Brendan O’Neill, who has only been blogging for about a month though clearly he’s been at the journalism game for much much longer, is at the top of my list of politically-related blogs I read daily. I’ve discovered no one better able to call it like it is without succumbing to a “liberal” (or “conservative” for that matter) party line that only sees problems on the other side of the fence.
However, I have to admit being a tad disappointed in today’s column, which looks at the various “anti-Israel” petitions (like this one, which has since become a joke, albeit quite a funny one — just take a look at the more recent signatories) and what O’Neill sees as a change in attitude or motivation for today’s brand of “anti-Israel” activist. O’Neill suggests that it might be a general “blind reaction against What the West Stands For” behind these petitions and other displays of “anti-Israel” activism, rather than specific and thought-out opposition to Israeli policy vis-a-vis Palestinians.
To me O’Neill ends up doing exactly what he’s criticizing on the part of these leftists. Rather than look at the merits of the various leftist positions regarding Israel, he simply lumps everyone together (including Islamic fundamentalists who won’t be satisfied until Israel is wiped off the map, and who have very little in common with O’Neill’s academics and “middle-class slackers of the anti-capitalist brigade”) and labels them “anti-Israel”. On the one hand O’Neil chastises these groups for “blind” opposition that criticizes Israel as part of some general anti-West sentiment. Yet he does this at the same time as he’s conflating these disparate groups under a single “anti-Israel” banner as if they’re all thinking along a single party line. This strikes me as being equally as blind and knee-jerk.
Tarring everyone with the “anti-Israel” brush tends to imply that all these groups are against everything Israel stands for, and even against Israel’s right to exist. That may be the extreme view of radical Islamic fundamentalists, but that is hardly the view of those who are petitioning universities to divest from Israel to protest Israeli government policy. I find troubling this notion that somehow if you criticize Israel you’re being anti-Israel, or worse, anti-Semitic. Never is there a distinction made between being against Israeli policies (by the “middle-class slackers” and “self-loathing” academics) and being against Israel in toto (the Islamic fundamentalist viewpoint). While I agree that some on the left have an “image problem” and need to do more to clearly differentiate themselves from the anti-Semitic Islamic fundamentalist company they are currently keeping, it’s simply too pat to group everyone together and then pronouce everyone guilty by association.
On these same lines, Noam Chomsky, who in fairness is not mentioned by name by O’Neill although I think it’s safe to say he would be included in O’Neill’s “academic types” category, is often harangued for being “anti-American.” Chomsky is certainly against much of American foreign policy, but against every aspect of America to the point where you could call him anti-American? C’mon. Like being labeled “anti-Israel” out of hand, this type of reduction only serves to stifle discussion and draw lines in the sand, rather than to stimulate discussion and perhaps find common ground.