Rachel Shabi and her intoxicated anti-Zionist rants

...Jewish anti-Zionist agitprop artists like Shabi, inebriated by post-colonial ideology, fancy themselves more sophisticated and politically enlightened than Israeli Jews, whose obtuse nationalism and ethnocentric loyalties, it is suggested, blind them to the dangerous folly of their path. Such condescension and visceral animosity towards her fellow Jews, under the guise (of course!) of “progressive” political thought, is as risible as it is repugnant.

Adam Levick..
CiF Watch..
18 July '13..

Professional Jewish critics of Israel – those commentators who in some manner leverage their connection to Judaism to garner more credibility when launching often hysterical attacks on the Jewish state – are as much defined by their hubris as their political orientation.

Writers like Peter Beinart, Richard Silverstein, or Daniel Levy truly believe they are equipped with a superior intellect and moral understanding, and often suggest – when offering criticism indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the most ardent anti-Zionists – that they are actually engaging in a political form of ‘tough love’. They are saving Israeli Jews from their own destructive tendencies – “saving Israel,” as it were, “from itself.”

The following is the headline from Rachel Shabi‘s latest ‘Comment is Free’ commentary, opining on recent news regarding European Union guidelines which restrict EU funding for Israeli projects across the green line.

Whilst the quote concerning water thrown at a “drunk” was actually from the site of the far-left group Gush Shalom, it was specifically cited by Shabi (in the passage which follows) to illustrate Israel’s collective state of mind in refusing to bow to such international criticism over the construction of homes across the green line.

Israel sees international policy on settlements as simply a guideline or position statement, as opposed to actual law. This escalating sense of hubris over settlement expansion – and getting away with it – is what makes the EU move such a shock for Israel: Gush Shalom, Israel’s peace bloc, likened the EU decision to “a bucket of cold water poured on the head of a drunk”.

Of course such gratuitous pejorative depictions and smears of the Jewish state are nothing new for the frequent ‘Comment is Free’ contributor.

(Continue)

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The propaganda battlefield - Where facts are irrelevant and Palestinian wrongdoing out of the question

The Al-Durah affair does not, as claimed, illustrate any intransigence or dogma on the part of the Israeli government; instead, it shows that a number of commentators cannot separate Palestinian propaganda and terror groups from the Palestinian people as a whole. For Shabi, Mohammed's alleged death cannot be blamed upon the Palestinians terrorists who opened fire on the Israelis, even if that is what took place, and doubts over Mohammed's death cannot be the fault of the Palestinians who staged it, even if they did.

Samuel Westrop..
Gatestone Institute..
14 June '13..

In 2000, a French television station, France 2, broadcast footage of a gunfight between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Caught in the middle, a father shields his young son, Mohammed, as bullets rake the air around them. Seconds later, the edited footage shows Mohammed Al-Durah draped lifelessly over his father's knees.

Thirteen years later, an increasing number of commentators believe that the Al-Durah affair, as many now label it, was staged. A number of organizations -- such as the Al Durah Project, which has obtained raw footage of the event and highlighted the countless contradictions in a number of the Palestinians' statements -- establishes that the Al-Durah incident is a prime example of Palestinian organizations' manipulating the media with falsified footage and incorrect testimony.

Further, the Israeli government recently concluded its own investigation into the Al-Durah incident; the Israeli report notes that crucial parts of the raw footage, revealing that Mohammed Al Durah was alive several minutes after France 2's report ended, had been deliberately omitted from the broadcast, and states that the cameraman's testimony was "replete with contradictions, inconsistencies and falsehoods."

Media manipulation, an important tool within the information battlefield, is well established in the Middle East, but staged incidents do not always go according to plan. One leaked video of another incident, for instance, shows a funeral procession carrying the body of a Palestinian, supposedly murdered by Israeli forces. After the corpse accidentally falls out of the stretcher, it quickly stands up and jumps back in.

Some attempts at media manipulation, however, do succeed. Whether the Al Durah affair or the Jenin 'massacre' -- a widely reported slaughter that never happened -- journalists' sympathy for the perceived underdog is extremely damaging. According to the Israeli review, "The battle for the TV or computer screen is often as or even more important than the actual military clash."

Most newspapers, despite widely reporting the Al Durah shooting in 2000, have not reported the Israeli government's recent findings, nor have they reported the ongoing case in the French courts that disputes France 2's footage.

The few media outlets that have reported the most recent Israeli findings have been skeptical. The most direct response came from an opinion article by Rachel Shabi, printed in The Guardian. Shabi writes that, "If Israel's government is to be believed, Palestinians have sunk so low as to be capable of faking their own deaths."

Suppress Mizrahi history? Why it can be ‘cool’.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
07 October '12..

Arriving at Ben Gurion airport last month, I sat next to a pleasant young American Jew on the sherut bus to Jerusalem. “What are you here for?” the young man asked. When I told him I was attending a conference on Jewish refugees from Arab countries, he thought for a moment.” You mean, about the discrimination the oriental (Mizrahi) Jews encountered when they first arrived in Israel?”

Well, not exactly, I explained. Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon was about to launch a campaign demanding justice for Jews expelled and dispossessed from the Arab world. From Jerusalem, Ayalon would be taking the issue to the UN in New York.

Compared to the blank stare from the (Israeli) airport security girl that greeted Congressman Jerrold Nadler on his way to the same conference, I should have been grateful that my sherut companion had actually heard of Jews in Arab countries.

Nevertheless it is disturbing that the mere mention of Jews from Arab countries triggers an association with ‘discrimination’ at the hands of their Ashkenazi brethren. To be sure, discrimination loomed large in the 1950s, but it is no longer a serious issue today. The systematic persecution and violence one million Jews encountered in Arab countries just because they were Jews, on the other hand, does not seem to figure nearly as prominently. A possible explanation is the Eurocentricism that has prevailed in Israel for so long in the media, in schools, in politics. In the interests of social cohesion, successive Israeli governments have suppressed the unhappy history of Jews in Arab lands before Zionism or glossed over the human rights abuses experienced by these Jews.

During the Oslo years, Jewish refugees became viewed as a ‘stumbling block’ to peace. It was never the right time to raise their issue. If you didn’t know any better, the only people with a justifiable claim to justice appeared to be the Palestinians.

Bataween - My obnoxious rebuttal to Rachel Shabi

Rachel Shabi

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
03 October '12..








(With thanks to all those who emailed me Rachel Shabi's article)

The Israeli government has just raised the Jewish refugee issue. (How tiresome for Rachel Shabi. She thought she was done with the subject.)

Israeli diplomats have been told to make an equivalence at every 'relevant' forum. What fun, she writes sarcastically. How very manipulative, misleading and obnoxious.

Writing in Haaretz, this award-winning journalist and author is but the latest of leftwing critics of deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon's campaign to obtain justice for Jewish refugees. Someone should have told her that a torrent of abuse is little substitute for powerful argument. As Victor Hugo once said, "Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause."

So let's examine what arguments she does advance: " Jews are supposed to have a nation." A variant of Hanan Ashrawi's contention that Jews cannot be refugees because they were returning to their 'homeland'. Yet it has been easily established that most Jews who came to Israel arrived through a combination of push and pull factors. A Jew can be both a refugee and a Zionist.

Then comes a restatement of the Arab propaganda argument that 'Zionist emissaries' caused the exodus when 'most Jews preferred to engage in home-grown nationalist movements'. This is simply not true. Iraqi Jews became Zionists overnight following devastating pogroms such as the 1941 Farhud - in which almost 200 Jews were slaughtered like sheep - because the underground offered them training in self-defence. They also turned to Communism because Arab nationalism marginalised and excluded non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Very few became nationalists.

Guardian’s Rachel Shabi spins Israeli concerns over Muslim Brotherhood as evidence of racism

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
07 February '11

Rachel Shabi’s animosity towards Israel seems to have no boundaries, and is not governed by even the most rudimentary sense of journalistic fairness, or decency. I’m overstating the case, you say. Hardly.

Shabi’s latest smear job, “Israel’s government raises alarm at events in Egypt”, begins thusly:

As pro-democracy demonstrations continue in Egypt, Israel‘s reaction has been of rising panic…”The Israeli government is freaking out,” said Dr Shmuel Bachar, at the Israel Institute for Policy and Strategy. “For the past 30 years we have depended on Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.”

Of course the word “panic” to characterize Israel’s concerns over the fate of their 30 year peace treaty with Egypt is nothing but hyperbole, and is also completely at odds with the sober and measured way the Jewish state has responded to much worse threats over the years (which included several Arab invasions).

Shabi continues:

Israel has been troubled by sight of masses of Egyptian people on the streets calling for democratic rights, freedoms and the ousting of Hosni Mubarak…in a poll published by mass-circulation daily Yediot Ahronot, 65% of Israelis think Mubarak’s removal from office would be a bad thing for Israel.

This passage is something approaching rhetorical malpractice. First, it implies, bizarrely, that Israel – the only real liberal democracy in the Middle East – is somehow hostile to democratic rights and individual freedoms. Then, it misleadingly cites a poll demonstrating Israeli concern over the upheavals in Egypt - and the potential that the crisis could lead to a government even more hostile to Israel – as evidence of the nation’s contempt for Egyptian democratic aspirations.

(Read full "Guardian’s Rachel Shabi spins Israeli concerns over Muslim Brotherhood as evidence of racism")

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Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab lands: Controversial? Only at the Guardian

CiF Watch
Guest Post
19 January '11

http://cifwatch.com/2011/01/19/justice-for-jewish-refugees-from-arab-lands-controversial-only-at-the-guardian/

This is cross posted by David Matas, and was originally published on the website of the group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries. It is a response to Rachel Shabi’s article: ‘The problem with Israel’s Jewish ‘refugee’ initiative‘ in the December 16th edition of the Guardian. (See our post on Shabi’s piece, here.)

Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries should, it seems, be an uncontroversial position. Who, after all, favours injustice?

Yet, Rachel Shabi in an opinion piece in the Guardian on December 16th, 2010 under the title “The problem with Israel’s Jewish ‘refugee’ initiative” labelled the call for justice as “cheap political point-scoring.” That is an odd response to a call for justice. Shabi does not claim that there was no injustice, no history of mistreatment of Jews from Arab countries. She acknowledges that Jewish properties and possessions in Arab countries were impounded, that Arab governments sacrificed Jewish communities for short term political expediency.

Shabi does not claim that the call for justice arose recently. She dates it from the 1970s, though, in fact, it existed long before that. Shabi questions the sincerity of those who call for justice, Israeli deputy foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), arguing that neither is “genuinely concerned” with justice for Jews form Arab countries because they have not proposed “setting up heritage centres to commemorate Jewish life in Arab lands”. Yet, JJAC has proposed exactly that for many years. For instance, in November 2004, JJAC issued a statement calling for “Building a Museum to preserve and portray the vibrant, 2,300 year heritage and history of the Jewish Community of Libya”.

Shabi also charges the advocates with insincerity because of their attempt “to corral the subject into the frame of Palestinian refugee claims”. Yet, equality is an element of justice. When there are two victims, both similarly victimized, then both should receive justice. When one does and the other does not, the victim without redress is doubly victimized, the first time by the original injustice, the second time by the inequality of treatment.

Shabi argues that there is a difference between Palestinian and Jewish refugees because some Jewish refugees do not like being called refugees but rather would prefer to be described as being “uprooted” from Arab lands. This argument is terminological flim flam. Moreover, it ignores the history of Palestinian refugees. For decades, Palestinians rejected the refugee label. The PLO objected as late as 1974, to the component of the 1967 UN Resolution 242 which calls for “a just settlement of the refugee problem” not because it recognizes, by implication, that Jews from Arab countries were also refugees, but rather because, so the PLO said it “deals with their (the PLO’S) cause as a refugee problem”. Palestinian refugee rights did not arise for the first time when Palestinians, relatively late in their history, embraced the refugee label. Nor do Jewish refugee rights cease to exist for those Jewish refugees who reject the refugee label. Human rights are inalienable.

Shabi argues that there is no real parallel between Jewish and Palestinian refugees because the Jews have a homeland and the Palestinians do not. Yet, most refugees do not want to be where they are. What is unusual about the plight of Palestinians, compared to refugees generally, is the unwillingness of the governments of countries in which many of them are found to offer local integration and the virulent rejection by the Palestinian leadership of offers of resettlement.

Shabi questions why Israel should represent Jewish refugees claiming redress for injustice. One answer is that the loss for that injustice was suffered not just by individual Jews, but, for Jews from Arab countries who got refuge in Israel, also by Israel. It was Israel who had to rehabilitate Jewish refugees in Israel from Arab countries, establish them and treat them for the physical and psychological wounds they suffered before flight.

As well, the government of every country should stand up for respect for human rights. It is hardly surprising that a Jewish state would stand up for the rights of Jewish victims. The real question would arise only if Israel did not do so. Shabi asks whether the claim for justice for Jewish refugees would arise if there were no Palestinian refugees. The answer to that is certainly yes. A claim for justice arises whenever there is an injustice.

Jews from Arab countries were victims of a great wrong. Communities which existed for thousands of years, from well before the advent of Islam, were brutally expelled, 850,000 in total, their assets confiscated, and their institutions destroyed. How does one remedy that wrong? The belated Palestinian adoption of the refugee vocabulary presents an opportunity. If the wrong to Jewish refugees will not be remedied in isolation, then, maybe it will be remedied in the overall context of redress for refugee outflows sparked by the Arab invasions of Israel in 1948.

Shabi calls what Ayalon and JJAC have done “possibly the worst sort of advocacy for Middle Eastern Jews.” Yet, in reality, what we are seeing now is the Jewish NGO world – in this instance through JJAC – and the Government of Israel at its best, acting as it has done to bring Nazi war criminals to justice and pursue Holocaust compensation, standing up for Jewish victims, taking advantage of an opportunity presented by the twists and turns of history – in this case the peace negotiations and the claims of Palestinian refugees – to do so.

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Viewpoint: When ideology discounts reality

Carmel Gould
Just Journalism
25 July '10

Scathing critiques of Israeli policy are the bread and butter of Guardian writer, Rachel Shabi. However, in her latest contribution, ‘Israel turns upon its own,’ published in print and online, she goes much further than the facts will carry her.

Depicting an alleged descent by Israel into ‘long-incubated racism, both institutional and incidental – a casual, acceptable prejudice’ she blames not Judaism but ‘the Eurocentric cornerstones of the country: the belief, expressed by Israel's founding fathers and still current, that the nation should be a bastion of the "enlightened" west in the heart of the supposedly savage Middle East.’

However, her attempt to illustrate Israelis’ apparent rejection of all things Arab – and presumably Muslim – only serves to highlight the gap between anti-Israel fantasy and a slightly more mundane reality.

Shabi claims that Israel is ‘the sniffy neighbour of the Middle East,’ explaining why ‘The ban on travel to most Arab countries is of no consequence to the majority of Israelis, who could not be less interested in the region.’ True, Israelis are banned by Israel from travelling to countries such as Lebanon and Syria, but Shabi omits to mention that they are also banned by the countries themselves. Even if a non-Israeli has so much as an Israeli stamp on their passport, they will be denied entry to Lebanon.

But what about Arab countries from which Israelis are not banned? Every year, tens of thousands of Israelis travel for tourism purposes to Egypt and Jordan - both countries with peace treaties with Israel - indicating that where they are welcome in the Arab world, Israelis will travel.

(Read full article)

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Guardian Remaps Israel -- Modi'in Is a Settlement

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
27 December 09

As if to prove our point about the Guardian, which so "frequently distorts the conflict," Rachel Shabi's article today ("Gaza ceasefire in jeopardy as six Palestinians are shot") refers to the "huge Israeli settlement at Modiin."

With some 70,000 people, Modiin can be considered huge, but it is not a settlement. It is fully situated within Israel's pre-1967 boundaries, or the Green Line.

Map source: BESA

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