Profile in courage

Here's something we don't expect to see: Jewish hate groups. No, not anti-Semite hate groups, those are all too sadly all too familiar. I mean Jewish hate groups. Their targets are, generally, other Jews who urge peace with Palestinians and/or withdrawal from the occupied territories, those they call "self-hating" Jews.

Deborah Fink is a singer and music teacher living in London [reports the Guardian for January 19]. She is also Jewish. Last month, out of the blue, she received a deluge of hateful emails - more than 150 in the space of a week.

One came from a rabbi in New York, informing her: "Your soul, my dear, is petrified and lost." Another said, menacingly: "Hitler killed the wrong Jews." ...

What, exactly, had Ms Fink done to deserve this vitriol? The short answer is that she had been planning to sing.

Ms Fink is a member of Just Peace UK, a mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish group opposing the Israeli occupation and seeking "a viable and sovereign Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel, with Jerusalem as the shared capital of both states".

Just before Christmas, she helped to organise an alternative carol concert in Trafalgar Square, at which traditional Christmas songs were sung with new words....

To publicise the event, organisers sent out several hundred emails. One of them fell into the hands of a man named Tom Gross, who strongly disapproved.

The furious Mr Gross passed the email to his friend, Naomi Ragen....

Ms Ragen circulated an email of her own, which began: "I suppose it's fitting that self-hating Jews will be singing anti-Israel Christmas songs to curry favour with oh-so-genteel British anti-Semites." ...

Email addresses for four of the "hate-mongering" carol singers followed, including that of Ms Fink.

The email made its way through Isralert, which describes itself as a "Jewish advocacy network" (although the guardian says its purpose is unclear), think-israel.org, a website based in Bethesda, Maryland (which claims that the Palestinians "have no historical, national or cultural identity distinct from other Arabs of the region" - that is, it denies their existence as a people), and ourenemies.org,

undoubtedly one of the nastiest non-pornographic sites on the internet.

The site is registered in Bogota, Colombia, where its owner is identified only by a Hotmail address. It is hosted by a company in Florida called Aleph-Net.

Besides making crude attempts at satire ("Arafat is gay! Former paedophile outed"), ourenemies.org targets what it calls "self-hating Jews" in a vicious and highly personalised way. ...

The site gives personal details of the people targeted, including their email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses, together with street maps in some cases ("so you won't get lost").

In the case of organisations, details of their internet servers are given - presumably to facilitate hacking. ...

Ourenemies.org says it is affiliated to another website, California-based Masada2000, which publishes a "SHIT List" of more than 6,000 "Self-Hating, Israel-Threatening" Jews.

Interestingly, most of the nastiness generated in the name of defending Israel seems to come from the US rather than from Israel itself.

Interesting but perhaps not surprising. It's long been true that there is more opposition to Israeli policies in Israel than there is in the US. Some respond by saying that proves that Israel is a democracy, unlike the Arab states. Which for the most part is true, but also irrelevant, since the comparison is being made between Israel and the US, not Israel and, say, Jordan.

"Self-hating Jew" is a particularly vile epithet, as it's intended to conjure up an image of someone so trapped in self-loathing from a fact of their own nature which they can't change that they not only hate themselves for being Jewish, they despise the very concept of Jewishness and would destroy it to destroy it in themselves. That is, to be a "self-hating Jew" is to be worse than the most blatant anti-Semite.

It is also, in the minds of these slimy oafs, an irrefutable accusation since the very fact of opposition is itself the proof. That is, it's not that "self-hating Jews" will oppose Israeli government policies, it's that to oppose Israeli government policies is to be a self-hating Jew. I mentioned recently a friend, then with the Jewish Peace Fellowship, who used to give a talk on "Can Israel Survive Itself?" I saw him once give (or rather, try to give) that talk only to be heckled and shouted at by some members of local synagogues, one of who later told me that the speaker was, yes, a self-hating Jew - even though the point of the talk was his conviction that short-term Israeli policies were endangering long-term Israeli security.

Ultimately, this is a form of racism no different than any other and just as impervious to any logical argument or dose of reality. All that it's targets can do is keep on keepin' on. And those of us who are not Jewish need to be aware of and respect that bit of extra courage it takes for them to speak out.