Kind enemies and hateful friends

On Saturday, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture at SOAS, London, on the grave injustices of the ongoing and illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the panel were revisionist Israeli historian, Illan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Gideon Levy, journalist at Haaretz, whose weekly column on the occupation, The Twilight Zone, is like a smack in the complacent face of the liberal and fundamentalist Zionist alike, and Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford academic and a former PLO representative. I will not go into detail here about the aspects of the occupation each panelist threw further light on, except to say that no matter how much I think I know about the 41 year occupation, and the events of the 1948 Nakba, my sense of outrage is never blunted.

Three weeks ago, an article appeared in Haaretz by Levy entitled, Let's hope Obama won't be a 'friend of Israel' . Levy made the very simple, but rarely heard, point that friends that do not criticise you for your mistakes, and in the case of Israel, fail to condemn your contempt for international law and human rights, are not true friends: "When we say that someone is a "friend of Israel" we mean a friend of the occupation, a believer in Israel's self-armament, a fan of its language of strength and a supporter of all its regional delusions. When we say someone is a "friend of Israel" we mean someone who will give Israel a carte blanche for any violent adventure it desires, for rejecting peace and for building in the territories."

Such a friend is hateful: Israel's greatest friend, Bush, "let it embark on an unnecessary war in Lebanon. He did not prevent the construction of a single outpost. He may have encouraged Israel, in secret, to bomb Iran. He did not pressure Israel to move ahead with peace talks, he even held up negotiations with Syria, and he did not reproach Israel for its policy of targeted killings." While Israel and Israelis may at present believe that this friendship protects them from terror, it does quite the opposite. America (and the UK's) economic and military support of Israel ensures that year by year its enemies multiply and their rage intensifies. Meanwhile Israeli society has achieved a state of chilling moral bankruptcy with its total insensitivity to the suffering of millions of its close neighbours, the Palestinians, that can only have been possible through the Israeli media and military's sixty-year long project to dehumanise the inhabitants of historic Palestine, forcing into exile huge numbers of people who to this day have no right of return, and rounding up, relocating and caging others - as if they were herds of animals - behind walls and checkpoints in shrinking bantustans.

Photo of Gideon Levy via arendt-art.de

I was struck by Levy's subversion of the idea of friendship that had featured so heavily in the recent, carefully staged, American election 'debates'. The two vice-presidential candidates tried to outdo each other in their expressions of love for Israel, and ended up bonding over their shared admiration for this failed state - an occupying power that is to date in contravention of over 100 UN resolutions, has no internationally recognised capital and no agreed borders (to name just a few of its failures). With friends like these, who needs enemies, as the saying goes... Levy has predictably been branded a self-hating Jew, in other words an enemy of the Israeli people and the Jewish State, as if his words and not their deeds were imperiling them. Yet Israel is his home and as much as he is heckled for speaking the truth, he has no intention of leaving. My impression is that he would rather stay and see it become a pluralistic nation-state with rights for all its citizens regardless of race or creed. He has, unfortunately, little reason for optimism at present.

Israel needs kind enemies such as Levy.

The Muslim world also needs such 'enemies'.

When discussing Islam, Muslim-majority countries, Muslim communities and individuals in the same breath as women's rights, many individuals, writers, activists and organisations both within the 'community' and without are branded Islamophobes, enemies of Islam, traitors, and so on. I would never deny that Islamophobia exists, just as my extensive reading of literature about the holocaust and the politics of Europe that lead up to this horrific mass-persecution and killing of innocents, would ever allow me to deny that anti-Semitism exists. And yet should not the true friend of Muslims, of Islam and of governments of Islamic lands be the first person to point out injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, stupidity and the spreading of false and malevolent ideas, wherever he or she sees them? The 'hateful friend', in contrast, is like the courtier that shields a king from the cruelty and humiliations inflicted upon his subjects, and from their growing discontent, until, too late, he advises 'his excellency' of his kingdom's descent into civil war.