The B'Tselem Witch Trials
Noah Pollak - Commentary May 2011
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-btselem-witch-trials/
When the United Nations released the so-called Goldstone Report in September
2009, Israelis and their supporters around the world were astonished by the
blunt words near its conclusion: “There is evidence indicating serious
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed
by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions
amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.” The report
declared that virtually everything Israel had done during Operation Cast
Lead—Israel’s attempt in late 2008 and early 2009 to stop Hamas’s rocket war
on Israeli civilians—had been a crime. No single written attack on the
Jewish state has been as damning, as prominent, or as influential. And yet
the South African jurist Richard Goldstone and his team had only a few
months to compile a report that runs to nearly 600 pages and makes hundreds
of detailed accusations about the Israel Defense Force’s conduct of the war,
and Goldstone himself made only a single four-day visit to Gaza. Where did
they secure the evidentiary rope with which to hang Israel?
The report was largely compiled from material provided by what is often
referred to as Israel’s “human rights community.” This vague euphemism
refers to a coterie of groups and individuals that has evolved over the past
decade into a highly politicized movement of dozens of nongovernmental
organizations that operate in Israel and subject its government, military,
laws, and people to relentless scrutiny and accusation. And, as first
pointed out by NGO Monitor, the Goldstone Report relied most heavily on the
largest and most prominent among them: the group known as B’Tselem. More
footnotes in the report, 56 in all, cite B’Tselem as a source than any
other. Indeed, as Jessica Montell, B’Tselem’s executive director, has said,
B’Tselem “provided extensive assistance to the UN fact-finding mission
headed by Justice Goldstone—escorting them to meet victims in Gaza,
providing all of our documentation and correspondence, and meeting the
mission in Jordan.”
In making such a profound contribution to the Goldstone Report, B’Tselem was
performing the task to which it has truly dedicated itself: not the defense
of human rights in the West Bank and Gaza, but the delegitimization of
Israel and its existence as a Jewish state.
_____________
B’Tselem—“The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories”—was founded in 1989 by what the organization refers to as “a
group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists, and Knesset members”
whose politics were overwhelmingly on the far left of the political
spectrum. Its purpose was to “document and educate the Israeli public and
policymakers about human-rights violations in the Occupied Territories,” and
during the 1990s it largely focused on that internal mission. Yet with the
onset of the Palestinian terror war in 2000 and Israel’s increasingly tough
responses to it over the succeeding four years, B’Tselem’s mission shifted
from trying to inform and influence the Israeli debate to becoming the
primary resource for those journalists, officials, and activists who saw in
Israel’s self-defense the full flowering of a new age of Israeli oppression
and criminality.
B’Tselem employs Israelis, and there is no doubt that the major reason for
its appeal—especially internationally—is due to the perception that it is an
Israeli group exposing Israeli crimes in order to achieve a more just
Israeli society. Yet almost its entire annual budget is provided by European
governments and American foundations, such as the New Israel Fund and the
Ford Foundation.
That money pays for 41 staffers who work primarily in two divisions, data
and communications. Most of the 19 members of the data division are
Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza and supply a constant stream
of anecdotes and testimony to the group’s Jerusalem headquarters, where a
few researchers compile the information and the 10-person communications
department packages and disseminates it to journalists, other NGOs,
policymakers, and activists. B’Tselem mounts campaigns on certain issues,
such as the supposed illegality of Israeli communities over the armistice
lines of 1949 and the supposed illegality of West Bank checkpoints erected
to interdict suicide bombers. “B’Tselem,” according to its own materials,
“ensures the reliability of information it publishes by conducting its own
fieldwork and research, the results of which are thoroughly cross-checked
with relevant documents, official government sources, and information from
other sources.” These reports have made B’Tselem the most famous and
successful Israeli NGO. It is also one of the most ambitious. A list of
“advocacy efforts” from its 2009 year-end report, for example, includes a
month-long, high-profile campaign using B’Tselem’s 20-year anniversary to
draw attention to the urgency of the human-rights situation in the Occupied
Territories; four Internet campaigns on Operation Cast Lead, security force
violence, the siege on Gaza, and Road 443, which is barred to Palestinian
use; four full-length publications, including Guidelines for Israel’s
Investigation of Operation Cast Lead and Without Trial: Administrative
Detention of Palestinians by Israel; 22 visual articles and films made
available online; and 80 study tours and 176 briefings for policymakers,
journalists, diplomats, and international organizations.
Today, B’Tselem conducts itself as though its true purpose is not trying to
convince Israelis to change their policies from within, but rather aiding
international efforts to pressure Israel to adopt the kind of policies
Israelis themselves have repeatedly rejected in elections. To that end, in
2008 B’Tselem opened an office in Washington, which, according to a press
release, it “expects to become the central clearinghouse for information
about human-rights conditions in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza
Strip for Member [sic] of Congress, the State Department, and other
policymakers.” Or, as Anat Biletzky told a small campus audience in 2007
just after she stepped down as the group’s chairman of the board, “B’Tselem
is now opening an office in D.C. because we think that there are two main
targets here. One is American policymakers. The other is the Jewish
community. And the two are not unrelated, as we have seen in Walt and
Mearsheimer’s book.”
All of this work has certainly paid off. In 2004, as Biletzky told an
interviewer, “B’Tselem is trusted by all sides. The Europeans of course. If
the American Embassy wants information, they come to us. If Tom Friedman
wants information, he comes to us.” The U.S. State Department can be added
to the list of those who not only trust B’Tselem, but rely on the group
uncritically. State’s annual “human rights report” on Israel reproduces B’Tselem
claims and statistics, quite obviously without external verification, to
such an extent that sections of the report simply read like a year-end
summary of B’Tselem reports. The just-released report on 2010, for example,
contains 26 references to B’Tselem and endorses its misleading Gaza casualty
figures. And the group’s reports are a regular feature of media coverage of
Israel. For example, Lawrence Wright’s lengthy 2009 account in the New
Yorker of life in the Gaza Strip cited, entirely without skepticism, B’Tselem’s
erroneous casualty statistics from Operation Cast Lead: “B’tselem has
documented seven hundred and seventy-three cases in which Israeli forces
killed civilians not involved in hostilities.”
What should have been obvious to an intelligent and worldly journalist such
as Wright is the conspicuous tension in B’Tselem between the group’s wish to
be perceived as an impartial guardian of human rights and its openly stated
desire to build a case against virtually every security measure Israel
takes, as well as against the Israeli presence, civilian and military, in
the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The irreconcilability of these two
goals is evident on B’Tselem’s website, where it describes itself as a
scrupulously apolitical organization that does “not weigh in on political
matters, except to comment on their implications for human rights”—and at
the same time also states that it “has worked successfully on both the
political and public level to shape Israel’s national debate over policies
regarding the Occupied Territories” and that it “acts primarily to change
Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.” Thus a basic question presents
itself: Is B’Tselem a human-rights organization or a political group?
B’Tselem, in fact, is consciously trying to have it both ways, using
human-rights rhetoric to conceal a radical and indeed anti-Zionist political
agenda that would be met with far less sympathy were it honestly expressed.
It is not an unintelligent strategy. Biletzky, for one, is proud of her
organization’s innovative approach:
In April of 2003, we issued a report called “Landgrab,” which is the most
comprehensive report ever on the settlements. It showed how the whole
settlement project is a violation of human rights according to international
law and the Geneva Convention. . . . It’s amazing because I think that
conceptually it’s very creative to think of settlements as being a violation
of human rights.
Creative it certainly is, especially because the claim is also based on a
false premise, namely that every dunam of the West Bank is sovereign
Palestinian territory and therefore any Israeli presence there amounts to
illegal occupation. This argument has become the standard claim of those who
demand the expulsion of Jews from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Yet
these have never been “Palestinian territory” according to the understanding
of sovereignty under international law. For 500 years, the West Bank was
ruled by the Ottoman Empire, then by the British Mandate, and then for 18
years by the kingdom of Transjordan. In 1988 Jordan formally renounced any
claim to the territory. The West Bank is disputed territory, as both Jews
and Arabs have lodged claims to it, and the peace process is supposed to be
the forum through which those claims are negotiated and resolved.1 Yet
“Landgrab” avoids all of this difficulty through a tautology: because Jewish
communities in the West Bank are ipso facto a human-rights crime, “B’Tselem
demands that the Israeli government act to vacate all the settlements.”
The fact that Israelis are living anywhere on the West Bank or in Gaza is
the original sin for B’Tselem, the wellspring from which all other crimes
emerge. Yet B’Tselem goes beyond even that point to argue that efforts made
by Israel to defend its citizens against attacks by Palestinians operating
in the West Bank and Gaza are in fact criminal acts under international law.
In a 2007 report on Gaza, for example, B’Tselem declared that, due to the
restrictions on border crossings to prevent terrorist attacks, “Israel has
turned the Gaza Strip into the largest prison on earth.” (Egypt, which also
restricted its border to Gaza, was entirely absolved: “Israel controls all
routes into and out of the Gaza strip,” B’Tselem improbably claimed. “No one
can enter or leave without the army’s permission.”) The Gaza report was
plastered with sensational photographs and pullquotes attesting to the
horrors of life there, all of which, the group insisted, were Israel’s
fault. This, despite the fact that Israel had pulled out of Gaza in 2005,
did not interfere when Palestinian elections there gave the terrorist group
Hamas the upper hand in 2006, and stayed out of it when Hamas staged a coup
in Gaza against the Palestinian Authority and took charge of the strip in
2007. B’Tselem acted as though all that was meaningless. “Whether you call
it an occupation or not,” the report says, Israel still “must safeguard the
rights and needs of the people there.” Elementary logic would seem to
dictate that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for safeguarding the rights
and needs of the people there, and that Hamas, by attacking Israel on a
daily basis, bore responsibility for the problems created in Gaza by the
state of war it insisted on maintaining.
Not according to B’Tselem. The group absolved Hamas of any responsibility
for conditions in Gaza, never mentioned its goal of destroying Israel,
blamed Israel entirely for the border restrictions that only followed Hamas’s
attacks (many of which targeted the border crossings themselves), and even
provided the terrorist group with an important incentive to continue its
rocket war. In this war, which Hamas wages intentionally from civilian areas
of Gaza, Palestinian civilians are occasionally killed by Israeli return
fire. Yet instead of condemning Hamas for employing civilians as cannon
fodder, B’Tselem suggested that their deaths were the result of an
intentional Israeli strategy: “Targeting civilians is absolutely prohibited,
even if the purpose is to protect other civilians.” It is not an
exaggeration to say that B’Tselem’s report on Gaza, despite its perfunctory
call for Hamas to stop firing rockets, is in substance a long apologetic for
both Hamas’s abuse of Gazans and its war on Israel.
Even when Israel acts in ways that seem to accord with B’Tselem’s wishes,
the organization declares the state in the wrong. In 2004, as Israel debated
whether to carry out a full withdrawal of its civilians and military from
Gaza, Montell wrote that “we must applaud any level of disengagement.” The
report her organization issued three years later, after disengagement, was
stamped on every page with the slogan: “Israel cannot disengage from its
responsibility.”
Also in 2007, the group released a 118-page report titled “Ground to a
Halt.” It declared every single Israeli checkpoint and road restriction in
the West Bank a multifaceted violation of international law. It may be
difficult to understand how a checkpoint erected to protect the human rights
of Israelis can itself be a human-rights violation, but that is precisely
what B’Tselem discovered. The group offered two main arguments. The first
had to do with the balance between Israeli security and Palestinian
inconvenience:
The state must prove that there is a rational connection between the
infringement of freedom of movement and achieving the security objective
sought to be achieved, that it is not possible to achieve the security
objective by a less harmful means, and that there is a proper relationship
between the harm caused to those whose freedom of movement is restricted and
the security purpose achieved as a result of the infringement.
Israel failed every aspect of this test, according to B’Tselem. But the test
was, in any case, mere window-dressing for the group’s real argument, which
is the same one offered in “Landgrab”: Israelis have no right to live
anywhere in the West Bank. And not only that, Israel therefore has no right
to protect them. Or as B’Tselem stated more artfully:
This consideration [of protecting Israeli civilians from attack] does not
exist in a vacuum. It is derived from broad, improper political
considerations without which the need to impose the restrictions on
Palestinian movement would never have arisen. The main improper political
considerations relate to Israel’s desire to perpetuate the settlements. . .
. The establishment of the settlements in the West Bank, a long-established
policy of the Israeli government, flagrantly contravenes international
humanitarian law.
B’Tselem ended with these words: “The conclusion is, therefore, that those
restrictions on movement, whose primary justification is ostensibly
‘protection of the lives’ of Israelis in the West Bank, are illegal.”
But surely an organization concerned with the rights of civilians would
acknowledge that Israel has a duty to protect its citizens, say, in Tel
Aviv, from Palestinian suicide bombers who start their journey in the West
Bank? No. When considering these matters, B’Tselem conveniently applied the
international-law principle of proportionality, which was originally devised
to determine the acceptable level of firepower used in military attacks
during war, to West Bank restrictions. Here, too, B’Tselem ruled that Israel
was guilty:
Even if the group restrictions have a certain measure of effectiveness in
achieving their security objective, it is hard to find a reasonable
relationship between the added benefit that the army contends they provide
and the unreasonable harm that they cause to the local population.
And so, even if the security measures worked, they were still “unreasonable”
and therefore a violation of international law. What would be a “reasonable”
security measure, according to B’Tselem? Armored transportation for Jews:
“Over the years, the authorities preferred to ignore alternatives that would
provide proper protection for the settlers, such as protected, bulletproof
vehicles used by settlers or by having them use protected, bulletproof
public transportation.”
B’Tselem also claimed that checkpoints and road closures constitute
“collective punishment.” That was a startling charge, because the term was
devised by the authors of the Geneva Conventions in response to the Nazis’
practice of slaughtering entire villages as punishment for the offenses of
individuals. B’Tselem has led the way in transforming that prohibition into
one that precludes any Israeli security measure that affects any Palestinian
not personally involved in attacking Israelis. Montell, for example, has
gone so far as to declare even Israeli air-force flights over Gaza a war
crime, writing in 2006
that the clear intention of the practice is to pressure the Palestinian
Authority and the armed Palestinian organizations by harming the entire
civilian population. It is a form of collective punishment, which is
blatantly illegal.
All in all, B’Tselem has been an innovator in manipulating traditional
definitions of international law, no matter how concocted and implausible,
to suit an assault on whatever Israeli practice B’Tselem wishes to condemn.
The group does admit in its reports that Israel has a right to protect its
citizens. But it is a right that B’Tselem affirms only in theory, never in
practice.
_____________
Another of B’Tselem’s major activities is compiling statistical reports that
it hopes will demonstrate, with empirical credibility, Israel’s abuses.
After Operation Cast Lead, for example, B’Tselem made headlines with a
report claiming that a majority of Palestinians killed during the war were
civilians, attacking the accuracy of the IDF’s numbers and undermining the
perception that the IDF had fought carefully in Gaza.
During the war, B’Tselem reported, 1,387 Palestinians were killed, 773 of
whom “did not take part in the hostilities” and only 330 of whom were
combatants. This curious phrasing, which was shortened in media coverage
simply to “civilians,” was in fact a bit of sophistry employed to conceal B’Tselem’s
results-oriented approach to statistics. The IDF’s own investigation, by
contrast, counted 1,166 Palestinians deaths, of whom 709 were terrorists and
295 were civilians—a commendable ratio given that much of the war was
fought, by Hamas’s design, in civilian areas.
B’Tselem arrived at such a high number of “civilian” deaths by adopting a
definition of “combatant” that transformed terrorists into civilians. The
group only counted those “who fulfill a continuous combat function” as
legitimate targets. Such people include full-time members of the Hamas
“armed wing,” and virtually nobody else—not Hamas policemen and not Hamas
political and spiritual leaders, financiers, propagandists, recruiters,
weapons smugglers, or support personnel. By adhering to this definition, the
United States would be barred from killing many members of al-Qaeda.
B’Tselem also claimed that 320 civilian minors were killed. Yet the group’s
own statistics on the male–female ratio of those minors strongly suggests
that many of the older minors were in fact combatants. As documented by two
Israeli researchers who examined B’Tselem’s data, the male–female ratio of
those in the 11-and-younger group was nearly 1:1. Yet as the age rose, so
did the gender disparity, to the point where the male-female ratio for 17-
and 18-year-olds was more than 6:1. If Israel had been indiscriminately
attacking civilians, how would it have been possible for such an
overwhelming number of them to have been males?
Recently, B’Tselem’s statistics were repudiated by an unlikely source, the
“interior minister” of Hamas. In November 2010, he told the London-based
Al-Hayat newspaper that between 600 and 700 Hamas militants had been killed
during the war—double the number claimed by B’Tselem, and almost exactly the
number reported a year earlier by the IDF.
_____________
In its 2009 year-end report, B’Tselem proclaimed that “in the past two
decades, B’Tselem emerged as the gold standard of human-rights research,
serving as an extremely reliable source of information in a contentious and
polarized climate.” Yet some of the most polarizing figures in Israel are
members of B’Tselem. To understand why B’Tselem acts the way it does, one
must understand its members. An organization, after all, is little more than
a collection of the people who lead and staff it.
Shortly following its self-proclamation regarding accuracy and moderation,
an Israeli columnist discovered that the group’s data-coordination
director—one of the most important positions in the organization—had posted
a number of curious entries on her personal blog. “Israel is committing
Humanity’s worst atrocities,” Lizi Sagie wrote. “Israel is proving its
devotion to Nazi values. . . . Israel exploits the Holocaust to reap
international benefits.” Israelis, she noted, “don’t erect gas chambers and
extermination camps, but if there were any, how many people would actually
resist it, and not only in their hearts?” And she admonishes, “In the name
of the State of Judaism we have stolen lands, murdered, starved others . . .
have created ghettos [for] all kinds of ‘others’ [and] allowed fascists to
raise their heads.”
Sagie resigned from B’Tselem following the exposure of these statements. But
they are only the most extreme version of a point of view held by B’Tselem’s
own leaders. Consider the cases of Jessica Montell, the current executive
director; Anat Biletsky, who served on B’Tselem’s board starting in 1995 and
was its chair from 2001 to 2006; and Oren Yiftachel, the current co-chair of
the board.
Montell was born in Berkeley, California, received a degree in women’s
studies at Oberlin, and then a master’s in international relations at
Columbia. She immigrated to Israel in 1995 to work for B’Tselem and became
its executive director in 2001. In a 2003 interview, Montell claimed that
“in some cases, the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid in
South Africa.”
That same year, Montell appeared at a roundtable discussion at the American
Colony Hotel, the favored East Jerusalem hangout of international
journalists, UN officials, and the NGO set. There she expressed the opinion
that the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings was
problematic largely because of Israel’s attempts to prevent more carnage.
“This current intifada,” she argued, “has greatly exacerbated Israel’s
human-rights violations. The current reality is affecting Palestinian human
rights in every sphere, and virtually all Palestinians, certainly if we talk
about restrictions on freedom of movement. It’s the most insidious form of
human-rights violations.” Israel had succumbed, she continued, to a
“security hysteria” that created a “lack of any sort of recognition of the
humanity and rights of Palestinians.”
Expanding her attack to include almost the entirety of the Israeli
population, she elaborated on what has become a standard talking point for
those who share B’Tselem’s view of the conflict: Israelis are so consumed by
racism and irrational fear that they are willing to engage in essentially
limitless abuse of Palestinians in order to protect themselves.
Panelist: The general public is willing to sacrifice most or all of the
human rights of Palestinians in exchange for some vain promises of security.
Montell: I agree. Our big challenge is to articulate a human-rights message
in the face of this security hysteria, to come forward with the message that
not everything is justified in the name of security, that the whole idea of
security has to be examined—what we mean by it, what’s justified, what
ultimately is going to achieve our security—all those questions that are
swept under the carpet in Israeli society.
Montell concluded with a thought that, when stated by non-Jews, is generally
viewed as anti-Semitic: “It’s the legacy of Jewish history that our own
security concerns are manipulated to act as some sort of blank check for all
Israeli government policies.”
The most fascinating part of the discussion, however, unfolded when Montell
was encouraged by the moderator to consider “abuses of human rights inside
Palestinian society.” Given an opportunity to balance her accusations
against Israel, Montell answered instead:
In general, there has been a collapse of rule of law inside Palestinian
society. The police stations and jails basically no longer exist and the
police force no longer has freedom of movement within the territories.
During parts of this intifada, the Palestinian police, or anyone wearing a
uniform, were automatically targeted by Israel. Obviously, that is going to
have very dramatic repercussions on the society as a whole.
For Montell, then, even Palestinian abuse of other Palestinians is Israel’s
fault.
In 2008 Montell wrote a piece for Tikkun in which she explored her
discomfort with Israeli Independence Day. “I prefer to think of myself as a
citizen of the world,” she wrote, “and, having been born and raised in the
United States before moving to Israel fifteen years ago, I ‘know’ and am
full of criticism for both. Patriotism doesn’t come so easy to skeptics like
me.” Indeed.
Then there is the case of Anat Biletzsky, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv
University. As she told a Brooklyn newspaper in 2004 about the history of
her involvement in anti-Zionist activism, which long pre-dates B’Tselem:
“The Communist party was not Zionist; it was Jewish and Arab. That was its
main plank, which was very important to me. I worked for those parties
during elections.” Biletzky—who was chair of the board of B’Tselem and its
most prominent public face during a period that included the Palestinian
suicide-bombing war, the Gaza disengagement, the Lebanon War, and the
beginning of the Hamas rocket war—shaped B’Tselem into the aggressive,
activist force that it is today. Her record of activism while serving as the
chair of B’Tselem displays astonishing, serial antagonism to the Jewish
state.
In 2002, after two years of Palestinian suicide bombings had left hundreds
of Israelis dead, the IDF entered the West Bank in order to, among other
things, protect the human rights of Israeli civilians to not be maimed and
murdered. Biletzky responded by organizing a petition of academics “to
express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers
who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories” and to “help
students who encounter academic, administrative, or economic difficulties as
a result of their refusal to serve.”
Later in 2002, as the United States contemplated invading Iraq, Biletzky
signed a bizarre petition that read, “We are deeply worried by indications
that the ‘fog of war’ [in Iraq] could be exploited by the Israeli government
to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged
ethnic cleansing.” It concluded by calling on the “International Community”
to take “concrete measures” to prevent Israeli “crimes against humanity.”
Biletzky’s activism reached its apogee in 2004, when she helped write what
is known as the “Olga Document,” a rambling tract named for the location in
Israel where it was written. Israel, the letter says, is a “death trap” and
“the biggest ghetto in the entire history of the Jews”; “military operations
and wars has [sic] become the life-support drug of Israel’s Jews.” It goes
on to state that “we are living in a benighted colonial reality—in the heart
of darkness”; and that Israel seems “determined to pulverize the Palestinian
people to dust” by subjecting them to “the nightmare of apartheid, the
burden of humiliation and the demons of destruction employed by Israel
unremittingly, day and night, for 37 years.” Out of “racist arrogance,” the
document claims, Israelis across the political spectrum “depict the
Palestinians as subhuman.”
The Olga Document continues: “We are united in a critique of Zionism, based
as it is on refusal to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country and
on denial of their rights, on dispossession of their lands, and on adoption
of separation as a fundamental principle and way of life.” Besides adopting
the self-evidently racist claim that only Arabs are “indigenous” to the land
of Israel, Biletzky also called for the repeal of all laws and the end of
all practices that make Israel a Jewish state. This, she said, along with
creating an Arab majority in Israel through the Palestinian “right of
return,” would finally absolve Jews of the moral stain that is Israel.
Biletzky has also acknowledged that she has been working to end Israel as a
Jewish state since the late 1960s. She stated that “Israel [today] is like
the Nazis or like Germany in ’34” and that life for Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza “is something that I do not hesitate to call a concentration
camp.”
Biletzky is not merely an apologist for terrorism. At times, she has given
terrorists moral support, as she did in the case of Azmi Bishara. He was a
member of the Knesset from the Balad Party, an anti-Zionist Arab faction. In
2006, Bishara fled Israel after coming under investigation for espionage and
high treason. When the gag order on the case was lifted in May 2007, it was
revealed that Bishara had acted as a paid informant for Hezbollah during the
Second Lebanon War, apparently helping the group select targets in Israel
for missile attacks. It was also discovered that he had stolen millions of
shekels from Arab charities. Biletzky responded to these devastating
revelations by publishing a statement of solidarity in the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz that read, in its entirety, “Azmi Bishara—we are brethren.”
Throughout her history of apologetics for violence and terrorism against
Israel’s Jews, as well as her advocacy for the dismantling of the Jewish
state, Biletzky has always been called a human-rights activist. For reasons
that may be disturbing to contemplate, the journalists who eagerly report
her organization’s accusations against Israel have never taken her biases
into consideration when assessing the veracity of B’Tselem’s accusations.
Most telling of all, perhaps, at no point did members of B’Tselem itself—its
board, its employees, or its army of supporters—protest the extremism in its
own ranks.
The situation is no better today. In 2006, Biletzsky stepped down as chair
and has been replaced by two people: Gilad Barnea, an attorney who avoids
political statements, and Oren Yiftachel, a professor of “political
geography” at Ben-Gurion University. Yiftachel is one of Israel’s most
outspoken anti-Zionists and calls his country “an ethnocratic regime” and a
“Judaization project [that] has caused the pervasive dispossession of
Palestinian-Arabs.”
His signature has appeared with Biletzky’s on many of the most extreme
anti-Israel petitions of the past decade, such as a 2001 letter they signed
endorsing Palestinian terrorism and calling for a “peace force” to stop
Israel from defending itself: “We regard Palestinian violence as being, on
the whole, a legitimate revolt against colonial occupation,” the statement
read. “We call for an immediate international intervention to stop the
killing and wounding of human beings who are exercising their elementary
right to claim political freedom.”
Yiftachel also signed the 2004 Olga Document and a petition dated January 5,
2009, in the midst of Operation Cast Lead, that called on the UN Security
Council and the EU to undertake a “massive intervention” to stop “Israel’s
atrocities.” After the war, he published an article titled “The Jailer
State” in which he argued that Hamas’s rocket war on Israeli civilians
should “be perceived as a prison uprising, currently suppressed with terror
by the Israeli state.”
Such expressions of furious contempt for Israel contrast sharply with B’Tselem’s
rather successful attempt to identify itself as a source of Israel’s
democratic strength. As Jessica Montell once told an American audience, her
group is “the best evidence [for] the vibrancy of Israeli democracy”; or as
B’Tselem’s spokeswoman wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “Israel must remain a
strong, vibrant democracy.” That many in B’Tselem view this democracy as
racist, belligerent, and illegitimate is an irony apparently lost on its
defenders. Indeed, Israel is so open a society that its leading
“human-rights” organization has been led for the past decade by two people
who are open supporters of terrorism against it.
_____________
B’Tselem is merely one player, albeit a leading one, in a political movement
that has developed over the past decade that seeks to place the very
legitimacy of the Jewish state in question. It is joined by dozens of other
groups in Israel and abroad that operate under the pretense of promoting
human rights and civil society. The proliferation of these NGOs appears from
the outside to be an independent and organic response to the worsening of
real problems in Israel, but in fact the groups are closely allied. They
have shared goals, shared funders (primarily European governments and the
New Israel Fund in the United States), coordinate their work closely, defend
each other from criticism, and collaborate on campaigns to promote specific
accusations.
The tactics of the ideological war they are waging are unmistakable. The
groups relentlessly accuse Israel of committing war crimes, human-rights
offenses, and violations of international law. They champion the Palestinian
cause and the Palestinian narrative of victimhood and Israeli oppression.
They supply the highly massaged “facts” and claims that animate
journalistic, diplomatic, and political activism against Israel, such as the
Goldstone Report. They advocate for “lawfare” against Israeli officials—that
is, prosecuting them for war crimes in European courts. And they argue
either openly or by implication that Zionism itself—the existence of a
Jewish state—is undemocratic, oppressive, and racist.
This war of delegitimization is so dangerous because it is targeted
precisely at the heart of Western support for Israel—the belief in Europe
and especially in America that Israel is not only a legitimate nation-state
but also an exemplar of Western liberal values, deserving of the free world’s
support and its protection in the face of constant attacks. The genius of
the NGO movement is its promotion of Israelis themselves to make the case
against Israel. Who better to convince Westerners that they are wrong to
admire Israel than Jews feigning concern over Israel’s moral standing?
The story of those Israeli Jews who have made careers out of attacking
Israel’s right to exist, such as Biletzky and Yiftachel, illustrates the
degradation of the once mighty Israeli peace movement. Originally, the
movement sought legitimacy and prominence in Israeli politics, and received
it for a time—and because it was part of the political process, it was
constrained by the need for electoral support and popular legitimacy. Yet
the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 2000 and the Palestinian terror war that
followed presented the peace movement with an existential crisis: With whom,
exactly, were Israelis supposed to make peace? The withdrawals from Lebanon
in 2000 and Gaza five years later, and the entrenchment in the vacated
territory of Iranian-backed terrorist groups, further disillusioned Israelis
and called into question the central proposition of the peace movement: if
Israel makes the right concessions, peace will follow. And so, over the past
15 years, the peace movement has fallen from a position of influence in
Israeli politics to one, today, of irrelevance, an anachronism that no
longer has realistic answers to Israel’s problems.
What remains of the peace movement is a white-hot core of activists who
refuse to acknowledge their failure and yet cannot gracefully recede from
the political stage. They have discovered an innovative formula for
rebuilding their political relevance completely outside the democratic
political arena: reconstitute themselves as NGOs and conceal their political
agenda in the apolitical rhetoric of human rights and international law. In
this guise, the peace movement no longer has any need to win elections or
offer a serious platform for governance. The NGOs instead position
themselves as a blunt opposition force working against mainstream Israeli
society, which is viewed as unsophisticated, provincial, racist, and
stricken with “security hysteria.” This “human-rights community” has thus
not only opposed every consensus Israeli security measure—Operation
Defensive Shield during the
intifada, the security fence to stop suicide bombers, the targeted killings
of terror-group leaders, the Lebanon War, and the Gaza War—but has branded
them war crimes and human-rights violations for which Israel should be
punished.
In these circumstances, where there is no point in trying to succeed at the
ballot box, leftist Israeli activism now directs itself internationally in
the hopes that fomenting a narrative of Israeli criminality will invite
enough sanction and condemnation from Europe, the United Nations, and
America to force Israel to accede to the demands of these otherwise
powerless radicals.
The policies they support would constitute nothing less than Zionism’s
destruction. And they apparently have no compunction about seeking its
destruction from without, since they have learned to their disappointment
and rage that Israel is too strong a nation to allow itself to be destroyed
from within.
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Footnotes
1 For a detailed discussion of the status of the West Bank, see “The
Illegal-Settlements Myth” by David M. Phillips in the December 2009 issue of
COMMENTARY.
About the Author
Noah Pollak is the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel.
His piece “They’re Doing the J Street Jive” appeared in our April 2009
issue.
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