AJC OPED in NY Sun

The Dangerous 'A' Words By Kenneth Stern June 8, 2006 The first book I thoroughly devoured as a youngster was Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," the colonial-era story of how prejudice can be normative, how Hester Prynne was forced to wear the dehumanizing symbol of the scarlet "A" (for adulteress), and how she, without significant allies but with grace, courage, and loyalty, faced down hatred. I was 15 in 1968, during the civil rights and anti-war movements. I was certain that if Hester Prynne had lived in the 1960s instead of the 1600s, she would not have been alone, that her neighbors — even if they did not approve of her behavior in every respect would have disapproved of the bigoted and duplicitous treatment she received, and that they would have understood how it not only harmed Prynne but also damaged their society. I am not so certain anymore. A new "A" is being affixed to the citizens of Israel. In recent weeks, the British-based National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education voted 106-to-71 to boycott Israeli academics who do not "publicly dissociate themselves [from Israel's] apartheid policies." The 896 delegates to the convention of the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees voted unanimously to support an "international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions" due to the "apartheid-like practices of the Israeli state." Apartheid is the modern scarlet "A." It refers to the racist colonial ideology of European whites who came to South Africa and oppressed the indigenous blacks. It was a system that was universally condemned as racist and antidemocratic. But in a distortion of history, some are trying to shoehorn the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into the South African analogy. For example, whites had no history in South Africa. But Jews and Palestinians are both indigenous to the Middle East. Jewish teachings and holidays refer to the land and history of Israel. Jews have lived there for thousands of years. The majority of Jews in Israel today are not refugees from Europe but those who were forced from Arab lands and their descendants. The apartheid analogy is intended to oversimplify a complicated, long-standing territorial and political conflict into a good-and-evil question in which Israel is inherently, irredeemably, and eternally evil, no matter what it does — just as Hester Prynne's actions were denounced without context. And just as Hester Prynne had to be made less than human in order to cast her out from her community, the apartheid analogy is being used to lay the groundwork for the removal of Israel from the community of nations, and therefore inevitably for the killing of its citizens, who would certainly fight for their country. There should be a rigorous discussion inside the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the University and College Union — the new British union formed June 1 from the merger of National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education leadership with the Association of University Teachers — about the motives behind these resolutions that affix the new scarlet "A" to Israelis. Members of both groups should ask themselves several questions: Where is their recognition that Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Taliban-like state? Why no mention that Hamas cites in is own charter the Russian anti-Semitic forgery, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"? Do the Iranian president's ongoing Holocaust denial and vows that Israel be "wiped off the map" not matter? One question matters more than most: Are University and College Union and Canadian Union of Public Employees members capable of imagining themselves in the place of Israelis too? What would they want the United Kingdom or Canadian governments to do if their children were being blown up by suicide bombers? Would they want barriers put up to protect them? What would they want if neighboring countries did not accept the right of the United Kingdom or Canada to exist, denied their history, and swore to wipe them off the face of the globe? What would they think if despite all the gross human rights violations in the world, including the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Canadians and Britons were being constantly painted as the worst human rights offenders anywhere? There are groups within the labor movement in Canada and the academic community in the United Kingdom that are working to help their colleagues understand the insidious dangers of the effort to demonize Israel and dehumanize Israelis. If British academics and Canadian Union of Public Employees members can imagine how they would feel as Israelis, not just as Palestinians, I have no doubt that the apartheid analogy can be beaten back. However, if they prove incapable of considering how this debate looks from an Israeli perspective, I fear that there might be another "A" word to explain this failure to imagine — anti-Semitism. Mr. Stern is the American Jewish Committee's expert on anti-Semitism, and the author of the forthcoming book "Antisemitism Today."

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