Mahmoud Abbas

Must confront lies

Leslyn Lewis, a candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership that will be decided in the coming days, made a stir last week when she invoked the Nuremberg Code, apparently with regard to coronavirus vaccines.

The Nuremberg Code is a postwar set of principles on medical ethics arising from the horrific medical experimentations of the Nazi era. Although Lewis did not explicitly mention COVID-19, the issue was clear in context. She warned of government overreach, saying, “even in modern times the tenets of informed consent and voluntary participation in scientific experiments can be easily undermined by even our modern governments.”

If for no better reason than avoiding a communications crisis, reasonable candidates for elective office should avoid comparing things to Nazism. In almost every instance, there is nothing to be gained. In this instance, where the candidate appeared to be referring to a vaccine that can prevent or seriously reduce the impacts of a potentially deadly virus, the comparison is irresponsible and base.

Around the same time as Lewis was causing controversy here in Canada, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, stood next to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and declared that Israel had perpetrated “50 holocausts” on the Palestinians. Scholz has been criticized for not immediately condemning Abbas’s atrocious act of Holocaust desecration – words that took place on German soil.

This incident was a flashback to the time, in 1999, when Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. first lady, got in trouble for standing on stage with Suha Arafat, wife of Yasser, when Mrs. Arafat accused Israel of poisoning the Palestinian water supply. This accusation, an unoriginal claim pilfered straight from antisemitic Medieval European well-poisoning canards, was akin to the latest outrage from Abbas in both form and international reaction.

About the only time the West expresses any concern about such defamations is when they are uttered in the presence of world leaders in front of less credulous media than the Palestinian leaders face at home. While Clinton and Scholz certainly deserve some censure for not speaking out instantly in the face of such overt libels, their presence is a sideshow to the main event: a narrative that is founded on grotesque demonizations.

Abbas is no newcomer to Holocaust revisionism and defilement. His PhD dissertation at a Soviet university contests the number of Jewish dead and accuses Zionists of participating in the Shoah to advance their nefarious aims.

These sorts of lies – “holocausts,” poisonings, genocide, even Zionist sharks attacking tourists – are routine fodder for Palestinian leaders, newscasters, media and even the United Nations-funded Palestinian education system. It is the nature of dictatorial leaders and undemocratic movements that they grow intellectually lazy, having groomed an audience so inured to lies and exaggerations that they will accept, or at least not contest, the most depraved allegations. After 70-plus years of exposure to increasingly preposterous conspiracies like Zionist-trained sharks snapping at European tourists at beach resorts, many are ready to accept and repeat them.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” Winston Churchill colourfully said. Churchill died before the internet was born. Today, a lie gets even farther even faster.

Mix the range and speed of the internet with millennia of conspiracies about Jews and the reality that most people are inundated with Israel-Palestine news without context, and it is easier to understand why people who are overwhelmed by complexity and who seek simple solutions don’t resist or even question such lies.

For similar reasons, we must both keep a critical eye on how science evolves with coronavirus and vaccines, as well as encourage people to get vaccinated, to reduce the risks of disease. Terrible experiments have been done on marginalized populations so, as a society, we must be sensitive to these experiences and traumas. The mistrust has a real history, but some people are using this fact to sow more mistrust in institutions and governments, which adds to the fires of conspiracy, which is bad for everyone, but in particular marginalized and minority populations.

While miles apart in quality, the remarks by Lewis and by Abbas deserve condemnation. The world, especially now, tends to move on quickly from one moral atrocity to the next, from this outrage to the next. But we cannot let these things go unchallenged – whether they come from dictators or from potential leaders in a democracy. The job of decent people is to come along and clean things up. It’s a dirty job. But somebody has got to do it.

Blaming the victims

In a speech to the governing body of the Palestine Liberation Organization last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rambled off a host of textbook antisemitic myths. He reiterated the refrain that Jews have no historical connection to the land of Israel, unearthed a legendary trope about Ashkenazi Jews actually being descended from Khazars and accused European Zionists of collaborating with the Nazis.

Abbas went on to say that the tragedies of Jewish history were not a result of antisemitism, but of Jews’ own behaviours. “The Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion,” he said, “but against their social function, which relates to usury and banking and such.”

One of the things Abbas has in common with other elected leaders is the willingness to try to get away with something and then to apologize when called out. Though his wasn’t much of an apology: “If people were offended by my statement … especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologize to them.”

The speech gave Israeli and other commentators the opportunity to once again insist that the Palestinian leader is no partner for peace, something that is no more or less true today than it was last month. Abbas has been saying things like this most of his adult life. His doctoral dissertation, which was later published as a book, quibbled over the number of Jewish victims of the Shoah and advanced the perverse conspiracy theory he returned to last week: that Zionists were Nazi collaborators for whom six million (or, on Abbas’s abacus, fewer) Jewish lives were a small price to pay for advancing the Zionist cause.

Inherent to most antisemitic suppositions is the defence that Jewish particularities, habits, traditions, identities – in other words, whatever stereotypes the purveyor is advancing – are the legitimate causes of Jewish woes. In Abbas’s telling, all European Jews were usurers and bankers. (Consider the corollary: That, if true, being bankers and usurers would seemingly justify genocide.)

It is appalling that a man who is accepted as a legitimate figure on the international stage can claim, with minimal consequence, that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves. So, the most salient point from this terrible incident may be what it says about his audience.

Consider this in the context of the widespread global interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. One can disagree with the policies or approaches of an Israeli government or any number of historical and contemporary developments. But, by no fair reading of history can the full blame for 70 years of conflict be laid at the feet of Israelis. Yet, at almost every point in history – when a pizzeria blows up in Tel Aviv or Jews are stabbed walking down the street in Jerusalem or when Hamas sends thousands to the Israeli border and floats firebombs that set the Israeli landscape aflame – there will be a sizable number of people who will conclude that Jews brought it on themselves.

Whatever else his speech may have accomplished, and despite his apology, Abbas has succeeded in bolstering the stereotype that cunning Jews will sacrifice whatever is necessary to reach their devious aims, and that any horrors that befall them are their own fault. That suits the contemporary popular narrative neatly.

Abbas more isolated

U.S. President Donald Trump with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the Presidential Palace, Bethlehem, May 2017. (photo by the White House)

Mahmoud Abbas has had enough. Thirteen years into his four-year term as elected leader of the Palestinian people, he has nothing of substance to show for his efforts and his friends are abandoning him.

On Sunday, his frustration was on full display during a two-and-a-half-hour speech.

Things have been building up lately for Abbas and his Fatah faction and, at a meeting of the Palestinian Central Council, he finally let loose.

Naturally, he focused on Israel, which he declared a European colonialist enterprise and denied Jewish connection to the land.

“Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews,” Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the Promised Land – call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

Abbas, who has a doctorate in history, has taken a creative approach the discipline from the start, when his dissertation discounted the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis and contended that European Jews were collaborators in their own genocide in order to advance the cause of Zionism.

Of course, Abbas also railed against the U.S. president for his announced intention to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. Abbas accused Donald Trump of destroying the prospects for peace.

“Yekhreb Beitak,” Abbas said in the general direction of Trump. According to the Associated Press, the curse literally translates as “may your house be demolished.”

“In colloquial Palestinian Arabic,” AP explained, “the phrase can have different connotations, from a harsh to a casual insult, but its use in a widely watched speech seemed jarring – and could exacerbate his already fragile relationship with an American president who is particularly averse to criticism.”

If the U.S. president is a notorious hothead, that’s exactly how Abbas appeared Sunday, but certainly not without reason.

What must hurt more than anything is that Abbas now sees those who have been the Palestinians’ historic allies softening their resolve. As a New York Times investigation earlier this month indicated, while Arab leaders from Egypt to Saudi Arabia were making appropriate noises in public about Trump’s Jerusalem gambit, behind the scenes they are giving every indication that they won’t expend political energy on the matter.

The irony is clear – and for Abbas and his allies it must be especially painful.

The welfare of Palestinians has never been a genuine priority for the Arab world, even as they have propelled the Palestinian cause to the top of the global agenda, paralyzing the United Nations in the process. For Arab leaders, Palestinians have always been little more than a battering ram with which to land blow after blow against the Zionist entity. Palestinian life under Israeli occupation and autocratic leaders is filled with small and large indignities.

Now that geopolitics suggests Israel is not so much the regional threat that Iran poses, the Palestinians, once a useful weapon for the Arabs in their 70-year confrontation with Israel, are being cast aside.

Abbas’s obvious frustration Sunday suggests there may finally be a change afoot to the status quo that has been unsatisfactory for Israelis and even more so for Palestinians. What the future looks like for the Palestinians – and for their relations with Israel – remains unclear.

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Note: The headline of this editorial has been changed. In the Jan. 19 newspaper, the piece ran as “Abbas rightly irked,” which misled some readers to think that we agreed with Mahmoud Abbas’s remarks. We in no way condone his abandonment of historical fact, his inhumane accusation that Jews were complicit in the Holocaust or the many other false and immoral statements in his two-and-a-half-hour diatribe.

Bad journalists, very bad!

Rolling Stone magazine recently completely retracted a story purporting to delve into an incident of gang-rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. The story was so devoid of basic journalistic processes and fact-checking that it is destined to go down as an object lesson in journalism schools for years to come.

Other incidents, less egregious but still dubious, popped up in the last few days.

Social media was ablaze last week over news that the federal government was preparing to criminalize critics of Israel, specifically by applying Canada’s hate laws against supporters of BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

Advocates of free speech were up in arms – and rightly so. BDS is a movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel, in the guise of a one-state solution, and is discriminatory in its targeting of products, people and ideas based on their national origin. It is the contemporary equivalent of book-burning. It is deserving of scorn and contempt. But it is not deserving of legal prohibition in a country that respects free expression.

As it turns out, the very idea that Canada was about to criminalize the BDS movement and its supporters was fabricated almost from full cloth by CBC reporter Neil Macdonald. Macdonald, who has been the subject of years of complaints for anti-Israel bias for his reporting from the Middle East and Washington, had a brief (and somewhat snarky) email exchange with a spokesperson for Canada’s department of public safety.

The exchange began because Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney, in a speech to the United Nations, promised to take a “zero tolerance” approach to those who boycott Israel. Macdonald demanded clarification of what “zero tolerance” meant.

In the email exchange, the spokesperson cites hate speech legislation, as well as laws around mischief involving religious buildings, and she noted the security infrastructure program that funds communities, such as the Jewish community, to improve security in communal buildings.

The response from the government was probably inadequate and Macdonald should have gotten a comment directly from the minister explaining what he meant by “zero tolerance,” and not used boilerplate from a civil servant (something he himself acknowledged in his exchange). Instead, he went ahead with an inflammatory story that was more conjecture than news, but which had the effect of rousing the reliably tetchy anti-Israel crowds.

This, too, could be an object lesson for future (and current) journalists. As could a story more visible than either of these: the story that Pope Francis declared Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an “angel of peace.”

The story of the old terrorist being dubbed an “angel of peace” by the head of Roman Catholicism alarmed those of us who have been impressed with Francis’ approach to world affairs. However, the fault did not lie with the pontiff but with the media.

What Francis said was that Abbas could be an angel of peace – if he made peace with Israel. What the Pope said to Abbas – “May you be an angel of peace” – is a far different thing than what was reported. It was a wish, not a declaration. And it is a wish we could not more heartily share.

Journalism struggles today in the changing landscape of media, tighter budgets, fewer staff doing more tasks – we understand all this. But when some of this country’s and the world’s leading voices of reporting get things so wrong, the institution of journalism suffers even more.

In a world where information (and misinformation) has never been so plentiful, what readers really need are the critical tools to discern fact from fiction and half-truths. In a world of 140-character attention spans, though, do we hope for too much?

Israel launches campaign to discredit inquiry

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014. (photo from UN photo/Amanda Voisard)

The Israeli government has launched a public diplomacy campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court’s recent decision to start an inquiry into what the Palestinians call Israeli “war crimes” in the disputed territories.

According to ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, the inquiry – which was initiated after a request by the Palestinian Authority – is not a formal investigation, but rather “a process of examining the information available in order to reach a fully informed determination on whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation pursuant to the criteria established by the [ICC’s] Rome Statute.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently signed the Rome Statute in order to join the ICC after failing to get a UN Security Council resolution passed that called for Israel’s withdrawal from the disputed territories by 2017.

Israel’s campaign against the ICC inquiry will focus on the fact that the because the charges were filed by the PA, which is not a state, the court has no authority to act. In addition, the campaign will point out the court’s bias against Israel – a country on the frontline of the war against terrorism that makes sure to abide by international law by way of an independent legal system.

The Israeli government decided to launch the public diplomacy campaign at an emergency meeting in response to the ICC decision that was convened by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The meeting, which took place at Netanyahu’s office, was attended by Israeli security, legal and diplomatic officials.

The ICC’s decision to launch the inquiry into Israeli actions is “the height of hypocrisy and the opposite of justice,” Netanyahu said on Sunday at the start of this week’s cabinet meeting, two days after the court announced the inquiry.

“During my years of public service, both as UN ambassador and as prime minister, I encountered these kinds of events, but this decision by the [ICC] prosecutor is in a league of its own,” Netanyahu said. “It gives international legitimacy to international terrorism.”

The prime minister said Israel would fight the ICC’s decision with every means it has available, including the enlistment of its allies. Along those lines, Israel is lobbying member states of the ICC to cut funding for the tribunal, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday. Israel, which like the United States does not belong to the ICC, hopes to dent funding for the court that is drawn from its 122 member states in accordance with the size of member states’ economies, said Lieberman.

“We will demand of our friends in Canada, in Australia and in Germany simply to stop funding it,” Lieberman told Israel Radio.

Netanyahu at UN: danger, opportunity ahead

Last week at the United Nations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas once again accused Israel of heinous crimes, including “genocide.” And, once again, the global community demonstrated its collective gullibility. It was left to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Monday to stand at the same lectern before the UN General Assembly and deliver what has become an annual rebuttal to the most preposterous allegations against the Jewish state.

It was not a cheery speech, but nor was it all doom and gloom. In that half-empty assembly hall – many delegates, apparently, cannot even bear to listen to the words of an Israeli leader – Netanyahu took on one accusation after another.

“I’ve come here to expose the brazen lies spoken from this very podium against my country and against the brave soldiers who defend it,” he said, holding up the Israel Defence Forces as representative of “the highest moral values of any army in the world” and insisting that “Israel’s soldiers deserve not condemnation, but admiration … from decent people everywhere.”

He slammed the UN’s Human Rights Council, which he declared an oxymoron.

“By investigating Israel, rather than Hamas, for war crimes, the UN Human Rights Council has betrayed its noble mission to protect the innocent,” the prime minister said. “In fact, what it’s doing is to turn the laws of war upside-down. Israel, which took unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties – Israel is condemned. Hamas, which both targeted and hid behind civilians – that, a double war crime – Hamas is given a pass. The Human Rights Council is thus sending a clear message to terrorists everywhere: use civilians as human shields. Use them again and again and again. And you know why? Because, sadly, it works.”

Then he turned his sights toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He warned that, while Iran may have softened its tone, its aim is the same as that of ISIS, Hamas and other militant Islamists – world domination.

These common dangers – “a nuclear-armed Iran and militant Islamist movements gaining ground” – provide an opening for peace between Israel and its neighbors. And not only militarily, but also in terms of regional development.

“Together we can strengthen regional security,” said Netanyahu. “We can advance projects in water, agriculture, in transportation, in health, in energy, in so many fields.

“I believe the partnership between us can also help facilitate peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Many have long assumed that an Israeli-Palestinian peace can help facilitate a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. But, these days, I think it may work the other way around: namely, that a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world may help facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

If Israel’s prime minister can talk about the potential for “new opportunities” in the Middle East alongside the dangers, and of “the indispensable role of Arab states in advancing peace with the Palestinians,” perhaps it’s not so naïve to remain hopeful.

Pope tries to please in Holy Land

The whirlwind visit to the Holy Land by the head of world Catholicism, Pope Francis, left commentators hyperventilating. The brief, two-day excursion was ram-jam full of symbolism, some of it seemingly contradictory.

After visiting Jordan, the Pope traveled to Bethlehem, pointedly referring to the area as the “state of Palestine.” He made an unscheduled stop at the security barrier, adjacent to graffiti reading “Pope we need some 1 to speak about Justice … Bethlehem look like Warsaw ghetto.” The Pope placed his forehead against the barrier and prayed, in an image most commonly associated with visitors to the Western Wall, a few kilometres away.

The Pope’s visit was emphatically billed as “strictly religious” and non-political, but, it appears, everything is political in this part of the world, most of all religion. The “state of Palestine” was festooned in posters of the pope conjoined with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Images abounded of Palestinian suffering parallel with images of the suffering of Jesus, from which some viewers might conclude that the same people who have for millennia borne the blame for the one incident are also solely responsible for the other. Of course, the Pope’s entourage was not responsible for Photoshopping done by Palestinian partisans. Yet, neither was the Pope’s time in Israel free from perceptions of politicization. He visited the tomb of Theodor Herzl, which must certainly have appeared to Palestinians as unambiguous as his reference to the “state of Palestine.”

The Pope invited Abbas and Israel’s President Shimon Peres to a prayer summit at the Vatican – an invitation both leaders accepted and which is to take place next week. Some commentators have noted that Peres is a figurehead who will not be directly involved in future peace negotiations and whose term is nearly at an end, but papal spokespeople noted that Francis and Peres have developed a cordial relationship and the event should not be seen as a snubbing of Abbas’ counterpart in peace talks, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The prayer summit is seen as an opportunity to recast religion as a unifying force in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, rather than the divisive force as which it is frequently perceived. The invitation is an interesting gambit, and an apparently overt move by the Pope to insert the Vatican back into the centre of global diplomacy where it sat for centuries. And while prayers for peace are always welcome, a mass prayer at the Vatican some months ago for peace in Syria seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Still, it can’t hurt.

Papal visits, in the age of 24-hour news, are highly visual and symbolic. Symbolism is powerful, particularly in scenarios of diplomatic complexity. But, by definition, symbolism lacks nuance. The Pope apparently attempted to please everybody, by paying homage to the national rights of both peoples. But while he voiced explicit hopes for an end to terrorism and for the right of Israelis to live in security – which, all ancillary issues aside, are the two pillars upon which eventual peaceful coexistence will stand – his symbolic efforts to please both sides are as likely to please no one. In this, Pope Francis is in good company with everyone else who has attempted to walk the impossible line of equanimity in this conflict.

Meanwhile, as attention was focused to the Middle East, events in Europe reflected a sadly repetitive history. As Pope Francis was incanting “Never again” at Yad Vashem and at a memorial to victims of terror, families were mourning the murders of four at a Jewish museum in Brussels. The Pope condemned the attack as a “criminal act of antisemitic hatred.” As well, the Pope’s travels partially eclipsed news of fringe extremist groups, some openly antisemitic, making significant gains in elections to the European parliament.

As Pope Francis returns to his home in the Vatican and prepares to welcome Abbas and Peres, there is no shortage of topics to pray about.

Peace talks fail – again

While the announcement of a Fatah-Hamas unity pact on April 23 may seem to have come out of the blue, the resulting collapse of the U.S.-led peace talks was not as surprising.

The negotiations never really gained steam and, just over a month ago, they started their nosedive. Israel announced it would not release another group of prisoners by March 29 unless the Palestinian Authority agreed to extend talks beyond their April 29 deadline (which they did not). On April 1, Israel issued tenders for homes in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo and, the next day, the Palestine Liberation Organization central council applied for membership in 15 United Nations agencies/treaties. While settlement construction freezes were not a peace-talk commitment, the prisoner releases and abstention from international recognition attempts were concessions that each side offered before the talks began last July.

The day before the unity announcement, PA President Mahmoud Abbas had threatened to hand the West Bank over to Israel if peace talks failed. After the announcement, he said that a unity government under his charge would recognize Israel, accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements and have Fatah in control of any weaponry/soldiers. Yet, on April 26, he demanded in return that Israel freeze settlement construction, free prisoners and begin border discussions.

On April 27, more developments. Abbas acknowledged the tragedy of the Holocaust and expressed sympathy for the families of the victims, while Hamas said that, actually, it would never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Also that Sunday, the PLO council decided to pursue membership in another 60-plus UN agencies/treaties. As well, the council refused to recognize Israel’s Jewish nature and demanded “a complete end to the occupation … the illegitimacy of settlements … and a refusal of land swaps,” when Abbas had indicated amenability to “limited land swaps.”

Israel’s cabinet made the decision on April 24 to suspend talks, not willing to deal with any government that included Hamas, a terrorist organization. However, there were dissenting opinions: Justice Minister Tzipi Livni (Hatnua), Finance Minister Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) and Opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Labor) wanted to leave the door to negotiations open, even in the case of a unity government, if it adhered to the three conditions stipulated by the Quartet (the UN, United States, European Union and Russia): recognizing Israel, accepting previous agreements and renouncing terrorism. That said, Naftali Bennet’s Jewish Home party doesn’t recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud is deeply divided on the matter.

On Sunday, Netanyahu dismissed Abbas’ Holocaust comments as “damage control,” and said that Israel will look for alternative paths to peace, that he’s “not going to accept a stalemate.” On Tuesday, the Israeli government decided to use the tax funds it collects on behalf of the PA to pay debts owed to it by the PA, and was considering additional sanctions. To that date, Netanyahu had resisted calls from within Israel to unilaterally draw its own borders.

As the United States/U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry went from blaming Israel for reneging on the prisoner release, to blaming both sides for the troubles, to understanding why Israel wouldn’t want to deal with an organization that doesn’t believe in its right to exist in the first place, to viewing the end of talks as an expected “holding period where parties need to figure out what is next,” to using apartheid to describe a possible future Israel, their leadership of the negotiations floundered. Amid this flurry of activity, the EU issued a statement Sunday supporting Palestinian reconciliation as long as a unity government upheld nonviolence, was committed to a two-state solution and accepted Israel’s “legitimate right to exist.” On Monday, the Arab League blamed Israel for the failed talks.

In broad strokes, that’s where things stood at press time. What then are some of the concerns going forward? Analysts have pointed to many, including:

• Hamas may be agreeing to resign from power when the unity government is formed because they hope to win Palestinian public opinion and, eventually, the elections to rule over both Gaza and the West Bank.

• With peace talks off the table, Hamas won’t have to change its stance towards Israel if it forms a coalition with the PA.

• Without the talks, there may be increased violence in/from the West Bank and increased international efforts to boycott Israeli goods and institutions.

• The PA could collapse if the United States withdraws financial aid because of the reconciliation with Hamas, leaving Israel responsible for West Bank residents and the moral issues that entails, as well as more international criticism and the threat of a state in which Arabs will eventually outnumber Jews.

So, as Israel turns 66, it looks like a challenging year lies ahead. We can think of more than one wish to make as the candles are blown out.