Through the relatively trivial – film festival tiffs and the Sid Ryan express – to the existentially alarming spectre of Iranian missiles and Mahmoud Ahmedinajad’s end game, there is a feeling in the air that the winds have shifted.
As Prof. Simon Schama, one of the world’s foremost historians, noted in a 2003 interview, “the line that’s being crossed is actually from an attack on what Israel does to an attack on what Israel is. And of course if the Jews would do the whole world a favour by disappearing entirely… then I expect there wouldn’t be any anti-Semitism, although as one of my colleagues reminded me, it didn’t stop there being Japanese anti-Semitism.”
As has been commented upon endlessly, Israel is the complex flashpoint for much of the critical rhetoric being flung about these days, and much of it comes from Jews themselves. Jennifer Loewenstein, associate director of the Middle East studies program at the University of Wisconsin, writes that “the destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control.” Or consider this from her fellow member of the tribe, Naomi Klein: “It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of the global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.” And Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has argued in columns for Ha’aretz that “Israel is a dangerous and violent country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law.”
All of this creates mounting pressure for Jewish students to separate fact from fiction, legitimate criticism from dangerous and even racist distortion, historical truth from clever propaganda. As U.S. president John Adams famously noted, “facts are stubborn things.” Getting them right takes time, and an ability to assess rationally and patiently. In the wake of recent battles against Hezbollah and Hamas, Israeli policy has been the subject of constant debate in the media and the world community.
On the evening of Nov. 7 in Toronto, at Torah in Motion’s eighth annual “Renewing Our Spirit Conference,” I will be conducting a dialogue with Prof. Michael Walzer of Princeton University, the world’s leading theorist on just war; MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler, renowned for his work on human rights across the globe; and Bret Stephens, former editor of the Jerusalem Post and currently head of the foreign bureau of the Wall Street Journal. We will discuss the following questions: What is the line between a “just war” and an unethical military campaign? What is the nature of human rights in the midst of war? What does “proportionality” mean in an armed conflict and how large a role should “innocent civilians play” in composing military strategy? How can one discern between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism? Is the media preoccupied with Israeli actions at the expense of focusing on violence and human rights abuses carried out by other states? How should Israel and the West respond to Iran? How large a role do settlements play in the ultimate disposition of peace in the Middle East? Does the fact that Israel is a Jewish state mean that it must abide by different moral rules than other countries?
Please join us and bring your own questions.