Bias Battle

Jewish groups consider strategies to battle anti-Semitism.

MICHAEL, J. JORDAN

Jewish Telegraphic Agency'

New York City
he new strain of anti-Semitism that has
broken out around the world, couching
itself in anti-Israel rhetoric, requires a
global strategy in response, Jewish and
Israeli leaders agree.
Yet six months after the strategy's creation, the
most high profile of several different initiatives
launched to combat this "new anti-Semitism" is still
in the organizing stage.
That raises several questions for those leading the
effort to beat back the new anti-Semitism: How will
Jewish groups translate their tough talk into action?
Will such action be unified and synchronized, or will
different groups duplicate efforts? And should Israel
direct such efforts, or be just one among several
actors?
In January, Israel's deputy foreign minister, Rabbi
Michael Melchior, announced the creation of the
"International Commission for Combating Anti-
Semitism." It would differ from other Jewish efforts
because it would be comprised primarily of prominent
non-Jews and would be global in scope, while angling
to establish local commissions in as many countries as
possible, Rabbi Melchior said.
The "demonization" of Israel has crossed the line
of fair criticism, Rabbi Melchior said, and the test
for the commission would be "how successfully we
can get the right people involved and turn this
organization into an international movement."
The commission would raise public.awareness of
anti-Semitism and take an active role in lobbying,
advocacy and education, Rabbi Melchior said.
Then, the Anti-Defamation League, which for 90
years has dedicated itself to fighting anti-Semitism,
announced it would team up with the World Jewish
Congress in a new global effort. Utilizing the WJC's
access to nearly every Jewish community in the dias-
pora, the groups would create a taskforce aimed at
keeping anti-Semitism "latent, dormant, immoral
and unacceptable," said Abraham Foxman, ADL:s
national director.
At the same time, the WJC, through its European
affiliate, the European Jewish Congress, has estab-
lished a separate "European Coordination Center" to
shape public opinion and lobby European govern-
merits and parliaments on issues of anti-Semitism,
said Avi Beker, WJC's secretary-general. The
European Center's first action was a rally that brought
Jews from across Europe to Brussels on May 29.
As for potential overlap between Rabbi Melchior's
International Commission and the joint ADL-WJC
taskforce, Beker said, "We have quite good lines of com-
munication and consultation" with the commission.
Besides, Beker said, "the more you do, the more people
you can reach out to, and the more you can achieve."

T

As for the Melchior commission, it so far has little
to show beyond its lofty vision statement and the
headlines its creation garnered. Rabbi Melchior set an
Oct. 1 target date to have the commission up and
running. But his spokesman, Moni Mordechai, said .
no full-time employee has been hired, and Rabbi
Melchior and his staff are only working part-time on
the commission.
Moreover, Mordechai said, they have raised only a
few hundred thousand dollars — partly from the
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs budget, the rest
from Jewish philanthropists — of the several million
he said is needed to jump-start the commission.
"The raison detre is already there, but the capac-
ity to do it is in the organizational stage," said
Irwin Cotler, a Canadian lawmaker and human
rights expert who co-founded the commission
with Rabbi Melchior and Swedish official Per
Ahlmark. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel also is expect-
ed to play a prominent role.
"We haven't had a sustained involvement in a
manner that would allow this to be established in a
quicker manner," Cotler said.
That raison d'etre actually snuck up on many
Jewish leaders and activists, revealing itself in its full
ferocity only during the past year. Israel long has
been isolated within the United Nations, the U.N.
Commission for Human Rights and other interna-
tional bodies. Indeed, the U.N.'s notorious 1975
"Zionism is Racism" resolution completely dismissed
Israel's guiding ideology.

Meanwhile, Holocaust denial long has pervaded the
Arab world, as have medieval blood libels and wild
conspiracy theories about Jews. But it was only with
the eruption of the Palestinian intifada (uprising) in
September 2000 that all these forces converged, open-
ing a crucial second front: the battle for world opinion.
Things came to a head late last summer in
Durban, South Africa, at the U.N. World
Conference Against Racism. While Arab and
Muslim activists and diplomats attacked Israel as an
"apartheid state" guilty of war crimes and genocide,
thousands of nongovernmental activists from around
the world, as well as local black South Africans,
climbed aboard the anti-Israel bandwagon with
wildly racist attacks on Jews and Israel.
Aside from Israel,. Jewish groups and the United
States, which reacted with indignation, only a small
clutch of non-Jewish activists and diplomats protest-
ed the onslaught.
Coder said his experience at Durban enabled him
to connect the dots. His description of "the new
anti-Jewishness" likely will provide much of the ide-
ological underpinning for Rabbi Melchior's
International Cothmission.
"What we are witnessing today — and which has
been developing incrementally, almost impercepti-
bly, for some 30 years now — is a new, virulent,
globalizing and even lethal anti-Jewishness without
parallel or precedent since the end of the Second
World War," Cotler, a law professor at McGill
University in Montreal, wrote recently.

New Mideast Paradigm?

Has Bush's speech opened the doors or nailed them shut?

LESLIE SUSSER

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jerusalem

T

here is a brief moment, after a gun is fired
or a bomb goes off, when the air is
filled with a shocked silence broken
only by the fluttering of birds who
have been startled from their perches.
It is only when the dust settles that reality sets in.
That might be a fitting analogy for the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict as the dust begins to settle from
President Bush's speech last week on Middle East policy.
By coming down so strongly on Israel's side, Bush
in one stroke changed the rules of the game in the
Middle East, shocking both Israelis and Palestinians.
After years in which Yasser Arafat turned double-
dealing into an art form — claiming to support a
peace process while funding terrorist groups — Bush
made it abundantly clear that there can be no diplo-

matic progress until the terror stops and Palestinians
remove Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.
But what happens until then? Does the Bush
speech mean that nothing substantial can move on
the Israeli-Palestinian track until Arafat goes?
According to follow-up statements by
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
and Secretary of State Colin Powell, it
would seem so. And that is partly why some
analysts say the Bush speech, rather than breaking the
Middle East deadlock, may actually have reinforced it.
Bush may have lulled Israeli leaders into thinking
there is no need for them to move, analysts say, and
numbed the Palestinians into resentful inaction.

AN ALYSIS

Fumbling Forward

The two sides seemed to be fumbling for ways for-
ward this week. Palestinian officials alternately rallied
MIDEAST PARADIGM on page 26

-7/ 5
2002

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