Over the past generation, we have been inundated by disinformation from an unlimited number of seemingly credible organizations whose aim is to discredit any development related to Israel that does not advance the positions of the Left. And due to the ubiquity of this disinformation, among wider and wider circles today the belief has taken hold that there is something fundamentally illegitimate about non-leftist Israelis and non-leftist supporters of Israel.
Since most Israelis are not leftist, and since the most outspoken supporters of Israel are not leftists, there is a widening belief – particularly among liberals – that Israelis, Israeli institutions and Israel’s supporters are illegitimate.
This brings us to the second reason that it has become so difficult for Americans – and particularly liberal American Jews – who viscerally support Israel, to defend or even understand the Jewish state today.
There is a Western tendency, most pronounced on the anti-colonialist Left, to ignore the nature of the Islamic world generally and the Palestinians in particular, and concentrate their attention on Israel alone.
Case in point is Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz.
Dershowitz is rightly considered one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in the US. But like his fellow leftist ideologues, Dershowitz apparently does not think that it is important to focus on the nature of things in the Islamic world. Rather than notice current realities, he places his faith in his power to shape the future through his intellect and his willingness to compromise.
The Western media has two basic approaches to their non-reporting of Islamic Jew hatred and its significance for international security. The first approach is to ignore the issue because it is ideologically inconvenient. The New York Times, like every other major Western media outlet except the Wall Street Journal is of the opinion that the Islamic world should be appeased. The Muslim Brotherhood and Iran should be accommodated. If they gave Islamic Jew hatred coverage commensurate with its actual significance, they would be undermining their ideological agenda. In light of their ubiquitous and vituperative obsession with Jewish people, it is obvious that it is impossible to appease the Muslim world.
The second approach to contending with Islamic Jew hatred is to justify it by claiming that Israel has earned all the hate coming its way. It’s “political” they say. The Islamic demonization of Jews is understandable given the Palestinians and all that.
Obviously, both of these approaches to the story of Islamic Jew hatred are appalling. The former approach involves a breach of the very concept of objective journalism. After all, the purpose of journalism is to report on the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.
When you know what you want, you use all the tools at your disposal to achieve your goals. When you don’t know what you want, no matter what tools you hold, you will fail to achieve your goals.
Consider two recent events. First, two weeks ago the UN Human Rights Council voted to launch a commission whose goal is to criminalize Israel for the existence of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.
The council’s decision to form a new kangaroo court to criminalize Israel was not the result of the Arab diplomatic war against Israel. It is the consequence of the European diplomatic war against Israel. It is Europe, not the Arabs that has barred Israel from caucusing with its UN regional group — the Western European and Others Group. By barring Israel from the caucus, the Europeans have denied Israel the ability to make its case to other UN member nations.
For its part, the Obama administration pays lip service to the need to end the Human Rights Council’s obsessive war against Israel. But at the same time, it has effectively joined that war by legitimizing the anti-Israel council both by joining it, and by refusing to use its membership as leverage to coerce the council into abandoning its campaign against Israel.
Following the council’s vote to form a new Goldstone-style commission to attack Israel, the State Department issued a statement in which it claimed that due in part to US membership in the council, the council had been spurred to “action on a series of important human rights situations around the world.”
The massacre of Jewish children at Oztar HaTorah Jewish Day School in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times - although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.
On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher. Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed.
But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served. Indeed, it hasn’t even begun to be addressed. The killer Mohamed Merah was not a lone gunman. He wasn’t even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about. He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.
An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime? Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?
The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Moreover, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.
And he was surely correct.
So why do the likes of Sarkozy and Obama hate Netanyahu? Why is he “a liar?” Why don’t they pour out their venom on Abbas, who really does lie to them on a regular basis?
The answer is because they prefer to blame Israel than acknowledge that their positive assessments of the Palestinians are nothing more than fantasy. And they are not alone. The Western preference for fantasy over reality was given explicit expression by former US president Bill Clinton in September.
In an ugly diatribe against Netanyahu at his Clinton Global Initiative Conference, Clinton insisted that the PA under Abbas was “pro-peace” and that the only real obstacle to a deal was Netanyahu. Ironically, at the same time Clinton was attacking Israel’s leader for killing the peace process, Abbas was at the UN asking the Security Council to accept an independent Palestine in a de facto state of war with Israel as a full member.
So too, while Clinton was blaming him for the failure of the peace process, Netanyahu at the UN using his speech to the General Assembly to issue yet another plea to Abbas to renew peace talks with Israel.
The Europeans’ behavior at UNESCO indicates that just as UNESCO is willing to undermine its mission to harm Israel, so the Europeans are willing to undermine the declared goals of their foreign policy for the sake of harming Israel.
This state of affairs has important consequences for Israel. To date, Israel has placed fostering good relations with EU member states high on its list of priorities. In light of the Europeans’ behavior at UNESCO, this ranking should be revised. The Europeans do not merit such high consideration by Israel.
Finally, the UNESCO vote exposed disturbing truths about US President Barack Obama’s position on Israel. Obama has been widely praised by American Jewish leaders as well as by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for his announced commitment to veto the draft Security Council resolution recommending that the PLO/PA be granted full state membership at the UN. Obama’s pledge - forced out of him by massive congressional pressure - is touted as proof of his commitment to the US alliance with Israel.
But Obama’s response to the PLO/PA’s bid for UNESCO membership tells a different story. In the lead up to the vote, the Obama administration went out of its way not to threaten UNESCO. It did not threaten to withdraw the US from the organization. Instead, just days before the vote, US Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter addressed the body and praised the “great things [that] have happened at UNESCO,” over the past year. Kanter then announced the US’s bid for reelection to UNESCO’s executive board.
The administration did not attack the move as one that undermines chances of peace. It did not note that by endorsing the PA/PLO’s decision to act unilaterally, UNESCO was making it all the more difficult for Israel and the Palestinians to achieve a negotiated peace deal. Rather, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland sufficed with claiming that the move was “regrettable,” and “premature.”
Administration officials did not make clear that in accordance with US law, all US funding to UNESCO would end if the Palestinian membership bid was approved. Rather administration officials joined forces with UN officials to lobby Congress to change the law.
As Claudia Rosett reported in Forbes on Tuesday, David Killion, the US ambassador to UNESCO, made what bordered on an apology for the US funding cut-off when he said, “We sincerely regret that the strenuous and well-intentioned efforts of many delegations to avoid this result fell short.”
Killion added, “We pledge to continue our efforts to find ways to support and strengthen the important work of this vital organization.”
So after UNESCO thumbed its nose at the US, after undermined its own mission, breached its own charter and seriously diminished chances of Palestinian peace with Israel by accepting “Palestine” as a member state, the Obama administration reacted with near groveling apologetics.
TO UNDERSTAND the full significance of the administration’s behavior, it is important to contrast it with the administration’s response to the Israeli government’s decision in the aftermath of the UNESCO vote to approve the construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem, Ma’aleh Adumim and Efrat. All of the housing units will be built in areas that will remain part of Israel even after a peace deal. And the administration knows this.
But speaking of the government’s decision, a US official told Reuters that the administration is “deeply disappointed by the announcement.”
“We continue to make clear to the [Israeli] government [that] unilateral actions such as these work against efforts to resume direct negotiations and do not advance the goal of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties.”
So on the one hand, the Palestinians’ move to abandon the peace process and UNESCO’s support for their move is merely “regrettable” and “premature.” But on the other hand, Israel’s decision not to discriminate against Jewish property rights undermines efforts to resume peace talks and harms prospects for an agreement.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon Abdullah Abdullah made clear in an interview Wednesday with Lebanon’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside of “Palestine.”
As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority?
Why have the senior peace processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans?
Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN?
Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats?
Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?
The Palestinians have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians’ genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.
The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don’t spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don’t teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel’s ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things. They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.
The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jewhating a bad name.
Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn’t go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.
It isn’t that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It’s just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade negative feelings towards Jews.
Every few months, we are presented with media reports about Jewish women rescued from their Muslim husbands in the Palestinian Authority or within Israel.
The stories are always similar. The women were tortured by their husbands, often locked in their homes or under constant guard by members of their husbands’ families. Either with or without the help of their Jewish families, they reached out to Yad L’Achim which rescues Jewish women and their children from Muslim husbands. Yad L’Achim volunteers plan and carry out often dangerous rescue operations and bring these women and their children to safety.
In January, Channel 10 presented live footage of one such rescue. Viewers saw relatives of a mother of four named Dana waiting anxiously at the Erez checkpoint as she and her children fled her husband and his family in Gaza and took their first steps of freedom.
During their courtship, Dana’s husband showed her every courtesy. After their marriage, he began regularly beating her and kept her under around the clock surveillance. A visit to Yad L’Achim’s website makes clear that her story is anything but unique.
Yad L’Achim’s work in saving Jewish women from violent Muslim husbands is especially notable given the nature of the organization. It is an fervently-Orthodox organization led by Rabbi Dov Lipshitz. It is not feminism that motivates its members to save these women. It is Jewish law. And specifically, the Halachic command of the ransoming of Jewish hostages. According to the organization, it carries out scores of rescue missions like the one that rescued Dana every year.
The question naturally arises, why do the fervently-Orthodox dominate what by rights ought to be a field occupied by secular feminists? Why aren’t Israeli and American Jewish feminists at the forefront of efforts to save these women from their violent husbands? Where, for instance, is the New Israel Fund? Its website brags, “The New Israel Fund founded or funded most of Israel’s women’s rights organizations and networks.”
Obviously Yad L’Achim, which defends these women’s right to live without fear is a women’s rights group. So why doesn’t NIF fund it? Yad L’Achim and other religious groups have been pilloried with allegations of racism in recent months for their public calls for Jewish girls and women not to date Arabs. In principle, these attacks seem fair. Blanket denunciations of Jewish- Muslim dating and intermarriage are problematic, even if they are justified from a religious perspective.
But whether one agrees or disagrees with the religious precepts that guide Yad L’Achim’s actions, the fact is they are not saving a principle. They are saving women and children. Shouldn’t that be enough to earn them the respect of the Left that is supposed to be motivated by concern for the weak and downtrodden?
