Israeli exceptionalism
Dr Andrew Vincent, Director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney said recently after a trip to Lebanon:
"What we’re seeing at the moment is a massive attack on a neigbouring country. Now just imagine if an Arab country was attacking another Arab country: destroying its infrastructure, bombing its airport, killing growing numbers of civilians, there’d be an international uproar! The world wouldn’t tolerate it. But because it’s Israel that’s doing it, we’re strangely silent. We pay as much attention to Israeli casualties — which hurt just as much, let’s face it — as we do Lebanese casualties, even though there are 20 or 30 times as many Lebanese casualties. And the Arab world, when they look at this, they say, ‘This is a double standard. What’s going on here?’"
He said this in an interview with Australian broadcaster Phillip Adams, who is accused of being both pro-Israel and anti-Semitic whenever he addresses issues of Middle-Eastern politics. I think he is neither. Clearly, not all criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Semitism and, for the sake of peace and justice, we cannot afford to go to the other extreme of permitting a double-standard in favour of Israel such as Vincent describes.
There has been a lot of discussion in the letters to the editor and the opinion pieces in The Age about what constitutes anti-semitism. In the past the Uniting Church has been labelled anti-semitic because of its support for a Palestinian state. Now attempts to hold Israel accountable for the deaths of civilians in Lebanon and descriptions of its response to Hezbollah rockets as ‘disproportionate’ also seem to be considered ‘anti-semitic’ by some.
But surely it is anti-semitic to suggest that Israel does not need to abide by the same rules as the rest of the world. Israel prides itself on being a civilised, secular, democracy, and the rest of the world should treat it as one. That means condemning its breaking of international law. Anything else is anti-semitism.