ISI LEIBLER
The exploitation of Judge Goldstone’s Jewish background by our enemies intensifies our obligation to confront the enemy within — renegade Jews — including Israelis who stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish State.
Such odious Jews can be traced back to apostates during the Middle Ages who fabricated blood libels and vile distortions of Jewish religious practice for Christian anti-Semites to incite hatred which culminated in massacres.
It was in response to these renegades that the herem (excommunication) was introduced.
More recent examples include Jewish communists who, in addition to undermining campaigns to liberate Soviet Jews and defending state-sponsored anti-Semitism, even applauded the Stalinist execution of their kinsmen on bogus charges. Like their contemporary counterparts, some of them attempted to depict themselves as devoted Jews championing “world peace.”
In practice they simply advanced the objectives of the Evil Empire. They were regarded as pariahs and isolated from the Jewish mainstream.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, took ruthless measures against Israeli renegades, insisting also that Israeli embassies maintain close ties with local Jewish leaders and persuade them to refrain from publicly criticizing policies impinging on security.
The consensus was that it would be immoral for Jews abroad to influence decisions that could have life-and-death implications for Israeli citizens.
Unfortunately, in the wake of the Oslo Accords, the massive divisions which tore Israeli society apart shattered this convention, ironically with right-wing politicians encouraging Diaspora leaders to undermine the Rabin government.
This occurred simultaneously with the rise of post-Zionism, vigorously promoted by the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, which published critiques of Zionist doctrine until then considered beyond the pale by the vast majority of Israelis.
Ha’aretz also launched an English internet edition which emboldened Diaspora Jewish extremists and provided a green light to global media outlets to run demonising articles about Israel on the grounds that they had already appeared in a “reputable” Israeli daily.
The most recent example was the Ha’aretz campaign defaming the IDF, which proved to be entirely baseless but created an enormous global upsurge of anti-Israeli hysteria and eased the way for the Goldstone Report.
In this atmosphere, fringe groups of “non-Jewish Jews,” many with no prior involvement in Jewish life, exploited their Jewish origins or Israeli nationality to defame Israel. Today, they occupy leading roles fueling global anti-Israel campaigns.
Regrettably, successive Israeli governments failed to respond even when professors at universities funded by Israeli taxpayers and Diaspora Zionists began exploiting their positions to delegitimize their country. They identified with Israel’s enemies, calling on the world to boycott Israeli institutions, including their own universities.
Israel prides itself on being the only country in the region in which genuine freedom of expression reigns supreme. But it is also a country under siege, surrounded by neighbors seeking its destruction and confronted by an ever-hostile global community.
To tolerate such abominations in the name of freedom of expression is taking an ideal to a lunatic extreme. Besides, it is hard to visualize the authorities adopting such a laissez faire approach had the offenders been racists, fascists or even radical right-wing extremists.
In fact, when senior academics like Ben-Gurion University’s Neve Gordon, call Israel an “apartheid state” and encourage the world to boycott Israeli institutions, they are the ones abusing academic freedom.
It is thus high time for the Knesset to set up a non-partisan commission to recommend legislation to deny tenure at state-sponsored institutions to those indulging in such activities.
The rot has extended to the Diaspora, especially Europe and has also affected the United States. Highly vocal Jewish groups like the recently created J Street describe themselves as ‘Zionist’ but their prime objective is to pressure the US government to use “tough love” against Israel — a euphemism for demanding that the Jewish state make further unilateral concessions to neighbours pledged to its annihilation.
In recent weeks a host of new anti-Israeli initiatives were reported. In Toronto, Jews were at the forefront of a campaign to boycott Israeli films at a film festival because the anniversary of Tel Aviv — ‘built on the destroyed villages of Palestinians’ — was being celebrated; two Israeli women who evaded national service are conducting a North American campus tour under the auspices of ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ to persuade students to intensify their role in the “resistance movement”; in San Francisco the local Jewish Federation is providing funds for a film festival which promotes the vilest anti-Israel films; radical Rabbi Michael Lerner invited a woman who justifies suicide bombings to address his synagogue on Yom Kippur; and so on.
Im ein ani li mi li? If we are not for ourselves, who will be? We are engaged in a battle against fiendish enemies committed to our destruction. The Israeli government must now take steps to neutralize the impact of renegade Jews who present themselves as legitimate alternative Jewish viewpoints.
Such an initiative by a country which provides genuine democratic rights to all its citizens, including Arabs, could hardly be categorized as eradicating freedom of expression. It would rather represent a highly overdue effort to exorcise such odious groups from the mainstream and expose them as unrepresentative fringe groups with no standing.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is currently riding a wave after his superb United Nations address. He should summon a global Jewish solidarity conference encompassing Jewish leaders, opinion makers, philanthropists and activists similar to that organized in 1989 under the auspices of then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and then defense minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to demonstrate the unity of the Jewish people.
At a time when we desperately seek allies, in addition to encouraging millions of Jews in the Diaspora who remain committed to Israel to become more actively engaged in our struggle, such a gathering would also provide an opportunity to exorcise the renegades from our midst.
Isi Leibler is a former head of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and a former senior vice president of the World Jewish Congress. He currently lives in Jerusalem. This column was originally published in the Jerusalem Post
Standby Document
The weakness of David Zyngier’s response is shown in his trying to slide Liebler’s condemnation of one academic at Ben Gurion University, Neve Gordon, into a condemnation of all Israeli university professors, senior academics and Diaspora Zionists (sic! I did not invent that, it is exactly what he said!). Actually, of course, Liebler was just making the perfectly legitimate and correct point that Diaspora Zionists are funding Gordon’s sort of anti-Zionist drivel, are being betrayed in the use of their money, and shouldn’t have to put up with it. They certainly have the right to complain about it. Only to Zyngier does that make them Diaspora Zionists allegedly condemned by Liebler as fellow-travelers with Gordon and worthy of banning. Crazy.
The same holds for Liebler’s reference to some of the other groups Zygnier tries to include as fellow-travelers with apparently his own anti-Zionism. The point Liebler is making is merely the pretty self-evident one that no mainstream Jewish community organization or representative should SPONSOR anti-Jewish initiatives, and make no mistake about it, Liebler is manifestly right that anti-Zionist attempts to weaken and delegitimize an already very endangered and isolated Israel — the only Jewish state in the world, whose policies are rightly and properly only those democratically determined by the entire population of that country, 80% of whom are Jews just as decent and fully able to understand their own situation for themselves as we are –amounts to collusion with antisemites and anti-Jewish behaviour. Tough, Mr. Zygnier, but that is the way it is. Nearly half of world Jewry lives in Israel, nearly half the rest live in the U.S. and are overwhelmingly Zionists. Anti-Zionism is definitely marginal and unrepresentative of Jewish views around the world. It, and its spokespeople, should have no support whatsoever from Jewish leaders. Jewish organizations and spokespeople should respect the democratic right of Israeli Jews to determine their own policies, and should then support those decisions for the sake of the survival of the Jewish people.
First its the odious Jewish apostates, then the post-Zionist Ha’aretz, then, Jewish extremists, then the non Jewish Jews, then its Israeli university professors, senior academics and Diaspora Zionists, the Zionist J Street in the USA, Israeli women Seruvniks (conscientious objectors), the Jewish Voice for Peace’ the San Francisco Jewish Federation and finally Rabbi Michael Lerner - who are a very small part of a growing trend among world Jewry to refuse to accept that everything an Israeli government does in its name must be supported.
Perhaps Isi Leibler - and others who think like him - might want to start thinking why more and more ordinary self respecting, community minded Jews are questioning whether the actions of current Israel governments are really in the best interests of peace - or are they interested only in forestalling peace in order to permit more and more confiscation of Palestine by fundamentalist settlers supported by the Leiblers of this world.
By golly…
By the sounds of it, the way Israel’s going it won’t be long until we’re all renegade Jews bent on the destruction of Israel!
Isi is evidently taking a leaf from Torquemada and of course attacking Ha’aretz as presenting Israelis with a different point of view from his (and the AJN’s) beloved Jerusalem Post.
Liebler would no doubt be an admirer of Ze’ev jabotinsky, the early ‘revisionist’ forerunner of the Irgun, Herut, and the subsequent Likud party. This is the same Jabotinsky quoted in Benny Morris’s (another ‘revisionist’ but of Zionist history) ‘Righteous Victims’ as declaring “There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all - [Jewish] settlement [of the land]” (p108). This is the same Jabotinsky of whom Morris writes ‘Jabotinsky admired Mussolini and the movement repeatedly sought affiliation and assistnace from Rome. His Zionism was single-minded, exclusivist, rigid.’
Liebler’s totalitarian/authoritarian stridency thus has more than a tinge of fascistic fanaticism echoing this dark legacy. Hannah Arendt would recognise it instantly were she alive today.
Liebler would no doubt have been apalled that the JCCV plenum conducted a minute’s silence last week to commemorate the death of a former Warsaw Ghetto uprising hero who elected to remain in Poland after the second world war, but then Isi wasn’t here to object.
I hope the AJN doesn’t endorse his diatribe although I doubt they’ll print the Ha’aretz response, if Ha’aretz could be bothered.
Les Rosenblatt
In response to Isi Liebler, I would like to take issue with a few of the terms and examples he uses in his tirade against Jewish “renegades”. That is an interesting word. A renegade is someone who commits to a group and betrays it. The example he uses of Stalinist Jews denouncing other Jews. They did indeed betray their fellow Jews (and humanity in general. Why? Often it was because they feared being denounced for betraying the Party and Comrade Stalin.
Mercifully we no longer have Stalin, or his American counterpart, Senator Joseph McCarthy, around. Unfortunately the rhetoric still lingers and Isi is using it. What exactly are you calling for here Isi - censorship of Jews who don’t toe your party line or something worse? Free thought is what has made Jews strong. It has always been Jewish dissidents who helped make the world a better place. When you try to silence so-called renegades, you try to murder freedom.