In statements from the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith, I have been accused of various sins. It is said or suggested that I am racist, that I have a pathological hatred of Israel, that I encourage antisemitism, indeed that I am antisemitic myself. I will address these accusations, not because they frighten me, but because they distress me. My intention is not to score debating points but to come to some kind of understanding, some degree of conciliation, with my accusers. Conciliation, of course, requires good will on both sides, so I cannot predict the success of my attempt. Before dealing with the accusations themselves, I note that they have been delivered with an unmistakable anguish. I very much regret being the cause of this emotion, and I understand it only too well. My opinions were once, and not so long ago, very similar to those of my accusers. I know what it is to feel that my people are under attack, that the whole world is against us, that there is no safety except in our own vigilance and strength. I can easily imagine circumstances that might lead me back t o this view. It is not without cost, then, that I have come to believe something very different: that, in the current situation, we Jews are digging our own grave, that the blood we spill is useless and pointless, that peace will come only with a most painful reassessment of our own situation. Indeed my writings are addressed as often to Jews as to non-Jews, and they are intended in part to effect such reassessment. I have often expressed myself with br utal directness, not because I enjoy inflicting pain on anyone, but because I believe that many of us need to be shocked out of our 'dogmatic slumbers'. In fact I believe that the outrage against me is misplaced: I am only the messenger, and my warnings should not go unheeded. This should become clear as specific accusations are addressed. For a start let me begin with the greatest absurdity, the claim that I am antisemitic. I rejecting this claim I do not hide behind my Jewishness; there may have been, on rare occasions, Jewish antisemites. But there is nothing even close to antisemitism in my opinions. Take the material that has caused the most outrage, a private email correspondence allegedly reproduced on the Jewish Tribal Review site. I have never denied that such a correspondence occurred, but only said the truth: that the site is not to be trusted, and that, lacking the original emails, I cannot vouch for its accuracy. I am distressed that the CJC has made so much of the material, not because it embarrasses me, but because it legitimates a truly poisonous, truly antisemitic site. I will commen t on the material as if it were accurate, because that is the only way I can refute the claims made on its basis. However at the same time I repudiate that material. No one has disputed that it was published, not only without my consent, but against my express wishes. What is almost comical about the use of the Jewish Tribal Review material is its context. The correspondence exists only because I published an article called "Blame Yourself: American Power and Jewish Power". This article is entirely devoted to attacking the myth that Jews control America: I believe and hope it to be one of the most systematic and effective attacks on that myth published to date. As a result of its publication, I received a good deal of hate mail. One message I kept, entitled "Neumann the Zionist", reads as follows: "Neumann's Jewish stripes finally begin to show, as we all knew they would. The Jews commandeer American foreign policy and make it do their dirty work, then send their mole Neumann to tell the goyim that its all their fault. How utterly predictable. You, Chomsky, Bennis, you're all the same. Go pick up your paycheck from the ADL. Show me a Jew who criticizes Israel and I'll show you a Zionist who hasn't had his coming out party yet. You just had yours." The Jewish Tribal Review is much more polite, but it was precisely their unhappiness with my contentions that provoked the email exchange. In this exchange, two sentences have been quoted entirely out of context: it strains my conciliatory intentions to believe that the quoting was done in good faith. Both occur in the following passage: "My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care. " I am the first to admit, and regret, the disturbing and intemperate language of the paragraph, but in context its meaning is not alarming. My correspondent has reproached me for showing no interest in further investigations into Jewish power. Having failed to demonstrate that Jews control America, he nevertheless wants me to endorse open-ended, unsystematic investigations into Jewish ownership. He wants me, that is, to help him dig up dirt on the Jews, in the guise of pursuing The Truth. In this context, it could hardly be clearer that my reply concerns my political writing, not my academic work. My political writing has a political, not an academic purpose; it is to help the Palestinians. For reasons detailed in the "Jewish power' article under discussion, I believe that the myth of Jewish control of America - an antisemitic myth - harms and discredits the Palestinian cause. So I say that, even if it is true that Jews own this or that or the other thing, I am not *interested* in such truths. My correspondent takes this, in mock horror, as some admission that I habitually twist the truth to suit my political objectives; I regret to say that the CJC happily embraces this interpretation. But my statement means what it literally says: that I am not *interested*, as I write on behalf of the Palestinians, in irrelevant truths, truths that don't further the Palestinian cause. It does not mean that I am out to conceal or twist truths. It does mean - which is what I am saying - that I am not about t o climb on board in search of Jewish power when that project has nothing to do with the welfare of the Palestinians. Later on I make clear that, in general, I do believe that political objectives may trump the obligation to be truthful, but go on to say that almost everyone believes this. Lies were used to hide Jews from Hitler, and indeed at times to defeat him; it is childish to believe that, in politics, one must always be truthful. But I hav e never seen any occasion to bend the truth on behalf of the Palestinians, and I take great care for the factual accuracy of my claims. What then of the statement: "If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care"? In the first place, as the preceding statements make clear, I am stressing the importance of the Palestinian cause by considering extreme possibilities. I first say that "if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it." In other words, I first say that I will not uncover truths detrimental to the Jewish people if that doesn't help the Palestinians. This hardly sounds like the project of an antisemite. In the second place, the statement is neither antisemitic, nor does it encourage antisemitism. It raises a remote possibility, and says that, should what I do - my writing - encourage antisemitism, that will not deter me. As I said in my letter to the National Post: "I will not self-censor my writings because they may be misused by antisemites, and it is only in this very particular and limited sense that I 'don't care' about encouraging antisemitism. Antisemites misuse all sorts of materials, includin g the statements of committed Zionists and of Mahatma Gandhi. It would be futile and impossible for me to tailor my writings to avoid such misuse." The notion that I would even contemplate deliberately cultivating antisemitism is absurd, not only because my family has been decimated by (Nazi) antisemites, but also because I have argued, at length, that Zionists manipulate antisemitism to their own purposes. (The Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen, in http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h-col.html, is of much the same opinion.) Finally, the import of the passage can be understood by making a substitution in some of it. Suppose a committed defender of Israel had said: "My sole concern is indeed to defend Israel, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, I still don't care." Of course I have left out the part about the destruction of the Israeli state, but that cannot be considered an antisemitic comment. It should now be clear that a willingness to tolerate these extreme consequences is neither antisemitism nor encouragement to antisemitism. Indeed the noted Israeli dove, Uri Avnery, has accused Zionists of exactly the same refusal to be deterred by antisemitic reactions: see his essay, "Manufacturing Antisemites". Like me, Zionists certainly care about the reactions - they won't just let such reactions stand in their way. So much for the material on the Jewish Tribal Review site. What then of the claim that I am racist, because I blame or implicate all Jews in what I call Israeli crimes? In fact I take great care *not* to say this. For example: "Do we want to say it is antisemitic to accuse, not just the Israelis, but Jews generally of complicity in these crimes against humanity? Again, maybe not, because there is a quite reasonable case for such assertions. Compare them, for example, to the claim that Germans generally were complicit in such crimes. This never meant that every last German, man, woman, idiot and child, were guilty. It meant that most Germans were." (http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0604.html) This very clearly casts the discussion in terms of most adult Jews, not all Jews. It therefore focuses on the behaviour of a Jewish majority, not of a Jewish race. But is there some covert racism at work here? I have been said to emphasize the collective responsibility of Jews for Israeli crimes. On the contrary, I am very hesitant about notions of collective responsibility: "perhaps the whole notion of collective responsibility should be discarded; perhaps some clever person will convince us that we have to do this." I speak instead of complicity, not of all Jews, but of a majority: "it would still be reasonable to say that many, perhaps most adult Jewish in dividuals support a state that commits war crimes, because that's just true." I stand by that statement. It has nothing to do with racism, which posits ingrained, biologically based faults. On the contrary, I stress elsewhere that complicity in Israeli crimes is eminently reversible: "One thing is clear: when crimes of this magnitude are committed by your people, in your name, bleating does not absolve you of responsibility. You must at the ver y, very least - even if you *do* nothing - advocate someth ing that will stop the crimes." (http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0427.html) It may be disturbing to hear that those Jews who don't advocate concrete steps to stop Israeli crimes may be complicit in those crimes, but it is certainly not racist to say so. And in fact the habit of calling Jews collectively to account for the misdeeds of a few is far more deeply entrenched in the Old Testament than in my writings, which do not call down divine vengeance on the entire peo ple of Israel for 'their' transgres sions. Some have claimed that the notion of Jewish complicity in Israeli crimes might make Jews complicit in 'murder'. I have never suggested anything of the kind. The term 'murder' suggests legal liability for a common crime. My claim is rather that those Jews who do not oppose Israeli policies might be thought complicit in those policies, some of which are criminal in the sense that they violate basic human rights. This is a very conventional line of argument: countless human rights organizations and chari table groups suggest, on all sorts of occasions, that people may be by their omissions complicit in the evils they fail to work against. This sort of complicity represents a moral rather than a legal liability, a much milder and more variable sort of guilt. No one should feel intimidated by such claims. What then of the suggestion that we might have some 'fun' with antisemitism. Shocking, certainly, but subsequent passages express the view that Zionists, not I, are in the habit of having such 'fun': of manipulating the definition of 'antisemitism' for political purposes. I do not endorse such 'fun', but on the contrary claim that it is dangerous and futile. The notion that I am antisemitic or racist becomes even more absurd in the light of my repeated claims that Israeli crimes endanger and discredit the Jewish people - not because Israeli crimes ought to be blamed on all Jews, but because they are committed in the name of all Jews. (Many Jews object to this: hence the dissident Jewish organization called "Not In My Name".) Why would an antisemite care about this? Why have these repeated assertions, readily available to the CJC, never made it into their polemics? Finally, the CJC appears to believe that some of my accusations concerning Israel or Israeli rightists are so extreme that they could be made only by an antisemite. One reference to 'superior Jewish DNA' was cited with some outrage. But this is no fabrication on my part. The Jewish authors Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, discussing Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, quote the American-Israeli Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh: "If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then eve ry strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA…If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value." (see http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0300/0003105.html) I specifically attributed such views to Jewish fundamentalists, not to all Jews or all Israelis, though I made the very common point that Jewish fundamentalists often set the agenda for the no n-fundamentalist Israeli majority. This is not to deny that my criticism of Israel is savage; I do indeed call Israel "an emerging evil". But I have no hatred of Israel, pathological or otherwise. Israel is an abstraction; to hate it would be foolish. Like all nations it contains wonderful and awful people; it is far too complex and heterogenous to hate. In any case I do not even hate Israeli crimes; like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, I merely judge that they are indeed crimes. As for the criminals, it is a myth tha t hateful acts must be committed by hateful people. The truth is even more depressing: that even very nice people, sufficiently deluded, can do hateful things. Very likely this is what happens in Israel, but the motivations of Israelis really do not concern me. I am concerned only to focus attention on the cruelty and foolishness of Israeli policy, and on the obligation of everyone to oppose it. In any case, my position on Israel is extreme only in the sense that I call for very strong sanctions to force Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. But that is all I call for. I do not advocate the destruction of Israel or even insist on implementing a Palestinian right of return. I acknowledge Israel's right to defend itself, to fortify its borders, even to make genuinely pre-emptive strikes across its borders. Unlike many leftists, I never compare Jewish crimes to Nazi crimes, and I ne ver use material from uncorroborated Palestinian or even Muslim sources. These are hardly the positions or practices of someone consumed with hatred. Where a solution to the conflict is concerned, my views are closest, not even to Israeli doves, but to The Council for Peace and Security. This body advocates unilateral withdrawal from the occupied territories, and describes itself as follows: "The council for peace and security is a voluntary body with no party political affiliation bringing together some 1000 members, each with a rich background in fields associated with security and diplomacy. Members include former high-ranking officers in the comma nd structure of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), former holders of the similar positions in the Mossad and Shin Bet security service and Israel police, retired diplomats, directors general of government ministries, professors and academics from various fields." (http://www.peace-security.org.il/engbg.html) Presumably these people are not filled with racist or pathological hate for Israel. My views, then, are in no way racist or antisemitic. I have fought racism ever since I picketed Woolworth's in 1959, and I have welcomed the opportunity to disabuse Palestinian correspondents of their belief in such myths as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There remains the question of how my views might affect my position at Trent. The CJC has repeatedly suggested that I might make Jewish or Israeli students uncomfortable. Surely not all of them: so far, I have had only support from my own Jewish students, and it should not escape anyone's notice that a good many Israelis are Arabs. I must add that it is not our business to make students comfortable: if it were, we would not allow feminists on campus because they might discomfort males, nor Native Studies professors because they might discomfort whites. Our obligation is rathe r not to engage in attacks on individuals, and I am scrupulous in my efforts to treat all students with consideration and respect. On top of this, my refusal to exercise my right to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict on campus means that any discomfort felt by students would have to be caused by reading my writings - which they need not do. That said, I am very willing to meet with students, off-campus, to discuss any concerns my writings may raise. I w ould also be happy to discuss specifically Je wish concerns with Jewish students should that be desirable. Finally, if my writings are alarming, why not refute them? If this is done on campus, I won't even defend myself there. In closing I again express regret for any misunderstandings, and willingness to engage in further discussion of my views.