Buried deep within a Haaretz article about the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator is an implicit threat of moral blackmail that explains much of the anti-Israel discourse today.
The article is a hit piece on Katharina von Schnurbein, the head of the EU’s office of the European Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life. Von Schnurbein is the rare EU official who stands again the otherwise nonstop flood of single-minded Israel condemnation from the union’s officials. Haaretz, and the sources who spoke to the paper for the piece, are putting a bureaucratic target on her back in the hopes that she will be reined in.
Von Schnurbein knows that certain criticism of Israel, even when it ostensibly addresses policy, can bleed into anti-Semitic tropes or collective blame. She is therefore a moderating force, but the EU establishment (and Haaretz, apparently) sees her as a threat. Supra-national bodies like the EU and UN thought they had figured out a clever way to lob blood libels at the Jewish state without taking responsibility for them: They would support a network of NGOs and pressure groups who would claim expertise and let those groups, behind a veneer of objectivity, make the harshest accusations.
Von Schnurbein undermines this system of criticism-by-catspaw. And former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell used the Haaretz article to make that clear:
“In an interview with Haaretz, Borrell warned over ‘inflationary misuse’ of accusations of antisemitism against Israel’s critics.
“The Catalonian former chief EU diplomat added that labeling the institutions mandated to uphold international law — including the UN, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice — as ‘antisemitic’ implies that, by opposing crimes against humanity, you oppose Jews. ‘That is playing into the hands of Jew-haters,’ he says.”
And that’s the scam underlying the entire narrative of the Gaza war: Jews cannot defend themselves against spurious accusations of blood-lust because then they’ll be confirming for the world that “Jews” and “crimes against humanity” are synonymous. You see, even in trying to bat away claims of anti-Semitism, these officials cannot help but express anti-Semitic tropes.
This is called blackmail. Jews must either accept the libelous denunciations of those who seek their destruction or they will trigger an escalating campaign of libelous denunciations.
The tactic of fabricating authority and then appealing to that authority can backfire, however. It has deprived the anti-Israel crowd of their critical-thinking skills, or erased whatever critical-thinking skills they once had.
You see this play out daily. Yesterday, for example, Spectator editor Michael Gove debated the “genocide” lie on social media with Green Party head Zack Polanski. Polanski accused Israel of genocide, and Gove responded, correctly, that “Rwanda was a genocide. The Shoah was a genocide. Equating Israel with the Interahamwe or SS is just wicked.”
And what was Polanski’s response? “Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Save the Children, the UN, International Association of Genocide Scholars, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council, Islamic Relief – all say, it’s a genocide.”
This is the issue in a nutshell. Gove mentions actual points of history, and Polanski says well these pro-Palestinian pressure groups said so. What’s more, Amnesty International’s attempt to accuse Israel of genocide was very famously a complete disaster for the organization’s credibility.
The definition of “genocide” is quite specific; it requires establishing intent and that genocide be the only plausible explanation for a government’s actions. In its report, Amnesty wrote of that definition: “Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict.”
Amnesty, then, was openly admitting that according to the accepted definition of genocide, Israel could not be found guilty. So the organization changed the definition, specifically for the Jewish state. Thus Amnesty accused Israel of something, but it wasn’t “genocide.”
Amnesty was relying on its supporters and financial backers to not know the law or the history. It understands that people like Michael Gove, who know a thing or two about the issue, aren’t its audience. It must count on Zack Polanski and his type—activists who must rely exclusively on “somebody told me” arguments.
Amnesty and its ilk must, that is, account for the knowledge gap between Israel’s defenders and the anti-Zionists, who are punching above their intellectual weight class.
Here’s another example. I wrote last week about Hamas’s own latest fatality statistics in Gaza. The pro-Israel side understands that the topline number of war dead given by Hamas is just a starting point—that it includes combatants, natural deaths, Hamas-caused deaths of Palestinians, etc. But in order to understand what the Hamas report actually says, you have to know these things, and you have to have the means to calculate the various subcategories. The result is that Israel’s defenders must master the data and develop actual expertise on what happens in a warzone. Israel’s accusers are entirely unable to navigate this terrain, and they aren’t expected to. They are merely expected to parrot what Hamas wants them to say and sneer that to challenge their errors is itself tantamount to a war crime.
It would be much better for the anti-Zionists personally to develop the critical thinking skills necessary to thoughtfully and knowledgeably engage on this subject. They just wouldn’t be anti-Zionists anymore.
