The anti-Israel lobby....

A nice article about why there's nothing progressive about hating Israel....

This lobby, a peculiar alliance of European officials, well-to-do journalists, sections of the old left, anti-globalists, Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazis, is drawn to the issue of the Middle East, not because it is committed to meaningful self-determination for Palestinians, but because Israel has become a convenient symbol of many of the things it instinctively hates: national sovereignty; unilateral action; forcefully defending one’s interests; refusing to bow to ‘international morality’; even a sense of commitment to modernity itself. Some very dubious arguments, emanating from a motley crew of organisations, are being promoted under the guise of solidarity with Palestinians.

In liberal circles, Israel is ultimately seen as a symbol of America, a smaller, more compact, more robust expression of what the anti-Israel lobby sees as the sins of contemporary capitalism and progress. If America is viewed by many anti-globalists and Islamic fundamentalists as the main rotten representative of destructive modernity (in Osama bin Laden’s environmentalist words, America is putting ‘all of mankind in danger because of the global warming resulting from the factories of its major corporations’), then Israel is seen as an even cruder, more unapologetic, militarised expression of destructive modernity (2). In contemporary debate, ‘America’ has become a codeword for greedy, obese, polluting progress – now ‘Israel’ is increasingly a codeword for progress at its most obscene, for the backward idea that, as one critic of Israel put it, the ‘genocide’ in Gaza represents ‘the crême-de-la-crême of Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ (3).

That bashing Israel has become a proxy for something else, for a broader discomfort with modern society, is clear from the fact that two of the most vocal groups in the strange anti-Israel alliance – new-left anti-globalists and old-world Islamic fundamentalists – have only recently discovered a passion for defending innocent Palestinians from evil Israel. Today, many of the youthful, green-leaning anti-capitalists who came to prominence in the anti-globalisation movement of the mid- to late 1990s devote much of their energies to slating Israel. Some have even moved to Palestinian territories to become human shields protecting communities from being bulldozed. American and British activists who have died ‘in the line of duty’ in Palestine have been lionised in books, plays and TV documentaries.

However, it is striking that many of these anti-globalist activists only seem to have become interested in Israel-Palestine – a conflict that has been fought in its modern guerrilla form from the early 1970s onwards – in 2003 and 2004. Prior to that, they had spent their time focusing on apparently more pressing, historically burning issues: the evil of Starbucks coffee, the wickedness of McDonald’s hamburgers, etc. They were attracted to Israel-bashing not from any profound knowledge of the history of the conflict, or from a commitment to Palestinian self-determination, but because in the early 2000s – particularly after 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War in 2003 – Israel was being increasingly criticised by its former allies in the West, and was being fingered even by European officials as a ‘rogue state’ that was the cause of most of the world’s violence (4). For the anti-modern, anti-Western anti-globalists, here was a readymade symbol of Western decadence, abandoned even by its former supporters in Brussels, Paris and elsewhere, which was now a legitimate target for those keen to express a broader sense of disgust with Western excess, with Western arrogance, and with the gone-off ‘crême-de-la-crême’ of dangerous Western civilisation.

The new-left anti-globalists simply projected on to Israel-Palestine the simplistic politics of anti-progress that they had developed in the mid- to late 1990s. This was not about getting to grips with the complexities of an historic conflict; rather, in one author’s words, it was about ‘young Westerners disillusioned with their pampered modern lives’ letting out a scream of angst in a part of the world where the clash between the forces of militarised modernity and ordinary people seemed most explicit: the Palestinian territories (5). They were delivering a ‘powerful slap at the state of Israel’ in their effort to help ‘shape a better world’ (6). In effect, they were lashing out against the world’s most powerful and ultimate Starbucks – that is, the world’s crudest representative of contemporary Westernism: Israel – in supposed solidarity with a people they considered to be ‘authentic, gritty and real’: the Palestinians (7). It is striking that following the launch of war in Gaza last week, the anti-globalists combined their two pet hates of Starbucks and Israel (talk about disproportionality…) by calling for a boycott of Starbucks because it plans to ‘donate all its money to Israel’ (8).

Likewise, radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda have only recently embraced the ‘Palestinian cause’. If you read Osama bin Laden’s statements of the past 15 years, you will notice that he says little about Palestine in the 1990s; his main concern is with the blasphemy of the Saudi rulers or with the failure of the West (ironically) to assist Bosnian Muslims. It is only at the turn of the millennium, in 2002 and 2003, that bin Laden suddenly realises that his raison d’être is standing up to ‘the destruction and murder of our people’ in Palestine (9). He, too, is subconsciously responding to the official and academic demonisation of Israel that followed 9/11 in particular, and adopting a cause readily recognisable in the West – Israel: bad, Palestine: good – in order to renew and re-justify his archaic, anti-modernity politics and violence.