Israel’s Enemies Within

A worrying minority is undermining the Jewish state’s self-confidence.

Mona Charen
nationalreview.com
07 January '11

The late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan coined a pithy test for whether a country is free or not. Take a look at the newspapers, he suggested: “If all the news is good, you’re not in a free country. If all the news is bad, you are.” A corollary to Moynihan’s test could apply today: If a nation is beset by concern about human-rights violations and injustice within its borders, it is a free country. If it concerns itself only with the supposed human-rights violations of other nations, it is not.

In this sense, Israel is just like the United States and other open societies. A free press and an independent judiciary, along with civic organizations, political activists, and professors, are watchful for any perceived deviation from the nation’s high standards.

But it is different for Israel. It alone among the world’s 195 nations is the target of a delegitimization campaign. This intellectual and moral assault is distinct from criticism of Israeli actions (which is always welcome in a free society). The delegitimization effort asserts not that Israel behaves badly, or that it should refrain from this or that activity, but that it has no right to exist at all and/or that the Jewish people do not exist. Long the position of the Arab states and the Palestinians, the denial of Israel’s essential legitimacy has spread over the course of the last decade to include a number of governments and non-governmental organizations, and, perhaps most significantly, a non-trivial number of writers and intellectuals.

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