If the Hippocratic Oath teaches “first, do no harm,” this government’s hypocritical oafs insist, “first do not brief us about the harm we’re doing.” I leave it to the IDF’s nonpartisan professionals to show just how all this unnecessary division and rancor undermines our deterrence.
Looking globally, I can add that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing mix of immorality, incompetence, and arrogance has emboldened the Bash-Israel-Firsters. Some may call this time of the year summer. To me, it feels like open season on Israel.
Open season on Israel: How the government emboldens bashing Israel
Consider some recent Jerusalem Post headlines:
- Australia will refer to West Bank as “occupied Palestinian territories.”
- Michigan state senator apologizes for visit to Israel.
- CUNY probing Jewish professors for “discrimination” against antisemites, BDS activists.
- Princeton students taught that “IDF harvests Palestinian organs” in course.
- Israel teen beaten while vacationing in Germany.
Meanwhile, over 800 academic propagandists signed a petition again accusing Israel of “apartheid,” “Jewish supremacy,” and other trendy crimes; J Street claims it doesn’t support conditioning American aid to Israel, yet this feckless lobby is “encouraged by the vibrant discussion” about this threat many J-street-financed candidates have triggered; and this very newspaper ran a sick, sloppy column “Israel is responsible for Palestinians killing Israelis.”
How dare he, the columnist, blame the victim! Let’s play Moral Mad Libs: Finding Israelis guilty for being demonized, delegitimized, and targeted by Palestinian terrorists is like saying “blacks are responsible for whites bullying blacks,” “women are responsible for men harassing women,” and “Palestinian dissidents are responsible for Hamas oppressing dissidents.”
Treating Palestinian murderers as noble freedom fighters may be the column’s most heinous distortion. Many terrorists are poor or vulnerable weaklings blackmailed into terrorism to restore their family’s honor or support their family – proving how much terrorism infects Palestinian society and politics.
ONE OF several signs of support for the Dee family created by neighbor Ashira Landau. (credit: ASHIRA LANDAU)I defy the writer of this despicable column to read it in person to the family of Meir Damari, 32, murdered by drive-by terrorists, or the Dee family mourning the ambush of Lucy and her daughters, Maia and Rina. How about visiting Rehovot and telling the survivors of Inga Avramyan, recently murdered by a Gaza-launched rocket, why Israelis should abandon more of Jews’ historic land, given how well the Gaza withdrawal worked out for that 82-year-old – let alone millions of Palestinians under Hamas dictatorship? And why not fly to Italy and explain to Alessandro Parini’s survivors why Israel is guilty of the Tel Aviv car-ramming attack that killed this 35-year-old tourist?
Justifying terrorism and excusing people who celebrate such murders is as perverse as dictators who charge a victim’s family for the bullets the firing squad used. Let’s debate Palestinian frustration with Israeli policy or with Israel’s existence. But to so broadly, callously, rationalize Palestinians’ terrorism industry, rooted in a deep Jew-hating anti-Zionism, is insane and self-destructive. Palestinian terrorists and their enablers would celebrate the murder of the writer and his family as easily as they would toast the murderers of me and my family. What kind of peacenik justifies the culture of violence, those addicted to violence, and the self-righteous slobs who encourage violence without having the grace to admit it?
Somehow, when attacking Israel, stupidity, venality, and sheer irresponsibility converge. This lethal mix encourages delegitimizers and terrorists, the biggest obstacles to Middle East peace.
As bad as it was before Bibi’s boobs came to power, the irrational Israel-bashers now feel supported by Israelis, too. Anti-Zionists gleefully exploit Israel’s robust, painful, overwhelmingly peaceful internal debate to justify their long-standing disdain for the Jewish state. Haters make no distinction between Israel and this government’s as yet unpassed proposals. Protesters encourage the delegitimizers with hysterical cries about “Israeli apartheid” and the “death of Israeli democracy.” The schadenfreude one hears from anti-Zionist Jews – “we knew they were antidemocratic primitives” – further encourages Jew-haters and Israel-haters.
Twinning the judicial reform debate with the Palestinian issue perpetuates Yasser Arafat’s great con: assuming that everything happening in Israel revolves around the Palestinians. Thus, hundreds of academics – including leading Israel studies professors and Jewish studies professors – sign their puerile petition “The Elephant in the Room” directly linking “Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation” – note the sloppy use of “Israel,” not its government. That purported attention-seeking elephant is actually a scene-stealing, forever-buzzing Palestinian mosquito.
Such superficial, unacademic, Johnny-one-note-ism oversimplifies Israel’s constitutional clash. True, some judiciary-sappers resent the courts for protecting Palestinian rights. And some goonatics have been hardened by their contempt for Palestinians. But these are minor melody lines in a louder social, political, ideological cacophony.
More worrying than scholars’ imaginary elephant in the room are the anti-Zionist termites eating away at academic integrity. Last week’s headlines prove how “occupation” talk negating any Israeli ties to the land spirals into repudiating what Israel is, not just what Israel’s government does, while criminalizing those who defend Israel. How dare the City University of New York investigate professors for complaining about working in anti-Israel, anti-Jewish environments! This vicious anti-Zionist crusade justifies exaggerations, distortions, lies, and libels that dehumanize Israelis and Jews. The result is violence against Israelis worldwide – be it touring in Berlin, driving on vacation, living your life.
As a Zionist, I will continue fighting this government, whenever any minister says something dumb, offensive, undemocratic, anti-Arab, and/or un-Jewish. Admittedly, that feels like a full-time job these days. But, as a Zionist, I will continue fighting this irrational Israel-hatred, even though that, too, felt like a full-time job last year – and has only intensified since.
The writer is the editor of the new three-volume set Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People (www.theljp.org).
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