People who criticise Israeli actions are leaving themselves open to a campaign of intimidation and accusations of anti-Semitism, writes Lara Marlowe.
In the US, the Harvard-educated historian and advisor to the Pentagon, Daniel Pipes, has set up a website (www.campus-watch.org) to denounce what he calls "hatred of Israel" in American universities. Pipes lists eight professors and 14 universities which he accuses of being pro-Palestinian.
One of the professors signed a petition two years ago in favour of the Palestinian-born academic Edward Said. Another of the professors denounced by Pipes participated in a debate on the detention of Muslims without trial after September 11th. Pipes asks students to inform on professors who commit what he calls "campus anti-Semitism".
In France, the radio journalist Daniel Mermet went on trial on May 31st, accused by the Union of Jewish Students in France, Lawyers Without Borders and the League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism of "defamation and incitement to racial hatred". These groups based their lawsuit on a five-hour series broadcast by Mermet from Israel and the Occupied Territories the previous summer.
Mermet's programme has 600,000 listeners on the state-owned radio station France Inter. The Israel/Palestine series included a Jewish family whose children had been killed in a bombing, and the family of a Palestinian "martyr". Mermet was taken to court not for his own reporting, but for broadcasting listeners' comments. One of the "offending" messages, left by a female listener on the programme's answering machine, said the Israeli government "revels in the killing and maiming of children, justifies indefensible things . . . and has the revolting arrogance to accuse us of racism when we timidly protest against this shameful behaviour . . ." The caller concluded by saying she was "fiercely anti-Zionist, but in no way anti-Semitic".
Referring to the broadcast, Gilles William Goldnadel, president of Lawyers Without Borders, said there was "but a hair's breadth between hatred for the Jewish State and anti-Semitism". An appeal in favour of Mermet, signed by dozens of intellectuals, including several Israeli academics, said "the struggle against anti-Semitism is dangerously cheapened when it is systematically, abusively invoked". In July, a Paris tribunal cleared Mermet of anti-Semitism. He said he was relieved, but angry at having been "dragged through the mud". Those who sued him were trying to silence the media, he said. "To try to understand and find a way out of a conflict like this, it must be talked about and talked about and talked about."
Public personalities have repeatedly been intimidated by such tactics. Speaking of suicide bombers in June, Cherie Blair, who is a human rights lawyer, told reporters: "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress." The protest from British opposition deputies and the Israeli embassy in London was such that Blair issued an apology within hours. At the same time, the Guardian published an interview with CNN founder Ted Turner, in which he said: "The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers; that's all they have. The Israelis . . . they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism."
The Israeli government promptly announced it was giving a television frequency to CNN's competitors, Fox News. Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli minister for telecommunications, said if Turner had been in Israel, he would have had him declared persona non grata. CNN issued a statement dissociating itself from the interview. Turner, like Blair, apologised.
Last April, Gretta Duisenberg, the wife of Wim Duisenberg, the Dutch president of the European Central Bank, hung a Palestinian flag from the balcony of the couple's home in Amsterdam. When their neighbours - whose family live in Israel - complained, she said, "The Palestinians are forced to look at Israeli flags among tanks every day." The Jewish Federation of the Netherlands filed a suit against her for "incitement to hatred" and asked the World Jewish Congress to ban Mr Duisenberg from New York. She received death threats. Mr Duisenberg eventually took the flag down.
At Amnesty International's annual conference in Enniscorthy on October 12th, Tom Cooney, a professor of medical and planning law at UCD and a self-described friend of Israel, claimed that - notwithstanding UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 which demand the "withdrawal of Israel's armed forces from territories occupied" in 1967 - the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are not "occupied" but "disputed". Merely to use the word "occupied", Mr Cooney said, is to condone the killing of Israeli civilians. Ephrat Tseelon, a professor of sociology at UCD, complained of what she called "bad faith and malice based on anti-Semitism" in media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The constant reiteration of accusations like those made by Cooney and Tseelon has cowed some media. An internal BBC memorandum in August asked correspondents to use the Israeli-preferred term "targeted killings" in lieu of "assassination" for 161 Palestinians who were assassinated by Israel over the past two years. "It's just as easy to avoid it, and causes us less grief," a BBC executive wrote.
Some journalists now refer to Israeli settlements on illegally occupied land as "neighbourhoods" rather than "settlements". Cooney insisted the forced deportation of Palestinians, illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, should be called "relocation". In another distortion, Israeli army violence is almost always called "retaliation" or "reprisal", while violent acts by Palestinians are "terrorist attacks".
Whether it be Pipes's website, the lawsuits against Mermet and Duisenburg or complaints to editors about words, a sustained campaign of intimidation is going on. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to "freedom of opinion and expression . . . and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers."
The right to information may be secondary to the right to life, so grossly violated by Palestinian suicide bombers and the Israeli army. But the two are linked. In the Middle East, words - especially the thoughtless and inaccurate use of them - can kill.
