Column Left: Ralph Seliger on "Anti-War or Anti-Israel?"

ISRAEL HORIZONS Winter 2006 

COLUMN LEFT: ANTI-WAR OR ANTI-ISRAEL?

On Sept. 14, together with fellow Meretz USA officer, Arieh Lebowitz, and another friend, I saw the George Galloway debate with Christopher Hitchens at New York's Baruch College Mason Auditorium. (It turns out that the auditorium is named for Arieh's uncle, his mother's brother.)  Meretz USA's program director, Miriam Felton-Dansky, was also in the audience and I met two pleasant young staffers for the ADL; one, Ben Cohen, was deeply engaged in heckling on the Hitchens side.  Cohen is British, so he really got into the spirit.

The program was entertaining in an irritating sort of way, more of a circus than anything else.  Hitchens chided Galloway's backers for their "zoo noises," but his supporters seemed just as loud. The audience was closely divided.

Hitchens is an ex-pat Brit who has made a career as a high-toned intellectual journalist, a writer of books ranging recently from George Orwell to Thomas Jefferson, and a left-wing polemicist. He recently broke with former comrades on the left to embrace US and Western interventions against heinously murderous dictatorial regimes, such as those of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. George Galloway is a leftist Member of Parliament, who was expelled from the Labor party for the vehemence of his opposition to Tony Blair over the Iraq invasion two years ago, and especially for words that may have invited violent attacks on British forces.

Personally, I'm pleased that Hitchens has broken with the most egregious elements of the isolationist and anti-American left, especially to defend the rights and lives of the mostly Muslim victims of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I respect his stand regarding Iraq, but believe that he goes too far in acting as an apologist for reckless and flawed foreign policy decisions by the Bush administration. But to me Iraq was, at its worst, a blunder; more precisely, the invasion was a mistake because it failed to persuade a wide international consensus for intervention. It was certainly not a moral shortcoming to overthrow the particularly odious regime of Saddam, but it has been badly handled politically, and badly executed on the ground – allowing an initial period of chaos to descend into a full-blown insurgency spearheaded by Saddamist hardliners and Al-Qaeda-inspired Jihadis.

Hitchens makes no apologies for his enthusiastic support for the intervention, despite its bloody downturn amidst a series of bad or questionable policies. Galloway, on the other hand, makes no apologies for the terrorists who lead the insurgency. He calls them the "resistance" and makes no bones about supporting them without reservation. And Galloway backs up his fierce attacks on the Bush and Blair alliance with glib but factually wrong claims.

One such claim is that the United States was Saddam's closest "ally" during the 1980s when, according to Galloway, Saddam committed his worst crimes. He even alleges that the US encouraged Iraq to attack Iran in 1981, without real evidence. Instead, he trots out the photographs of Don Rumsfeld visiting Saddam during those years as an envoy for the Reagan administration.

In point of fact, our "alliance" with Saddam was tense and tenuous in the 1980s. It was clearly a matter of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." A US vessel was even attacked in the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces during this period. In contrast to Galloway's contention, Saddam's bloodiest crimes against his own people were not only committed in the '80s, but continued into the '90s in the wake of the first Iraq war – when Kurdish and Shiite rebels and their communities were massively murdered and oppressed (with over 100,000 slaughtered) and during the time of the UN trade sanctions and the reign of the "oil for food" program, when Iraqis died in even larger numbers from starvation and disease because Saddam allegedly bribed and robbed the UN to finance his network of presidential palaces and buy the loyalty of his vast security/military apparatus. And Galloway has been accused of profitting financially from the political support he's unabashedly given Saddam by illegally benefitting from the corruption associated with "oil for food." 

Galloway comes off as a demagogue who declares solidarity with the Iraqi people while siding with "resistance" forces who murder them in the thousands. Unfortunately, Hitchens comes off as arrogantly defending US policies when he should be a nuanced liberal critic. Galloway cleverly began by praising Hitchens for his past outspoken support for the Palestinian cause and quoted him skewering Charlton Heston in a 1990 debate on the first Iraq war. Hitchens defended his right to change his mind about warring against Saddam Hussein, explaining that he did so after visiting Iraqi Kurdistan and feeling solidarity with the long-oppressed Kurdish people. In this debate, Hitchens said nothing memorable regarding Israel and Palestine; perhaps this was a tactical consideration, since most of his cheering section was pro-Israel (Galloway gleefully knocked him for this).

For Zionists, Galloway is especially problematic. Of course he puts Israel and the US in the same boat, and views Bush and Sharon both as "criminals."  As progressives, we might also see some of Bush and Sharon's actions as "criminal," but against the context of terrorists who absolutely are criminals – and are supported by Galloway and his ilk – how do you trust such labels? To people like Galloway, does Israel have any right to security? Probably not.

Galloway explicitly believes that the terrorists struck us on 9/11 because of US Mideast policies, prominently including US support for Israel; what kind of support, exactly – for Israel's mere existence, or for a right-wing agenda that we might also oppose? Galloway doesn't say.  What he does say is, "We have to stop support for Sharon's Israel, its apartheid wall.... Reverse your policy toward Israel and Palestine... and our world will all be safer." To me as a Jew, this simplistic stridency sounds like a threat.             

                                  A Zionist-free Anti-war Movement

On Sept. 24, the very day that Israel's Zionist peace camp coordinated a rally in Jerusalem with a Palestinian peace rally in Ramallah, what passes for an anti-war movement in this country staged its large demonstration in Washington, DC, along with some major events on the West Coast. The two major speakers for 20,000 gathered in Ramallah and Jerusalem were Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Meretz party leader and Geneva Accord initiator Yossi Beilin. The American events made no notice of, let alone an expression of solidarity with, the activities in Israel and Palestine.

According to the account by Daniel Levy of the Israeli "Geneva" organization (visit the Geneva-Accord.org Web site):

"President Abbas spoke about the shared mission of the peace groups in Palestine and Israel, and the need to work together to secure a negotiated peace.  He called for immediate resumption of negotiations for a two-state solution and an end of unilateralism, strongly condemning the armed chaos.  'We must stop all parades with weapons and should ban the use of guns by civilians', he said....  Prominent [Palestinian] cabinet and parliament members, Muslim and Christian religious leaders and political figures were in attendance.

"Yossi Beilin led the rally in Jerusalem with a call not to allow radicals on both sides to set the agenda.  Condemning that day's Qassam rocket attacks in Southern Israel, he noted the flawed approach of unilateralism and the need to create 'a coalition of sanity' of the majority of both peoples....  Former IDF Gaza commander and Israeli negotiator Shaul Arieli described how the Israeli interest was best secured by negotiations and finality as opposed to gradualism.  'An Israel making peace is a stronger, not weaker Israel', he said.  Other speakers included MK Issam Makhoul and representatives of Peace Now and student coalitions.  Palestinian Peace Coalition director Elias Zananiri and activist Terri Bulatta made their way from Ramallah to Jerusalem, addressing the Israeli crowds and receiving a rousing reception."

Back in the US, Rabbi Arthur Waskow very properly indicated his surprise and disappointment that United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) had reversed its previously stated policy against jointly sponsoring the Washington rally with the extremist ANSWER organization. I salute Waskow for rallying a Jewish pro-two-states presence in Washington, in distinction to the vehemently anti-Israel participants who dominated the official anti-war events.

[In December, the UFPJ announced its disappointment with ANSWER's manipulative tactics and renounced this partnership; but the UFPJ still links together the following: "the connections between the Iraq war and Washington's overall empire building, the US support of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, racism, repression and injustice at home...." With typical rhetorical overkill, the UFPJ implicates Israel, Zionists and Jews for the war, and in so doing, invites anti-Semitism.] 

Also on that day, Sept. 24, I coincidentally met US Congressional Representative Jerrold Nadler, on a street in his district, which runs narrowly down the West Side of Manhattan (including the World Trade Center site) into Brooklyn. We know each other from the Reconstructionist synagogue we used to attend. We both noted that we were not participating in the anti-war activities; he – an outspoken liberal critic of the Iraq war and the USA Patriot Act – even referred to the movement's leadership as anti-Semitic. The fact that a member of Congress, who desires an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq, could not in good conscience support the anti-war movement, emphasizes its weakness and marginality.

I favor a gradual withdrawal, but was convinced by Nadler that even a rapid pullout would not likely lead to a Baathist-Al Qaeda takeover. A coalition of Shiites and Kurds – both heavily armed communities that constitute at least 75 percent of Iraq's population – could probably defeat extremist elements within the Sunni minority. And they might do it more readily if the US troops were no longer there as a magnet for nationalist resistance. Regardless, we both expect that the Bush adminstration will trumpet substantial reductions of US troops in time for the November 2006 Congressional elections. (News reports already speculate about plans to downgrade the US military presence by over one third, to below 100,000.)

Returning to the mass protests on Sept. 24, the following is what a blogger at <http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/09/29/toward_a_zionistfree_antiwar_movement.php> had to say about the demonstration in San Diego:

"Jamal Kanj, a fiery Palestinian from a group called Al-Awda [which advocates a total Palestinian 'right of return' to Israel – ed.], takes the podium. 'We Palestinians', he begins, 'have been subjected to GENOCIDE at the hands of the Israelis for generations.' He rants on. 'In 1948, they forced us out of our homes, and today we must DRIVE THE JEWS FROM PALESTINE!'

"Suddenly, a middle-aged man wearing a black 'F the President' T-shirt rushes the stage, screaming at Kanj, 'I’m TIRED of this CRAP! You people keep bringing this up! This is supposed to be an ANTI-WAR rally, not an ANTI-ISRAEL rally!'

"Kanj yells back, into the microphone. Others in the crowd stand up and join in the shouting match. The Arab-Israeli conflict has arrived in San Diego.

"Red-vested 'peace monitors' converge on T-shirt Man, trying to contain this sudden outburst of dissent. They are followed closely by the San Diego Police Department, who quickly take control of the situation and lead the man away.

"As T-shirt Man exits stage right, ANSWER front man Carl Muhammed enters from stage left, strutting in front of the platform and waving a large Palestinian flag. Carl and his radical Palestinian posse face down the angry Israel supporters, and the entire rally begins to descend into chaos.

"In an effort to regain control of the rally, CodePink maven Barbara Jaffe-Rose takes the podium, declaring her solidarity with the Palestinian cause. 'As an anti-war Jew, I support the Palestinian right of return, and demand the end of US aid to Israel.'  She attempts to lead the crowd in a cheer: 'Not one penny, not one dime, US out of Palestine!'

"It flops. At least a third of the crowd has departed. Others remain behind only to express their disappointment and disgust."