Endless onslaught: Would Israel’s Mordechai be attacked as ‘antisemitic’ in Australia?
Haaretz, Israel’s oldest and most widely known newspaper, has just published a long, roughly 8,000 word feature article, about the work of Lee Mordechai, the Associate Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has compiled on line a massive report entitled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War.”
The English translation of the text is 124 pages long buttressed by 1400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources, including eye witness reports, video footage, investigatory material, articles and photographs. The impact of the report is overwhelming documenting with impeccable scholarship that Haaretz calls ‘the horrors committed by Israel in Gaza.’ It is all there– the unprecedented, endless onslaught on the densely populated Strip and a population who have no means to defend themselves. Then there is the destruction of almost everything that once supported communal life. Mordechai does not dwell on what terms we can use to define the catastrophe but his vast wave of evidence sweeps away all exculpatory exercises whether personal or official.
What can we make of this in Australia? It should remind us how parochial and tepid media debate is here. Reporting is cautious and mealy mouthed or, in the case of News Limited, brazenly pro-Israel. The significance of the recent decisions of The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are nowhere fully explained even by the government. How is it then that almost every issue of Haaretz contains criticism of Israel that would be considered anti-Semitic in Australia. Great journalists like Gideon Levy would be attacked for distressing our Jewish community and disturbing social harmony. But above all it calls into serious question how we define anti-semitism and use it to label any criticism of Israel. It will be interesting to see if Mordechai’s report will be mentioned here at all. We can be certain, in advance, that it will not be honoured with an 8,000 word exegesis.
This brings into sharp focus the role of Australian universities in current debates. How would a report like Mordechai’s have been received by one of our leading tertiary institutions? All the evidence we have to hand suggests it would not be welcomed by current administrators who have found the pro-Palestine encampments troublesome. There would be incessant media demands for the author’s censure or dismissal. There has, after all, been an ongoing barrage of criticism from the federal opposition, the Murdoch media and the Jewish community. Vice Chancellors have been brought before Parliamentary Committees to respond to accusations of antisemitism. A week ago the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights opened an inquiry to consider the prevalence, nature and experiences of anti-Semitism at universities. Committee deputy chair Henry Pike told Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of Sydney University, that it would appear to the average Australian that’ your university isn’t just a sanctuary for anti-Semitism, but is actually an incubator of anti-Semitism in this country.’ Much of the evidence mobilised in this, and related investigations, has come from Jewish students who have complained, widely and loudly, that they feel uncomfortable, even threatened and alienated on campus.
Having taught history and politics on Australian campuses for over forty years, I can empathise with their discomfort. But there are several gaping holes in the conceptual pathway. At the very start there is the ubiquitous conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The implication is that any open, public discussion of the situation in Gaza should be taboo because it evokes personal distress, and beyond that, it undermines our social cohesion. In all my years working in universities I never heard it argued that discussion and debate on the campus had to be guided by concern for social harmony.
It is hard not to have some sympathy for Jewish students. Any discussion of the Israeli government and the IDF cannot now avoid the precise wording and clear definitions of the two world courts—the ICJ and the ICC. We are talking about war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and arguably genocide. And then there is Israel’s isolation from the world and its pariah status which was graphically illustrated in the most recent General Assembly vote which resulted in a score of 157 to 8. Apart from the United States and its fringe of dependent micro-states in Micronesia there was one of Latin America’s 33 States and one of Europe’s 44 and altogether roughly 5% of the world’s population. Israel is probably more isolated now than was South Africa at the end of the apartheid era.
So what are our Jewish students to do if they continue to support Israel through thick and thin? In an article written in May Jewish elder Mark Leibler demanded that the University leaders must stand up for Jewish students. He declared that he was’ a proud Zionist’ and that was the case with 90% of Jewish Australians. So to protect the Jewish homeland the cry of anti-Semitism works well as an effective distraction and this is clearly the case in contemporary Australia. But if the chain of logic can run unimpeded from opposition to the actions of the Jewish State to anti-Semitism it can, with even greater ease, be reversed moving from support for Israel to complicity with war crimes, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. It is then not surprising that there is such a ranked chorus of voices demanding what is essentially a ban on open, public debate about Gaza and the West Bank in our universities because it so troubles the Jewish cohort.
In his May article, Leibler reminisced about his own life as a student at the University of Melbourne and at Yale and referred to his close contemporary connection with the University of Tel Aviv and his current role on the Council of his alma mater. It should come as no surprise then, that he is concerned with discomforted Jewish students. But there was no concern and no mention of their contemporaries in Palestine, all 87,000 of them. They have no universities to go to any more the IDF has destroyed them, all 18 of them, along with all the libraries, most of the books and three quarters of the schools. In his study Mordechai estimated that 100 professors had been killed by the Israelis, at least some of them in targeted murders.
Call me old fashioned but I find the current concern for anxious Jewish University students and their worry about anti-Semitism more than a little self- indulgent.