Abusing Israel: The Fashionable Thing to Do

Israelis are being painted as peace refusers, terrorizers, killers, torturers, and recently, pilferers of internal organs.

P. David Hornik

pajamasmedia.com
24 November 09

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told France Inter radio recently:

What really hurts me, and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel. There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace. It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it.

Just a couple of days earlier, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had written:

[T]he only time America has been able to advance [Arab-Israeli] peace … has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy. … Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other. … If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it.

And it was just a few weeks earlier that Friedman’s colleague, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, claimed that in Israel:

The anxiety of the diaspora Jews has ceded not to tranquility but to another anxiety. … The annihilation psychosis has not disappeared but taken new form. … I worry when Israel makes a fetish of its exceptional status.

A people that does not want peace, is not suffering enough pain to desire peace, and has an exceptionality fetish — is this enough abuse of Israel for a short period? Obviously not. (Regarding the second of those charges, it should be noted that it was issued from the banks of the Hudson to a Middle Eastern statelet that has absorbed scores of suicide bombings and a total of over 12,000 Hamas and Hezbollah rockets, as well as regular threats and predictions of its annihilation from Tehran, in less than a decade.) All those charges and many others, of course, pale before the Goldstone report’s concluding section on “Actions by Israel in Gaza,” which states:

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