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China Confidential

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

 

Beautiful Israel Increasingly Isolated, Demonized

Foreign Confidential....

Beautiful Israel. Its currency may be the world's strongest; its military, the region's strongest (one hopes). But appearances can be deceiving. America's strategic ally--the only democracy in the Middle East--is effectively at war. And the conflict is going badly--for Israel.

So says P. David Hornik. Writing in FrontPageMagazine, he paints a dark picture of Israel's situation. The country is in dire straits, he argues, with many of its citizens, overseas supporters and friends in a state of denial. Hornik:

Anyone sincerely bearing friendship toward Israel and wanting to help it should take account of a few things:

1. If the Center-Right wins in February as currently predicted and expected, it will be a rational response by a considerable majority of Israelis to a situation of official corruption and delusion linked to constantly deteriorating security and deterrence. One cannot claim that one admires and respects Israeli democracy and at the same time react to such an outcome with contempt. Anyone—and this refers particularly, of course, to the incoming U.S. administration—who reacts by arm-twisting the newly elected Israeli leaders into following policies similar to those of the previous, rejected leaders is not a friend of Israel and is an enemy of its democracy.

2. The Fatah leadership, members, and supporters are products of the same cultural background as Hamas and as the terrorists who struck in Mumbai and have the same attitudes toward Israel. As has been abundantly documented by Palestinian Media Watch, the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, and others, Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are raised on hatred of Israel and Jews irrespective of their or their parents’ current political affiliation. The fact that Fatah is now in conflict with Hamas—in one of the myriad Arab internecine conflicts past and present—does not mean Fatah has become an ally of the United States and Israel. Continuing to “strengthen” Fatah—as the incumbent U.S. and Israeli governments are doing—by releasing prisoners and building forces to take over security in West Bank towns will, if not stopped, dissolve Israel’s hard-won security gains in suppressing West Bank terror.

3. Six decades after the Holocaust, with official commemoration of the genocide now instated in many of the world’s Western democracies, much of the world is engaging in a more or less concerted effort to delegitimize, demonize, and destroy the Jewish state with tacit or active Western participation. Diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, and others who protest that they favor the “two-state solution” while singling out Israel for obsessive condemnation are as much a part of this mechanism as the bloody terrorists who are forthright about their aims.

Click here to read the whole analysis.