When Israel's Left aligns itself with the Hamas movement and acts as a mouthpiece for its propaganda - by Ben-Dror Yemini

The Left in Israel has opportunities to show that it is pro-Zionist, but when it comes to Gaza's so-called March of Return, it squandered that opportunity. Rather than unting behind Israel and calling this racist and anti-Semitic march out for what it really is, it aligned itself with the Hamas movement and is acting as a mouthpiece for its propaganda.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Ynet/Opinion..
01 April '18..
Link: https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5216085,00.html

There are moments in which the Zionist left-wing—and this includes Meretz, the New Israel Fund, Peace Now and other groups and people—can prove that it's not just Left, but also Zionist. Hamas's "March of Return" is just such a moment. After all, this wasn't a fight against the occupation. This wasn't a march for peace. This wasn't resistance to the settlement enterprise. This was a provocation which is situated somewhere between the desire to annihilate Israel—as the march's organizers publicly declared—and the crazy shouting of the march's participants. "Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud," which is the Muslim battle cry, from days of old, to slaughter Jews. Not Zionists. Not Israelis. Jews.

In such moments, the Zionist left-wing should make it clear: We're not there. We know this is a provocation. We know this is a march of hate. We know the goal of Hamas and/or the organizers of the march is one and one alone: As many fatalities as possible to embarrass Israel. Any humane and liberal person, any supporter of human rights, anyone who wants peace and reconciliation should come out against this march, its organizers, and the racist and anti-Semitic sentiments leading it.

But no. The representatives of the Zionist left-wing failed this test. They have complaints, but only, or mostly, against Israel. Tamar Zandberg, the chosen leader of the Left, released a statement on "extensive harm done to the Palestinians," while calling for an inquiry. Not a word about the negative sentiments, the racism, the demand of return, the calls to kill Jews. Nothing. Zandberg is not stupid. She knows that the declared goal was "return" and the practical goal was fatalities. But damn the facts. She has another opportunity to slam Israel, and this is what she's doing.

Statements in the same vein were released by Mickey Gitzin, the executive director of the New Israel Fund ("non-violent activity"), and Yariv Oppenheimer ("What are we, Syria?"), the former leader of Peace Now.

Who is Being Delusional? by Caroline Glick

...Abbas is the hero of the Left. He is their partner. He is their moderate. He is their man of peace. Abbas is the Palestinian leader to whom every leftist politician worth his snuff, from opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog to the Meretz Knesset faction make regular pilgrimages to prove their devotion to peace. Their man in Ramallah received the most radical offer ever to see the light of day. And rather than accept it, he rejected it out of hand and refused to meet with Olmert ever again, and he openly admits it. The Left’s non-response is not surprising. Abbas’s decision to end all speculation about whether or not he is a man of peace is merely the latest blow reality has cast on their two-state formula.

Caroline Glick..
Column One/JPost..
19 November '15..

On Tuesday night, Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publicly for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.

Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”

For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offer has been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really reject it, but just failed to respond.

But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.

Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer because, by the time Olmert made it, he was involved in criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight months later.

Hogwash, says former AP reporter Mark Lavie.

Following the interview’s broadcast, Lavie countered that if Abbas were truly interested in establishing an independent Palestinian state, he wouldn’t have cared about the political fortunes of the Israeli prime minister. He would have taken the offer and run, knowing that, as Olmert said, the likelihood that he’d get a similar offer in the next 50 years was nonexistent.

The most notable reaction to Abbas’s admission was the reaction that never came. The Israeli Left had no reaction to his interview.

Abbas is the hero of the Left.

He is their partner. He is their moderate. He is their man of peace. Abbas is the Palestinian leader to whom every leftist politician worth his snuff, from opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog to the Meretz Knesset faction make regular pilgrimages to prove their devotion to peace.

Their man in Ramallah received the most radical offer ever to see the light of day. And rather than accept it, he rejected it out of hand and refused to meet with Olmert ever again, and he openly admits it.

The Left’s non-response is not surprising. Abbas’s decision to end all speculation about whether or not he is a man of peace is merely the latest blow reality has cast on their two-state formula.

The Left’s policy of land for peace failed more than 15 years ago when Abbas’s boss, Yasser Arafat, preferred war to peace and initiated the worst campaign of terrorism that Israel had ever experienced.

Yet for the last 15 years, the Israeli “peace camp” has never wavered in its view that, despite it all, Israel must rid itself of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Rather it members has grown angrier and angrier at their own people for abandoning them and less and less willing to agree that there is anything – including Israeli statehood itself – that is more important than giving up Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.

The Left’s reactionary position was on full display last Thursday at the annual “peace conference” hosted by the far left Haaretz newspaper.

BDS's next man of the year, Amos Oz

...I feel sorry for Amos Oz. I feel sorry for the camp which used to be a peace camp. It has failed to bring peace closer, but has succeeded in bolstering the Palestinian rejectionist camp and the campaign for Israel's destruction.

While the leftist camp has failed to
bring peace closer, it has succeeded
in bolstering the Palestinian rejectionist
 camp and the campaign for Israel's
destruction (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
09 November '15..

Amos Oz will win the BDS campaign's man of the year award. It's strange, because the Israeli author is against the BDS movement. But he recently announced that he would boycott state-sponsored events around the world.

There is nothing original about this move. Oz is joining a new trend of a small and noisy minority among US Jews: We love Israel, we are Zionist, but we are basically joining the boycott against Israel. It's true that the leaders of the boycott campaign are against peace, it's true that they are against two states, it's true that they object to the actual existence of the State of Israel, it’s true that they mainly identify with Hamas - but does that really matter? Intellectuals, as much as others, must join trends. Now Oz is one of them, and it's sad.

It's sad because the Zionist Oz - an Israel lover, not an Israel hater - symbolizes the tragedy of the Israeli Zionist left.

During Operation Protective Edge, Oz made sensible comments which angered the radical left. Oz delivered two important lectures this year and combined them into one article, in which he laments what we are going through. He does not share the left's illusions on the Palestinians. He does not disregard the right's fears over what will happen here if there is an agreement. And he reaches the conclusion that there is no escape from pursuing an agreement and a separation. For our sake, he argues, for our sake. It’s a national interest. I support almost every sentence in the article. Occasionally, maybe not as often as I should, I write it myself.

And this is where the tragedy lies: Because the voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. You can’t make rebuking comments of a loving person, which can be accepted by most Israelis, including a large part of right-wing voters, and at the same time join Israel haters' operation pattern.

And that's the exact story of a large part of the Israeli left: It's okay to criticize the government. It’s okay to warn of wrongs. It's okay to equip hundreds of Palestinians with cameras, so that once in a few months someone will be able to catch a soldier beating or cursing a Palestinian. But when this "criticism" is mainly used by the campaign for Israel's destruction - you become part of it.

Reality, peacenik Israelis and rock-throwing all converge in Ramallah

...After word of the gathering got out, about 30 protesters showed up outside the hotel. Protesters tried to enter the hotel, but found the doors locked, and then began throwing stones that shattered several windows and glass doors.

Elder of Ziyon..
09 January '13..

There has been a bizarre private initiative to have ordinary Arabs and Israelis get together and see if they could agree to a peace plan.

From a press release:

The Israeli and Palestinian leaderships apparently do not have a working strategy to cope with their conflict. So, the time has come for the two peoples to take matters into their own hands!

On January 9-10, 2014 an Israeli delegation, a Palestinian delegation and an audience will negotiate solutions to the conflict. The Congress will have a historic first being held in Ramallah and Jerusalem. Each delegation will include 20 people from all walks of life: Israeli generals, Palestinian commanders, Israeli settlers, Palestinian ex-prisoners, academics, business people, and students; reflecting the entire political spectrum.

The congress is co-chaired by Dr. Sapir Handelman – an Israeli who received the Peter Becker Award in Peace & Conflict Studies; and Mr. Ibrahim Enbawi – a prominent Palestinian leader in East Jerusalem. The chairmen have five sessions to lead the public assembly to reach peace agreements.

This historical event is an important step towards the establishment of a major Israeli-Palestinian Public Negotiating Congress with political power. The congress is designed to involve the people in the peacemaking efforts and motivate the leaderships to conclude agreements.

So how did the meeting in Ramallah go today?

(Continue)

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Ari Shavitt's addition to “Israel is losing its soul” books

...In any case, that even a more thoughtful, nuanced left-winger like Shavit feels compelled to write about his country in terms of “tragedy” and “doom,” and that so many people are now getting this warped message, is really something to lament.

P. David Hornik..
FrontPagemag.com..
23 December '13..

I haven’t read My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, the new New York Times bestseller by Israeli left-of-center journalist Ari Shavit. In my book-reviewing days I read more than my fill of “Israel is losing its soul” books. I have a lot of resistance to subjecting myself to another, along with other priorities.

Shavit, of course, is not just another Israel-basher. Among left-wing Israeli commentators he’s distinguished by having admitted he was wrong about “peace” with Syria, relating to Binyamin Netanyahu as a human being instead of a demon, and being intensely concerned about the Iranian threat—that is, capable of acknowledging that Israel still faces threats that it did not create itself.

Some commentators I respect clearly like My Promised Land. However, a review by another of my esteemed authors and commentators, Ruth Wisse, makes me all the more leery of putting any time into the book.

“[E]verywhere in My Promised Land,” Wisse writes, “the techniques of literary foreshadowing are deployed to telegraph impending doom.” And yet, “according to Shavit himself, his fears arise less from what Arab and Muslim leaders intend to do to Israel than from what Israel has done to them.”

Israel, in other words, as a doomed country—as comeuppance for its own sins. Sounds all too familiar.

Perhaps, if I read the book myself, I would get a different impression of its import. It seems unlikely, though, in light of some quotations Wisse offers.

Such as some sentences of Shavit’s about a concert by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz at Kibbutz Ein Harod in 1926—that is, in prestate, pioneering Israel, twenty-two years before statehood. As Shavit imagines this event:

I think of that great fire in the belly, a fire without which the valley could not have been cultivated, the land could not have been conquered, the state of the Jews could not have been founded. But I know the fire will blaze out of control. It will burn the valley’s Palestinians and it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark.

“…burn the valley’s Palestinians,” no less. Here you can see a map of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The blue part was supposed to be Israel, the orange part Palestine (Jerusalem belongs to neither, an internationally administered city). Everything from Beersheba southward is desert; the Jews, whose connection to the land goes back over three thousand years and who have been assiduously building it up since the 1880s, get the Negev Desert, a strip along the coast, and eastern Galilee. The Palestinians get the rest.

As Ari Shavit knows, the Jews accepted this plan; the Palestinian and Arab side rejected it out of hand and instead launched a war to annihilate Israel. Shavit also knows that in 1994 Israel created the Palestinian Authority; that in 2000-01 it turned the historical clock back by offering the Palestinians a state that they—again—rejected; ditto for 2008; that meanwhile in 2005 Israel withdrew totally from Gaza; and that in 2009 Netanyahu, with his right-of-center background, pronounced himself in favor of a two-state solution.

Apparently, though, for Shavit, none of this is enough to expiate the primal sin he feels hovering over himself, over his country.

Demanding the release of racist murderers?

...What can I say, the understanding being extended to the Palestinian narrative, which favors terrorists who blow up crowded buses, has become extremely bizarre.

Gonen Ginat..
Israel Hayom..
29 July '13..

The debate over the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Palestinian acquiescence to resuming peace talks has become ridiculous. The biggest opponents of any trace of racism are also the same people who are now the biggest advocates of releasing racist killers. (It sounds odd in the Israeli reality, but yes, targeting Jews is also an act of racism.) The same people who demand all-out war against anyone who spray paints the words "price tag" on a wall are showing magnanimous mercy when it comes to baby killers and dismemberers of bodies.

What can I say, the understanding being extended to the Palestinian narrative, which favors terrorists who blow up crowded buses, has become extremely bizarre. Even the hypocrisy of Yedioth Ahronoth, the paper that has incessantly demanded a resumption of peace talks, but once talks were resumed launched a war against the price Israel had to pay, doesn't exceed the normal levels of hypocrisy over there.

And where are all the knights who valiantly advocate the rule of law? Why are they suddenly silent as the verdicts handed down to Arab murderers are becoming mere abstract recommendations? What will the release of all these prisoners do to the families of the victims? After all, we are all the family of the victims: We all cried with them. We all recoiled from the atrocities together.

No automatic right to perform on Army Radio

Eytan Meyersdorf..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
21 October '12..

Last week singer Izhar Ashdot was scheduled to appear on Army Radio, the IDF radio station. In his new song, Ashdot comes out against Israeli soldiers, singing, “In their heart is only hate, evil intention and darkness...they learn cruelly...how to instill fear...how to kill – it’s just a matter of habit.”

When I found out about this, I posted on Facebook in various groups, informing people about what was about to happen, and imploring them to take action and protest against this. I was naive enough to believe that everyone would want to speak out against this. I mean, a man who publicly calls soldiers murderers is about to perform on the station dedicated to those very soldiers he is calling murderers – it’s laughable.

Unfortunately, I was mistaken. My posts were attacked by numerous people, crying out about democracy, freedom of speech, and how we, as a democratic country, must let this man perform.

First and foremost, that argument holds absolutely no water. Army Radio is a state-owned station, and is well within its rights to take the position that a person who comes out criticizing their values has no business being on their station.

If Ashdot wants to perform on a privately owned station, he is well within his rights, but not Army Radio. Imagine a singer coming on the American Forces Network, the network of the American army, and calling American soldiers murderers – there is no way that would be permitted, it’s absurd! The fact of the matter is there is such a fundamental flaw with their arguments that there must be something else going on here – and that is the lack of values and national pride.

Weinberg - Migron: Yalla, Pogrom!

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
26 March '12..






The Migron outpost now must be evacuated by August 1, the High Court injudiciously ruled Sunday, overturning a wise government compromise that would have allowed an orderly move of the settlement to Psagot over the coming three years. Chaval. (Too bad).

Particularly sad about this turn of events is the old, hateful rhetoric that has been let out of the bottle by the Supreme Court debate. Left-wing rabble rousers like Zahava Galon of Meretz, Yariv Oppenheimer of Peace Now, and hundreds of benighted academics who published a repulsive, sinister anti-Migron petition in the newspaper Haaretz on Sunday, have peppered the public debate with settler-hating epithets like “land robbers,” “lawbreakers,” “violators” and “corrupt manipulators.”

Listening to some of these spokesmen on radio yesterday and today you could feel the hatred of anything related to settlers, settlements and the Netanyahu government oozing from every pore of their oh-so-democratically-and-legally-pure bodies. There was no sympathy expressed whatsoever for the plight of the Migron residents – who settled there with full government support and in the knowledge that the State of Israel had title to the land.

Eydar - The politics behind the protests

Dror Eydar
Israel HaYom
3 July '11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=257

Saturday evening we watched Channel 2 news anchor Yonit Levy turn into Marxist activist Rosa Luxemburg and compete with protest organizer Daphni Leef in encouraging and recruiting protesters. Channel 2, like most other media outlets, long ago stopped being a fair observer of events and became an active subverter of the elected government. In the studio sits the haughty crossword compiler Amnon Abramowitz, who lives in a black and white world. The bad guys are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the settlers, religious people, and the Jewish state. The good guys are members of the “white tribe,” for which Abramowitz is a loyal spokesman.

I am surprised that the public has not yet ransacked the studio building over this constant incitement by Abramowitz and his friends. As with all his broadcasts, in this one too he brandished his voodoo dolls of settlers and religious people. “Netanyahu talks about the periphery, but for 80 days of the year, there is no public transportation,” he said, referring to the closure of public transport on the Sabbath and on religious holidays. “This is the political price the religious people exact from us.” Listen to what he is saying: the Sabbath day is a political price! Perhaps it is for Abramowitz’s “white tribe.” The Sabbath day, like the Jewish state, is a political price. For most of the public, the Sabbath day is a value. This seems to be true even for some of the protesters in Tel Aviv.

Good and innocent protesters, you are just in your struggle, but you are being led by the nose. You have to differentiate between attempts to correct long-standing injustices, and attempts to destroy everything. Israel is not Egypt. The country cannot bear the responsibility for everything in our entire lives. We too have responsibilities. The social justice being discussed here now was tried for years in the former Soviet Union. Every immigrant from the former Soviet Union can attest to its failure.

The government has to deal not with the protest but with those behind it, forces who are cunning and cynical, some who are even experts in social engineering, media spins, and political subversion, who have a vision of a state belonging to all its citizens. Some of them are wealthy individuals, who ironically, despite the protest slogans, feel threatened by Netanyahu's government, which is currently investigating the concentration of financial wealth in the hands of a select few. Negotiations with the tycoons would be scorned by many, but welcomed by the tycoons and many in the media.

Slogans shouted out at the protests were filled with hate against the prime minister. Some called him a bloodthirsty dictator. One sign portrayed Netanyahu as the servant of the tycoons. How many lies can you feed the public? Netanyahu's government is the only one that has stood up to the tycoons: in the mobile phone market and in the revenues the state would get from the new gas reserves discovered off the coast, and now with the committee set up to investigate monopolies.

Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) sat in the studio and said, “I am telling you that Netanyahu doesn't care. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He never saw an empty refrigerator in his life."

It is appropriate to mention this rude and provocative sentence, coming from the mouth of someone who aspires to be a leader in our society. In every place, after trying to hide the political drive behind the protests, it came out anyway and appeared in the middle of a city street. If the protest is indeed political, other groups will have something to say about it as well.

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