[News] Anti-Defamation League accuses the Bay View of being anti-Semitic

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Anti-Defamation League accuses the Bay View of being anti-Semitic
http://www.sfbayview.com/012804/antisemitic012804.shtml

by Jeff Blankfort



The Bay View received a letter last week from the Anti-Defamation League 
(see page 5) suggesting that the paper had crossed the line from being 
simply critical of the policies of the State of Israel, to being 
anti-Semitic. One of the two examples provided concerned JR's report on the 
unsuccessful attempt of workers at the Rainbow Grocery Co-op to implement a 
boycott of Israeli products in protest against Israel's ongoing occupation 
of Palestinian land and the brutal and inhuman treatment of the 
Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army.

What the ADL objected to and characterized as misleading was JR's reference 
to Israel's founders having simply invaded and settled Palestine in 1948; 
the use of inflammatory phrases such as the Israeli Zionist government ... 
steal[ing] more and more of the Palestinians land; as well as direct 
comparisons to South Africa during the Apartheid era.

It is true that Israel did not invade and settle Palestine in 1948. The 
settlement of European Jews, what the indigenous Palestinian Arabs (and JR) 
correctly perceived as an invasion, began as a trickle in the latter part 
of the 19th century. When Lord Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary of 
Great Britain, the reigning imperial power of the time, declared in 1917 
that Palestine should become the national home of the Jewish people, the 
influx gathered steam and gained the support of the Western powers. That a 
minister of one country awarded the land of another to a third has never 
troubled many who oppose the abuses of imperialism, but make an exception 
when Israel is concerned.

What did happen in 1948 was the establishment of Israel and with it the 
destruction and theft of 382 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 
their estimated 750,000 inhabitants who have never been allowed to return 
despite UN Resolution 194 guaranteeing them the right to do so. The 150,000 
Palestinians who remained were held under military law in 1966 and to this 
day, as non-Jews, are restricted from owning or leasing property within 
93.7 percent of Israel's 1967 borders.

The  ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their land has never ceased, 
nor has Israel's expropriation of what remains, as attested to by Israel's 
ongoing construction of the 25-foot high apartheid wall through sections of 
the West Bank that has received international condemnation and whose 
legality is soon to be reviewed by the World Court in the Hague.

When it objects to comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, 
particularly when it does so in San Francisco, the ADL is treading on 
dangerous ground. It was 10 years ago this month that an embarrassed SFPD 
revealed that one of its officers, Tom Gerard, working together with Roy 
Bullock, a long-time undercover agent for the ADL, had been spying on the 
African National Congress, Black South African exiles, and the 
anti-apartheid movement, for South African intelligence.

Since Bullock had been spying on the apartheid movement for the ADL, as he 
told SFPD Inspector Ron Roth, doing the same for the South Africans meant 
little extra work, since much of the information the South Africans wanted 
he and the ADL already possessed.

As would be expected, the pair were already spying on Palestinian and Arab 
groups and individuals. But what was revealed in the more than 700 pages of 
documents released by District Attorney Arlo Smith was that the ADL was 
keeping files on more than 10,000 individuals* and 600 political groups 
that ranged across the political and racial spectrum - from the NAACP to 
the Asian Law Caucus to the San Francisco Labor Council - and that similar 
operations were being conducted by ADL agents across the United States, 
making the ADL probably the largest private intelligence gathering 
operation in the country.

At the time, Bullock had been paid through a cut-out, a Beverly Hills 
lawyer, who would send him a check every week. The ADL's response to the 
revelationthat their agent was moonlighting for the South Africans was to 
put him directly on its payroll. At the time, Israel was a close ally of 
the apartheid regime, selling it weapons, tear gas, water cannons and high 
tech electronic equipment, and jointly developing atomic weapons, in 
violation of the international sanctions then in effect.

As they were then and remain today, the ADL's policies are 
indistinguishable from those of the Israeli government. When questioned in 
May 1993 about his organization's spying on the ANC and the apartheid 
movement, the ADL's long-time national director, Abe Foxman, was unapologetic.

"People are very upset about (the files) on the ANC," he told the Jewish 
Bulletin. At the time we exposed the ANC, they were communist. They were 
violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were pro-PLO, and they were 
anti-Israel. You're going to tell me I don't have the legitimacy to find 
out who they were consorting with, who their buddies are, who supports whom?

Comparisons between Israel and South Africa are not new and have been made 
by critics of both regimes, including Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson 
Mandela. In 1987, Israeli Uri Davis wrote Israel: An Apartheid State, and, 
more recently, Israeli Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University wrote:

By July, 2002 & Israel's separation can no longer be compared with the 
apartheid of South Africa. As Ronnie Kastrils, South Africa's minister of 
water affairs, said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, The South African 
apartheid regime never engaged in the sort of oppression Israel is 
inflicting on the Palestinians. For all the evils and atrocities of 
apartheid, the government never sent tanks into Black towns. It never used 
gunships, bombers, or missiles against the Black towns or Bantustans. The 
apartheid regime used to impose sieges on Black towns, but these sieges 
were lifted within days. Nor, we may add, had South Africa applied a 
systematic policy of bringing the Black population to starvation. What we 
are witnessing in the occupied territories Israel's penal colonies - is the 
invisible daily killing of the sick and wounded who are deprived of medical 
care, of the weak who cannot survive in the new poverty conditions, and of 
those who are approaching starvation (Israel/Palestine: How to End the War 
of 1948, Seven Stories Press, 2002).

There is much more to this story that the ADL does not want us to know, so 
it will be continued.

*Jeff Blankfort is one of those individuals who brought a class action suit 
against the ADL for violation of our privacy rights under California law. 
In 2002, the ADL settled out of court. Email him at jblankfort at earthlink.net
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