Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? by Lerman Antony;

Author:Lerman, Antony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

10

Human Rights: the ‘Mask Under Which the Teaching of Antisemitic Contempt for Israel is Carried Out’

The role of villain played by human rights law, culture and activism—Cotler’s bête noire—in the ‘new antisemitism’ has already figured in various places in this book. It is a key driver of UN delegitimisation of Israel and the basis on which left-wing groups and parties unfairly criticise Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, according to successive Israeli governments since the late 1960s, as well as to Israel advocacy groups and Zionist organisations. They view human rights as nothing more than a cloak to hide the antisemitic anti-Zionism of its network of affiliated forces. But from the landmark events relating to antisemitism at the turn of the century and the subsequent EUMC and IHRA redefinitions of antisemitism in 2005 and 2016, there has been a sharp increase in the significance of Jewish disillusionment with and growing attacks on the human rights movement broadly defined. This chapter traces how this unfolded. In doing so, in order to grasp its full importance, some of the pre-2000 developments relating to human rights and the ‘new antisemitism’ are briefly reprised.

* * *

We have seen how one of the key promoters of ‘new antisemitism’, Irwin Cotler, has made an integral part of his often-repeated narrative the antisemitic manipulation of human rights culture, norms and institutions, fleshing out his view that Israel is ‘the “collective Jew” among the nations’, which was given a full exposition in 1992 at the Brussels My Brother’s Keeper conference (see Chapter 3). But as Michael Galchinsky points out: ‘Although Diaspora activists embraced international human rights during the 1950s and 1960s, their enthusiasm began to cool in the mid-1960s’.1 He explains this as resulting from the

many members of the new UN majority—including the Communist bloc, Arab states, and newly independent African and Asian states—[which] began to use the human rights system not just to criticize Israel for particular violations but to ostracize it from the community of nations. The General Assembly’s resolution of 10 Nov. 1975 (A/RES/3379) equated Zionism with racism and initiated decades of condemnations of Israeli rights practices by various UN bodies.

The attempt to ostracise Israel from the UN system may have continued long after the Zionism = racism resolution was revoked on 16 November 1991, but it had lost any serious practical, negative consequences in the wake of the post-1989 geopolitical changes. Moreover, Israel made its revocation a condition of its participation in the Madrid Middle East peace talks, which took place from 30 October to 1 November 1991. The signing of the Oslo Accords took place two years later and generated optimism that a formal reconciliation would soon be concluded by the Palestinians and the Israelis. Although the Oslo process looked to be in serious difficulty by the turn of the century, the impact of any singling out of Israel for attack was progressively weakened as geopolitical realities led to Israel’s relatively steady integration into the global political system.

Galchinsky argues: ‘Beginning in the 1970s Jewish

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