In 2000, as Oslo was crumbling and the second I/P "Intifada" began, articles began appearing on the Internet from two sources who would seem well-suited for the camps that adopted them: Joseph Farah and Israel Shamir. Farah, an Arab-American pro-Israel writer, and Israel Shamir, a Jewish Israeli pro-Palestinian writer.
Farah's piece, Myths of the Middle East was widely circulated among pro-Israel advocates, and why shouldn't it have been? Nine years ago, most of us were either completely unaware or, at the most, unfamiliar with Farah or World Net Daily, and here we had an Arab-American opinion journalist lay out a convincing case for Israel.
Meanwhile, in the pro-P camp, Israeli author Israel Shamir was a new star of the movement. To hear Electronic Intifada co-founder Nigel Parry describe it:
With a powerful command of the English language, compelling anecdotes, dramatic metaphors, and a spirited opposition to the Israel's military occupation, Shamir was rapidly and warmly accepted into the pro-Palestinian activist scene, and by Spring 2001 had embarked on a speaking tour of the United States, speaking at many public events alongside leading lights of the Palestinian scene.
We all know what came of Farah and World Net Daily. Increasingly marginalized by their absurdly far-right views, they demonstrated once and for all what kooks they truly are when they jumped into bed with the birthers. Farah, as best I know, still pushes the discredited Joan Peters book, From Time Immemorial that seeks to effectively deny the existence of the Palestinian people. It makes sense--in his "Myths" piece on Israel, he wrote:
There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of 1 percent of the landmass.
But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today. Greed. Pride. Envy. Covetousness. No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough.
Today, only the farthest right of pro-Israel types will have anything to do with Farah, and with ample reason. He's not really pro-I, he's just anti-P.
After Israel's Shamir initial acceptance into pro-Palestinian circles, the pro-P establishment here grew somewhat wary of him. Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, then the Communications Director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee circulated a letter in April, 2001 detailing their increasing wariness of Shamir. The letter condemned some of Shamir's works, including "an 'Easter Message'...in which he repeats the most odious characterizations of Jews as 'Christ killers,' the staple of classic European Christian anti-Semitism," as well as an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post that quoted Shamir as saying "Jews only exist to drip the blood of Palestinian children into their matzas."
Eventually, Ibish, Parry, Abunimah, and presumably others washed their hands of Shamir, doubtful that he was even Jewish, let alone an acceptable Jewish critic of Israeli policy.
Today, we have a similar situation, based partially on the recent Shlomo Sand polemic, but in a larger sense, the I/P debate as a whole.
We've had two Sand-related diaries here which seemed to revel in Sand's hypothesis that effectively centers around Jews being an invented people, traceable to the Khazars, "a semi-nomadic Turkish people who dominated the Pontic steppe and the North Caucasus from the 7th to the 10th century CE." (Wiki) The ultimate point of the hypothesis: that there is little in the way of an actual Jewish claim to Israel, as modern day Israelis have no lineage with the Israelites who were driven out of the country by the Romans. This is the yin to the yang of the Peters/Farah argument that there is no real Palestine, and the Palestinians are a modern invention. In one of the diaries that started out as partially a Sand diary, we saw a video of some dastardly settler running over a Palestinian with his car and the resulting outrage for that action. Buried in the background was that the driver of the car was the husband of a woman the Palestinian man had just stabbed. Yet all the focus was on the evil settler, a classic example of how poisoned the I/P well has become.
To compound matters, we've seen an increasing conflation of Judaism and Israel not from the pro-I side as some have done in the past, but from the critics of Israel, a conflation that easily crosses the line from criticism of Israeli policies to anti-Semitism. It is a frequent refrain of many folks who are pro-P or anti-I that they are unjustly characterized as anti-Semites merely for criticizing Israel. This has, on more than one occasion, been used as a prophylactic argument so that the supposed critic of Israel can inoculate themselves before launching into some anti-Jewish tirade. But here, when you're using the justifications of Israeli policy to hammer Judaism, you're only further poisoning an already toxic I/P well.
And that helps no one.