obsession with Israel all springs directly from the almost universal obsessive Muslim hatred of Jews…mandated by the Islamic religion. This has poisoned the well. I for one refuse to indulge in this this obsession, this hatred.

What would Blighty do if the a bunch of errant Frogs were firing rockets over the channel at regular intervals. I wonder…..NOT!

Mod, good question. I don’t know the answer. Nick (South Africa), I think boycotters are a more diverse movement than you suggest. They include simple pro-Palestinian activists, anti-imperialists seeking atonement, revolutionaries seeking instability, Jewish anti-Israel activists seeking relief from something I don’t quite understand, Israel negationists, pan-Arabists, Arab fetishists, anti-nationalists, antisemites, Holocaust deniers, and conspiracy theorists.

So, if there is a decisive enough new PGFTU direction (and it must be very sensitive territory for the PGFTU) I think there will be different responses to it.

Some boycotters will quietly change tack to the new PGFTU line (such as emerges…), and start hunting out occupation products and services to boycott – some of the academic ones will carry on trying to convince us that every aspect of Israeli academia is implicated in the occupation.

Others will relinquish all pretence of responding to a call and condemn the PGFTU as having been nobbled by the Zionists, or crushed by the US imperialism, or requiring excommunication from the global workers’ movement for their pusillanimity. Hamas, Hesbollah and Hizb-ut-Tahrir will be pleased.

Presumbably others will recognise that there will be no mass international movement for them to be in the vanguard of, and quietly subside until some new opportunity comes up. Maybe these people will be the majority – I hope so.

Actually, I don’t think it’s so surprising (or at least, if it is, is shouldn’t be).

Both sides of the conflicte are ’supported’ by people who live elsewhere and who adopt more hardline positions than many who live with the problem day to day.

As Dershowitz says, when the supporters of Israel stop trying to be more Israeli than the Israelis and the supportes of the Palestinians stope trying to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians, there might be a better prospect for peace.

I know a few pro boycott/Israel hating people and they are without exception in nearly every respect good, kind and generous people, they are also I am afraid anti semetic in the ‘traditional’ worldwide jewish conspiacy sense. The really worrying thing to me is that they feel free to express such views and see no contradiction between them and the rest of their suposedely ‘progressive’ politics.

JR, is that the Harvest shops?

Why do British supporters of boycotting Israel seem more extreme and intransigent than the Palestinians ?

Because it is a displacement activity. Most people on the British “left” who adopt this position are middle-class Leninists or if not full-blown Leninists then have been influenced by Lenin’s theory of Imperialism. They have little or no connection to the British working-classes who they actually despise as not willing to listen to the vanguard. Having lost any reason at all for their existence as supposed socialists it was necessary to find another people who validated the claim to be progressive – step forward the Palestinians.

Alas every now and again the British middle-class “leftists” actually awaken to the total absurdity of the situation which they have created for themselves, if in company then the only reaction to this
alarming realisation is for them to try and outdo their friends in ludicrous emotive statements about the middle-east (although we know that it isn’t the middle-east they are talking about at all but an orientalist fantasy of their own construction.) Like Scheherazade, if they don’t keep telling the story they are fucked.

Alec Macpherson, yes.

To me it’s a mixture of what Graham and Nick in S.A. said.

None of the Israel haters make any sense, and none seem even remotely interested in basic facts.

You could write volumes on the subject, actually.

Let’s just call it “The Syndrome”.

Judy,

you’re absolutely correct, I should have credited the JC, however, I disagree with you about the Palestinians’ views, I think there is a great deal more nuance to their positions than we often give them credit for, and many of them live in terrible conditions which is a breeding ground for violence, but that is not true for their “academic” supporters, what drives them? that’s my question

It seems to me when the Israelis and Palestinians finally make peace that the first people to criticise them will be the likes of BRICUP.

“Any racist or offensive comments aimed at Palestinians will be deleted, and are off topic, so think about the issue and moderate your language before you post.”

Speaking of “off topic” comments…

It could be anti-semitism.

“British supporters of boycotting Israel are cunts”

Indeed. Whatever that mealy-mouthed appeaser Benjamin says.

“I would guess that at least a quarter of the fanatical, so-called pro-Palestinians are rabid anti-semites”

I would have said rather more than that.

“I know a few pro boycott/Israel hating people and they are without exception in nearly every respect good, kind and generous people”

Oh, yes, ‘good’, ‘kind’, ‘generous’ antisemites. There were plenty of such people in the Third Reich.

Modernity, it is of course true that in any movement, individual supporters actually hold a range of positions. However, the boycott is and continues to be a rock solid position of the Fatah movement, and it is the sort of movement where individual views are of little consequence–as they are even in present day Putinesque Russia–they have grown from similar roots.

What is undoubtedly the case is that both Fatah and Hamas often have people and sometimes senior figures putting out statements for the west that are intended to beguile gullible western liberals into seeing them as on their way to adopting western perspectives. Even the appalling Tamimi has done this for Hamas in the past when he has claimed that they were going to ditch their founding charter. Strangely, that still somehow hasn’t happened.

Remember also that Abu Mazen has repeatedly and recently said (1) That Fatah will never recognise the state of Israel as a Jewish state and that (2) the Palestinian definition of their Right of Return to Israel is a non-negotiable position. These are hardly positions which accord with a campaign focused solely on getting an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Finally, you produce supposed poverty/misery/dreadful conditions as a rationale for Palestinian hard line policies. This is at variance with the evidence. Both in Hamas and Fatah, some of the most extreme and bitter rhetoric (and terrorist organization) comes from the mouths of men with sophisticated professional and cultural histories–many of them are paediatricians, surgeons and the like. As they are at the top of Al Qaeda. But it is also the case that Palestinian propagandists living comfortably in western liberal democracies or the more comfortable western-oriented emirates and sheikhdoms are often the most extreme and absolutist of all. Edward W Said, for example, was a rejectionist of the Oslo accords long before the Israeli hard right took up rejectionism of Oslo.

Judy,

please, please, I expressly wrote:

“Notice: this thread is not about bashing Palestinians rather how some Western “academics” use the Palestinians cause to attack Israel.”

you wrote:

“Finally, you produce supposed poverty/misery/dreadful conditions as a rationale for Palestinian hard line policies.

I didn’t, you misread me, but I’ll leave it at that.

“What is it about Western pro-boycotters that makes them so fanatical ?”

Perhaps some of the pro-boycotters have motivations which are a little closer to home? Like creating a negative atmosphere for British Jews, and other pro-Israel people in our colleges ?

Mod, did you not say this in response to my first comment?

however, I disagree with you about the Palestinians’ views, I think there is a great deal more nuance to their positions than we often give them credit for, and many of them live in terrible conditions which is a breeding ground for violence, but that is not true for their “academic” supporters, what drives them? that’s my question

[sigh] Judy, I answered as I did, initially, because I felt you deserved a fuller response, I could have equally ignored your off-topic comments, next time maybe that’s what I’ll do :)

but let’s not bicker, please, and back to the topic of pro-boycott academics

“I know a few pro boycott/Israel hating people and they are without exception in nearly every respect good, kind and generous people”

Oh, yes, ‘good’, ‘kind’, ‘generous’ antisemites. There were plenty of such people in the Third Reich.”

That is of course precisely the point, if they were all shaven headed twats with ‘nosy cunt’ tatooed on their foreheads, there would not be anything for us to worry about; proletarian scum, we can ignore them can’t we?

“proletarian scum, we can ignore them can’t we?”

Not sure whether you are suggesting that this was what I implied. It wasn’t what I meant, in any event.
I detest proletarian scum just as much as I detest ‘nice middle-class’ scum, no more nor less, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore either kind.

The anti-Israel cowd hate Israel far more than they care about the Palestinians. And, if the Palestinians’ adversary was, say, Saudi Arabia and not Israel, no one would care about the Palestinans at all. Just like no one cares about African human rights when all the parties involved are black. The anti-apartheid struggle was far more invigorating.

modernity – you pose a very interesting question, and I would have loved to join the debate earlier. I would suggest that one answer to your question has to do with the media coverage of the I/P conflict (and some of the relevant issues were raised on another current thread here, i.e. the one on the Seth Freedman affair); the problem is perhaps also particularly relevant WRT the blogosphere and sites like Cif: while professional journalism requires that subjects are covered with at least some reference to the relevant context, the blogospere offers ample opportunities to satisfy the all too human desire to get a simplistic black and white picture that invites emotional identification (us vs. them) — oh, those poor Palestinians vs. those dreadful, dreadful Zionist occupiers who wantonly oppress the poor Palestinians.

Take e.g. a recent Cif-piece by a guy (Leech) who, according to his profile, is an expert on Palestinian factionalism. He wrote a piece about a Palestinian student who was arrested by the IDF half a year ago, and has since been charged with throwing stones ages ago – obviously not a very convincing charge. Leech tells the guy’s story, i.e. how terrible it all is, and that there are many detainees like him, without even hinting once that the guy was arrested in the run-up to the student council elections that were surrounded by bitter infighting between Hamas- and Fatah-affiliated groups. The fact of the matter is that in the past few months, there was a big effort to crack down on Hamas in the Westbank – and guess what: on this issue, Israel and the PA have managed to find quite a bit of common ground…
To be sure, it doesn’t make the fate of the individual detainees any better if they were arrested because it suited not just the Israeli authorities, but also the PA. However, what makes the case so terrible for the Cif-audience is not that some guy is being detained on what looks like trumped-up charges, but that he appears to be the victim of a cruel militaristic disaster-capitalist occupying power etc.

Consider in this context e.g. the almost non-existent Western media coverage of the recent Hamas assault on the Hilles clan in Gaza: at least 10 dead, the clan’s neighborhood severely damaged by Hamas bombardment, and some 200 “refugees”, including wounded, who fled to Israel (which tried to convince Abbas to grant them political asylum on the Westbank, but he wasn’t really eager to do so).
Now imagine the uproar in the media if Israel had wrought the same death and destruction…
The first version that really happened doesn’t have much potential to identify emotionally: a political group with an extremist Islamic agenda vs. a clan that runs its affairs Mafia-style – whose side to choose?
But if the same death and destruction had been caused by Israel, it would be perceived as a very different story, because it would allow the us-vs.-them identification.

So all the factors that have been mentioned here in the various comments, i.e. antisemitic sentiments, leftist obsessions etc. do play a role, but there is also, on a very fundamental level, the us-vs.-them impulse that is so easy to feed in cyberspace, where you can get all your news from a Favorites folder that makes it simple to build a well-isolated echo chamber.

“Why do British supporters of boycotting Israel seem more extreme and intransigent than the Palestinians ?”

-maybe too many of them are sourcing their info from Mr Duke?

Excellent, Petra.

“Why do British supporters of boycotting Israel seem more extreme and intransigent than the Palestinians ?”

You mean “the Palestinians” who disagree with the general boycott, which isn’t all of them. Anyway, its a rhetorical question – there is no answer. I’d be quite interested if anyone wants to answer Benji’s question above – what do we think about the PGFTU proposal of a targeted, rather than general boycott. I think it could be workable.

thanks everyone for your comments (I think Graham and Petra’s points deserve more consideration) and if someone is willing to help TheIrie with basic reading and comprehension skills, I’d appreciate it :)

I try not to comment on each and every misguided comment, since life is short (and way too pleasant to be spent in front of a laptop). Moreover, I’ve noted this thread as it is slowly on its way toward extinction. Yet, on the off-chance that somebody is reading this, let me debunk the fanciful version of reality of Judy because it is likely to mislead the unwary and those who don’t really know the situation.

The Palestinian “civil society” grouplets calling for boycotts are mostly not Fatah and have nothing to do with Fatah (which itself is a very heterogeneous mix-and-match of groupings). They are Palestinian self-described “leftists”, mostly associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a large collection of small grouplets with fewer members than the number of capital letters in their acronyms. In the Palestinian scheme of things they are either insignificant or, in the case of PFLF, marginal, but they have a number of advantages for ignorant supporters in the West: they speak the right language, press the right emotional buttons and provide a perfect alibi to support an extreme right-wing programme of Hamas under a faux left-wing pretense.

Judy should admit to an agenda. She doesn’t want a two-state solution based on an agreement between Israel and PA (which means PLO, which means al-Fatah). This is her right (she is in this in agreement with Sue Blackwell and with Hamas, but again this is her right). To this end she needs to smear the Fatah (which has enough faults – a good smear must contain some truth). This is familiar, since UCU boycotters are equally eager to smear Israeli moderates (who have enough faults – a good smear must contain some truth), and for an identical reason.

s.o.muffin–good job, much needed