Israel has fought so long, and usually so well, in real battles, but it seems to have forgotten how to fight in verbal ones. On the day of the flotilla incident, all the outraged governments were on the airwaves almost before anything had happened. But it took five and a half hours before the Israeli Ambassador in America appeared in public. Quite a lot of articulate people spoke up in Israel’s support – it really will be a black day when there are no articulate people to be found to defend the Jewish state – but they had no clear, coordinated, Israeli government message, and so their ‘innumerable guns’ were pointing in different directions. Very true. But it’s actually worse even than Moore thinks. He observes: Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism. So why doesn’t Israel make this case effectively? I would advance several reasons. Certainly, as Moore suggests, the Israeli government is organisationally dysfunctional and chaotic, riven by petty rivalries and crippled by the country’s ludicrous electoral system which locks in weak coalition governments. And yes, there is also indeed its lethal and self-fulfilling conviction that ‘the world will always be against us so there’s no point bothering to make the case’; and also the fact that, since it believes its moral case is so overwhelmingly obvious, it simply cannot get its head round the astonishing degree of ignorance, unreason and bigotry that it provokes in the west. But worse even than this is Israel’s inability or refusal to acknowledge publicly – and maybe in private too – the true and devastating nature of the geopolitical drama in which it has such a pivotal role. Presented with the fallacy driving western opinion that the Arab and Muslim war of annihilation against Israel is actually a dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over dividing up the land, Israel fails to set the record straight -- and instead goes along with the fallacy. Placed in the remarkable position in which the western world is requiring the victim of nine decades of exterminatory terror to make security concessions to its attackers even while they continue to attack it, Israel fails to challenge this unique double standard -- and instead meekly plays along with the fiction and makes concession after concession to the Arabs, thus actually helpingAmerica, Britain and Europe to compromise its security and strengthen its attackers. Faced with an American President who is throwing Israel under the global bus at a time when Iran is at the point of obtaining its nuclear genocide bomb, Prime Minister Netanyahu chooses not to appeal over Obama’s head to the great mass of staunchly supportive Christian Americans, who need to be told precisely what is being done in their name against the ally in the Middle East that they so passionately support and what the lethal consequences may be. Moreover, despite the fact that what it has been facing for the past nine decades is at root not a war over land but a holy war, driven by the fanatical Islamic belief that not just the Jewish presence but the historical claim by the Jews to the land of Israel must be expunged altogether, Israel never presents itself as the victim of Islamic fanaticism, thus failing to drive home to the west the fact that Israel is the front line of the west’s own defences against the jihad. In part, this failure to tell the world these home truths derives from a progressive weakening of Israel as a result of the Oslo debacle, which invested Arab terror and propaganda with both weaponry and diplomatic credibility and cut the ground from beneath the feet of anyone who wanted to reconnect Israel with reality. In part, it derives from Israel’s extreme vulnerability. This means it can be bullied by America; and because it feels it cannot take on the entire world, it feels it must observe the rules of the diplomatic game – even if that game is patently rigged, unjust and irrational. More disturbingly still, it is reluctant to admit even to itself that it is facing not a war over territory but an Islamic holy war. As has been said to me on more than one occasion by members of Israel’s establishment: ‘Since we are surrounded by many millions of Muslims, a religious war against us is far too terrifying for us to acknowledge’. As a result Israel, which is understandably so preoccupied with the military onslaught against it, has failed to grasp what is perhaps the single most important fact about that Islamic holy war – a fact which was so graphically illustrated once again by the flotilla episode -- that the principal strategy of the jihad is the manipulation of public opinion through intimidation, propaganda stunts and the suborning of the western intellectual establishment to a meta-narrative of lies. Israel is up against psychological warfare, practised over many decades with a huge investment of funding, a high degree of professionalism and a very shrewd understanding of the credulousness of the western intelligentsia and their receptivity to lies. Yet Israel has simply refused to take any of this seriously. Failing to go onto the public offensive and provide a systematic antidote to the Big Lies being told year in, year out it has been reduced to bewildered attempts to defend itself in under three minutes against hostile BBC interviewers. And then it wonders why the world has turned against it. For the Islamists, the real battleground is the mind, both in the Islamic and the western world. And that is the battleground that Israel has left empty – with the baleful consequences for all of us that we can now so clearly see.
The lethal vacancy on the battleground of the mind
In the wake of the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident, Charles Moore has made the blindingly obvious point -- so obvious that the people who most need to acknowledge it are the last people on earth to do so. It is that those who defend Israel are undercut by Israel’s own utterly lamentable inability to make its case properly to the world. Moore writes:
Sunday, 6 June 2010
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