Britannia Radio

REDEEMING THE JEWISH WIMP

Par Emmanuel Navon- Pr de relations internationales à l'Université de Tel Aviv

Efrat 16/04/10

In his press conference last week, Prime Minister Netanyahu lamented that his Turkish counterpart has been attacking Israel since Operation Cast Lead.  Actually, Erdogan’s anti-Israel salvos have a longer history.

In 2004, Erdogan called Israel a "terrorist state" after we eliminated Sheikh Yassin.  In February 2006, he hosted Hamas leader Haled Mashal in Ankara.  In January 2009 he staged a temper tantrum at the Davos Conference calling Shimon Peres an expert killer.  In October 2009, the Turkish state television started airing fiction series showing Israeli soldiers intentionally murdering Palestinian children.  In November 2009, Erdogan declared that he’d rather meet with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (accused of war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court) than with Benjamin Netanyahu.  In March 2010, Erdogan claimed that the Temple Mount, Hebron and Rachel’s tomb were never Jewish sites.  Last week, Erdogan used his official visit to Paris to call Israel the greatest danger to the world and to peace.

Israel has been quietly putting up with Erdogan’s antics for no justifiable reason.  True, Avigdor Lieberman decided to finally say something by comparing Erdogan to Chavez and Gaddafi.  That was ineffective and silly: nothing could make Erdogan happier than being categorized as anti-American Don Quixote.  All Lieberman had to do to embarrass Erdogan and expose his hypocrisy was to mention the Armenian genocide, Turkey’s refusal to grant a "right of return" to the post WWI Greek refugees, Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus, Turkey’s "apartheid wall" and "settlers" in Cyprus, Turkey’s adamant refusal to accept the establishment of a Kurdish state, and Turkey’s stubborn insistence on holding to a territory it grabbed from Syria (the Alexandretta Province).

Alas, Israel is a wimp -and not only with Turkey.  Israel would never dare to "upset" Egypt by complaining about the fact that Mubarak’s state-controlled media are full of anti-Semitism, blood libels and Holocaust denial.  When Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said he would burn any Israeli book he found in his country, Israel didn’t have anything to say.  And when the Egyptian Government backed Hosni’s candidacy for the job of UNESCO Secretary General,Israel didn’t vote against because Mubarak asked us not to.  By contrast, Jewish intellectuals around the world (such as Eli Wiesel and Bernard Henri-Lévy) were vocal against Hosni’s candidacy.  Diaspora Jews have more guts and self-confidence than the Jewish state.

The question is why.  I remember having a conversation with my students about this.  Their answer was that Israel can’t afford to be assertive. When I asked them why, their answer was that Israel owes its existence to the goodwill of the nations and that we can therefore not upset those who tolerate us. I believe this is the root of the problem, and that the problem is serious indeed.

Our founding fathers certainly didn’t suffer from this inferiority complex.  Think about Abba Eban and Menachem Begin.  They had different political opinions about nearly everything.  But they were educated, outspoken, and proud Jews.  They knew that Israel doesn’t owe its existence to the goodwill of nations but to our exceptional history and courage.  They were unapologetic and articulate advocates of Israel who had no problem putting people in their place.

Compare, for instance, the current US-Israel crisis with the one that erupted three decades ago.  In December 1981, the Reagan Administration threatened to "punish" Israel over the annexation of the Golan Heights by suspending the US-Israel strategic cooperation agreement.  "What do you mean by punishing?" screamed Begin to US ambassador Samuel Lewis. "What are we, a vassal state of yours, a banana republic? You don’t have any right to punish Israel and I protest about the very use of that word.  The Jewish people has survived for 3,700 without a strategic cooperation agreement with the United States, and we’ll continue to survive for another 3,700 years without such an agreement.  You can tell your Secretary of State that the Golan law will not be repealed."

Young Israelis are often surprised to hear that the US Government got off our case.  Same thing with France.  In the early 1980s, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson started lecturing Israel about the need to establish a PLO-controlled state in the West Bank and in Gaza.  Begin decided to publicly reply that France should accept the establishment of an FLNC-controlled state in Corsica.  Cheysson got mad and asked his government to issue a statement condemning Begin’s "nerve."  But President Mitterrand thought this would make France look silly.  "Begin is right" he said during the weekly government meeting on February 24, 1982.  "What he said is both upsetting and true. After all, Corsica is French only since 1768.  That’s more recent than Abraham."

While the sabra Israeli, which was supposed to represent the new and proud Jew, behaves with foreign leaders like a medieval shtadlan, Israel’s proud and outspoken leaders were all former Diaspora Jews.  I am not saying that young Israelis should go back into exile to learn the basics of diplomacy and leadership, Heaven forbid. 

History, rhetoric and national pride can be learned in Israel.

The problem is that they are not.  Our educational system, especially in Universities, does not teach general knowledge, Jewish history, and critical thinking.  And this is where the problem begins.  Rather than being taught how to think forthemselves, to learn about Jewish history, to get a sense of the deductive and persuasion skills mastered by Plato and the Talmud, our international relations students waste most of their time with this nonsensical and charlatanesque field know as "International Relations Theory."

We need our younger generation to regain the self-confidence and pride of our founding fathers and realize, like they did, that the world will not respect us as long as we don’t respect ourselves.