Saving Israel or Assisting it to Commit Suicide?
Alan Hart 20 December 2009
I had to struggle with myself to decide which of two headlines was most appropriate for this article — the one above or “The hard core of lunatics are pulling up the drawbridge”. A Jewish friend in Canada drew my attention to an article in the Jewish Ledger, an independent weekly newspaper in Westport, Connecticut. The headline over it is “Saving Israel” Expert says American Jews key to Israel’s survival.
I have rarely read such dangerous nonsense. It’s the voice of Zionism, deluded as ever, but with more than a hint of panic. The “expert” quoted is Dr. Daniel Gordis, senior vice president of the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center, which describes itself as a research and education institute. He had addressed a standing-room only crowd of close to 300 in the small sanctuary of Westport’s Conservative Synagogue.
His main point was that Israel has survived all conventional military attacks and frustrated their aims (never mind that Israel’s survival was never in question), and has reduced terrorism to a minor threat, but there is now a threat “that is capable of succeeding and against which Israel has no defense.”
What, according to Gordis, is this new threat? “The direct assault that Israel is now under by the Arabs via appeals to the world community.
This coordinated effort aims to delegitimise the Jewish state and cause it to be treated as an international pariah, whose products and scholars will be boycotted and ostracised from the international community.”
Gordis went on to say that in order to survive this new attack, “American Jews must fight in the halls of Congress and on the American campuses. This means getting involved with organisations willing to present Jewish arguments, e.g. The American Israel Political Action Committee, AIPAC.” (Its real title is The American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and “Jewish arguments” is a misrepresentation. Some Jewish arguments are opposed to Zionist arguments. Gordis wants more American Jews to present Zionist arguments).
So according to Gordis the fact that the Zionist (not Jewish) state is now being seen by a still smallish but growing number of people in the Western world as a pariah state is all the fault of the Arabs. To say that I think one has to be either a devilish spin-doctor who knows what he is saying is propaganda nonsense, or deluded close to the point of clinical madness.
The real reasons for Israel’s worsening image in the world are the extraordinary self-righteousness of its leaders, their contempt for international law and their policies, which currently amount to completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by stealth. That plus the fact that more and more people are beginning to see Israel for what it really is – the obstacle to peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. My view is that if more American Jews take Gordis’s advice and become active in support of this Israel, they will not be saving it but assisting it to commit suicide. They’d also be exposing themselves to a charge of complicity in its crimes.
In an apparent effort to frighten more American Jews into campaigning for Israel right or wrong, Gordis reportedly said this: “If Israel were to be destroyed, American Jewry would be reduced to the bleak existence they experienced years ago in Poland or Russia.”
I can only guess at what Gordis was seeking to imply with those words. One obvious implication is that he meant something like this. If there was a turning against American Jews, and if Israel did not exist to be a refuge of last resort for them, they would be persecuted and possibly exterminated. One of my own often stated fears is that, provoked by the Zionist state’s behaviour, there could be another great turning against Jews, possibly starting in America. It follows, or so it seems to me, that the way to stop the monster of anti-Semitism going on the rampage again is not by supporting Israel on its present course as Gordis advocates.
The way is by making Americans and other Westerners among whom most Jews live aware of the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and thus why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Israel. It could also be said, and should be said, that American and other Western Jews could best protect their own real interests by distancing themselves from the monster the Zionist state has become. (And in my view was always bound to become with the failure of the major powers to control it).
Gordis is also in doubt that Israel will have to attack Iran. The notion of a nuclear-armed Iran posing an existential threat to Israel is beyond crazy. It presumes that a nuclear-armed Iran would launch a first strike against Israel. That would never happen. If it did, the whole of Iran would be obliterated. No Iranian leader is ever going to be that stupid. Not even by miscalculation.
Zionism is playing up the Iranian threat because a nuclear-armed Iran would change the balance of power in a way that prevented Israel from imposing its will on the region at no significant cost. So far as I know there were no men and women in white coats to carry Daniel away to the nearest asylum.
The Canadian friend who drew my attention to the article in the Jewish Ledger was Sid Shniad, the co-chair of Independent Jewish Voices. In my thank you email to him I commented, “What expletive deleted nonsense!” He replied, “The hard core of lunatics are pulling up the drawbridge.”
Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialised in the Middle East
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