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Why Ghassan should be boycotting John who should be spurning Ned: Geoffrey Levey.

Article Excerpt
Just when you thought the Israel-Palestine situation couldn't be any more depressing along comes Ned Curthoys' intervention 'An Argument for a Moratorium' in the May issue of Arena Magazine.

Curthoys is a signatory to the academic boycott of Israel launched last year by Ghassan Hage and John Docker, his father. He is incensed by Andrew Jakubowicz's measured critique of this and like boycotts that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (8 February 2003), and, as a signatory, feels the need to defend himself. My purpose here is not to defend Jakubowicz's article, with which I have my own points of disagreement. Rather, it is to take issue with Curthoys' basic contention that 'left-Zionist' positions like Jakubowicz's involve 'critical contortions' and are 'intellectually dishonest'.

It is easy to see why Curthoys is challenged by left-Zionist positions. They acknowledge some moral and historical complexity to the Middle East conflict. They recognise that the conflict turns on both legitimate

and illegitimate competing claims by Israelis and Palestinians alike. Writing in the Guardian (6/4/02), the Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz argues that there are two Palestinian-Israeli wars afflicting the region:

One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause.

Michael Walzer, the American political philosopher and co-editor of Dissent, suggests that there are, in fact, four Israeli-Palestinian wars now being waged:

The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel. The second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within the 1967 borders. The fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories. (Dissent, Fall 2002).

Curthoys will have none of this complexity. There is not even one 'war'; there is only the powerful Israeli state and Jewish minority in the region occupying, terrorising, and subjugating the. majority Palestinian people a la South African apartheid. Like many of the boycotters, he believes Israel is fundamentally illegitimate and that Jews have no right to their own state. Yet for all his concern about the intellectual probity of others, he cannot bring himself to say this directly. It is left to intonation and insinuation. Left-Zionists, he says, who 'decry Israel's excesses ... but loudly defend its "right to exist" and its "democratic" values"...

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