Following his meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Obama made it clear that along with security measures, he is expecting Palestinians to do more to combat incitement and hate speech against Jews and Israel. As I observed yesterday, they should certainly do this, as it is strongly in the Palestinian national interest. Not only does incitement damage the prospects for the peace agreement that both Palestinians and Israelis require to cure a decent future, societies in which hatred is tolerated or common find themselves corroded and ultimately poisoned by the distortions that irrational anger and rage create. Of course, occupation is itself the most potent source of Palestinian anger against Israel, so that serious measures to crack down on incitement have a symbiotic relationship with progress on peace: neither can make progress without the other. However, the President’s bold and constructive approach on settlements and other issues vital to the Palestinian interest mandates that Palestinians take all possible measures to restrain incitement both in their own interests and in response to reasonable demands from a United States government that is acting responsibly and playing its part.
However, as anyone who follows Israeli and pro-Israel discourse will be well aware, incitement and hate speech are a two-way street in this conflict. Racism, intolerance and hate speech against Palestinians and other Arabs have been a standard feature of some Israeli discourse dating back to the origins of the Israeli state, and there is no need to recite the litany of hateful comments by significant Israeli figures and organizations over many decades that reflect hatred as vicious as anything to be seen on the Palestinian side. Moreover, some extremist supporters of Israel in the Diaspora have been among the most enthusiastic purveyors of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in the West. Prominent right-wing Jewish websites such as jewishworldreview.com and David Horowitz’s appalling frontpagemag.com spew such hatred on a virtually daily basis. The right-wing Israeli organization Aish HaTorah and its American supporters were responsible for the distribution of millions of free DVD copies of the overtly bigoted anti-Muslim film "Obsession," which argues, in effect, that the Palestinian national identity and cause are nothing more or less than an anti-Semitic Nazi plot. The extremist author Bat Ye’or has constructed a bizarre conspiracy theory about European leaders supposedly "selling out" Europe to "the Arabs" in order to get money and continue an unfinished holocaust against the Jews that rivals anything inspired by the notorious forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Denial that the Palestinian people exist at all, have any national rights, or are animated by anything other than barbarism and an inherently murderous and terrorist mentality are commonplace in certain segments of pro-Israel discourse. Confidence tricksters posing as reformed "Muslim former terrorists," who are both shameless hucksters and fanatical right-wing evangelical Christians who yearn for the apocalypse, have been able to apparently make a decent living going around the country preaching the most extreme intolerance against Palestinians and Muslims. One could go on indefinitely with this theme, but you get the idea.
Even more disturbingly, incitement to anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab violence is to be found on the fringes of Jewish-American rhetoric about the conflict, just as incitement to violence against Israel and Israelis can be found at the extremes of Muslim-American rhetoric. In one scandalous recent incident, an Israeli settler leader called for the murder of Palestinian President Abbas at a fund-raising event at a synagogue in New York City. This disturbing phenomenon has been further illustrated by two additional examples of pro-Israel Jewish-American incitement against Palestinians. Rabbi Sidney Schwarz wrote in the Jewish Week about attending a recent pro-Israel celebration in which young Jewish-American men danced around chanting rhymes alternating “’the people of Israel lives’ with ‘all the Arabs must die.’ It rhymed with the Hebrew. Given the way all joined in, it was clear that this was not the first time it was sung. I leaned over to a young man who was next to me, also wearing a kippah and tzitzit. I nodded at the dancers and asked: ‘Does this song bother you?’ He looked at me with a suspicious look and replied: ‘This is Zionism.’”
Rabbi Manis Friedman of the Bais Chana Institute of Jewish Studies in St. Paul, MN answered a question from Moment Magazine about “How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” by writing: “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)." The Rabbi subsequently attempted to "clarify" that he was only speaking about how Jews “should act in a time of war.” What a relief! According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, "Friedman, who lives in St. Paul, Minn., is among the country’s most prominent Chabad rabbis. He has appeared on CNN, PBS and the BBC, and been the subject of articles in major national publications.”
It should be noted that Rabbi Friedman’s outrageous remarks have met with considerable condemnation in many Jewish-American circles. However, what these incidents, and scores of others like them, demonstrate is that the important mission of combating incitement and hate speech is required of both Palestinian and pro-Palestinian communities and Jewish and pro-Israel ones as well. President Obama is right to be concerned about the ill effects of incitement, but incitement, in the final analysis, is a symptom of the conflict, not its central cause, although certainly it drives as well as feeds off of the violence and lack of peace that bedevils the Middle East. What this all underscores is the urgent need for responsible and serious voices in all communities to play their part in making it crystal clear that hatred and incitement are unacceptable and that they damage the health, well-being and interests of the communities which they are supposedly intended to serve.