How anti-Semitism helped Israel reverse Reykjavik’s boycott vote

September 30th, 2015

Awake Goy

Iceland financiers spread fears that Jewish backers would pull out of a hotel project next to Reykjavík’s Harpa concert hall because of the city council’s vote to boycott Israeli goods. (Bob Travis/Flickr)

When Reykjavík city council voted on 15 September to boycott all Israeli goods, Israel and its lobby groups were quick to cry anti-Semitism.

Their reaction to the move by Iceland’s capital followed the standard response to the growing movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS): any criticism of Israel must really be motivated by a hatred of Jews instead of, say, mountains of evidence of Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians.

But in fact it was not anti-Jewish prejudice that motivated the boycott. Rather, it was classic, anti-Semitic fearmongering that helped drive its panicked reversal barely a week later.

Anti-Semitic letter

Björk Vilhelmsdóttir, the boycott’s author, told The Electronic Intifada that her city council colleagues could not resist what she called a “brutal backlash” from Israel and its US lobby groups.

It included criticism, smears and threats from such lobby heavy-hitters as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the World Jewish Congress. The Palestinian Authority also played a role in undermining support for the boycott.

But perhaps the most remarkable intervention came from Icelandic financiers, who, relying on familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes, spread baseless fears that rich, powerful Jews would pull their money from a major hotel project at the fashionable Harpa concert hall on the Reykjavík waterfront.

On 18 September, four days before the council reversed its decision to boycott Israel, Eggert Dagbjartsson, an Iceland-born principal at Boston-based Equity Resource Investments, sent an email to Höskuldur H. Ólafsson, the head of Iceland’s Arion Bank.

Ólafsson then forwarded the email to Reykjavík Mayor Dagur Eggertsson. It was read out during a “heated” city council debate over the boycott, where council member Sveinbjörg Birna Sveinbjörnsdóttir cited it as an example of how the boycott could “directly [affect] revenue for the City of Reykjavík.”

In his email, Dagbjartsson expressed concern that the boycott decision “could potentially have a very negative impact on our project – the proposed Reykjavík Edition,” a joint project for a luxury hotel backed by American businessmen Ian Schrager and Richard L. Friedman and the US-based Marriott hotel chain.

Schrager is perhaps best known as co-founder of Studio 54, the iconic New York nightclub of the late 1970s. Friedman, a powerful Democratic party donor who famously lent his Martha’s Vineyard vacation home to the Clintons, is CEO of Carpenter & Company, a developer of luxury hotels.

“Controlled by Jewish Americans”

Investor Eggert Dagbjartsson is unequivocal about his fear that rich Jews, angered by the boycott of Israeli goods, could retaliate by harming Iceland’s economy in general and the Reykjavík hotel project in particular.

“The fact is that many of the key people who are ultimately going to be responsible for making this a success are Jewish Americans,” he wrote. “Both Ian Schrager and Dick [Richard] Friedman are Jewish. Many of the top people at Marriott are Jewish as well. Furthermore, most major US hotel companies – such as Starwood, Lowes, etc. are either owned or controlled by Jewish Americans.”

Marriott, Starwood Hotels and Loews Hotels – which may be the firm Dagbjartsson was referring to – are all publicly traded companies.

“While American Jews are by no means a unified group,” he conceded, “they are generally strongly supportive of the State of Israel and sensitive to boycotts or banning of Israeli related products or services.”

Remarkably, Dagbjartsson admitted that “I’ve got no idea how someone like Ian Schrager or Dick Friedman will react to this – and I’m hoping they don’t find out about this and it will be somehow quickly fixed.”

Ironically, the financier claimed that with the boycott vote, Reykjavík had sent the message that “if you are Jewish – your not welcome here [sic].” He also worried it could be interpreted to mean that Icelanders “are racist when it comes to Jews.”

But the only bigotry on display is that of Dagbjartsson and anyone else who cited his email as a reason to reverse the boycott.

Dagbjartsson acknowledges that his sole reason for assuming that Friedman and Schrager – and other Jewish Americans “controlling” powerful companies – might have retaliated against Reykjavík is that they are Jews.

These are precisely the kinds of attitudes that the ADL defines as anti-Semitic stereotypes.

I have found no evidence that Friedman or Schrager have ever expressed a public view on Israel or used their business interests or influence as leverage on Israel’s behalf.

Whether or not either of them supports Israel, they still may not want their global brands associated with Israel’s increasingly toxic reputation – though now, without their consent, Dagbjartsson has done just that.

Dagbjartsson, Arion Bank CEO Höskuldur H. Ólafsson, Friedman, Schrager and city councillor Sveinbjörg Birna Sveinbjörnsdóttir all did not respond to requests for comment from The Electronic Intifada.

As I noted in a recent article, exaggerated fears of angering Israel or its perceived supporters reflects what author and academic Sarah Schulman calls “a weird kind of anti-Semitism.”

“It seems that they hold clichéd and stereotyped beliefs about punitive rich Jews who will pull out their Jew-money if anyone criticizes Israel,” Schulman said about the New York LGBT center’s ban on hosting Palestine-related events in 2013, “and it was this misguided prejudice that led them to defensively ban any criticism of Israel.”

Sadly, this is precisely the anti-Semitic fear clearly manifest in Eggert Dagbjartsson’s email as well as in Reykjavík’s decision to turn its back on its principled decision to stand in solidarity with Palestinians struggling for their freedom against Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.

Comments

Antisemitism like racism are theory to be erased

Permalink DJONDO replied on Mon, 09/28/2015 – 23:48

Funny how the courageous decision to boycott not only Israel, but the behavior of the American sionist finance is overtrown by fear… Fear, indeed leads to bad decisions. Fear and antisemitism are linked together like racism and prejudice. Both of these attitude where enginered to weaken the capacity of decision. Both where there to put together the wrong idea there are human races, as there is only one Human Specie. Jewish are NOT israel and Israel is NOT jewish as a whole. Being Jewish is NOT being part of a select club of humans but merely of a select group of religious lead people.
Therefore, the first mistake of council member Sveinbjörg Birna Sveinbjörnsdóttir is to generate the wrong idea that jewish would react as a stereotype to reject the boycott of Israel for this project.

antisemitism, indeed

Permalink tom hall replied on Tue, 09/29/2015 – 17:40

The reversal of the Reykjavik city council’s decision to boycott Israel is lamentable. The apparent reasoning behind the retreat is even more dismaying. But Ali is right to point out in this case as in others, that “fear of the Jews” and their supposed power is a hallmark of antisemitism.

In the same way, the grotesque inversion of Jewish identity and culture which characterizes the Zionist project manifests a rejection of historical as well as contemporary Jewish life in all its complexity. The Zionists were not supported by most Jews in Europe or North America, and the colonial ambitions of Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky and their followers were held to be foreign to the Jewish struggle for freedom and justice. Israel today reflects this antagonism. The state and civil society are awash with brutal supremacist delusions and hatred for the racial weaklings (Palestinians) and traitors (Leftists) as the country lurches towards a Final Solution of its own.

The New Jews of Israel bear a remarkable resemblance to the old persecutors of their ancestors. Those attributes of Jewish life that were most worthy of preservation are the very qualities militant, militaristic Zionism despises- compromise, empathy, flexibility, wit, learning, a deep sense of irony, and instinctual identification with those subjected to persecution.

At this point, does anyone still doubt that Zionism is a species of antisemitism?