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Livni, the Jewish National Fund and Israeli war crimes

Tzipi Livni, current leader ofIsrael ’sKadima party, will be a star of the JNF 13 December conference, Creating A New Future For Israel in the Negev. Livni was constantly on our screens during last year’s bombing ofGaza , a chief apologistof the slaughter. Shamelessly, she had said: “There is nohumanitarian crisis in Gaza .”[1]

Livni’s brutality has atradition. Her parents were prominent members of the terroristorganisation Irgun – responsible for the 1946 bombing of theKing David Hotel inJerusalem . Ninety-one peoplewere killed: including 41 Arabs, 28 British, and 17 Jews. The Irgun announcedthat it would mourn Jewish victims, not, British ones [2]; there was not evenmention of the Arab dead.

In this one action the Zionists had killed moreJewish people than all the rockets ever fired fromGaza to Sderot. But during lastyear’s onslaught Livni’s concern was for Sderot: “It isunbearable. Children cannot go to school, and the residents cannot live theirlives” [3]

The JNF conference that Livni willgrace is part and parcel of the ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouinpeople. Discriminatory laws and practices have forced tens of thousandsto live under constant threat of seeing their homes demolished and theircommunities torn apart.[4] Hundreds of Bedouin and Israeli Jewshave protested the state’s refusal to recognise Bedouin villages,depriving them of water, and the JNF’s theft of Bedouin land. [5]

There is no 'new' anti-Semitism

By Aaron Lakoff

The Israel/Palestine debate has been a controversial topic atConcordia in recent years. However, there is a point when discussion ona controversial issue can be used as a pretext for censorship andrepression. With recent political manoeuvring within and beyondConcordia around this issue, I fear that we may be moving in thatdirection.

The presidents of some 25 Canadian universities were invited toOttawa this week to testify at the Canadian Parliamentary Inquiry Intoanti-Semitism, an initiative of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition toCombat anti-Semitism. Frederick Lowy, who was Concordia's presidentuntil 2005, testified on Nov. 24.

As a Jewish student at Concordia myself, some might find it odd thatI would oppose such a forum and the participation of personalities frommy university.

I would be in favour of the CPCCA if its purpose were to fight realanti-Semitism, but a closer examination shows us that this isdefinitely not the case. The CPCCA is merely a tool to stifle debate onIsraeli apartheid at Canadian university campuses and elsewhere.

Zionism is the problem

It's hard to imagine now,but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president ofthe American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist idealof Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerianconcept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionismwas a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel,anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jewslike Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious ratherthan political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as animpious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- mygrandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as adistraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a memberof a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered.Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland ora right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered usanything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation bornof the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out atthe oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry outagainst the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. Toquestion not just Israel'sactions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too longbeen regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.