The right to criticize Israel is beside the point - by Jonathan S. Tobin

The issue isn’t whether it’s OK to criticize the government of a democracy, but whether that democracy has a right to exist and to defend itself.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
23 October '18..

In an election season in which we are awash in polls, we’ve now been given one more telling us something that everybody already knew. A new group founded by Jewish Democrats called the Jewish Electorate Institute has commissioned and published a poll that says Jewish voters back Democrats over Republicans by a 74-26 margin in the upcoming midterm elections. For good measure, it also informs us that Jews disapprove of U.S. President Donald Trump’s performance in office by a 75-25 margin.

This is what the news business calls a “dog bites man” story. But there was one question the survey raised that is worthy of comment: whether or not American Jews thought they had a right to criticize Israel’s government. A majority of them believe they do, with 59 percent saying that you could be both pro-Israel and still disagree with some or many of the Israeli government’s policies.

This result is being trumpeted by groups critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as proof that they are more representative of American Jewish opinion than those U.S. Jews who are supportive of the government. It is also put forward as a vindication of sorts for a liberal Zionist perspective on the Middle East conflict that argues that American Jews not only have a right to oppose Netanyahu’s policies, but a duty to push for pressure on the Jewish state to change its ways while still being able to claim the label of pro-Israel.

But those heralding its results are missing the point. The issue isn’t whether it’s OK to criticize the government of a democracy, but whether that democracy has a right to exist and to defend itself. Even more to the point, the key question is whether Israel’s voters have a right to have their judgment respected by those who would like to push foreign governments to put intolerable pressure on their government to do things its people have clearly said they oppose.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. 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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Anti-Zionist Jews And Anti-Palestinian Arabs! - by Sheri Oz

...The anti-Palestinian does not seek to kill off all Arabs who identify as Palestinians. It just means that the individual does not believe in a sovereign Palestinian Arab state. The anti-Palestinian would like to see the Arab states take responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948 in the same way Israel took care of the equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, in addition to those from Europe who survived World War II. In other words, being anti-Palestinian is not being anti-Arab. In spite of this, I have not seen any anti-Palestinian Arabs, whether they are anti-Zionist or pro-Zionist. The anti-Zionist, however,...

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
06 December '17..

We know there are anti-Zionist Jews. Are there anti-Palestinian Arabs?

To be anti-Zionist means to believe that Israel has no right to exist; that Jews have no right to a sovereign state of their own. To be anti-Palestinian means to believe, not only that a state of Palestine never existed in the past, but that the Palestinian Arabs have no right to a sovereign state of their own today or in the future.

What is interesting is that one can be well aware that there was never a Palestinian “people” or state in the past, and yet believe that a Palestinian Arab “people” exists today, regardless of how it came into being, and that they deserve a sovereign state of their own. In contrast, one can believe/know that the Jewish People is an ancient people, that it lived on the land that is now the modern State of Israel plus Judea & Samaria, that Jerusalem was always its capital and, yet, that the Jewish People have no right to sovereignty in modern times over at least some of these lands.

This latter opinion is an expression of antisemitism, whether it is voiced as a vote for a one-state solution in which Arabs would be the majority or a two-state-solution within indefensible borders and a Jew-free Palestine.

We hear anti-Zionist sentiments expressed by many Jews, both those in Israel and those in the Diaspora. Until recently, however, we have not heard anti-Palestinian sentiments expressed by Arabs, whether they are Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Arabs living in either the Palestinian Authority (PA) or elsewhere;

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. 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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Winning Approval, Minority Elites and Israel’s Jewish Defamers

Kenneth Levin..
frontpagemag.com..
27 August '12..

In a 1977 Supreme Court opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first African-American justice, observed, “Social scientists agree that members of minority groups frequently respond to discrimination and prejudice by attempting to disassociate themselves from the group, even to the point of adopting the majority’s negative attitudes towards the minority.”

Marshall further noted that “such behavior occurs with particular frequency among members of minority groups who have achieved some measure of economic or political success and thereby have gained some acceptability among the dominant group.” In fact, such behavior is particularly common within minority group elites more broadly; not only those to whom Marshall refers but also, for example, academic, artistic and journalist elites. In addition, it is more common not simply among those who have achieved elite status but also those who aspire to such status.

Of course, not all members of these elites within minorities embrace the wider society’s bigoted indictments of their own group; nor is the embrace of those indictments limited to the besieged community’s elites. But elites typically play an especially prominent role in this phenomenon.

In the context of Jewish experience, this has been a recurrent pattern throughout the history of the Diaspora and has figured in Israeli history as well. (Virtually all the psychological characteristics of minorities chronically denigrated, marginalized, and otherwise targeted by surrounding majorities are found as well within the populations of small states chronically besieged by their neighbors.)

The Oslo process of the 1990′s is illustrative. The path to Oslo was paved by journalists, academics, novelists, purveyors of other arts, and elements of the political elite who argued that the Palestinian-Israeli, and the broader Arab-Israeli, conflict remained unresolved because Israel had failed to make sufficient territorial and other concessions. If Israel would only return essentially to the pre-1967 armistice lines and were also more forthcoming in other ways, they argued, peace would be achieved. By the early 1990′s they had won about half of Israel’s population to variations of this view.

In doing so, they ignored the reality that throughout this same period, as well as in the wake of the initial Oslo accords of 1993, Yasser Arafat and his followers continued to tell their constituency that their goal was Israel’s annihilation and continued to promote terror to achieve that goal. During the years of Oslo, the editors and journalists of Israel’s three Hebrew dailies failed to report on the incessant defamation of Israel and calls for her extermination that permeated not only speeches by Arafat and his associates but broadcasts of Palestinian media more generally as well as sermons in Palestinian mosques and curriculum in Palestinian schools. The upsurge of terror that followed the initial Oslo accords was downplayed by the Israeli political leadership that had championed the Oslo process. Israeli academics, both immediately before and during the Oslo years, created a bogus “New History” that rewrote Israel’s past in a manner supporting the delusions of Oslo, the claims that Israeli missteps were perpetuating the conflict and Israeli concessions would resolve it. Israeli novelists, dramatists, film makers, as well as painters and others in the plastic arts, promoted the same delusions. A similar pattern of distortions characterized the work of many Jewish community leaders, journalists, academics, and artists in the Diaspora.

The Liberal Betrayal of Israel

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
31 May '10

Over the last two weeks, a liberal scholar and pundit named Peter Beinart got a lot of attention by arguing that liberals could no longer be pro-Israel because the country and its people had moved too far to the right. The reality however is just the opposite. In every way, from national defense to the role of religion in public life, Israel has actually watered down its principles and liberalized. But it could not and cannot keep up with the pace at which liberals have slid far to the left.

The key factor in falling liberal support for Israel is not inside the country, but outside it. As liberals have become more radicalized, what used to be the left is now simply liberal. And the delegitimization of Israel is part of a larger package of radical beliefs which extends across the spectrum into every area of domestic and foreign policy. For example the anti-Communist liberal who was not at all hard to find in 1967 when Israel fought the Six Day War, is nearly extinct today. And liberals who support the War on Terror are an endangered species. And if they can't even support America's national defense, it's not surprising that they don't support Israel's own national defense.

Beinart like other left-wing Jewish critics insist that Israel needs to go further to accommodate their support. But how much further is there to go? Israel has worked for 17 years to cut a deal with the Muslim terrorist gangs who employ a constructed identity as Palestinians to leverage international support for their killing sprees. It has withdrawn from large amounts of territory, provided weapons to their militias and even lobbied on their behalf. Will the left suddenly begin supporting Israel, if after offering East Jerusalem to them, Fatah and Hamas still refuse to make peace? We know better than that. No offer Israel could make would suffice to demonstrate its goodwill and the intransigence of the terrorist gangs.

Beinart himself suggests that only when the Palestinian terrorists are happy, and Israel is transformed into an oasis of social justice, (and presumably all conservative parties are banned and the Russian immigrants who voted in Lieberman are deported back to Russia) will his compatriots possibly get on board with supporting Israel again. Which really means that their support for Israel is conditional on the Palestinian terrorists accepting Israel. That is not the way that people who actually ever have any intention of supporting Israel talk or think. It is the way that people who trying to strengthen the terrorists' hand argue. And of course that is the real aim of the left.

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