David Grossman, An Economic Blood Libel is Treasonous
Published: Arutz Sheva -Friday, August 02, 2013 3:08 PM
The recent interview given by David Grossman, famed Israeli author, to an Italian newspaper, is a betrayal of his people. Readers should know about it.
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.
The European economic blood libel against "the settlers" is already bearing its poisoned fruits.
Following the European Union official guidelines prohibiting the funding of Israeli bodies and actions beyond the Green Line, two large retail chains in the Netherlands, Aldi and Hoogvlit, stopped "selling goods produced in Israelisettlements".
And the secular, leftist, intellectual Jewish establishment is hailing this European racist policy.
David Grossman, one of Israel's most famous writers abroad and a "peacenik" activist who lost a son in the IDF, released an interview to the Italian daily La Repubblica about the resuming of "peace talks" in which he declared: "I believe that the European Union's resolution of boycotting the settlers' goods should have been taken twenty years ago."
What Grossman has been pushing for and exalting is beyond the conceivable and it is even more severe than the writer's boycott of the Ariel cultural center. That was an internal, Israeli betrayal.
Now Grossman isn't just demanding a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Grossman is inciting an entire continent, Europe, to blacklist and strangulate Jewish generations, Jewish towns, Jewish lives in the post-1967 areas.
Grossman is calling on the 28 EU member states to stop funding, cooperating with, awarding scholarships, research funds or prizes to anyone residing in the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria.
Grossman is a naive fool who perseveres in the damage he is doing to Israel and the Jewish people. But he has now put an entire Jewish sector in danger.
Goods - including fruit, vegetables, cosmetics, textiles and toys - worth €220 million are exported to the EU from "settlements" each year.
The value of agricultural products in the Jordan Valley "settlements" is estimated at €100 million per year. More than 80% of dates from the Jordan valley are grown for export, mainly to France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries.
Ahava makes $17 million in profit from exports every year in products sold across Europe in branded Ahava stores as well as in pharmacies and retail chains.
SodaStream produces home devices for carbonation of water and soft drinks. Its products, also known under the brand name Soda Club, are manifactured in the industrial zone of Ma’ale Adumim, one of the so-called "settlement blocs"..
By calling on Europe to stop selling these goods, Grossman may be condemning to death Jewish economic activities in Judea and Samaria.
Grossman economically blood libelled 600.000 Jewish citizens who live beyond the Green Line.
Julien Benda famously called it "La trahison des clercs", the treason of the intellectuals. It is a perfectly apt description of Grossman, who has more than once shown signs of disloyalty to the Jewish people.
Ater the Gaza war, he called for an independent inquiry into the conduct of the IDF, helping to pave the way for the biased Goldstone Report.
He urged dialogue with Hamas.
When he went to collect a cash prize funded by the Israeli state, he refused to shake hands with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
After the flotilla terror attack, Grossman charged that Israel behaves like “a band of pirates.” He also said the blockade on Gaza was “despicable,” attacking the Israeli government “which is prepared to embitter the lives of a million innocent people in the Gaza Strip, in order to obtain the release of one imprisoned soldier.”
Pacifism in the face of terror has nothing to do with peace. Thousands of brave Jewish families paid for Grossman's peace of shame. That is why Grossman became the Israeli darling of Europe's culture.
I doubt that Grossman's friends in Ramallah appreciate his ideals of liberty, tolerance and equality. He, too, should notadvocate the establishment of a totalitarian Palestinian state a mere eight kilometers from his home in Jerusalem.
Mr. Grossman, it doesn't matter that Barack Obama has taken with him - on his vacation at Martha's Vineyard - your novel "To the End of the Land". I deeply sympathize with your loss of your beloved son in the Lebanese war, but you must remember the feelings of other bereaved Israeli fathers.
Your actions are those of a traitor to the Jewish people. Your morality is amoral.
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The Freeman Center Is A Defense Against Ignorance
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense.
If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. (George Orwell, Partisan Review, 1942)
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cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less
formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But
the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly
whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of
government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor - he speaks
in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and
their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the
hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation - he works secretly
and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city - he
infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer
is less to be feared." -Cicero, 42 B.C.E.-
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