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.

Continually Stuck in a Time Warp, the Retrograde Israeli Left

...This desperate need to excuse the Palestinians, no matter how ridiculous, was also the order of the day for Labor MK Eitan Cabel who, during the same debate, declared “I’m not defending the Palestinians, but it’s amazing how people act like they’re shocked that the Palestinians have demands. Isn’t that the meaning of negotiations?” The Palestinian demand that Israel agree to all the final outcomes of the negotiations before they even got underway may seem a little unreasonable to some, yet, if this line of saying “yes the Palestinians don’t act like they want peace but…” was ever convincing then it certainly ceased to be so quite some time ago.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
07 April '14..

Listening to Israel’s “progressives” you might think it was still 1994, as if two decades of failed peace efforts, Palestinian intransigence, and unrelenting incitement and terrorism had simply never happened. They speak as if they’re still living in some heyday of the Oslo peace accords. Naturally, it is the role of the political opposition in any democracy to find fault with the actions of governing political rivals, but what Israel’s left-wing politicians are saying goes far beyond normal critique of government policy despite the fact that, although they would never admit it, the current government’s strategy for peace talks is not fundamentally different from what they themselves propose.

On Monday Israel’s parliament convened from its recess for a session on the peace talks, as had been called for by 25 Knesset members, only 15 of whom bothered to show up. But perhaps those who stayed away were the wiser; in reality this supposedly urgent session was little more than a shameless opportunity for opposition politicians to capitalize on the failure of the latest round of peace talks. Pouring scorn on Prime Minister Netanyahu, left-wing party leaders called for everything from new elections to a breakup of the coalition and the formation of a new government. Political ambitions aside, what these individuals really displayed was a total unwillingness to recognize any of what has been happening in the last few months–really, the last few decades. Israel’s left is stuck in a time warp and whereas the right is increasingly looking to formulate new alternatives, the backward-looking left appears utterly unable to adapt to current realities.

The reading of the failure of negotiations offered by Labor leader Isaac Herzog was hardly convincing. It essentially amounts to: Abbas is no picnic, but that’s beside the point because Netanyahu is infinitely worse. Apparently ignoring the fact that Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas is now without any democratic mandate, not to mention the way in which he already rejected the remarkably generous offers of Olmert’s Kadima government in 2008, Herzog announced before the Knesset, “Abu Mazen is a tough and infuriating partner and sometimes very exasperating, and can even be depressing, (but) he is our partner and there is no point at all in wishing otherwise.” Yet of Netanyahu Herzog had this to say: “We are on the edge of a volcano and the public does not understand the severity of the situation, and all of the blame is on a prime minister who is incapable of doing anything. The entire process has collapsed because as far as Netanyahu is concerned there is no place for taking real steps for peace.”

What these “real steps” are remains unclear, but presumably the offer of another 400 security prisoners going free and a partial settlement freeze doesn’t really cut it for those in the business of taking “real steps for peace.” Of course to admit otherwise would be to concede that Abbas is anything but the partner that Herzog insists he is. It is certainly remarkable that Herzog could claim, with a straight face, that “all of the blame” lies with Netanyahu. This desperate need to excuse the Palestinians, no matter how ridiculous, was also the order of the day for Labor MK Eitan Cabel who, during the same debate, declared “I’m not defending the Palestinians, but it’s amazing how people act like they’re shocked that the Palestinians have demands. Isn’t that the meaning of negotiations?” The Palestinian demand that Israel agree to all the final outcomes of the negotiations before they even got underway may seem a little unreasonable to some, yet, if this line of saying “yes the Palestinians don’t act like they want peace but…” was ever convincing then it certainly ceased to be so quite some time ago.

Oslo Accords - Recognizing the failure but not learning from it

Ze'ev Jabotinsky..
Israel Hayom..
27 December '12..

The Meretz party's new political platform proposes overturning the Oslo Accords. The leaders of this party were among the original initiators of the agreements, and the most active in getting them approved, yet even they admit now that the Oslo Accords are a failure.

Oslo caused enormous damage: It upgraded the Palestine Liberation Organization's status from a terrorist organization to an internationally recognized legitimate political organization. Two weeks before the exposure of the secret Oslo talks, huge headlines emerged suggesting that the PLO was nearing final dissolution due to its senior members' desperation and the lack of funds for continued terrorism against Israel. It was at that point that then PLO leader Yasser Arafat was given a lifeline, and he used it to establish an armed presence inside Israel, a move that until then he had only dreamed about.

Under the protection of Oslo, Arafat's emissaries murdered more than 1,600 Israelis and caused crippling injuries to thousands more, while the Israeli economy sustained losses in the billions, thousands of families became refugees in their own land, and, worst of all, Israel lost legitimacy in the world. The legitimacy was lost because Israel built an international stage for Arafat, which he used to disseminate his lies about invented rights that come at the expense of the rights to which we are entitled to by international law.

Are Settlements An Obstacle to Peace Debate, (Video) Part 2

www.kumah.org
05 April '11


Highlights from Yishai Fleisher and Charney Bromberg debate, "Are Settlements An Obstacle to Peace?". Originally broadcast on ShalomTV on cable television for the month of January 2011.


Uploaded by EyeOnZionTV on Apr 4, 2011

Yishai Fleisher is the founder and executive director of Kumah (see info below). Charney Bromberg is a former executive director of Meretz USA. This shortened version was prepared by Kumah. This is Part 2.

Learn more about Kumah by visiting http://www.kumah.org

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Zionists are not tattletales

Israel Harel
Haaretz
20 May '10

Out of fear over demographics and anxiety over the position of the Obama administration, a good many Jews are prepared for concessions in the West Bank and a temporary cessation of construction in Jerusalem.

But the Jewish public's deeper instinct remains Zionist. The public knows that the state arose thanks to the settlement of the valleys, the Galilee and the Negev. If it supports - as does the government - accepting American dictates, the public arrived at this point sadly. It certainly does not share the joy with which the radical left welcomes the American dictates. It disdains this left, whose campaign over the years, funded by foreign elements (some of which reject the fundamental existence of the Jewish state ), encourages alienation from parts of the homeland. The obvious outcome of the left's activity is rising violence between Jews and Arabs and strife between Jews.

For these reasons and others, fewer than 1,000 people (as reported disappointedly by Army Radio, which had earlier worked hard to fill Zion Square ) turned out for the leftist "mass demonstration" under the slogan "Zionists, not settlers."

Zionists, as every high school student knows, even if he studies civics using the post-Zionist text "To be a citizen of Israel" (and most high school students study from this, as the Education Ministry's official text ), always settled the land. Without settlement, the State of Israel would not have been established. And the moment the settler movements began to undermine their own foundations and reject the just nature of their historic path, they crumbled socially and economically. The best of its young people left the country, their creation dried up and their impact on the culture and values of the rest of Israeli society faded.

The leftist coalition that organized the rally - "the national left" of Meretz, Peace Now and what remains of the Kibbutz Movement (just before the rally internal dissent forced it to remove its name from the list of organizers ) - broadcast hatred, alienation and denunciation. Hatred and excoriation were woven into almost every section of the "manifesto" of the "national left," initiated by Eldad Yaniv and Shmuel Hasfari, first and foremost against the settlers. A movement does not emerge from such an insulting and destructive text, even the greatest opponents of the settlers concede. Such a movement certainly does not emerge that is renewing the constructive, unified and pioneering path of the national Zionist left, as its writers and supporters allege (and only in that realm; it has almost no support among the general public ).

(Read full article)

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Birthday Wishes

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
29 November 09

Shulamit Aloni, a former head of Israel’s Meretz Party, gave an interview to Yedioth on her 81st birthday. “It’s hard for me to say a kind word about the state today,” she said.

“No one should be speaking this nonsense about ‘blood on the hands.’ Since 2000, with the launching of the second intifada, we have murdered thousands. We too have blood on our hands,” she remarked.

“We need to release those demanded (by Hamas) immediately,” she went on. …

“We are a nefarious people. What we are doing in the West Bank is worse than all the pogroms done to the Jews.” But she qualified her statement by saying she was “not referring to the Nazis, but the Cossacks.”

Conventional leftist self-hatred, as these things go. But this comment on Israeli politics was interesting:

“The Right has two left hands, but the Left doesn’t even exist today,” she said.

Here’s some free political advice: That’s because most Israelis don’t loathe their country, and they know the Aloni-Meretz faction does.

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Barghouti Mania

JPost Editorial

16 August 09

The election last week of convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti to the Fatah Central Committee has reinvigorated long-extant advocacy for his release among those Israeli politicians apparently convinced that he alone can revive the moribund peace process.

The view that Barghouti could do what no one else would - and that he wants to - is rife in some Labor, Kadima and Meretz quarters, though it is by no means the unanimous attitude in at least the first two of these parties.

On May 20, 2004, Barghouti, commander of Fatah's Tanzim militia, was convicted by an Israeli civilian court on five counts of murder, including commissioning and organizing the attack on Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant where three guests partaking in a bachelorette party were shot to death in 2002. He was sentenced to five life sentences, and another 40 years for attempted murder.

Nevertheless, there are people both abroad and inside Israel who persist in depicting Barghouti's imprisonment as somehow illicit. Many more consider it counterproductive. Relying on Barghouti's perceived relative moderation prior to the second intifada, they argue that only he can foster the adoption by the Palestinian leadership, and the acceptance by the Palestinian public, of viable terms for the two-state solution sought by mainstream Israel, including by our current prime minister. This faith in Barghouti as peacemaker persists despite his self-acknowledged orchestration of the second intifada terror war and even recent inflammatory statements to the Fatah convention.

Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor) argues that "Barghouti is the only one who can deliver the goods to Israel."

His party colleague, Minorities Affairs Avishai Braverman, believes that "we must consider freeing Barghouti in order to create a viable, strong Palestinian leadership."

Kadima MK Gideon Ezra, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet security agency, declares that "Barghouti is the best anti-Hamas bulwark. Israel needs a strong man to negotiate with."

Common to such statements is the assertion of ostensible pragmatism - at the expense of considerations of justice, even for Barghouti's murdered victims.

But those considerations are anything but marginal.

Bringing terrorists to trial is no negligible matter. Members of Israel's security forces put their lives on the line to track down and capture such homicidal kingpins. What message do we send to them if we then set those terrorists free?

What of the inherent contempt for our own judicial system - one of the most autonomous, fair-minded and progressive in the entire democratic world? By overruling multiple murder convictions, we invalidate verdicts, delegitimize our courts and damage Israel's legal reputation beyond repair.

In truth, furthermore, there is no pragmatic certainty here - no remotely credible reason to believe that Israel, if it followed this route, would be doing anything more than liberating a dangerous antagonist, and potentially facilitating new terror onslaughts of the sort Barghouti masterminded in the past.

Setting Barghouti free, not incidentally, would also reward the hard line adopted by Fatah at its assembly in Bethlehem these past few days - including the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state, the adherence to a "right of return" that would turn Israel into Palestine by weight of numbers, and the demand for full Palestinian control of Jerusalem as a precondition to renewing negotiations.

NONE OF the advocates of Barghouti's release has ever detailed precisely how or when he was transformed from a killer into a peace-lover. None can credibly explain why Barghouti's own rhetoric, which so contradicts their assertions, should be dismissed.

In this context it is instructive to listen to Kadima's Avi Dichter, a former Shin Bet head and ex-minister of public security. Barghouti "earned his status in PA society with the blood of murdered and wounded Israelis," Dichter, a proven advocate of compromise with the Palestinians, said this week. "This man has amply proved his unreliability."

This admonition should also be kept in mind vis-a-vis Hamas, which is now demanding Barghouti's release as part of the ransom for Gilad Schalit. Much as we all want the kidnapped soldier back home, we need to remember why Barghouti is popular in Gaza, and that securing Schalit's release in an outrageously asymmetrical "exchange" would merely boost the incentive for more abductions, and the capacity for more terrorism. In ignoring this unhappy truth, the architects of such an exchange would be risking another of the "crazy deals" so bitterly censured by the Winograd Committee.

Related: Justice (1995)
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