Those who make no apologies for the Jewish State - by Daniel Greenfield

...The authentic pro-Israel activist does not split the moral difference with the suicide bombers and the beheaders. She does not give equal time to poverty in Gaza when discussing the rockets fired from Gaza. She does not fantasize about reclaiming the moral high ground, but boldly bestrides it. She does not apologize for Israel. Instead she demands that the international sponsors of PLO terrorism in Israel apologize for the murdered Israeli men, women and children whose blood is on their hands.

Daniel Greenfield..
Frontpagemag.com..
12 April '16..


The Pro-Israel Wing of the Pro-Israel Community


Forget the alphabet soup acronyms of a thousand organizations. The pro-Israel community has only three elements.

There’s the anti-Israel side of the pro-Israel community. This misnomer calls itself Liberal Zionism even though, like the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither liberal nor Zionist. Instead illiberal anti-Zionist groups such as J Street provide a comfortable pathway from the pro-Israel community to the anti-Israel left by selling the illusion that it is possible to be pro-Israel while opposing the survival of Israel.

These illiberal anti-Zionists, like most domestic abusers, claim to be providing “tough love” by pressuring the Jewish State to make the “tough decisions” it needs to make in order to “end the occupation”.

These “tough love” and “tough decisions” though all translate into appeasing and aiding terrorists. The only people that the illiberal anti-Zionists, who clutch fistfuls of dirty Soros cash while hiding behind the blue skirts of the pro-Israel community, are willing to get tough on are Jewish victims of Islamic terror.

Somehow Abbas and Hamas never seem to come in for any tough love from these lovers of Israel who instead relish showing their tough love by kicking and beating the Jewish State at every opportunity.

And then there’s the great center of the pro-Israel community, which is not quite anti-Israel nor quite pro-Israel. Instead it hovers moderately and indecisively in the glorious middle. The center of the pro-Israel community is not really pro-Israel. Instead it’s for a two-state solution. It’s for Israel and for the PLO. It wants foreign aid for both. It wants peace. And no amount of terrorism will change its mind.

The marshmallow center of the pro-Israel community is the best recruiting ground for the anti-Israel left because its worldview is hypocritical and incoherent. It lobbies for arms for Israel and yet insists that peace is inevitable. It concedes that both sides have good arguments, but that Israel’s argument is slightly better. Or perhaps slightly less worse. It evades the issues to talk up Israel’s tech sector or the gay bars in Tel Aviv. It believes in boosterism, but not in Israel’s right to finally end terrorism.

The best and brightest culturally liberal youth naturally see through this nonsense and leave. And why shouldn’t they? On campuses they hear from one side that Israel is the devil while their side tells them that Israel is flawed, but basically means well because it is tolerant enough to concede most of the arguments of the other side. You don’t need to be a debate champion to see the trouble with this.

Israel and the Tragic State of American Jewry - by Caroline Glick

...The hard truth seems to be that the salvation of American Jewry can only come with the restoration, at wider and wider communal levels, of the three foundations of Judaism to their proper positions in a meaningful, substantive way. Torah literacy needs to increase. Jewish peoplehood needs to be experienced and advocated. And Zionism, and Zionist history, needs to be taught. Maybe that is the answer to Sanderson. ....in a culture where people expect instant and continuous gratification without knowledge, this won’t be easy. But if American Jewish history teaches us anything, it teaches us that they are all necessary.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
14 March '16..

The American Jewish community is steeped in multiple crises. They threaten its present and its future. The crises that receive the most attention – skyrocketing intermarriage rates and communal positions on Israel, particularly in the face of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel – are a product of another, more basic quandary.

Throughout Jewish history, Jewish continuity and survival have been rooted in Torat Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Am Yisrael. Torah literacy, including familiarity with and at least basic knowledge of the biblical narrative and laws, including the Oral Laws, and the prayers was for thousands of years the basic pillar of Jewish exilic identity. It was through familiarity with the Torah and its laws that Jews were made aware of their uniqueness and maintained their ties to one another, to Jewish communities worldwide and to the Promised Land.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and with the rise of secularism in the US generally and among American Jewry in particular, Zionism and Jewish peoplehood became more prominent focuses in the formation and cultivation of Jewish identity for American Jewry.

The notion, which is doubtlessly correct, is that it is easier to teach Jews about Israel, and about non-religious aspects of Jewish history – first and foremost the Holocaust – than it is to teach a highly secularized community Torah with its concomitant laws of religious observance.

For a few generations, this reliance on Israel and Jewish peoplehood worked fairly well. It worked for two reasons. First, until the 1980s, intermarriage rates were relatively low. And second, until the 1980s, the Left, with which the vast majority of American Jews identified, was solidly pro-Israel.

With rising intermarriage rates, the basic acceptance of Jewish uniqueness became more difficult to maintain. After all, once families were forced to decide between Jewish heritage – including Halacha – and half-Jewish grandchildren, there was no question that Halacha fall by the wayside. It is inhuman to expect grandparents to support a law, particularly one with which most of them are entirely unfamiliar, over their grandchildren.

Then there is Israel. As the American Left has attached itself to anti-Israel narratives to ever greater degrees, the easy coexistence of leftist politics with support for Israel has ended. Partly in response to this trend, during the 1990s much Zionist education became conflated with peace studies. Support for Israel became conflated with support for the peace process with the PLO.

As a consequence, just as intermarriage rates were rising steeply among non-Orthodox Jews to the point where today almost all non-Orthodox Jews intermarry, new generations of Jews were entering adulthood with little familiarity with the history of Zionism or knowledge of Israel beyond its relationship with the PLO.

Today, as leftist hostility to Israel has become widespread, and that hostility has taken on an anti-Jewish character so blatant that even The New York Times is noticing, American Jews on the Left are feeling the pinch.

With little knowledge of Jewish texts besides what they may have learned preparing for their bnei mitzvah, with little knowledge of Jewish peoplehood due to the prevalence of intermarriage and cultural assimilation, with little knowledge of Israel and with little knowledge of Jew hatred beyond the Holocaust, many Jewish students on campuses today cannot understanding why they should defend Israel. Many Jewish students cannot understand why they should care about whether their date is Jewish or not. Many Jewish students cannot understand why people who reject the Jewish state’s right to exist are anti-Jewish.

Last week Jay Sanderson, the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles gave voice to their frustration – and that of their parents – when in an interview with Haaretz, he lashed out at the Israeli government for investing resources in fighting the BDS movement on US campuses.

(Excellent) The Theory and Practice of Hasbara

...Finally, there is a fourth, dual audience that makes hasbara obligatory. It is the past and the future. As George Orwell wrote in 1984 about the Party's compulsion to revise history, tossing inconvenient truths down the memory hole: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." Those who hope to prevent the delegitimization and destruction of Israel and intellectual-political reghettoization of its supporters have no choice but to insist on an accurate description of the present, over and over, as long as necessary.

Eric Rozenman..
inFocus Quarterly..
March 2015..

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

—Andre Gide

Does pro-Israel hasbara (Hebrew for information) matter?

It was early in the first intifada, the 1987-1992 Palestinian "uprising" against Israel. News media coverage featured images of rifle-toting, helmeted and mask-wearing Israeli soldiers fighting stone-throwing Arab teenagers trying to ward off tear gas. The frequent calls went something like this: "I've been a supporter of Israel for years. But these pictures! They make us look so bad! How can I criticize the media? What can I tell my children?"

I was editing Near East Report, the weekly newsletter published in conjunction with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Tell them the demonstrations aren't spontaneous but have been taken over by the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and that terrorists fire from among the children," I said. "Tell them if this were happening in an Arab country, the security forces would massacre the rioters." "That'll just sound like pro-Israel propaganda," callers lamented.

Having fought the 1975 Soviet-inspired, Arab League-promoted UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism and lost, Israelis and some American supporters of the Jewish state adopted a "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" approach. They forgot that all war is preceded, accompanied, and followed by psychological warfare. Now, finding objective truth to be an insufficient, even abstract response to subjective, emotion-laded images and their simple but pernicious storyline—Israelis as new Nazis, Palestinian Arabs as new Jews—they sought a hasbara silver bullet.

That none was at hand could be seen in the choice of the winning entry in a 1988 European editorial cartoon contest. It was a simple, obscene inversion of the iconic Holocaust-era photograph showing a frightened, cap-wearing Jewish boy, his hands in the air, a German soldier's rifle pointing at his back. The cartoonist merely replaced the child's cap with a kefiyeh and transformed the soldier into an Israeli trooper.

Bingo! The decades'-old Soviet campaign to tar Zionism—Jewish nationalism—as fascist bore fruit among European intelligentsia. When the nationalisms of Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein with their pan-Arab claims failed and their Kremlin sponsor collapsed, competing versions of Islamic supremacism—sponsored by the Iranian government, wealthy Saudis, and others—seamlessly adopted the Israeli-as-Nazi, Palestinian-as-Jew political pornography. The mold was set for right-thinkers in academia, the media, and even show business to peddle soft-core scenarios with Zionists as imperialists, Jews as colonialists, and Palestinian Arabs as oppressed, indigenous people. This hardened into "the Palestinian narrative," the media's default filter.

(Continue Reading)

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Israel? There are Norwegians who absolutely do get it

...Jews were indigenous to the region 1,000 years before the Islamic conquest, with an uninterrupted presence not just in Palestine, but all over the ‘Arab’ world. The issue turns on its head the common misconception that Israel is an outpost of western colonialism and imperialism. The 7th century Arab invasion turned native Jews and Christians into minorities in their own lands, converting them to Islam, appropriating their shrines and erasing their history.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
21 June '13..

To put it mildly – Norway is not known for its sympathy to Israel, or indeed Jews. Arguably, anti-Zionist waters run deep in its sleepy fjords. The celebrated lawyer and advocate Alan Dershowitz received an Arctic welcome and was prevented from lecturing at Norwegian universities. A recent cartoon in the mass circulation Dagbladet marks a slide into mindboggling anti-Semitism.

Thus it came as a pleasant surprise to read of the experiences of David M Weinberg, Director of Public Affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Weinberg spent a week with activists of Med Israel for Fred (MIFF), a dynamic Norwegian pro–Israel group. He writes:

Norwegian MIFF activists have learned that it is simply not enough to explain Israel’s security dilemmas or to revisit Israel’s diplomatic generosity toward the Palestinians. What’s needed is a much more basic restatement of Israel’s cause and purpose: Israel as a grand historic reunion of people and land, as a shelter for the Jewish People, and as a just and moral actor in the medieval and violent Arab Middle East.

One issue in particular delivers a ‘bombshell’ – or a ‘knockout punch’: Jewish refugees from Arab countries:

Particularly important in this regard is education of the non-Jewish public about the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Nobody knows about the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were expelled from Arab lands and absorbed by Israel, and when they learn of this it dramatically changes the discourse. As opposed to a conversation about Palestinian rights vs Israeli security, the conversation becomes a debate about a balance of rights: about Israeli/Jewish rights and Palestinian/Arab rights.

MIFF has some 7,000 members, mostly in western Norway’s Bible Belt. One of its leaders, Odd Myrland, told Weinberg:

This evens out the playing field, and forces people to think about justice for Israel. We’ve extensively tested this messaging over a long period of time and it is a bombshell. Jewish refugees from Arab lands is our successful knockout punch. We mustn’t ignore this important issue.

Some might object to the expression ‘knockout punch ‘: It trivializes an issue that goes to the heart of justice, human rights, and the Arab/Islamist conflict with Israel and the Jews. But if advocacy is a slanging match between rival narratives, the Jewish refugee issue is a surefire debate winner.

Inserting Jewish refugees into the discourse pays other dividends. Jews were indigenous to the region 1,000 years before the Islamic conquest, with an uninterrupted presence not just in Palestine, but all over the ‘Arab’ world. The issue turns on its head the common misconception that Israel is an outpost of western colonialism and imperialism. The 7th century Arab invasion turned native Jews and Christians into minorities in their own lands, converting them to Islam, appropriating their shrines and erasing their history.

Yes, The American Public Both Understands and Supports Israel

Jonathan Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
18 March '13..

The idea that America’s Middle East policy is purely the result of the machinations of a shadowy “Israel Lobby” was once again proven to be a canard with the release of a new poll that shows that an overwhelming majority of the American people sympathizes with the Jewish state. The Washington Post/ABC news poll published today on the eve of President Obama’s visit to the country shows that Americans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinian Authority by a margin of 55 to 9 percent, with 35 saying they liked both or had no opinion. It also showed that a plurality of those polled thought the U.S. needed to pressure the Palestinians to make peace more than the Israelis. Most interestingly, an even more resounding majority thought the U.S. ought not to be the prime mover of the peace process, with fully 69 percent saying the decision should be left to the parties while only 26 percent thought it should play a leading role.

The results, especially with regard to support for Israel, are consistent with previous polls. But the number of those who want America to be running the peace negotiations has plummeted in the last decade as the futility of trying to coax the Palestinians to abandon terrorism and embrace a two-state solution has been amply demonstrated. This gives the lie to both the “Israel Lobby” theories as well as the notion that Americans want their president to be twisting the arm of the Israeli government to make concessions to revive a process that the Palestinians have shown no interest in.

The basic numbers illustrate why those who claim the across-the-board bipartisan support for the alliance with the Jewish state in Congress is bought and paid for by Jewish campaign finance donations (as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it) is a lie. Israel has the backing of every political and demographic group measured by the poll showing that backing Israel is simply a matter of political survival irrespective of how many Jews vote or donate money in a given district or state.

Witnesses for the defense of Israel

Ruth King
Mideast Outpost
20 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

It is a major understatement to say that Israel is condemned without trial in the court of international public opinion. I speak of Western nations whose media, academies and even legal institutions have been suffused by anti-Semitism fueled by an unholy alliance of leftists, Moslem immigrants and petrodollars contributed to their sagging economies by the Arabs.

Those who have defended Israel, who have abjured a weak-kneed “neutrality”, who appreciate Israel’s extraordinary history and legacy, who understand Israel’s dilemma in the face of the determined Islamic onslaught on her existence, who support Israel’s right to take up arms in its own defense are honorable people deserving celebration.

In this issue we include the refreshing mission statement of the “Friends of Israel” initiative undertaken by Jose Maria Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain.

Here we would like to feature an eclectic group which has independently taken up the cudgels for Israel.

Among journalists we single out Britain’s Melanie Phillips. In May 2010 in an interview with National Review editor Katherine Lopez, Phillips said: “The treatment of Israel by the left-wing Western intelligentsia is unique in its irrationality and moral and historical inversion. It takes a nation that is the historic victim of aggression and blames it for jeopardizing peace in the region and causing Islamic extremism worldwide—despite demonstrable evidence that this is simply untrue….It takes a nation that has been under exterminatory attack for six decades (nine, if you include the Palestine Mandate) and insists that it make compromises with its attackers, even as they continue to attack it. And if any Jews dare protest at the manifest injustice, lies, and bigotry in this unique delegitimization, they find themselves accused of ‘dual loyalty’ or being part of a covert global conspiracy to put the world at risk.”

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