- 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.
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- The WSF and the new anti-Semitism
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- 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 causalitythat groups like JVP or Al-Haq exist
not because we are anti-Jewish or anti-Israelbut 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.
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