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One Palestinian, one Jew, and two very different impressions of ‘Golda’
(JTA) — Like many other Diaspora Jews, I was curious to see the film “Golda,” which dramatizes Israel’s first female prime minister’s handling of what for Israel was the nearly disastrous Yom Kippur War of 1973. But I wanted to know what it would be like to see it with a Palestinian American.
So I called up my friend and colleague, Omar Dajani, professor of law at the University of the Pacific and a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel from 1999-2003. We agreed to see the film the same night in our respective cities (he in San Francisco and me in Ottawa) and compare notes the next morning.
On the film’s artistic aspects — for instance, the excellent casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir and Liev Schreiber as U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; the less successful portrait of Moshe Dayan by Rami Heuberger, who missed the boat on the defense minister’s well-known charisma — our agreement was deep and broad. (And I succeeded in getting Omar on board with my favorite Israeli actor, Lior Ashkenazi, who plays David “Dado” Elazar, the IDF’s chief of staff.)
But finding common ground on the framing of the Yom Kippur War, the focus of the film’s narrative — proved much harder.
Most of the Israeli criticism of its country’s handling of events in October 1973 has focused on the Israeli intelligence failure in the lead-up to Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack. Israeli analysts refer to this blindspot as the “conceptzia.”
Talking to Omar, I soon realized that I, too, had been caught up in a conceptzia, albeit of a different sort.
I was only a baby when the Yom Kippur War broke out. But so much of my life was indirectly shaped by those three weeks in 1973. My first boyfriend had come to Winnipeg with his Israeli parents in part because of that war. Same with my seventh-grade crush, in Vancouver. Born two days apart, both were exactly a year old when the war changed things for so many Israelis. My husband had the reverse family story; he moved with his parents and sister to Israel a few months before the war broke out before they returned to Canada 18 months later. And my kibbutz “dad” (some youth movement-raised young adults, like I was, are gifted an “adoptive” family on kibbutz to connect with as they spend time in the country) served on the front lines in 1973. Just two months ago, we talked about his battle memories — still raw and unfiltered — until the wee hours of the night.
All these personal connections have meant that when I think about the Yom Kippur War, I feel instinctively protective. Protective of Israelis who were forced to endure the insult of being attacked on their holiest day of the year (for Jewish Israelis at least) — even if that holiness extends, for many, to simply bike riding on empty streets. Protective of the memory of the 11 boys who were killed on my aunt and uncle’s kibbutz — for whom a stunning tune to the Yom Kippur Prayer “Unetaneh Tokef” was written, and which I’ve led at my synagogue on High Holidays past.
Though I’m ashamed to admit it — given her comments denying the existence of the Palestinian people — I was also protective even of Golda’s legacy as a Jewish stateswoman.
But talking to Omar I was forced to consider another perspective. “As a film about the 1973 war,” Omar told me, “I found it infuriating. The film did almost nothing to set up the fact that the Egyptian offensive against Israel was taking place to a great extent on Egyptian territory.” Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was trying to get back the Sinai, after all.
Omar also stressed that Meir refused to entertain various opportunities for Israel-Egyptian peace in the years leading up to the war, a point made in a recent Jewish Telegraphic Agency article about the film. Sadat “was dying for a peace opening,” Omar said to me. “The film claims that Israeli-Egyptian peace in 1979 was a result of what Meir did, while I would argue that the peace agreement was in spite of what she did.”
I challenged Omar on the idea of the war being started on “Egyptian territory” given that the Sinai was (legally) occupied by Israel following the Six-Day War of 1967; he countered with a view of that war as having resulted from an offensive attack by Israel. I drew on the idea that Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran and expulsion of United Nations peacekeepers may have justified Israel’s pre-emptive strike; he referenced Article 51 and Article 2 of the United Nations Charter regarding acceptable uses of force.
After 90 minutes of back-and-forth, I carefully strode across the proverbial debate stage and asked the question most often considered taboo in academic circles.
“Do you think,” I asked gingerly, “that our respective debating positions are a function of our ethnic allegiances?”
“Yes and no,” he offered. “On one hand, opposing Israel taking others’ land and holding it indefinitely whenever it feels it will serve its security purposes is not about being Palestinian; it is about believing in the international rule of law, and I’m an international law scholar.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “I’ve lived in Egypt and so I certainly recognize that my sympathies affect my tendency to see some acts that are unlawful as being justified. And so while I see how some people defend Israeli acts as justified even if they are unlawful, the same goes for me and Egypt. For instance, Sadat violated the ceasefire in the first place.”
Where does all this leave me? I suppose it served as a healthy reminder that we — analysts, scholars, writers, and human beings — have a set of complex commitments that stem from our understanding of how things are and how they ought to be. While we hope that those commitments are free of tribal ties, sometimes that’s just not possible.
At least Omar and I both agree that the most pressing contemporary humanitarian issue in Israel-Palestine is that of the grinding occupation and the human rights abuses that flow from it. We also both see Israel’s current judicial crisis as in part a reflection of those circumstances. And ultimately we agree that to be human is to care deeply about both one’s own and about the other, whoever they are. I suppose that’s a start.
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The post One Palestinian, one Jew, and two very different impressions of ‘Golda’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Group Lambasted for ‘Desecrating the Name of Raphael Lemkin’ in ‘Infuriating Abuse’
Raphael Lemkin being interviewed on Feb. 13, 1949. Photo: Screenshot
Pressure is mounting on a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization that has usurped the name of a Jewish lawyer and anti-genocide activist to pursue a campaign of strident anti-Israel activism.
Earlier this month, The Algemeiner exposed the extreme anti-Israel activities of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, reporting that family members of Raphael Lemkin are outraged that the name of Lemkin, who died in 1959, is being used without their permission to groundlessly vilify the world’s lone Jewish state.
Jewish organizations and Israeli government representatives voiced alarm at the situation disclosed in the article. Lemkin was an ardent Zionist who coined the term genocide and spearheaded the effort to win passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, while the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, founded in 2021, has repeatedly and — despite all evidence to the contrary — accused Israel of planning and perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.
“The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (@LemkinInstitute) is desecrating the name of Raphael Lemkin and the word ‘genocide’ by falsely labeling the Gaza war as ‘genocide,’” the Simon Weisenthal Center said in a social media post linking to The Algemeiner story. “Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’ and dedicated his life to exposing the horrors of the Holocaust. While the Lemkin Institute is entitled to its political agenda, it has no right to besmirch Lemkin’s legacy.”
An Israeli diplomat, Tammy Rahaminoff-Honig, posted about the article from her official government account: “An important story by @IraStoll in the @Algemeiner reveals infuriating abuse by @LemkinInstitute of Raphael Lemkin’s name and legacy, as well as the terms Holocaust and Genocide, for political bashing of Israel.”
The Azerbaijani Jewish Assembly of America wrote in response to the article, “Finally, @LemkinInstitute has been exposed. It has been a platform for not only antisemitic rhetoric but also blatant Azerbaijanophobia. Backed by funding from the Armenian lobby, it has relentlessly targeted Azerbaijan, promoting the dehumanization of the Azerbaijani people.”
The Lemkin Institute, which didn’t answer The Algemeiner‘s inquiries before the article was published, issued “a note on recent criticism of the Lemkin Institute.”
“We are proud of our record and of our unfailingly frank assessments,” the statement said. “It is almost never popular to call out genocide as it is happening or to point to red flags as the process is getting started.”
In a social media post, Michel Elgort characterized the Lemkin Institute’s note as “a very long, vague, and empty statement that didn’t answer the most basic question that was asked by The Algemeiner: Did you or did you not co-opted the name of Raphael Lemkin to appropriate the good will associated with his name and works, without his family and successors approval?”
The post Anti-Israel Group Lambasted for ‘Desecrating the Name of Raphael Lemkin’ in ‘Infuriating Abuse’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints
It’s been a rocky year for relations between Toronto’s Jewish community and city hall following the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel—which led to an ongoing regional war in the […]
The post Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema
Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema attends a press conference following the violence targeting fans of an Israeli soccer team, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 8, 2024. Photo: Reuters/Piroschka Van De Wouw
JNS.org – In the arsenal of the antisemite, denial is a key weapon. Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust? Didn’t happen. The Soviet Union persecuted its Jewish population in the name of anti-Zionism? Zionist propaganda. Rape and mutilation were rampant during the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? What a smear upon the noble resistance of Hamas. And so on.
No surprise, then, that the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is now publicly regretting her use of the word “pogrom” in her summation of the shocking antisemitic violence unleashed by Arab and Muslim gangs in the Dutch city in the wake of the soccer match between local giants Ajax and visitors Maccabi Tel Aviv two weeks ago.
One day after the violence, Halsema noted that “boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli football fans, it was a hit and run. I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.” She could have also mentioned (but didn’t) that the Dutch authorities ignored warnings from Israel that the violence was being stoked in advance in private threads on social-media platforms, resulting in a massive policing failure; that Ajax supporters were not involved in the attacks, undermining claims that what happened was merely another episode in the long history of inter-fan violence at soccer matches; and that the “boys” engaged in the assaults were overwhelmingly youths of Moroccan or other Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds, who gleefully told their victims that their actions were motivated by the desire to “free Palestine.” But at least Halsema grasped the nature of the violence. Or so we thought.
A few days later, she rolled back her initial comments. “I must say that in the following days, I saw how the word ‘pogrom’ became very political and actually became propaganda,” she stated in an interview with Dutch media. “The Israeli government, talking about a Palestinian pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. In The Hague, the word pogrom is mainly used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. I didn’t mean it that way. And I didn’t want it that way.”
On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.”
Halsema’s discomfort does not, of course, mean that what happened in Amsterdam was not a pogrom. Nor does she speak for the entirety of the Dutch political class. Both the center-right VVD Party and the further-right PVV Party, for example, continue to describe the violence as a pogrom and have suggested strong measures for countering further outrages targeting local Jews and visiting Israelis. Both parties have urged a clampdown on mosque funding from countries promoting Islamism, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and have called on the Netherlands to follow Germany’s example in denying or removing citizenship from those convicted of antisemitism.
But the mayor’s 180-degree turn speaks volumes about how the left in Europe enables antisemitism by denying that it is a serious problem. To begin with, there is a refusal to situate each incident in its historical context, which makes it all the easier to portray violent explosions as an anomaly. Listening to Halsema, you would never know that the Amsterdam pogrom was preceded in March by a violent demonstration at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, where pro-Hamas protestors masked with keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags—this century’s equivalent of a brown shirt and a Nazi armband—lobbed fireworks and eggs in protest at the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. What you will realize, however, is that Halsema is terrified of being labeled “Islamophobic.” That explains her pleas for understanding for a bunch of Moroccan thugs who express contempt not just for Israel but for the country that has provided them a sanctuary with housing, education and many other benefits.
Not only are Jews expected to take all this abuse lying down; they are then told by non-Jewish leftist politicians—often aided by Jewish “anti-Zionist” lackeys—that they have no right to situate the violence directed against them within the continuum of Jewish persecution over the centuries. What happened in Amsterdam, we are badgered into believing, was different because it wasn’t motivated by hatred of Jews but a righteous rejection of Israeli policy.
That’s why the behavior of some of the Maccabi fans is brought into the equation. Video showing fans descending into a subway as they chanted “F**k the Arabs” spread like wildfire on social-media platforms, along with reports that Palestinian flags adorning some private homes had been torn down. I am not going to endorse these actions, even if, as a Jew, I can understand and empathize with the feelings that motivated them, but I also consider them essentially irrelevant to this case. The advance planning of the pogrom, coupled with the wretched record of pro-Hamas demonstrations around the Netherlands in the previous year, proves that the Maccabi fans would have been hounded and attacked even if their behavior had been impeccable. Moreover, legally and morally, violent assaults are in a different league than acts of petty vandalism or the singing of distasteful songs. There can be no comparison, and nor should there be.
What the Amsterdam pogrom underlines is that the extremes of the left and the unreconstructed elements of the nationalist right are now at one in their attitudes towards Jews. On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.” Both terms carry the same meaning, but are expressed in language designed to appeal the prejudices of their respective supporters. For the left, claims of antisemitism are dismissed as expressions of Jews exercising their “privilege,” dishonestly seeking victim status at the same time as the “colonial” state they identify with is persecuting the “indigenous” inhabitants. For the right, claims of antisemitism are a tactic to shield the contention that Jews are superior to everyone else. Translated, both communicate the same message: The violence you experience is violence you bring upon yourselves.
To her eternal shame, Halsema is now trafficking in this noxious idea while presiding over a city in which no Jew can now feel safe, less than a century after their ancestors were rounded up and deported by the German occupiers. She should resign.
The post Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema first appeared on Algemeiner.com.