Is it antisemitic to criticise Zionism? This was the motion up for debate at the Munk Debate, held in honour of industrialist and free speech advocate Peter Munk. Journalist Douglas Murray supported the motion at the debate in Toronto on June 17 while news anchor-writer Mehdi Hasan opposed it. The motion was resolved with the conclusion that anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.
India has no history of antisemitism. So why have meetings about Palestine been banned and demonstrations by students protesting against the genocide being committed in Gaza been stopped?
The unwritten reason is that for a Hindutva government, the Palestinian cause is identified with Islam, the religion of a majority of the Palestinians.
But debates about religion eclipse the central fact that the real issue is land: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
This occupation was “founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation and manipulation”, writes political scientist-activist Norman Finkelstein in his 2018 book, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom.
It is for this reason that India, in the first years after independence from British colonialism, forbade citizens from visiting Israel and South Africa as a gesture of solidarity with the people of Palestine and South Africa fighting against apartheid.
It is also the reason why many have refused to condemn the militant group Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year that killed at least 1,200 people. This is despite the fact that they neither support Hamas’s ideology nor do they condone the attack on civilians.
As scholar Edward Said wrote in Covering Islam, the Western media and experts have been guilty of “exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility” towards Muslims in general and Arabs in particular.
Scholar Jack G Shaheen’s analysis of 1,000 Hollywood movies similarly found “cinema’s systematic, pervasive and unapologetic degradation and dehumanization” of Arab men, women and children. In his 2009 book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, Shaheen wrote that Arabs have been depicted as “brute murderers, sleazy rapists, religious fanatics, oil rich dimwits and abusers of women”.
This outlook is evident in the refusal of Western countries and the English media to use the term “genocide” to refer to the mass violation of human rights in Gaza. Increasingly, the human rights discourse has been used by the West to justify the Israeli occupation and freedom of speech has been weaponised to vilify Arabs.
Anyone who has seen the bombing of hospitals, the testimonies of doctors who have worked in hospitals there, the images of children buried under rubble and the relentless bombing of infrastructure would be hard put to deny that Israel is not committing war crimes that amount to genocide.
It is the human rights community that has played a vital role in documenting these crimes against humanity and even if many of these reports lie buried, they are a record of Israel’s violations.
More recently, Amnesty International documented how Israeli forces have carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
“Israeli forces have caused unprecedented destruction, at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, leveling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites, rendering large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable,” says the report released on December 4.
There is no telling what the impact of the Amnesty International report will be. There will certainly be an effort to undermine its influence.
Long before Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel had been condemned for crimes amounting to genocide in a 2009 United Nations Fact Finding report by Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and a Jew from a family that supported Zionism.
The United Nations appointed the committee after the three-week long “Operation Cast Lead”, as Israel called it, during which 1,400 Palestinians were killed between December 2008 and January 2009.
Goldstone’s report found that the operation was anchored in a military doctrine aimed at disproportionate destruction and disruption in the lives of as many people “as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals”. The goal was to clear: “dire consequences for the non-combatants in Gaza”. The report added that this policy was rooted in the humiliation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian population.
The report also commended the resilience and dignity of the residents of Gaza and recommended that the Security Council “refer the situation in Gaza to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court”.
Israel’s reaction was predictable, dismissing the report and condemning Goldstone, who was accused of being an antisemite and a traitor to the Jewish people. The vilification and defamation of Goldstone even led to the US House of Representatives voting 344 to 36 in condemning the report as “irremediably biased and unworthy”.
Finkelstein wrote that Goldstone’s report was significant in heralding the dawn of the new era in which the “human rights dimension of the Israel-Palestine conflict moved centre stage – and even temporarily – displacing the fatuous ‘peace process’”. The report also coincided with a vicious campaign in Israel and the United States to discredit human rights organisations.
Under the mounting pressure Goldstone recanted. But he did not recant from the main charge that Israel deliberately deployed “disproportionate and indiscriminate force in order to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”. How could he when Israeli soldiers and writers had boasted that the Israeli Defense Forces had unleashed “insane” amounts of firepower.
An indiscriminate and disproportionate attack on civilian areas is itself a war crime. Two decades since Goldstone’s report, human rights activists and organisations have continued their work of documenting Israel’s war crimes, providing activists, students and journalists with material evidence with which to expose Israel’s genocidal acts.
It is also the human rights discourse that gives space to students to protest on campuses and the right to free speech to journalists such as Mehdi Hasan, comedian Bassem Youseff or intellectual-activist Finkelstein to publish his books on Israel’s war crimes. Youseff’s interview with English broadcaster Piers Morgan, in which the comedian highlighted the racism of the Western media, got millions of viewers from around the world.
When we listen to debates, read books on genocide and war crimes or take part in protests on political issues, it is the efforts of human rights activists and organisations that keep us informed of events on the ground, often at risk to their own lives.
The human rights discourse has indeed been weaponised and even used to justify wars. But the human rights discourse has also been used to expose war crimes. That is why it is important to remember the human rights community of activists and to pay tribute to their work this Human Rights Day.
Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer and award-winning author.
December 10 is Human Rights Day.
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