Jewish Chronicle, 14 October 2010
Last weekend, I was a speaker at a huge CAMERA conference in Boston on the topic of the ‘war by other means’, the global campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel.
CAMERA stands for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The work it does in combating the media onslaught against Israel, through careful, calm and forensic exposure of the lies and distortions being promulgated about Israel, is of enormous value.
But, for all the great work that it does, and for all the undoubted commitment of the conference’s 800-plus participants, it seems to me that so many American pro-Israel Jews — like those in this country and doubtless elsewhere — are missing the big picture.
This feeling was amplified by remarks made by another conference speaker, Wall Street Journal columnist (and former Jerusalem Post editor) Bret Stephens. As he said, much pro-Israel advocacy isn’t very smart because it is conducted from a permanent defensive crouch rather than an offensive position which sticks the accusations into Israel’s attackers.
So, for example, such friends of Israel fret endlessly about whether or not Bibi will extend the moratorium on new building in Jewish communities in the disputed territories, rather than ask the much more germane question of what the Palestinians are offering as an equivalent concession.
The answer to that one, said Stephens, is that they say they will keep the lid on terrorism. So their great concession is to stop killing Jews. Which kind of illustrates that, while the issue in contention for Israel is land, that for the Palestinians is mass murder.
But instead of accusing the Palestinians and their western supporters of this rejectionism — the true reason for the Middle East impasse — many self-professed ‘friends’ of Israel position themselves on the very ground that Israel’s enemies have chosen to conceal their real aim to obliterate it.
This ground defines the conflict instead as being about the boundaries of two states, Israel and Palestine. Hence the almost exclusive focus on the settlements and the territories, and on Israel’s supposed obduracy on these issues as the major obstacle to peace.
This is demonstrably absurd. The only obstacle to peace is the Palestinians’ continued and open refusal to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and thus their continued objective to wage a war of extermination against it.
That is why, when the bulk of the territories was offered to them in 2000, their response was to start blowing up Israelis in buses and pizza parlours; that is why, when Jewish settlers were removed from Gaza, their response was to fire thousands of rockets at Israeli towns; and that is why ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas says the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state.
In short, the whole issue of the settlements and the territories is a giant red herring which has been swallowed wholesale by the west’s Israel-bashers. But many in the pro-Israel camp have precisely the same preoccupation, obsessing about whether Israel is making enough concessions on the settlements.
And so they endorse — albeit in softer and more anguished tones — precisely the same false, manipulative narrative employed by Israel’s enemies to conceal the real nature of this conflict.
As Stephens rightly observed, Israel’s defenders should be moving the conversation on to the subject of the ill treatment of the Palestinians by the rest of the Arab world — and towards each other.
I would go further. I would ask self-styled ‘progressives’ who obsess about removing the settlers from the disputed territories why they promote an agenda of racist ethnic cleansing designed to remove every Jew from a putative state of Palestine — while Israel, whose Arab minority enjoys full civil rights, is excoriated for ‘apartheid’.
Put the other side on the back foot where it belongs. Change the narrative.
The war for civilisation
Well at least one man gets it.
Rupert Murdoch has made a direct, to-the-point, ambiguity-free speech about the anti-Israel, anti-Jew frenzy now consuming the west. In a speech to the Anti-Defamation League, which gave him an award, he said this:
My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews...This is the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere: the media … multinational organizations … NGOs. In this war, the aim is to make Israel a pariah.
The result is the curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran – a nation that has made no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction – pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.
For me, this ongoing war is a fairly obvious fact of life. Every day, the citizens of the Jewish homeland defend themselves against armies of terrorists whose maps spell out the goal they have in mind: a Middle East without Israel. In Europe, Jewish populations increasingly find themselves targeted by people who share that goal. And in the United States, I fear that our foreign policy sometimes emboldens these extremists.
Tonight I’d like to speak about two things that worry me most. First is the disturbing new home that anti-Semitism has found in polite society – especially in Europe. Second is how violence and extremism are encouraged when the world sees Israel’s greatest ally distancing herself from the Jewish state. When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Today it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left.
Do read it all. It is a rebuke to the world on the single most important and defining issue of our time.
And right on cue, here’s some more anti-Israel bigotry which yearns for a Middle East without Israel -- this time a ripe example of the genre from Adrian Hamiltonin the Independent. Hamilton objects to Israel’s proposal for a ‘loyalty oath’ for non-Jews who want to become Israeli citizens.
Now much of the argument against this oath is emotional and muddled, since it merely refines an existing oath of loyalty to 'the State of Israel' -- which is, after all, a Jewish and democratic state, just as Britain is British, France French and so on. (For a balanced view of this controversy, read this analysis on Just Journalism or this on Myths and Facts). Britain requires newly naturalised subjects to swear a loyalty oath to the British sovereign. Does that make it discriminatory against all those with republican sympathies? Of course not. But Israel's loyalty oath is being called 'racist' -- and by many who happen to support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a putative state of Palestine, and who are also totally silent about Arab countries which belligerently assert their exclusive Arab identity, as Professor Raphael Israeli observes here.
Israel's oath may be tactically unwise but it is not racist. It poses no problems at all to Arabs who want to settle in Israel and are happy to be loyal to the country they want to live in -- as indeed many Israeli Arabs already are. The only people it 'discriminates' against are those who are hostile and treacherous towards the country they want to live in. And the reason for introducing this oath now is that, although the refusal by the Arab and Muslim world to accept Israel's national identity has always been the sole reason for the conflict, this rejectionism is making ever more dangerous inroads within Israel, where Islamisation and anti-Israel incitement are steadily radicalising the Arab minority.
Within the west, it is also the ever-more brazenly explicit reason for the campaign of delegitimisation being waged against Israel. Israel is the one and only country in the world whose right to exist is being questioned. And that of course is the point of Hamilton's little tirade. For he objects to the very idea of Israel being a Jewish state at all:
The more closely you define Israel as a uniquely ‘Jewish’ state, the less room there is for it to act as a co-operative member of a Muslim majority Middle East. Its role becomes that of an enclave which views itself as not just separate but in clear opposition to everyone else about it.
'Uniquely Jewish'? What does that poisonous little phrase mean? Israel has Arab and other non-Jewish citizens -- citizens of a Jewish state, who have full civil and political rights. But for Hamilton, a 'Jewish state' just sticks in his craw. For him, it seems that the Jews alone can’t have their own state. And why not? Because it is situated in a
Muslim majority Middle East.
The fact that it happens to be their lawfully constituted country, to which they are entitled many times over by virtue of their ancient claim to this land which predated by many centuries the birth of Mohammed let alone the
Muslim majority Middle East
counts for nothing. Rather than the historical fact that the Jews are the victims of nine decades of exterminatory aggression in that rightful homeland by Muslims (and note that Hamilton casts this as a religious conflict with Muslims, rather than Arabs) Hamilton believes that it is all Israel’s fault for being
in clear opposition to everyone else about it.
In other words, just for being. So what Hamilton wants is for Israel no longer to be.
Ahmadinejad and Hamas would agree.
Thus the ‘progressive’ western intelligentsia make themselves potential accomplices to genocide.
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