Tuesday, 12 June 2018

Israel: The never-ending Dreyfus affair, part II


For part one, click here.


Part Two


One could list the litany of their complaints and demands, as if it would make any difference to the way the conflict is perceived by western elites, governments and intellectuals combined.


The self-ascribed Palestinians plunder and murder.


They falsely accuse the Jews of defiling their holy places and deliberately killing their children.


They proudly announce that should they ever get a state of their own, no Jew will be allowed to live there.


Even now they kill any Arab who sells property to Jews when they can get their hands on the person. If anybody had any illusions about what they would do were they to get their hands on a state, that person has but to look to contemporary Syria where Bashar Assad has had no compunction in killing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of his own country. Of course, he does not recognize them as fellow citizens because they belong to a tribe outside his own Alawite clan network. He has even killed thousands of Palestinians, but on that little topic the world is also silent.


When does it speak up? When Arab Muslims under the control of the Palestinian Authority are egged on to march on Israel, as happened recently on the Gaza border, determined to cut the fence, cross the border and murder as many Jews as they can, and reclaim homes that do not belong to them.


Less than five hundred refugees remain from the 1948 war, but the western world has allowed the number of “Palestinian refugees” to swell to over five million. That same western world forgets that the Arab Muslim world drove out over 850,000 Jews from their lands after the State of Israel was born, the vast majority of which Israel absorbed at its own cost.


There is no point in going over all the sordid details of the West’s treatment of Israel for the past twenty-five years. The latest incidents in Gaza contain most of the elements, best exemplified by a major US television network’s coverage of the events. A female reporter garbed in a hijab kept repeating how tens of thousands of Gazans were merely out for a picnic when Israeli forces opened fire on them.


No mention was made that these Gazans had been mobilized by Hamas and sent there with kites to which were attached knives and Molotov cocktails they then tried to fly over the Israeli border into Jewish settlements, there to do as much damage as they could. Nor was mention made of people who approached the fence with wire cutters so they could illegally get into Israel or rocks and firebombs which they hurled at Israeli soldiers. Instead, the whole situation was described as a peaceful protest with the festive air of a picnic, to which parents brought their children before sending them forth into battle.


That normal parents do not bring their children to a picnic in the middle of a battle zone was not even raised as an aside. Instead, the people gathered at the border were described as motivated by hopelessness because President Trump had moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Implicit in the shots accompanying the report, contrasting the Israeli containment of the threat to its border with the ceremony marking the opening of the embassy, was the message that the mass attack on Israel’s border and the ensuing casualties were the fault of Israel’s heartless policy and American complicity.


The reporter, of course, knew nothing of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. She knew nothing of the history of Zionism or the Palestinian Arab response to it. She knew nothing of the nature of Arab Muslim society in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. All she knew was that there were soldiers and civilians lopsidedly armed, and from that contrast she knew who the good guys were and who the bad. In that simplistic analysis she was supported by the banner story of the New York Times and the knee-jerk reactions of the pundits across the board who account for much of what goes on as journalism in the media, research in the think tanks, policy formulation in the halls of government.


The world is divided into the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the oppressor and the victim, and that is enough to explain how and why people act as they do. No need to look at the endogenous factors at work in a given group or society to explain their conduct. All explanations lie in the wider environment that makes them act as they do. That this is bad psychology and bad sociology is immaterial, for that is what this reporter and all her colleagues well beyond her network and profession learn in the classrooms of western universities. Taught to be stupid, they then go out into the world where they also become blind and lazy, content to rely on this thumbnail sketch of how the world works rather than do the necessary work to uncover the facts, past and present.


That they are part of the oppressing machine they are so eager to denounce nonetheless eludes them. Instead they feel smugly superior to all those they label rednecks back home who can still tell the difference between thugs and decent people and know that when people attack your border and threaten to overrun your country it is time to defend it with all you have.



When people attack your border and threaten to overrun your country it is time to defend it with all you have.
Oh yes, this same reporter managed to squeeze into her voice-over that Israel was carrying on a blockade against Gaza, omitting to mention that Israel, unlike Egypt which also shares a border with Gaza, permits thousands of tons of foodstuffs and supplies to pass into and out of Gaza on a daily basis. She also forgot to mention that Israel supplies electricity to Gaza even though Gaza daily vows to destroy the Jewish state. One could go on, but it is both unnecessary and truly hopeless. Ever since its rebirth as a nation Israel has been subject to vilification and lies. These are but the latest. And they go on ad nauseam, all facts to the contrary suppressed or denied, just as the facts in the Dreyfus Affair were suppressed or denied, making Israel the contemporary personification of Captain Dreyfus himself. And even more than was the case with Dreyfus, there is no point trying to argue otherwise. As my favorite sociological theorist used to say, people cannot see what they cannot see. The upshot, however, is there is nothing Israel can do or say that will change the minds of western elites when it comes to their attitude to the Jewish state, unless of course Israel agreed to commit national suicide. Doubtless that is what the current Canadian Prime Minister and his counterparts in the European Union would prefer, as they continue to fund the UN agencies that fan the flames of Palestinian irredentism and support the lethal combination of ideology and terror that makes up the Palestinian way of life. To which, of course, they add their calls for investigations of Israeli military actions anytime that Israel responds to attacks on its territory. These calls are prefaced by blithe statements supporting Israel’s right to exist, though in practice that right does not entail the duty to protect itself.



Israel, however, can put an end to this ongoing Dreyfus Affair by removing this conflict once and for all from our nightly television screens. Instead of answering the unfounded accusations that it uses disproportionate force to deal with the genocidally-inspired attacks masquerading as protests of its Arab Muslim neighbors, Israel should send in its military, first into Judea and Samaria and then into Gaza, eliminate the cadres of the terrorist entities which tyrannically rule these areas, and declare these territories part of Israel.


Taking a page from Kuwait’s book for dealing with a population that seeks its destruction, Israel should then make the lives of the Arab Muslims living there so miserable they will elect to move elsewhere. As there is no way Israel can contain a population of significant size that is wedded to its destruction, this would be the most humane and elegant solution to the impasse. So-called Palestinian society has been so thoroughly impregnated with blood lust for Jews and their country it is beyond redemption. The inhabitants of that society may also be beyond redemption, but that is another question and one those people shall have to answer in time for themselves.


Were Israel to do that, then the biblical prophecy that the Hebrews would be able to sit peacefully in their land once the Israelites of old conquered it and drove out the idol-worshippers would finally come to fruition.


This was not what Herzl had envisioned, but then Herzl still believed in the liberal values that inspired the Europe of his time. Those liberal values are all but dead. The people who think they incarnate them have abandoned all defense of liberalism. They would rather be progressive, a cause in whose name they would drive us all to ruin. Fortunately for him, Herzl did not live to see how liberalism was betrayed and how the Jews paid the steepest price for that betrayal. Nor does he have to listen to the way the western world has turned on Israel and the Jews, some even going as far as to claim that Israel is no different from Nazi Germany, comparing Judea, Samaria and Gaza to concentration camps, this latter libel but the most outrageous in a long and despicable list that shows no signs of abating.


It is time to recognize what Jabotinsky, that renegade follower of Herzl who saw clearly what had to be done to realize the Zionist dream as early as 1920, long advocated and wisely so, though he too fortunately did not live to see the horror of the destruction of European Jewry he warned against. Jabotinsky understood that the Arabs and Muslims so hate the idea of a Jewish state that only overwhelming force would make it clear to them that they have to abandon all ideas of destroying it. As there is no way Israel can tolerate a dysfunctional, tyrannical and genocidal state on its border twenty kilometres away from its major airport, the implications of Jabotinsky’s strategy are clear to any person with a brain in his or her head.


The people who have to be convinced of its worth, however, are not the Gentiles who wish Israel harm, but the Jews who need to ensure Israel’s survival. The Jews, in short, have to stop talking about the two-state solution and set their energies to work to annex Judea, Samaria and Gaza and extend Israeli sovereignty over the Promised Land. Nothing short of that will protect Israel. Nothing short of that will ensure that Jews are no longer killed for living in their own land.


Israel will not be any less good because it does that. Nor will it be any less democratic. But it will finally be the Jewish state of the Jewish people. And what Herzl saw as the only realistic solution to the Jewish question when the Dreyfus Affair burst on the scene over a hundred years ago will finally come about. In so doing it will also put an end to this never-ending Dreyfus Affair of our time, namely the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself.


Perhaps it will also put an end to the millennial schizophrenia of the Jewish people, who shortly after agreeing to the covenant at Sinai started dancing around the molten calf they fabricated and hailed as the god who brought them out of Egypt. Finally, they will sign on to being a sovereign nation in their sovereign land, and even their anti-Semitic friends will come to terms with it.









Read More

No comments:

Post a Comment