The new McCarthyism sweeping Israel

[Violet_Crumble]

To disagree with the state is to 'delegitimise' the state: that is the increasingly strident response of the country's political and military establishment to those who dare to criticise its conduct

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

It's hard, sitting on the other side of the office table from which Naomi Chazan is picking at her modest hummus and salad snack lunch, to believe that the amiable 63-year-old university professor with a self-deprecating sense of humour has suddenly become the most discussed, not to say demonised, woman in Israel.


Ms Chazan is president of a long-established agency with large numbers of Jewish donors in the US and Britain, which is committed to fighting for "social justice and equality for all Israelis". The New Israel Fund has over the last 30 years disbursed some $200m to around 800 charitable, social and human rights groups, and justly claims much of the credit for building modern Israel's still vibrant civil society.

But in the last fortnight the former Knesset member who by her own account loves her native Israel "without reservation" has been sacked as a columnist on the Jerusalem Post after 14 years, had rowdy demonstrators outside her house brandishing a chilling caricature of her with a horn obtruding from her forehead, and most far-fetched of all, been accused, in a newspaper article circulated to foreign journalists by the Government Press Office, of "serving the agenda of Iran and Hamas".

The onslaught has prompted Nicholas Saphir, the Jewish businessman who runs the New Israel Fund in the UK, to warn that the "Jewish values of social justice and our duty to tikkun olam (repairing the world) have come under serious threat in the state of Israel".

The row has come to symbolise a new mood of establishment intolerance in Israel towards criticisms by Israeli human rights groups of such episodes as last year's military operation in Gaza. This harsh new mood has been fuelled by ministers, right-wing politicians and military figures who have closed ranks behind accusations that the UN-commissioned report into the war, led by Richard Goldstone, which accused both sides of war crimes, is being used to "delegitimise Israel".

The NIF's travails began when a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu provoked accusations of latterday McCarthyism by charging that "without the NIF there could be no Goldstone report and Israel would not be facing international accusations of war crimes". It is a charge which Abe Foxman, director of the US-based Anti- Defamation League and no great friend of the Israeli left, told New York Jewish Week was "absurd".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-new-mccarthyism-sweeping-israel-1898156.html

[aquart]

1. How can you commit a war crime if you're not a nation?

Sigh. By having George Bush open his big fat mouth and declare a crime to be a war crime conveniently starting a war.

But normally you have to be a nation so the 'delegitimizing' is silly.

[Violet_Crumble]

2. Do you have anything to say about the article that was posted?

Sigh. Because yr going to have to explain what you said had to do with the article. Did you even read it?

[TomClash]

3. Israelis . . .

Welcome to political life in the USA.

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. The extremist right wing in Israel is simply using the Karl Rove playbook

Divide, lie, inject fear, rinse and repeat.

[bemildred]

5. It's not the "critics" that are "delegitimizing Israel".

It's the fundy nuts and right-wing extremists and other ideological tools, and the actions of factions in the Israeli government.

[Scurrilous]

6. U.S. Non-Profit Targeted Rights Group over Goldstone

<snip>

"A campaign of attacks against the New Israel Fund (NIF), a U.S.-based progressive organisation that supports human rights groups in Israel, has gained attention in both the Israeli and U.S. media, raising questions about the role played by foreign non-profits and non-governmental organisations in influencing Israeli government policy.

But an IPS investigation into publicly available tax records has shed light on where funding for the attacks may have originated.

A group called Im Tirzu spearheaded the attacks, which claim that the NIF funded various groups' support of and participation in the Goldstone report. They allege it was part of a campaign by the NIF to delegitimise Israel.

The Goldstone report, formally known as the "Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict", found that both Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) committed war crimes during the Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 18, 2009 Gaza War. The report was released last fall.

The campaign ran a one-page advertisement in the Jerusalem Post depicting NIF's president, Professor Naomi Chazan, wearing a demonic horn. Chazan was fired from her biweekly column at the Jerusalem Post after threatening legal action over the advertisement.

"It's baseless. It's vicious. It's ideologically motivated and it capitalises on the Israeli public's anger over the Goldstone report. We see it as part of a larger pattern to shut down Israel's human rights community," Naomi Paiss, director of communications of NIF, told IPS.

Israeli Knesset member Otniel Schneller proposed a parliamentary commission to examine the NIF and its grantees' role in "transferring false, exaggerated, and non-credible information to Justice Goldstone, thus harming the national interest of the State of Israel."

The commission does not appear to be moving forward for now but a parliamentary sub-commission has already been formed to examine the foreign funding of Israeli organisations.

Im Tirzu, which describes itself as "an extra-parliamentary movement to strengthen Zionist values", requests that supporters send contributions to the Central Fund of Israel (CFI), a non-profit which funds a number of right-wing Israeli groups.

These include Amitz, which funds settler militias; Magen Yehuda, which assists with military training for settlers; and Women in Green, a right-wing group which opposes the return of land captured during the Six Day War of 1967 and promotes the "transfer" of Arabs to neighbouring countries.

As reported by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz, the CFI supports a yeshiva whose leader, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, has tried to justify the killing of gentile babies because of "the future danger that will arise if they are allowed to grow into evil people like their parents."

"What we're seeing in Israel is a greater official intolerance of dissent," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "One of Israel's outstanding strengths has been its vibrant civil society and its flourishing public debate, so these developments are particularly worrying."

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