The CAA is one of the groups that, using similarly twisted logic, led the attacks on the British Labour party over claims of antisemitism in its ranks under leader Jeremy Corbyn. It helped to foist a highly problematic new definition of antisemitism on the party that downgrades concerns about racism directed at Jews to prioritise a supposedly bigger crime: criticism of Israel. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition offers 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which refer to Israel rather than Jews.
Preposterously, the CAA alleged that Guerin had violated one of these examples. It said her report had included "drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis". Very clearly, she had done no such thing.
Erasing the record
The most that could be inferred from Guerin's extremely vague, overly cautious remark was two things. First, that Israel justifies the need for a Jewish state on the threat to Jews posed by antisemitism (as evidenced by the Holocaust). And second, that the resulting state of Israel has inflicted a very high price on the Palestinians, who had to be displaced from their homeland to make that state achievable. At no point did Guerin make a comparison between the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians.
She simply, and rightly, hinted at a chain of related events: European racism towards Jews culminated in the Holocaust; the Holocaust was used by the Zionist movement to justify European sponsorship of a Jewish state on the ruins of Palestine; Palestinians and their supporters feel aggrieved that the Holocaust has become a pretext for ignoring their plight and suppressing criticism of Israel. Each of those links is irrefutably true. And unless the truth is now antisemitic and there is mounting evidence that it is being made so by Israel, its lobbyists and western governments what Guerin said was not conceivably antisemitic.
It may seem obvious why Israel and its lobbyists would want to silence criticism, or even a basic historical understanding, of the context and consequences of Israel's founding. But why are western officials evidently so keen to aid Israel in this project of erasing the historical record?
Israel could never have been established without the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and the destruction of hundreds of their villages to prevent any return. That is why a growing number of historians have risked the wrath of the Israel lobby to declare these events ethnic cleansing in other words, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Western hypocrisy
Let us note that the circumstances in which Israel was created were not exceptional at least, from the point of view of recent western history. In fact, Israel is an example of a typical settler colonial state. In other words, its creation depended on the replacement of the native population by a group of settlers, just as occurred when Europeans founded colonies in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
The difficulty for Israel and its western allies has been that Israel's crimes are being committed in the modern era, at a time when the west has claimed to have learnt the lessons both of its colonial past and of the Second World War. In the post-war period the west promised to change its ways, with a new commitment to international law and the recognition of human rights.
The shameful irony about the west's complicity in Israel's creation is that Israel could only have been established through the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Those outrages occurred in the very same year that, via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, western states pledged to create a different, better world.
In other words, Israel was launched as an old-style western colonial project at the very moment when the western powers promised to decolonise, giving their colonies independence. Israel was embarrassing proof of the west's hypocrisy in promising to break with its colonial past. It was evidence of bad faith from the outset. The west used Israel to outsource its colonialism, to bypass the new limitations it claimed to have imposed on itself.
A colonial spin-off
So committed were the western powers to Israel's success that France and Britain helped it from the late 1950s to build a nuclear arsenal the only one in the Middle East in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Predictably, that further destabilised an already highly volatile region as other states, especially Iraq and Iran, considered trying to level the playing field by developing their own nuclear weapons.
In another sign of the west's commitment to this colonial spin-off was its determination to turn a blind eye in 1967 to Israel's greedy expansion of its borders in conquering the rest of historic Palestine. For more than half a century Israel has been given free rein to entrench its occupation and to build settlements in violation of international law. All these decades later the International Criminal Court is still dragging its heels indefinitely, it seems rather than prosecute Israel for settlements that are irrefuably a war crime. And more than 50 years on, Europe continues to subsidise the settlements through trade agreements and a refusal even to label settlement products.
Rather than account for these outrageous violations of an international order the west founded, Israel's allies have helped to obscure or pervert this real history. Israel has developed a whole industry, hasbara, to try to prevent outsiders from grasping what has happened since 1948.
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