Independent Australian Jewish Voices

You’ve got to hand it to Melanie Phillips. There is no doubt that she writes the most compelling accounts and impassioned moral exhortations in her recent article making a case for Israel (comparing favourably with those of Alan Dershowitz’ book of that title). Indeed, her case is so compelling that you have to wonder how it’s even possible for people like me and so many other Jews around the world to be raising their voices against the ‘Israel Lobby’ and against this stirring picture of an embattled, heroic Israel struggling for survival against all odds and against implacable enemies bent on its destruction in another Holocaust. Are we crazy?

In a following blog I’ll comment on a couple of specific points that Phillips makes, but here I want to reflect on the psychological question that is posed by such accounts.

If Phillips is right, indeed we are all deranged, deluded and, worse, – foolish, unwitting accomplices of ant-Semites. Of course Melanie Phillips is the one who coined the undeniably evocative term ‘Jews for Genocide’ to describe people like me and those 400 Australian Jews who signed our even-handed IAJV statement in 2007 on the model of the UK Independent Jewish Voices (IJV).  However, it’s the very overwhelming persuasiveness of Melanie Phillips’ rhetoric and her “historical” picture that must make even the most ardent supporters of her view stop to ask the obvious question: How can the growing dissident Jewish voices such as the new J-Street movement in the US be so misguided? How can they be incapable of seeing the powerful, indeed desperate case for Israel – that “plucky little country” (as Greg Sheridan has called it). If Phillips is right, how can we be so utterly deluded and evil?

This is a psychological question – a question about the sanity, rationality and decency of people who appear to be so bizarrely hostile to Israel. And, of course, there is a psychological story that must be offered to explain our bizarre position. The only way to explain how anyone might disagree with Melanie Phillips’ account is that they are suffering from some kind of psychopathology that prevents them from seeing the obvious truth that everyone knows along the lines of Phillips’ account.

Although it is perhaps wearing a bit thin, the only psychological hypothesis to explain the irrationality of so many dissenting Jews is that they are “self-hating” and perhaps also “lefty” academic wankers. It’s revealing that nobody ever tries to give a serious analysis of this syndrome. What does it mean? How does it arise? Why would it lead otherwise normal people to hold such deviant views contrary to the obvious evidence that everyone knows? Above all, how can so many intelligent, well-educated and significant people be so afflicted? Of course, the trick is not to permit seriously asking these questions but just to use the label as if it needs no explanation or justification. It’s an old trick seen many years ago in the attribution of “Stokholm Syndrome” – another mental illness of a political hostage coming to see the point of view of their captors. It couldn’t be contemplated that their view might have been a rational conversion due to better information and insight since this might mean that the “terrorists” had a case. Rather, we are encouraged not to even think of such a possibility by labelling the convert as suffering from a pseudo-diagnosis dreamed up by propaganda pop-psychologists. This means that you don’t need to take their point of view seriously.

In the present case, it’s the very persuasiveness of Melanie Phillips’ story that is the warning sign. If you find it compelling, as most Jews do, then you need to stop to ask how leading Jewish commentators, journalists, historians and growing numbers of ordinary people remain unconvinced. Something is deeply wrong and can’t be ignored. Recognizing this radical divergence in the “narratives” is the first step towards resolving the apparent dispute. As in the wonderful story of the rabbi of Chelm whose wife said “They can’t both be right” we need to confront the diametrically opposed views seriously, precisely because the Melanie Phillips picture is so convincing that nobody in their right mind could deny it. Or could they?

 If I were teaching a subject on The Israel Lobby, I'd set my students the usual exercise to 'compare and contrast' the two Opinion articles that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday (April 29): one by Peter Manning Redress the balance on Palestine and the other by Colin Rubenstein, the executive director of AIJAC (Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council) The time for peace has come. Little comment is required except to note how the comparision between these two pieces reveals the characteristic moral blindness of Rubenstein and the Lobby.


I can't resist making just one specific comment on a sentence in Rubenstein's article. He writes:

"While it is understandable that Palestinians remember the suffering of 700,000 Palestinians who fled or otherwise lost their homes in 1948, it is worth remembering that this tragedy was completely avoidable had Palestinians and the Arab states heeded the UN's resolution calling for two states for two peoples. Instead, a war to ethnically cleanse the area of Jewish inhabitants was launched."

 In the light of the uncontroversial facts of 1948 and since, it requires a pathological chutzpah to blame the Palestinians for ethnic cleansing and for the failure of a two-state solution on the very occasion that they were expelled, dispossessed and massacred, and their towns obliterated. According to Rubenstein it seems that the Palestinians were to blame for not accepting the theft of their land and the atrocities through which this was achieved. Rubenstein's characteristic propaganda shows a contempt for a readership who may not know the truth.

This article by Tony Karon is a sensitive and insightful piece that captures the kind of Jew that one might aspire to be in the diaspora if one can extricate one's self from the grip of the official dogmas and mythology:

Healing Israel's Birth Scar April 2, 2008 Tony Karon 

 The opening paragraph:

With the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth — and of the Palestinian Nakbah (catastrophe) — which are, of course the same event, almost upon us, I was reminded this week that April 9 was also the 60th anniversary of an event that has long epitomized the connection between the creation of an ethnic-majority Jewish state and the man-made catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian Arabs. That would be the massacre at Deir Yassein, a small village near Jerusalem where fighters of the Irgun, led by Menahem Begin, massacred up to 250 Palestinian civilians — in what later emerged as a calculated campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” using violence and the threat of violence to drive Palestinians to flee their homes and land, which were then summarily appropriated by the new state of Israel, which passed legislation forbidding the Palestinian owners from returning to their property.

On this occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel it is salutary to note a point about the United Nations General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947. Not least, it is instructive to see ways that the issue is treated by official representatives of the Israel Lobby. The Partition Resolution 181 was mentioned by the Director of the Victorian State Zionist Council, Danny Lamm in his article responding to ours in the Melboure Age. Lamm's introductory paragraph is as follows:

THE path to peace in the Middle East is a tortuous one. Israel and the Palestinian Authority are working together with great difficulty to establish an Israel and a Palestine living side by side together in peace, as envisaged more than six decades ago by United Nations Security Council resolution 181 and in line with the "road map" for peace proposed by a quartet of international entities: the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

The cynicism and fraudulence of such pious sentiments are clear to anyone who cares to go beyond these public propaganda statements to some informed discussion. A good example is the article by Henry Siegman in London Review of Books, 16 August 2007 titled 'The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam'.

Before noting Siegman's account of UN 181, we may note that Siegman bluntly states the theme of his detailed discussion as follows:

 The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.

 Siegman's article is shocking in its exposé of the myths that are constantly repeated about the entire history of Israel/Palestine and the "peace process". He cites James Wolfensohn's comments on the way that the US systematically undermined the agreement he had helped make in 2005, turning Gaza into a vast prison. He mentions the maps showing the 'facts on the ground'. These reveal the truths that Siegman says are drowned out by "the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin ..."

 Typical of such "blather", as I have shown in earlier blogs, is Lamm's mention of the 1947 UN Partition Resolution 181. Siegman reveals what lies behind these self-righteous remarks:

Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.

In this blog I return to the response to our article in The Age. Let’s begin with Lamm’s line that it is Israel who is trying to achieve peace “to establish an Israel and a Palestine living side by side together in peace”. This is the usual ritual incantation of commitment to a 2-state solution which Israel has made a practical impossibility under the relentless policy of illegal settlement. The presence of nearly half a million Israelis in the West Bank together with the military occupation and elaborate infrastructure of cantonisation, Jewish-only roads and illegal separation wall makes such pious pronouncements just cynical Orwellism.  However, it has the reassuring sound of virtue and sincere commitment to peaceful co-existence – shamelessly, explicitly, suggesting, of course, that it is the Palestinians who are the cause of any obstacles and “opponents” of the two-state solution.

So, we see that Lamm’s article is remarkable for what it manages to avoid: Lamm neglects to mention the brutal military occupation and manic settlement building on Palestinian land that is difficult to reconcile with a commitment to a just peace or a meaningful 2-State solution. The illegal settlement program continues in bad faith even in the midst of "peace process" negotiations, however fraudulent these may be. Maps indicated below that are never seen in the press make the situation perfectly transparent.

Perhaps this is what Lamm has in mind when he refers to Israel’s commitment to “reaching a fair and just two-state solution to this long-standing conflict”. A map of the West Bank gives the picture of a territory in which 2.5 million Palestinians are confined to enclaves separated by Israeli roads, settlements, fences and military zones. The impact of Israeli civilian and military infrastructure is to render 40 per cent of the territory off-limits to Palestinians.

This map is produced by the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).


While Palestinians are under military occupation and near-complete dispossession of their land, Lamm has the arrogance to portray Israel as the victim and suggest that the main problem is “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination”. It is difficult to understand how such a reversal of the obvious facts can be seriously uttered and seriously entertained, though it reflects the most common delusional reversal of the truth of the Israel/Palestine tragedy.

Lamm makes the usual attempt to smear critics with the anti-Semitism slur – and issue which I have addressed in an earlier blog. While they seek to identify Jewishness with support of Israeli government policies, they complain when critics of these policies fail to make the distinction. Furthermore, Lamm and the Israel Lobby have failed to appreciate the effect that these slanders have on most readers outside their ghetto. It should be obvious that representatives of any group who remain silent, tacitly condoning injustice and crimes committed in their name will bring opprobrium upon themselves. It is not those who publicly dissent and dissociate themselves from the group’s sins that are the cause of hostility.

Lamm tries to deflect our claim that Israel was never the David confronting Goliath by seeking to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt whom we quoted. Lamm tries to smear these scholars whose work is undoubtedly open to criticism for their controversial claims concerning the Israel Lobby, but this was not the issue on which we quoted them. Lamm’s effort to dismiss Mearsheimer and Walt is simply irrelevant to the David and Goliath claim. The basis for this specific claim can be found widely in the literature that is not just Israel Lobby propaganda as I have indicated in an earlier blog (Conflicting narratives, March 30, 2008). Even in 1948 the Israeli military force was superior to the Arab armies it confronted, despite being outnumbered. The 1967 June Six-Day War is always cited as another case when Israel faced destruction, but we need not rely on Mearsheimer and Walt.  Perhaps Lamm might accept as more reliable the claims of the former Commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Ezer Wiezmann, Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev and General Mattityahu Peled, all of whom held that there was no threat of destruction. Other sources that Lamm could hardly discredit include Menachem Begin and Abba Eban, both of whom discounted Nasser’s intention to attack Israel - a judgement shared by US officials at the time.

It is revealing that of all the serious issues at stake concerning the dispossession and brutalization of Palestinians, Lamm thinks that “The most problematic claim” we make is that Israel is not the state of its citizens but only of the Jewish people. Not our charges concerning Israel’s disproportionate violence, collective punishment, targeted assassinations, illegal settlements, daily humiliations and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, but our claim that Israel officially makes its own Palestinian population second-class citizens is the one that Lamm regards as the most serious issue. This suggests a moral blindness of pathological extent, so that our alleged  unfairness in characterizing official Israeli domestic policies is of deeper concern than the litany of violations of international laws and abuses of Palestinian’s human rights.

Lamm’s tactic is, of course, not to deny our claim directly since it is simply a fact. Instead, Lamm uses a sleight-of-hand hoping to misdirect readers from the realities of Israeli policies, laws and official or unofficial administrative discrimination. Lamm lists other undoubted facts such as that Arabic is one of the country’s official languages. This will undoubtedly be a great comfort to those who are suffering wretched circumstances in Gaza and the West Bank under military occupation.

 Lamm becomes simply absurd in citing the growth of the Arab population as evidence against our charge of ethnic cleansing. He conveniently neglects to mention our reference to foremost Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, whose book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine provides the uncontroversial evidence for this indictment. This kind of response by Lamm is unworthy of schoolboy debaters but is evidently the best that a leading representative of the Israel Lobby can muster. Above all, it reveals the egregious inadequacy of the case against our criticisms.