Are Critical Voices Silenced?
Panel 2 Q&A
April 10, 2015
Moderator Askia Muhammad: That, again, was Dr. Jack
Shaheen, who provided us the Las Vegas review. Thank you. Time for
questions and we have many questions. Why don’t we start here, and
we’ll extend our time with Dr. Rothchild. Why don’t you do a couple
questions. Then Dr. Falk has many questions directed to him. I think
I have one question also for Dr. Shaheen. But we’ll start with Dr.
Alice Rothchild.
Alice Rothchild: I’m going to address a couple of
questions. I just want to say on the issue of the action…
Askia Muhammad: Let me interrupt. I’m sorry. I
apologize. I had a note; I left it. Please, be reminded that Jack
Shaheen will be signing his book after this panel at 11:45. That’s a
commercial from our sponsor. I’m sorry.
Alice Rothchild: That’s okay. And I’m signing my
book at 1:05, no commercial. I just wanted to add to that the action
film called “Dig,” which is filmed in East Jerusalem. There were
over 20 Palestinian civil society activist groups that protested the
filming of the film in East Jerusalem. What people don’t know is
that the Israeli government and Jerusalem municipality gave the film
people a $6.2 million grant to make that film. So this is also
Israeli propaganda—hasbara—stuff going on. But that wasn’t the
question.
So the first question is, "what is anti-Semitism," which is a fabulous
question, "and how does it relate to Zionism?" So let me give you the
two-minute answer to something that people write Ph.D. theses on.
The way I define anti-Semitism is hating Jews because they are Jews.
That’s the main reason to hate them or the organization they’re in
or whatever. How does Zionism mesh with being Jewish? If you look
historically at Zionism for a kabillion years, there was sort of a
religious Zionism, the Zionism of my Orthodox grandfather. It was a
messianic—who knows when the Messiah will come? And it was that kind
of religious mythical Zionism. It wasn’t actually meant that
something would actually happen in the near future.
And then in the late 1800s, with Herzl and the first Zionist
Congress, there was an increasing movement amongst Eastern European
intellectuals to respond to the horrific amount of Christian
anti-Semitism that occurred in Europe. And they, along with all
sorts of other groups, were having movements of nationalism, so it’s
in that context of nationalism, and also in the context of
colonialism, developed the idea that the Jews needed an actual place
to go to be safe. They were kind of vaguely helped by the British
Empire. They promised the same piece of land to the Arabs and the
Jews. And I think one of the things to remember is that Lord
Balfour, with the Balfour Declaration, had Christian Zionist
tendencies. So there were a lot of anti-Semitic reasons why colonial
powers wanted to get rid of their Jews and put them someplace else.
There was actually a tremendous debate within the Jewish
intellectual community. I put Martin Buber on one side and Herzl on
the other. Should there be an actual place? Should it be in Uganda?
Should be it Palestine? Should it be a binational state? Should it be
a Jewish-only state? I mean, this was a major, major debate. I think
it’s important to understand that. The people who wanted a
Jewish-only state won out, so the rest is history. At this point,
when I use the word Zionism, I’m referring to a political Zionism as
it is currently practiced. And the way I define it as currently
practiced is a belief that Jews, for either historical, Holocaust,
biblical, whatever reasons, deserve or must have a state that is for
Jews and that privileges Jewish people over everybody else. That is
what’s going on in Israel right now and in the occupied territories.
The reason that I think it is really important to separate Jews from
Zionists is that, first of all, many Jews are not Zionists. Zionism
is a political movement that I think in retrospect has had really
catastrophic implications, both to non-Jews and to Jews. I would
argue the political Zionism, as it is now practiced, is incredibly
dangerous to Jews. When I look at the state of Israel and I look at
the policies of the state of Israel, I can’t find anything Jewish
about it except singing "Hatikvah" in Hebrew. I mean, seriously. When
I’m at a checkpoint and there’s some 20-year-old pointing a big gun
at me and accusing all the civilian Palestinian women that I’m
surrounded by of something, this is not Jewish. This is not Jewish
values. It is not Jewish history. It’s just not related to any of my
understanding of what it means to be a Jew. So I put that under
Zionism and under political Zionism and under occupation and under
oppressing some other people because they’re not Jewish. Even in the
state of Israel, 20 percent of the citizens are Palestinians, and
they are second-class citizens. They get less of everything.
So for me, founding a state that by definition privileges Jews over
everybody else is doomed to chronic catastrophe and, ultimately, to
failure. And I think that’s very different than Jews as a religion
or an ethnicity or as a culture. So that’s why I keep those very,
very separate.
Prof. Richard Falk: I thank you for a series of
questions, which I cannot do justice to. But let me, at least,
address one that I think raises a very important question. The
question asked: "Israel has ignored with impunity numerous U.N.
resolutions. Why has there been no effort in the General Assembly to
decertify Israel from the U.N.?" In effect, there is no
constitutional veto in the General Assembly. The great majority of
governments in the world are highly critical of Israel. But what I
think one doesn’t understand, and I probably didn’t make clear
enough in my remarks, is that in addition to the constitutional veto
that exists within the U.N. Charter and the way in which the
structure of the U.N. is set up, there has emerged a geopolitical
veto which paralyzes the organization at the level of
implementation. The U.N. General Assembly can say what it wants. It
can declare things. It can propose fact-finding inquiries into the
attacks on Gaza of the sort the Goldstone Report did.
But it’s incapable of implementing the recommendations that follow
from those initiatives or of enforcing or achieving compliance with
its resolutions. That’s because the U.N. was created with the idea
that it is an instrument of statecraft, not an alternative to it.
The U.N. is very important symbolically and in waging this struggle
to control the heights of international law and morality, which
mobilize people. There wouldn’t be a BDS movement or an
anti-apartheid campaign if there hadn’t been a U.N. to create a
consensus that what Israel is doing and what South Africa was doing
were fundamental violations, not only of international law, but of
the most basic ideas of international morality, and constitute, in
effect, crimes against humanity.
The U.N. is important for mobilizing a moral consciousness around
the world. But it’s incapable, due to its structure and due to the
way in which world order is organized on a global basis, to create
the behavioral changes that that moral consciousness calls for. That
depends on civil society. There is growing realization, I think,
that governments are not going to solve this problem, and that the
U.N. cannot solve this problem. That it will depend on the
mobilization of people. That’s why, in my view, the growing global
solidarity movement and the organizations like Jewish Voice for
Peace and the BDS campaign are so important at this stage of the
struggle.
Alice Rothchild: I’m being asked, "what is the New
York Police Department doing in Israel? There are no blacks there to
kill, except Ethiopian Jews." First of all, that’s not quite correct.
There are Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who are black, who
are subjected to a horrific amount of racism, so there are blacks to
kill. But that’s not the answer.
The thing that you need to understand about Israeli PR
is that one of their biggest products is security. And that they
really know how to do crowd control. They’ve been occupying a whole
ton of people for decades now, so they have the expertise to do
crowd control and to fight terrorism. And when you sort of
investigate this a little bit, not only do they have the most
advanced weaponry—mostly from us—but they have developed a huge
system of collaborators and a malicious kind of security system to
keep a population under control. So what our American cities want to
do is to learn how to control us. They want to learn how to control
protest and crowds. They want to learn how to fight “terrorism,” as
it is getting more and more broadly defined. And Israel is supposed
to have the best product. So that’s what our policemen are doing in
Israel.
The other thing that is very, very worrisome, I think, is, for
instance, if you look at the wall between the U.S. and Mexico, that
is partly built by an Israeli company because they’re also really
good at building walls to keep people out or in or whatever they’re
doing. The thing that gets even more messy about this whole thing is
that our U.S. military now has all this excess equipment—now that
we’re not actively killing a whole bunch of people. We’re just kind
of doing it more slowly. So the military is now giving our police
departments tanks and, you know, things you might need to do if
you’re doing traffic in Idaho or something. So we have a police that
are weaponized by our excess military equipment that are trained in
Israel. That means that we are all at risk. I always like to remind
people that this is not some little conflict off in some crazy
country. This is going to come to bite us. The reason that we have
our Fergusons and all the black men that are just assassinated,
shoot-to-kill, is for a reason. And these are the kind of forces
that go into making that true in our society.
Moderator Askia Muhammad: Red lights are flashing. Tones are beeping. It is time for us to take a break. As much as we might want to hear more, it is time for us to take a break. I think we should stick with our discipline and carry on as the previous panel did and not be a bad example for those who have yet to speak. So, please, take a break. Dr. Falk will be signing books in 10 minutes. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad you’re here.
[End of transcript]
