As if Israel hasn’t been playing the victim long enough, as if it hasn’t exploited the Six Million to the absolute limit, now comes a new weapon: the “Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.” This has long been an Israeli answer to the Palestinian refugees – that roughly as many Middle Eastern Jews as Palestinians lost their homes because of the 1948 war. This week, though, the government made the issue a major new front in its information war. Fittingly, the head of the “I Am a Refugee” campaign is Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, whose personality and politics were best conveyed a couple of years ago when he sat the Turkish ambassador to Israel on a much lower chair than his own, directing the Israeli photographers to emphasize the relationship of superior to inferior.

Ayalon and the movement had a big conference in Jerusalem, the World Jewish Congress was a co-sponsor, and Prime Minister Netanyahu sent along a supportive video. What’s more, according to Haaretz, “Israeli diplomats and representatives abroad have been instructed to raise the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries at every relevant forum.” And when Ayalon goes to New York in a couple of weeks, he “intends to call on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to include the issue on the international organization’s agenda.” This is all “part of a new international campaign to create parity between the plight of Jewish and Palestinian refugees…”

Actually, the campaign is going for more than parity – it’s going for superiority. It’s staking the claim that the Jews who left Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and other Arab countries were bigger victims than the Palestinian refugees. From Haaretz:

According to figures presented at the conference, around 856,000 Jews in Arab countries were displaced following the establishment of Israel. That compares with around 726,000 Palestinians. Many also had their assets seized and nationalized.

Dr. Stanley Urman, the executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, noted that Jewish refugees lost property worth $700 million (around $6 billion in today’s terms), while Palestinian refugees lost property worth about $450 million (around $3.9 billion in today’s terms ). Since 1950, he said, Palestinian refugees have received $13.7 billion in U.N. funding, whereas Jewish refugees have received just $35,000.

So, all you goyim out there, don’t you dare shed a tear for the Palestinian refugees until you first shed several tears for us, for Israel, for our Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who are better than their goddamn refugees, and whose suffering just pisses all over their suffering.

What amazes me is that Israel’s leaders doesn’t see how embarrassed the goyim are going to be to have to sit through this song-and-dance. They don’t realize how gross, how ugly it makes Israel look – to compare Israel’s Mizrahi Jews who left their homes after ’48 to the Palestinian refugees. To call those Mizrahim refugees – today.

They are not refugees. A refugee is somebody who flees his country and becomes stateless, homeless, because no country is willing to take him in. The Mizrahim, on the whole, fled their countries under duress in the post-’48 atmosphere in the Arab world, so they fled as refugees – but they were helped in and even pulled in immediately by Israel and made citizens of their new country, their own country.  The Mizrahim were refugees only for a brief, transitional period, and that period ended 60 years ago, more or less.

By comparison, about 1.5 million Palestinian refugees live today in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. (All told, including their descendants, the refugees number about five million.) They don’t have their own country to go to, and Danny Ayalon, along with the government he belongs to, mean to keep it that way.

Funny, Israel’s leaders characterize long-established Israeli citizens as refugees, yet they refer to traumatized Africans who cross Israel’s borders seeking refuge from hell as infiltrators. Good luck to them on their new campaign.

We can find names of [those] Israelis… we should hit their soft spot, publish their pictures, maybe it will embarrass their friends and relatives at home, and hopefully the local [Palestinian] activists will think that they work for the Mossad…

The acts of these activists are, I think, not ideologically motivated, but rather have to do with psychological reasons (disappointment with their parents or problems with their sexual identity) or due to their need to receive a residence permit (refugee visa) in one of the European countries…

The Foreign Ministry told Channel 10 that the letter doesn’t reflect the work of the office, which “doesn’t carry out witch-hunts.”

There is no factual basis for listing Israel alongside countries like Zimbabwe or Venezuela, but that is not thanks to the government’s efforts – which have fully pushed legislation against human rights NGOs; if the government actually had its way, then the recent condemnation of Israel by UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay would have been quite accurate.

The Foreign Ministry was quick to characterize as “absurd” the recent statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who grouped Israel together with the likes of Belarus, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and other countries in the dubious club of those that restrict the activities of civil society organizations. Israel, the only democratic country included on the list, was named as a result of a bill to restrict foreign-government funding to “political organizations” introduced last November. While the bill was approved by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation and supported by Prime Minister Netanyahu, he ultimately froze the bill, likely due to international pressure as well as the fact that the Attorney General warned it would not hold up in the High Court of Justice.

The truth is that the Foreign Ministry is right: Israel, inside the Green Line, does not have legal restrictions similar to those that exist in dictatorships, impeding on the activities of civil society organizations. The legal reality regarding the work of NGOs in Israel is still different. But if the legislative efforts initiated and led by Netanyahu, Lieberman and MKs Elkin, Kirschenbaum and Akunis had succeeded – well, in that case the High Commissioner’s statement may very well have been fairly accurate.

The Foreign Ministry should thus blame no one but the Israeli government itself, and especially the Foreign Minister. What Lieberman is now doing by criticizing Pillay is in fact trying to celebrate as an achievement the failure of his own party’s explicit legislative efforts to suppress the work of human rights organizations in Israel . After all, since the establishment of the current coalition government back in 2009, both Likud and Israel Beitenu competed with each other on leading the legislation drive against the activities of NGOs they wished to silence.

Some of the legislative initiatives that the government has been trying to promote – laws that if passed would have made Israel more like the countries that the Foreign Ministry now cries out against comparing Israel with, include: Manipulative taxation schemes targeting organizations that happen to be the ones criticizing government policies; preventing foreign funding from groups that the government wishes muted; requiring certain non-partisan, civil society organizations, to report to the Registrar of Political Parties (!); draconian restrictions (indeed, suspiciously similar to legislation in Ethiopia) on the permitted level of foreign governmental funding; not to mention the attempts to promote a politicized parliamentary inquiry committees against the activities of Israeli human rights organizations; the attempts to amend the Income Tax Law and to meddle with Israel’s Law of Associations, and much more.

This coalition government has invested a huge legislative effort in all of the above initiatives in recent years, an effort that if successful, would have bought Israel an unfortunate place of honor amongst the oppressive dictatorships that the High Commissioner condemned. But Israel not reaching that dubious place had nothing to do with the government, for it has initiated and supported these very efforts. In fact, it was the steadfast work of the very civil society organizations that the government targeted, as well as international condemnation and pressure, that revealed the truth behind these undemocratic legislative attempts and fought tirelessly against them.

Indeed, the word “absurd” is quite well-suited to describe all this. But not quite as the Foreign Ministry intended.

The author is the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). This op-ed was originally published in Hebrew at Ha’okets.org

Two Israeli universities, Haifa University and Tel Aviv University, now offer programs in Hasbara. The Haifa course is meant for Israeli students, the Tel Aviv one for foreign students. Both are supported by Israeli ministries: the Haifa one by the Ministry of Propaganda and Diaspora (Ministry of Hasbara, in Hebrew) and the Tel Aviv program by the Foreign Ministry.

The Haifa program is public and can be viewed here (Hebrew.) It has also been covered by the Canadian Jewish News. It’s called “Ambassadors in the Net,” and its stated purpose is to prepare students for online Hasbara. Among other issues, the students (the university proudly said it selected an elite of 30 students from many applicants) will practice debating with anti-Israeli activists, and will try their hands at PR – and at editing Wikipedia. Students who finish the course will win the so-called “prized ambassador in the net diploma.” The chair of the program is Dr. Eli Avraham. He refused to talk to me and referred me to the university’s spokesman – a somewhat surprising position, coming from someone who purports to teach others on Hasbara.

The Tel Aviv program seems more secret. I did not find any publications about it, and was only informed of its existence by a source. The plan is called “Ambassador Club,” is intended for foreign students – presumably Jewish – and consists of seven meetings. All of those meetings, aside from one with Dr. Khalil Shikaki (a well-known Palestinian pollster) are with right-wing and Hasbara people. There are no leftist guests. The “Ambassador club” plan will grant academic points to students who attend all seven meetings. It is also supported by Stand with Us.

The first meeting, held this week, was with Ari Varon, a former advisor to the prime minister. The next one will be with Itamar Marcus, the manager of Palestinian Media Watch and a former vice president of the Central Fund for Israel, a right-wing fund that also channels money to Im Tirzu and to Honenu, an Israeli NGO that defends suspected Jewish terrorists (Hebrew). The third would be with Lt. Col. Avital “They had AK-47s, hence they were Gazans” Leibovich of the IDF Spokesman, then it is Dr. Shikaki’s turn, and after him follows veteran Hasbarist Neil Lazarus. The sixth speaker is Col. (ret.) Miri Eizen, who will lead the students on a tour of Jerusalem, and the program is to be closed by Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman to the foreign press.

For this you get academic credits?

Proud partners TAU and Stand with Us. (Yossi Gurvitz)

There are several points worth pondering. First of all, Neil Lazarus. Along with Col. Eizen, he appears in both programs. He is described as an “external advisor to the Foreign Ministry.” You may remember him from that botched pinkwashing episode, “Gay Mark is kicked off the flotilla.” Lazarus was the guy who released that video. So, when Tel Aviv University speaks of “ambassadors” and Hasbara, what it actually means is teaching students how to lie for the government of Israel.

The second point relates to Stand With Us. This is an American right-wing organization, which was more than once accused of fostering hate towards Muslims and Palestinians. It makes heavy use of pinkwashing (the brand of Hasbara that goes “leave poor Israel alone, it may bomb and occupy millions of Palestinians, but in some parts of it the gay community is quite cozy, when its members are not being murdered with the police being unable to find the murderers), so heavy in fact that it came under attack by gay activists who did not like the idea of their community being annexed by Israel’s Hasbara apparatus. It also claimed that J-Street “frequently endorses anti-Israel, anti-Jewish narratives.” In short, this is the American version of Im Tirzu. Nice partner, TAU.

Thirdly, governmental involvement. The two universities, starved after years of neo-liberalism, have quietly acquiesced to becoming propaganda arms of the government. In this, they have betrayed their mission. A university is not supposed to sing the praises of its own society; it is supposed to study it and criticize it. Furthermore, when you lie with dogs, don’t act surprised when you wake up with fleas: when TAU collaborates with Stand With Us, when it bestows its academic halo over professional fabricators like Lazarus, it invites international boycott. When it approves the teachings of the settler Itamar Marcus, it can no longer say it has no part in the occupation. When it spreads its aegis over colonels Leibovich and Eizen, it can no longer claim it is not a part of Israel’s military-media complex.

It is worth mentioning that the Foreign Ministry decided, some two years ago, to use front organizations to promote its messages (Hebrew), since it reached the conclusion that Israel’s brand is so poisonous that nobody will take it seriously. If I single out TAU here, it is because it is painful to see your alma mater, where you spent some of your best years, becoming a front organization for Avigdor Liberman.

I asked both universities for comment. None was received so far.

Correction: Itamar Marcus was originally identified in the post as a vice president of CFI. Haaretz reported earlier this year that Marcus no longer holds that title.

Press Release (Communicated by the Bureau of Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon)

Deputy FM Ayalon Addresses Arab leaders at WATEC Conference: “Many times in the history of our region, water was a reason for conflict and bloodshed. Today, I want to change this equation, together with you to turn water into a bridge to peace.”

Today, 15 November 2011, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon opened WATEC 2011, the international conference on water technologies, renewable energy and environmental control. More than thirty heads of state and ministers as well as 150 business delegations have come to Israel to attend the conference.

DFM Ayalon said in his opening speech, “Israel is among the leading states in the world in water technologies and is willing to share its knowledge and experience with other countries so that together we can provide for the increasing needs of the world’s ever-growing population.”

During his speech, Ayalon addressed the leaders of the Arab states, reminding them that Israel’s hand, outstretched in peace, is not empty and that pooling our resources will benefit all of the people living in the Middle East. “Israel will benefit from a peace agreement, but you will also gain a genuine partner for development and the assured welfare of future generations in the region,” Ayalon said. “Unfortunately, many times in the history of the region, water was a reason for conflict and bloodshed. Today, I want to change this equation, together with you to turn water into a bridge to peace.”

“We, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are constantly looking at ways to conduct relations beyond traditional diplomacy. To this end, we conduct a form of Environmental Diplomacy and try to apply it also within our own region, here in the Middle East, and beyond.”

After the speech, DFM Ayalon met with Uganda’s Minister for Water, the Czech Minister of the Environment and Georgia’s Commissioner for Economic Development.

I would like to direct your attention to two parts of that to re-read:

More than thirty heads of state and ministers…have come to Israel to attend the conference.

And…

During his speech, Ayalon addressed the leaders of the Arab states.

One would assume that the Arab leaders were seated right there in the front row listening attentively. Clearly this would be a big news story, given Israel’s increasing regional and international isolation.

Following my request for clarification, Ashley Perry, an adviser to the foreign minister’s office, the body which prepared the communique, explained that no Arab leaders were actually present. Apparently, this was an “open call to Arab leaders.” At least the foreign ministry didn’t have mannequins sitting-in for them during the photo-op.