Pro Israel, or Useful Idiots?
Published: Arutz Sheva - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 1:04 AM
What it takes to be a "pro Israel" liberal and what will make you politically incorrect.
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.
"I want to see the end of most of the settlements. I want to see land swaps", declared Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz at the Project Nuremberg Lawyer's Luncheon at Temple Beth El of Boca Raton.
The "pro Israel" mainstream, to which Mr. Dershowitz belongs, is a useful idiot, as Lenin used to call those gullible liberals who excused totalitarian enormities in the name of goodwill. Dershowitz, a very decent person and writer who goes all over giving speeches, including some new effort that one of the "Stand With Israel" groups has to train university students, has embraced the racist project of a new freeze of the "settlers".
Recognizing the “settlers”, Judea and Samaria’s Jewish residents, for what they really are – heroes – is the most difficult endeavor for any observer of the Middle East conflict. And Dershowitz is a total failure on that.
These "pro Israel" useful idiots, with their talents and writing skills and their impeccable credentials, are seduced by how their influence is regarded. They literally fabricate the illusion that Israel can reach "peace" and conquer the international consensus by adopting their defeatist agenda. They want to be the nice and better Jews, they angelize Israel's history, they want to be accepted by the chattering classes. Abraham Foxman has put it in this way: "How to support Israel while being critical". Lenin could not have said it better.
It is amazing to list all the journalists, academics and writers who rhetorically stand with Israel, but always and only inside a trite set of values.
This is the catalogue of sophistry and sycophancy for belonging to this pro-Israel mainstream: no to the Jewishness of the state, it is a "democracy"; no to the "settlements", and if some settlements should be maintained, only behind an international consensus of ghettos; no to Israel's calling to Europe's Jews to emigrate, life in the diaspora is so enriching; no to a "disproportionate" use of force, the Jews are morally superior human beings; no to the Torah in public life, that is the "start up nation"; no to a preemptive strike against Iran; no to Israel's boycott of the United Nations' anti-Semitic forums; debate with Jewish traitors like Peter Beinart and don't bar Gunther Grass from Israel.
There is a saying in Italian: "Having the barrel full and the wife drunk". These useful idiots want to be accepted by the Western racist milieu that demonizes Israel, but they also want to avoid problems of conscience over their being Jewish.
There is another way of being a friend of the Jewish State and its people. Here is the alternate catalogue: the Jews have the right to build everywhere in Judea and Samaria; the Palestinian State is the greatest existential threat for the Jewish people after the Holocaust; the Jews have more rights to buy a house in Hevron than in Paris' rive gauche; Jonathan Pollard is like Captain Dreyfus and he must be immediately freed; Israel has the right and duty to boycott the NGOs which campaign against the Jewish State; Iran's diabolical nuclear program must be stopped by any means, including a military strike, with or without the United States; Barack Obama is the most anti-Israel US president ever; house demolitions, roadblocks, fences, targeted assassinations and checkpoints are existential tools to protect Israeli citizens; Israeli soldiers have the right to refuse immoral orders like demolishing Jewish homes or evicting Jewish mothers in the middle of the night; the ultra-orthodox Jews are not "parasites" to be conscripted into the army like the Czar did, but they are the basis of Judaism; Israel must not release genocidal terrorists, but comdemn them to the gallows; Israel must allow the Jews to pray on the Temple Mount without fearing Arab riots; Israel must bury the rules of Oslo, which has been the self imposed most hallucinating political project in modern history; Israeli diplomacy should boycott, not certainly fund, anti-Semitic idiocies such as "The Gatekeepers".
Under this set of rules, how many friends can the State of Israel really count these days in the press?
On the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Barack Obama will pass near the Adam "settlement" without even noticing it. If a so-called "pro Israel" friend doesn't understand why that Jewish village has the right to be in Binjiamin or why it has to be fenced while the Arab villages around it are not, it means that he is not a friend of Israel, but a naive ignoramus. Or worse, an opportunist.
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