A glossary of newspeak slogans

The Left has a habit of downplaying, deriding and denigrating opposing convictions; and denying them resonance, it then portrays its own viewpoints as the majority’s article of faith.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
28 May '10

It was sweet solace for the soul to learn that some on the entrenched Left still retain a smidgeon of hankering for the Zionist fold. It was comforting to conclude that maybe the more progressive self-appointed guardians of other people’s consciences have noticed, albeit belatedly, that they had strayed too close to the loony fringe. So it was with genuine joy that many of us received the news of initiatives to purportedly back away from postmodern/post-Zionist excesses and return to the patriotic middle ground that was historically the solid power base of this country’s Labor-Left.

We sincerely yearned to applaud the renascent National Left (Smol Leumi), not least because our entire body politic must be able to count on two responsible mainstream mainstay alternatives. It must be able to count on alternatives which place Israeli security and self-preservation above all trendy inclinations and which do not observe our reality through deliberately distortive enemy lenses.


But then came the pitifully under-attended but grossly over-hyped rally in Jerusalem which let the mangy cat out of the bag. These Peace Now/Labor/Meretz activists weren’t changing course. Like classic front organizations, they just wanted to hoodwink us and get us to believe they were. The goal was to convince the Zionist majority that the Left is its sole true expression. The idea was to parade leftist dogmas as indispensable Zionist creeds.

Subtext: If you don’t adhere to the Left’s latest ideological transmutations, you are perforce ejected from the Zionist camp. These supposedly Zionist leftists weren’t joining the Zionist majority; they were out to transform that majority in their image. Anyone who dissents from their compulsory definition of Zionism – a far cry from Berl Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion and even Meir Ya’ari and Ya’acov Hazan – is pilloried as a heretic.

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