Opinion – Page 83

Bigotry shameful

A personal tragedy in Montreal last week exposed yet again a streak of unpleasant racial attitudes in Quebec. A 48-year-old woman died on a Metro station escalator when her scarf became entangled in the mechanisms and she was strangled. Editors at the tabloid Journal de Montréal made a judgment that the most newsworthy fact of the tragedy was that the “scarf” was, in fact, a hijab, the head covering often worn by Muslim women. A characteristically enormous headline roared: “Strangled by her hijab.”

As more temperate reporters would later discover, Naima Rharouity, a mother of two, was indeed wearing a hijab. But she was also wearing a scarf. Montreal is very cold this time of year and hijabs are not intended for warmth. It appears that, while the victim was wearing a hijab, she was strangled by a run-of-the-mill scarf, the sort that many, if not most, Quebecois wear during the winter months.

Yet, why does it even matter? The tragedy is a tragedy, with no need to add unnecessarily to the pain of the loss experienced by the family and community.

The sad accident comes in the midst of the province’s public hearings on the Parti Quebecois’ proposed Charter of Values. While it is hard to imagine what motivated the newspaper to trumpet (apparently incorrectly) the religious nature of the garment that caused the misfortune, it seems that readers were to assume that the woman had lost her life because she insisted on dressing herself in the exact sort of garment the Charter of Values seeks to censure. Of course, the discussion around the charter is not strictly about the letter of the proposed legislation, which would apply clothing limitations only to public-sector employees; it is cloaked in a spirit of intolerance that goes beyond the limitations of the bill. The hearings have proved an invitation for anyone with an aberrant sensitivity to other cultures to openly express their views in a welcoming environment, and witnesses at the hearings have raised all range of paranoid and bigoted opinions.

Any who question whether Quebec is indeed a “distinct society” within Canada should hope that is the case, at least as regards the charter and the notions on which it is based. But we dare not assume that our distinctly laid-back West Coast society is free of religious intolerance. We must stand up to religious and racial intolerance everywhere and in every form.

The rhetoric of Palestine denial

The intensifying Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have caused opponents of a Palestinian state to revive former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir’s 1969 canard that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” However, “Palestine denial” is less a debating point than a conversation- stopper: if there are no Palestinians, then there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and thus no need even to discuss West Bank policies. One problem: Palestinians do, in fact, exist.

In December, Israeli diplomat Danny Ayalon posted a YouTube video entitled “The Real Truth About Palestine,” in which he claimed that Palestine is a place, not a nation: “Like Antarctica, the Amazons or Sahara, naming a place doesn’t create a nation of Antarcticans or Saharans.” And in a recent Front Page Magazine essay, Hoover Institution scholar Bruce Thornton referred to “the so-called Palestinians” and stated that the very idea of a Palestinian nation is but “a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel.”

In 2012, three U.S. Republican presidential candidates endorsed Palestine denial: Newt Gingrich called Palestinians “an invented people”; Rick Santorum said “there are no Palestinians … all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis”; and Herman Cain referred to “the so-called Palestinian people.”

Palestine denial, like Holocaust denial, is easily refuted. Most historians, since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities three decades ago, have accepted that every people is invented, some very recently.

Italian consciousness dates to 1764 and, until 1871, Italy wasn’t a country. Earlier residents considered themselves Neapolitans or Venetians or Florentines, and their primary loyalties were to their religion or ruler. But “Italian” is not a timeless identity, nation, or people.

Before a UCLA professor coined “Asian American” in 1968, Americans whose backgrounds were Chinese or Filipino or Japanese weren’t really part of a unified ethnic group. Yet the government now applies census and voting-rights laws to Asian Americans as if they existed – which, today, they do.

Czechoslovakia, carved from former Austro-Hungarian territory containing mostly Czechs but also Germans and Slovaks, lasted from 1918 to 1992. But the state was only partially successful in creating a unified Czechoslovakian identity out of those ethnicities. The joke among Jewish historians is that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only Czechoslovaks were the Jews of Prague.

Being Jewish is itself an invented identity. Though Judaism is thousands of years old, it’s not ageless. Ancient concepts of tribes and kingdoms differ greatly from today’s nation idea. In fact, Hebrew has a different word for biblical peoplehood (am) and modern nationhood (l’om). Jewish nationalism traces only to the late 1800s, when secular European Jews faced rising nationalist antisemitism in their countries of residence, as expressed in France’s Dreyfus Affair and the Russian pogroms. The central Zionist myth of uninterrupted but dispersed Jewish nationhood with consistent identity tracing to biblical times and finally gathering in modern Israel is historically inaccurate.

Palestinian identity and peoplehood started in the early 20th century, but intensified after the events of 1948 and 1967. The Palestinian nation then developed a strong sense of shared history and future, grievance and aspiration. It has a flag, a shared language (Palestinian Arabic), particular cuisine and a varied literary canon.

Palestine denial is hackneyed and utterly predictable. Its followers boast of the following 1977 citation by Zuheir Muhsain of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pan-Arabist faction: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.” The obsession over a hoary 35-year-old quote from a Palestinian with a minority viewpoint suggests no other textual evidence exists.

Deniers also champion Mark Twain’s 1867 Innocents Abroad, always using the same passage, which describes Palestine in part as a “desolate country” where Twain “never saw a human being on the whole route.” But this 68-word mantra, presented as a single coherent opinion, selectively combines sentences and phrases from pages 488, 520 and 555 of the travelogue. Never mentioned are Twain’s half-dozen anecdotes about encounters with Arabs in Palestine. Innocents Abroad actually offers more support to the Palestinian narrative than the Zionist one.

Finally, West Bank residents are purportedly just a motley collection of Arab economic migrants, not a unified nation. Of course, the United States was also populated by economic migrants, and everyone recognizes the American people.

Denial rhetoric invalidates Palestinian rights by contradicting common sense and nearly all nationalism scholarship. It also leads to very strange questions. Are Italians a nation? Do Pakistanis (a 75-year-old identity) deserve a state? Should we tell a person who says she’s Asian American, “No, you’re not”?

Opponents of a Palestinian state can raise many legitimate points. But the “myth of Palestine” is not one of them. The idea needs to be retired, so real discussions about the Israeli and Palestinian futures can start.

David Benkof has a master’s degree in modern Jewish history from Stanford. He teaches Hebrew in Jerusalem. He can be reached at [email protected].

Backlashes ensue in Canada and in Israel over words spoken

Images and symbolism mean a great deal in politics. This was presumably on the mind of Conservative Member of Parliament Mark Adler last week, when he hounded an aide to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to let him into the cordoned-off area adjacent to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, where Harper was to be photographed having a quiet moment of reflection against Judaism’s holiest site.

Adler, who later claimed he was making a joke, asked Harper’s handler to let him get a photo with the prime minister at the Wall, saying, “This, it’s the reelection. This is the million-dollar shot.”

Assuming that not everything Adler said was in jest, he was not speaking about the Conservative party’s reelection as government, but his own reelection in a swing riding with a large Jewish population (Toronto York Centre). The incident was particularly harmful – joke or no joke – because it seemed to confirm what many critics have posited about the prime minister’s visit.

Harper and his supporters maintain emphatically that the prime minister and his government’s stalwart allegiance to Israel is based on principle. Adler’s outburst appeared to be evidence that the most cynical political calculations were at play, at least for some members of the tour. Regardless, it is probably safe to say that, after nearly eight years of Harper’s prime ministership, any Jewish Canadian who is going to be influenced to vote Conservative based on Harper’s foreign policy has already been won over.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s words early this week also sent people into a tizzy. Netanyahu appeared to moot the idea that, when a two-state resolution is realized, the Jews living in the West Bank should have the option of becoming citizens of the new Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s intention, perhaps, was to draw global attention to the hypocrisy of accepted wisdom that Israel should be a multicultural society that respects minorities and that Israel should negotiate a “right of return” for Palestinians, while a “free” Palestine should be free of Jews. Realistically, of course, the idea of Jewish residents opting to remain in a new Palestinian state holds the potential for both comedy and tragedy. Not for nothing have Jews almost to a number fled every Arab-majority state in the region. Most settlers would not look fondly at their options under Palestinian rule. In fact, if Netanyahu’s trial balloon was meant to get a reaction from the world community, the sharpest response was from closer to home. His own cabinet minister, Naftali Bennett, responded with a single word: “Never.”

In any negotiation, wise participants put forward proposals that the other side is certain to reject, sometimes in an effort at appearing to compromise, sometimes to expose the other side’s pretense. Netanyahu’s latest gambit appears to be along these lines. But the Palestinians have demonstrated no willingness to entertain the idea of giving Jewish people citizenship in their new country. And the world community, for whom the words may have been expressed in the first place, will likely be unswayed.

However, Netanyahu’s own right flank appears to view his comments as the abandonment of the Jews of the West Bank. In the aftermath of the resulting backlash, one can almost imagine him taking a cue from Adler, who, after the incident at the Wall, confronted the reporters who conveyed the incident to voters back home: “You guys don’t get a joke, huh? It’s all said tongue-in-cheek. Tongue-in-cheek, guys, come on.”

Canada’s support of Israel feels good

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in Israel’s Knesset Monday and delivered a speech that was, predictably, a summation of his government’s unconditional defence of Israel’s right to exist in peace.

While Harper received thunderous applause, his speech was significantly disrupted by a couple of members of the Knesset. At home, while Harper’s position is deeply pleasing to Zionists, it has been condemned as a betrayal of Canada’s traditional “honest broker” role, our middle-of-the-road approach to this issue and many others.

There is no doubt that Harper’s government has moved the country’s foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction, but seeing this as an abandonment of a balanced approach requires selective hindsight. Was Canada’s position “balanced” when we maintained our “go along to get along” approach that saw us vote in support of endless rounds of anti-Israel resolutions, year after year, at the UN? No.

Since the formation of Israel, the Liberal party has governed Canada for some 20 more years than have the Conservatives, including Harper’s seven-plus years as prime minister. Looking at the three main parties, from left to right, it’s the NDP, Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals are in the middle. It should not be surprising that the party’s position on any topic should, on average, be closer to the middle, or more “balanced” than a position taken on the same topic by the NDP or Conservatives.

In other words, our vaunted Canadian neutrality is a figment of the ideological imagination. It is a chicken-and-egg scenario to determine whether Canadians’ overall middle-of-the-roadness caused so many Liberal federal governments or whether our middle-of-the-roadness is the product of many years of Liberal governments. The question of identity is a complex one, but Canadians are perceived as polite, apologetic, and meek rather than aggressive. This is a perception that, most likely, has allowed us to act as peacemakers in the international arena where others have failed. (It also helps, no doubt, that Canada has never been strong enough militarily on its own to pose a threat to any government with which it may be working to resolve a conflict.)

On many fronts, Harper and his Conservative government have thrown into question what it has meant to be Canadian thus far, from social policy to arts funding to foreign affairs. But, as Canadian voters have given him a majority government, he and his party are obviously not the only ones interested in reshaping the Canadian identity and changing its role in the world.

Harper’s political opponents – and those activists who tend to side against Israel – insist that Canada is losing face internationally, that our long-husbanded reputation for not making waves is hurting us on the global stage. Keeping in mind that Canada remains a small power whose influence, such as it is, has always come through the world’s respect for our principled stands, not because we have the biggest army or the largest population, this may be true as regards our role as a peacemaker. However, the jury is still out on how it will affect our international standing to be a country that speaks out strongly and unequivocally in support of our friends.

The argument that “true” friends are unafraid to criticize and, therefore, Canada is not being a true friend of Israel in its supposedly unquestioning support (we are not privy to what happens behind closed doors) holds some sway, but, at this point, there is no shortage of people letting Israel know what it is ostensibly doing wrong. The international discourse is so lopsided and biased against Israel that, despite any disagreements with Harper we as Canadian Jews might have on any number of his domestic or foreign policies, it is hard not to be proud – both as Canadians and as Jews – that he is so publicly and steadfastly supportive of Israel, rather being a bit player in the European and American chorus of ambiguity.

Harper’s seemingly uncharacteristic Canadian lack of balance on this matter of international affairs appeals to us. Whether or not his lonely voice is having any impact – positive or negative – in re-balancing a wildly unbalanced discourse doesn’t even matter. It just feels good to hear it.

Diaspora and Israel 2.0

Next month, we may get an idea of the shape of a dramatic paradigm shift in Israeli-Diaspora relations. The government of Israel is expected to spend as much as $1.5 billion in the next 20 years on a new initiative to strengthen Jewish identity outside Israel.

The Jerusalem Post reports that working groups are considering programs in seven different areas, primarily targeting Diaspora Jews aged 12 to 35. Ideas being floated include a world Jewish peace corps, Hebrew language courses in public schools, and the expansion of Birthright-style programs to younger Jews and more financial support for Jewish summer camps.

The program, which first made news last summer, seems to be a significant shift away from the traditional Israeli position that the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty in the state of Israel should logically and inevitably lead to the “negation of the Diaspora.” As Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett said last year, “In Israel, we typically view the world as a source of aliyah and a big fat wallet, and that’s got to change.”

The Israeli government is apparently prepared to put up $30 million this year, rising to $300 million annually within five years. The initiative has a 20-year timeline.

The potential is enormous. But there are issues to address as the idea comes to fruition. In initial discussions, the issues of intermarriage and assimilation in the Diaspora appear to be significant motivators for the Israeli proponents. Certainly, the creation of more social and programmatic opportunities for young Diaspora Jews to meet one another will increase the possibility that they will find their bashert. However, there has been, at least in certain parts of the Diaspora, an effort to recognize intermarriage and accommodate it, in order to ensure that our communities are inclusive and accepting of diverse families. It would not be a welcome measure if the Israeli government were to initiate public relations campaigns that appear to condemn or stigmatize intermarried families.

There is also the not-insignificant reality that, it could be argued, the Diaspora has more effectively managed relations between Judaism’s religious streams than has Israel. The quasi-governmental role in religious affairs we see in Israel represents a degree of discrimination against the very streams of Judaism that represent a majority of Jews in the Diaspora. There are a great number of things that Israel would do well to export to the Diaspora; relations between religious streams and secular Jews is not among them.

Especially among secular Israelis, Israeli-ness is often considered effectively a successor to Jewishness. The Diaspora experience has nothing to parallel this reality. Israel is founded on Jewish traditions, values and rituals. It follows a Jewish calendar. It observes Jewish holidays. Its citizens – religious, secular, even non-Jewish – are confronted and absorbed every day with a culture that is intrinsically Jewish. In the Diaspora, Jewish people must make a personal effort to engage with their Jewishness. In many instances, the synagogue is the point of connection between Jewish families and their identity. In Israel, belonging to a synagogue can have a very different connotation.

The proponents of this program – in the government of Israel and in the Jewish Agency for Israel – appear to be making tremendous effort to incorporate the interests and needs of Diaspora communities into the planning of the program. There is great reason for optimism that this could be the beginning of a profoundly improved and dramatically more integrated relationship between and among the world’s Jews. If, as early indicators suggest, this program progresses as a mutually supportive undertaking, and not as Israelis telling Diaspora Jews how to run their affairs, it could be a turning point in Jewish life for the 21st century and beyond. Israel has much to teach the Diaspora. And the Diaspora has much to teach Israelis.

Any increase in dialogue and understanding between Jews inside and outside of Israel is a step in the right direction. But neither group should attempt to define for the other the right way to be.

Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

A message from U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to the people of Casablanca, found on the street of that city in 1942. (image from commons.wikimedia.org)

In the wake of invasion and military defeat in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and the French government in Vichy, now headed by Marshal Pétain, concluded an armistice by virtue of which France was divided into an occupied zone and a non-occupied zone. The conditions imposed by Germany were at first relatively lenient: the French government retained partial autonomy in the occupied north and full autonomy in the non-occupied south. Vichy also retained varying degrees of control over the French colonial empire: while Algeria remained under direct French rule, Morocco and Tunisia had the status of protectorates under their native rulers supervised by France. In Morocco, King Mohammed V defied France by refusing to apply Vichy’s antisemitic laws. In Tunisia, Gestapo and SS followed Erwin Rommel’s army and, in 1942, rounded up the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi death camps.

In the spring of 1942, strong disagreements among the Allies came to light in regard of the strategy to adopt against Germany. While President Franklin Roosevelt initially leaned in favor of Josef Stalin’s insistent demand for a landing in Western Europe in 1942, in the end, he reluctantly rallied to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s view that such a landing at that time could not possibly succeed. He believed that the Allies would not be ready for this risky operation until late in 1943, or even 1944. Churchill proposed that, instead, an Allied landing be staged in North Africa, in order to deny Germany and Italy full control over the Mediterranean and compel Rommel’s army, which was retreating from Libya, to fight on two fronts.

In preparation for this operation, the Americans entered into secret contacts with the anti-Vichy underground in Algiers to enlist its assistance in the landing, albeit with some reluctance since the United States still recognized the legality of the Vichy government with which it maintained diplomatic relations.

Such is the background of Operation Torch placed under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. On the morning of Nov. 8, 1942, a mostly American fleet of more than 100,000 men landed under air cover on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria. Three days later, the Germans violated the armistice of 1940 and invaded the southern zone of France in collaboration with the Italians.

In the port of Algiers, the landing was greatly facilitated by the local resistance, composed in the main of young students, who effectively sabotaged the communications of the local French military, seized public buildings and even arrested two of the top commanders: Admiral François Darlan, Pétain’s former prime minister, and Gen. Alphonse Juin. It is important to note that two-thirds of these 400 young resistance fighters were Jews. The French authorities in Algeria were fanatically devoted to Vichy and so zealous in the implementation of that regime’s antisemitic legislation, that they established internment camps in the Sahara in preparation for the round-up and deportation of the Jewish population to the death camps of Europe. Vichy also deprived the 116,000 Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship that had been awarded them in the 19th century.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

Roosevelt despised de Gaulle and his Free French Forces, and chose to place in command of the French army of North Africa, whose commanders, including Darlan, resented Germany’s violation of the armistice of 1940, the semi-Vichyste Gen. Henri Giraud. The young anti-Vichy fighters were for the most arrested and interned in the Sahara. Some of them narrowly avoided being executed. The Vichy laws remained in force. De Gaulle eventually rallied a number of generals in charge of colonial troops in French Equatorial Africa and arrived in May 1943 in Algiers, where he established the authority of Free France, invalidated the Vichy laws, and restored to the Jews their French citizenship.

Unfortunately for those of us who grew up revering him, Roosevelt’s connivance with Giraud and Vichy’s military commanders, and politicians in Algeria who had conveniently changed sides, was not the only instance of his betrayal of the hope that our people had pinned on him during the dreadful years of the Shoah. As for de Gaulle, the sympathy that he expressed for the suffering of our people at the time of the liberation of France and his sadness-filled admonition to his Jewish soldiers in the Free French Forces that antisemitism was not dead, were expressions of a friendship, which unfortunately did not survive the temptations of realpolitik and opportunism. On the morrow of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, de Gaulle labeled the Jews a “proud and domineering people” and turned France from an ally into an enemy of Israel.

It took nearly half a century for the Jewish resistance in France to win official recognition; for the members of the Jewish communist urban underground, even longer. The Jewish contribution to the liberation of French Algeria is only now beginning to be written about.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.