[Reader-list] Anti-Semitism at the World Social Forum?

[geert lovink]

Published on Thursday, February 19, 2004
by CommonDreams.org

Anti-Semitism at the World Social Forum?
by Cecilie Surasky

It is my first morning at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India
and I am at a workshop on Palestinian women and the occupation. In
the audience is a woman who I first think might be Israeli -- she
could easily be one of my friends and I feel an immediate kinship
with her. She tells me she is 34 and has lived her whole life in
Gaza except for college. I ask her if I can interview her.

She cautiously eyes my card, on which I have purposely written in
thick, visible letters: Jewish Voice for Peace. "I don't know, she
says. "Do you support the occupation?" It seems such a surreal
question. How could anyone support an occupation? The very word
evokes domination, a kind of cruelty. No, I say, we want to end the
occupation. We want a peace that is just.

I ask about the checkpoints. She describes sitting in her car
waiting to be allowed to drive through. The young Israeli soldiers
are in sniper posts. You can't see them, but they can see you, she
explains. They signal it's time to go by shooting their guns. She
waits a long time until the soldiers say, "OK, now the dogs can
go."

"You think, 'Do I want to be called a dog, or do I just want to
go?' " she tells me. "I don't care, so I start my car and they yell
'No! Not you, I said dogs!' So she turns her car off, and sometime
later they say, "OK, now humans can go!" She starts her car and
they look at her and the others and say "No! I said humans." And
she turns her car off and waits until finally this "other" category
of Palestinian -- neither human nor animal -- is allowed to pass.

"This," she says, "is my only contact with Israelis." And this, I
think, and is my first contact with someone from Gaza.

The WSF and the new anti-Semitism

The World Social Forum (WSF) is the populist answer to the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Instead of a gathering of the
world's mostly wealthy, white, and male heads of state and captains
of industry in Davos, the WSF is a cacophony of
anti-globalization/human rights activists from all over the globe.

The roughly 100,000 participants represent every imaginable cause --
from Indian "untouchables" and Bhutanese refugees to child
trafficking and sexual minorities. They are seen in the hundreds of
marches that seem to appear out of nowhere down the main
thoroughfare, at the 500 information booths, in more than 1,000
workshops, and on the political posters filling every inch of
available wall space.

I have come because my New Voices human rights fellowship has
decided to send the fellows to the WSF. But I have an additional
reason for being here. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has cited
the WSF as one of the centers of what it and others refer to as the
"new anti-Semitism", and these charges have been picked up by
various journalists as evidence of a dangerous new trend on the
left.

Upon closer reading, most of these accounts make little if any
distinction at all between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel,
or between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The SWC description of
the "anti-Jewish" atmosphere at last year's WSF in Brazil is one of
these accounts.

And yet, their description of the WSF is so disturbing, even
frightening, that I am prepared to encounter at minimum silent
hostility, and possibly even physical attacks from my fellow
attendees. I have come to the WSF to be loudly and visibly Jewish,
to make a presentation that deconstructs the theory that Jews
dictate U.S. policy in the Middle East, and to see for myself this
purported new tidal wave of hatred of Jews from the rest of the
global left.

The conference is not what I expected

It is surprising to find that the Israel-Palestine conflict and the
occupation are not more prominently featured at the conference. Out
of hundreds of ongoing marches, I witness only one small
pro-Palestine march, which includes a prominent Israeli leftist
marching in the front row.

Out of about 500 information stalls, only two represent Palestinian
human rights groups: PENGON, which is working to tear down the wall
Israel is building through Palestinian land, and Al-Haq, which is
launching a campaign identifying collective punishment as a war
crime. Of the thousands of political posters, I see only one series
-- Al-Haq's powerful posters on collective punishment -- related to
the issue.

I attend most of the workshops I can find on the Israel-Palestine
issue. What I do not hear (or see) is anything I would consider
anti-Semitic. In a global conference of 100,000 people, one expects
to hear an enormous range of political perspectives, including the
occasional extreme or intolerant remark. Given that I am prepared
for the worst, I am shocked that the overwhelming majority of what
is said in workshops critical of US and Israeli policies in the
territories is milder than the articles and essays one can read in
Israeli newspapers on any given day.

Two realities, one anti-Semitism industry

After I return home, the Wiesenthal Center publishes an alarming
piece entitled "Networking to Destroy Israel" in the Jerusalem
Post. The article claims that this year's WSF was "hijacked by
anti-American and anti-Israeli forces" and leads me to wonder
whether we attended the same conference. In this piece, and for the
second year in a row, they strangely declare themselves the only
Jewish NGO to attend the WSF.(I personally saw participants from
Brit Tzedek and Yesh Gvul, to name just a few -- and Jewish Voice
for Peace is listed in the official program.)

They go on to cite a litany of statements, including mine, as proof
that the WSF is a place where people who want to destroy Israel
meet to plot and recruit. Employing a form of twisted logic that
would make Donald Rumsfeld proud, they essentially claim that the
absence of any blatant anti-Semitism is not proof that there was
none, but merely an indication of a more "sophisticated" kind of
anti-Zionism (and therefore anti-Semitism) in which sympathetic
Jews such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) play a starring roll.

The account is so riddled with errors -- I am misquoted, JVP is
described as "campus-based", all of my colleagues are given the
wrong attributions, and quoted either inaccurately or out of
context -- that it is pointless to list them all. It contains bits
of truth but strings together isolated statements to make them
sound like a tidal wave of hatred and part of what they call an
"orchestrated" and "insidious" campaign to destroy Israel.

All this begs the question of why a group such as the SWC would
want to fuel hysteria about anti-Semitism in general, especially in
regard to the left. The SWC has an important history of hunting
down former Nazis, exposing the activities of neo-fascists and
other right-wing hate groups, and fighting genuine anti-Semitism.

But the SWC is like many other mainstream Jewish organizations in
the United States that have expanded their mission from fighting
the oppression of Jews by others to attempting to silence critics --
including other Jews -- of Israel's human rights record. These
organizations' new role as arbiters of acceptable opinion is a far
cry from their proud past. And it is ironic, given the spirited
debate about Israel's occupation that takes place in Israel, but
apparently is unacceptable in the rest of the world.

For many of these organizations, as evidenced in the SWC op-ed, the
mere mention of the heartbreaking reality of Israel's occupation of
the Palestinians is proof of an insidious plan supported by other
Jews to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Further, it is
evidence of bias simply to point out causality-that groups like JVP
or Al-Haq exist not because we are anti-Jewish or anti-Israel-but
to end the injustices of Israel 's occupation and treatment of
Arabs, and to stop the spiral of revenge that has become a horrible
tragedy for everyone.

To even the most casual observer, this is shocking for a community
with a long tradition of protecting free speech, and an even longer
tradition of embracing debate. It is also self-defeating given the
now increasingly mainstream view both in Israel and the US that the
occupation and militarization of Israeli culture is bad not just
for Palestinians, but also for Israelis.

What is perhaps most troublesome is that by fueling the fires of
fear through hyperbolic statements, (an easy thing to do to a
people with our history of suffering and persecution) these
groups--who say they represent all Jews-- play a critical role in
giving the current Israeli government permission to violate
virtually every moral and ethical standard central to the Jewish
tradition in its effort to keep down the Palestinians.

They make peace ever more distant by perpetuating the myth that
Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, have nothing to say to
each other and are incapable of recognizing each other as full
human beings with similar wants and needs. They get under our skin
and seek to make Jews believe that indeed, the world is out to get
us and we can trust no one.

Acts of Lovingkindness at the WSF, the untold story

In my own experience as a very "out" Jew at the conference, I felt
no hate. Instead, I met a number of Palestinians and Arabs who, on
some fundamental level, expressed the pain of separation. "I am
Muslim, and we were raised to respect the Jewish tradition," a
Palestinian woman living in Jordan told me. "We used to live next
door to Jews, and we were friends."

After I spoke at a session about suspending military aid to Israel
until it ends its occupation, and identified myself as a member of
Jewish Voice for Peace, a Palestinian woman thanked me and a
distinguished Lebanese man from Jordan came up and gave me a huge
hug and a kiss.

Two of the Arabs that the SWC op-ed quoted most prominently in
their description of what they called a campaign to destroy Israel
were environmental scientist Rania Masri and activist journalist
Ahmed Shawki.

Thirty minutes after meeting me for the first time at the Forum,
Ahmed Shawki offered to loan me the new digital camera given to him
by his wife. He knew I was eager to take pictures and the airline
had misplaced my luggage. Knowing nothing of my politics, only that
I was from a Jewish peace group, he gave me his digital camera.

The next day, the bag containing my passport, credit cards, and his
camera was stolen. Our mutual friend and colleague from Lebanon,
Rania Masri, handed me a hundred dollars from her wallet and
absolutely insisted I take her ATM card and PIN number so I would
have money for the rest of the trip. And Ahmed? To this day, Ahmed
refuses to accept payment for the camera that was stolen.

This is the real story of Jews, Arabs, and the World Social Forum
that needs to be told; that is, the ways in which we so quickly and
easily recognize each other's fundamental humanity. As one young
Arab-Israeli woman -- who will never be quoted in an article about
the rising tide of anti-Semitism -- said so eloquently and
passionately the last night of the conference, "Yes, I experience
discrimination in Israel. But my friendship with Jewish Israelis is
proof that it is a lie when both sides tell us we can't live
together. We can live together. You must not believe the lie."

Cecilie Surasky is the Communications Director for Jewish Voice for
Peace and a New Voices fellow with the Academy of Educational
Development.