Israel Hayom..
10 October '13..
Recently the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv (or Al-Shaykh Muwannis, as the invitation said) hosted a conference sponsored by the Zochrot organization and devoted to "transitional justice."
By transitional justice they mean the necessity of forcibly evacuating Jews from those areas inhabited until 1948 by Arabs who fled or were expelled in the heat of battle. Conference participants planned how to rebuild the old Arab villages so that the refugees' descendants could return there.
The entire conference was based on a historical and moral distortion of what actually occurred. Here you have another example of how the extremism and cynicism of many leftists encourage Israel's Arab leadership to hope than a political, economic and military war of attrition will destroy Israel, so why compromise or make peace?
There is no nice way to say this: the Left, and in fact anyone who supports the establishment of a criminal Palestinian state, are obstacles on the road to peace. Many of those supporters encourage, and sometimes even incite, the Arabs' criminal leaders to give them a moral imprimatur to conduct a war of destruction against Israel "by different means." Like returning the refugees to Israeli territory.
The Left, from its prophets Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman to the most extreme activists of the New Israel Fund with its dozens of straw organizations, believes with all its heart that an independent Palestinian state is a necessary condition for peace. It ignores the fact that establishing such a state, which like other Arab countries would be led by tyrannical rulers who severely oppress their citizens and embezzle foreign aid, would also condemn Palestinian Arabs to a life of poverty and great suffering, hatred and wars. Arab leaders use hatred to distract their subjects from the misery they cause them, and then channel their anger into crude propaganda for all-out war against Israel.
Even if there were truth in the Left's claim that the occupation is the source of all evil, on what ethical basis do they dare promote a "solution" whose results would be to worsen the terrible servitude of people on whose behalf they say they are working?
How can they hope to help the Palestinians by giving the imprimatur of "self-definition" to a thieving Palestinian leadership that fans hatred for the stranger and other, and preaches a religious war of destruction? How can they justify a solution that first and foremost constitutes a critical blow to Palestinian individual rights?
Is the nationalism that the Left hates when espoused by Jews justified when it comes from Palestinians? Is the collectivist ideal so elevated in their world view -- as in the days when they genuflected to Stalinism -- that they totally ignore the terrible blow that a Palestinian state would inflict on the basic human rights of its citizens. In particular the rights of women, children and minorities, whom the left passionately claims are their highest priority?
Is it that "this doesn't interest us?" as A. B. Yehoshua said? Does it not interest that someone who shares a building with his neighbor places chemical weapons inside?
Is it because there is conflict between us and the Palestinians that we are exempt from the human responsibility not to agree to a solution that will seriously hurt innocent people, whether actively or by omission, because a Jew is not supposed to "stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor" (Leviticus 19:16), even that of a neighbor who is bad and dangerous?
And what about the ethical command to "watch yourselves very carefully" (Deuteronomy 4:15)? Is it only the injustice of the "occupation" that should preoccupy us? This despite the fact that the occupation is perhaps the least of all evils, because not only did the occupation improve the living conditions of individual Arabs to an amazing extent, but it is more of a metaphor than reality.
Most residents of the disputed territories do not live under occupation. Unless it is under the occupation of terrorists whom we brought back from Tunis following the Oslo accords so that they do the dirty work of repressing Hamas terrorism ("without the High Court and without B'Tselem"). All of this, of course, in the name of peace and justice and truth, even if this truth consistently ignores the suffering of more than a million Jews who were forced under threat of death to flee Arab countries and ignores the threat of destruction against the Jews of Israel.
We should not stand idly by, even though in the final analysis it is the Palestinian Arab attempts to commit genocide against the Jews that are responsible for the terrible wars, horrific suffering and the tragedies that befell both them and us.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5931
Daniel Doron is an Israeli publicist and political activist. He is the founder and director of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress (ICSEP).
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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