The savagery element of the conflict

April 19, 2024

The savagery element of the conflict

The following column appeard in the Jerusalem Post on April17, 2024 but at present has not yet been uploaded and if it is, I will add the URL.

The savagery element of the conflict

Savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds

Yisrael Medad

Mohammed El-Kurd, a Sheikh Jarrah activist, stood at the podium in New York where he studies on March 2 last month and addressed a pro-Gaza rally. His remarks were closed with a series of savage shout-outs: “we are beyond debating our resistance, there is no right to debate our resistance…we are past persuasion…abolish Zionism!…f*ck Israel!”

At that same rally, actress Susan Sarandon spoke of Gaza’s 75 years “going through this”, referring to Israel’s engaging with; the Arab terror emanating from there. She then raised her right arm in a sort of revolutionary salute and shouted, “Free Palestine!”

Already in May 2023 we could have read Nada Elia who wrote: “Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished”. She argued that justice for Palestine must go further by “dismantling the supremacist ideology of Zionism itself.”

That slogan of “Abolish Zionism” had already appeared in Neukölln, Berlin on February 10 this year on a no-parking marker. In Montreal, pro-Palestine protesters performed Nazi salutes and called for the death of Jews outside a March 6th event at the Jewish Community Foundation and Holocaust Museum building, of all places. That same week, Jewish students at Tufts University were spat on and told they stink during a contentious BDS vote on anti-Israel actions.

The anti-Israel voices have become anti-Zionist roars. The arguments have become drowning outs. Disputes have become demands. There is no dialogue but vociferous viciousness. There is a policy of pollution and cancellation. It is not about Israel but rather the negation of Jewish national identity.

Seth Mandel, after noting several outrageous statements uttered by Islamist anti-Zionists, characterized them in Commentary as “indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Hamas or neo-Nazi groups.”

It appears that it is just simpler for the pro-Palestine forces to accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing and thus be away with their problem altogether. The debates over Israel’s policies have moved from the verbal to multiple forms of physical and psychological intimidation as well as actual physical injury. The atmosphere is disparaging, threatening and venomous. It is a new form a pro-Palestine terrorism.

In adopting this extreme position, the pro-Palestine forces have not only assumed that all the truth is on the side of the Arabs and not only are they positioning the conflict into another zero-sum game result as in 1948 but they are engaged in a major regression, rolling back the confrontation between Jews and Arabs to where it was over a century ago.

In doing so, they not only are ignoring what happened during those 100 years and more, but they are repeating the same mistakes by the Arabs during that time as well as acting blindly to what we Jews accomplished since then. Today’s reality is vastly different from the situation that Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion faced at the time.

Moreover, the acts of blacklisting Jews, banning them from appearances whether on the music stage or the academic conference panel, gathering outside synagogues during services as happened at Temple Emmanuel in Manhattan and worse acts that have occurred should raise an alarm of greater proportion than what we have witnessed. They are not going after Zionists but Jews. Do they want Jews to protest outside mosques demanding the Imams denounce Hamas? Do they wish to import the Middle East violence into faraway countries?

Looking towards the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority announced in November 2016 it was preparing a lawsuit against the British government, being that 1917 letter Arthur Balfour signed had paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. That had followed Mahmoud Abbas’ speech in the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September 2016 when the Palestinian Authority president said that Britain should apologize for that declaration. In an op-ed in The Guardian on November 1, 1917, Abbas wrote that Great Britain should “atone” for the act.

Aside from the downright ridiculousness of that attempt to rewrite history, there is a more invidious effort being pushed, if for years, that has assumed dangerous proportions with online social media platforms and that is the actual rewriting of history for the younger generations.

In response to a post of mine on X, I received this response: “Bible stories are not scientific. And even if was true, if you’ve left for 3000 years that doesn’t give you any right to take it from the people who have lived there for 3000 years since.”

Of course, archaeological finds as well as external to the Bible documentation such as the Merneptah Stele, the Mesha inscription or the Monoliths of Shalmaneser III lend important credence to the Biblical narrative. But more relevant is the shared ignorance that Jews have continuously been present in the territory of the Land of Israel throughout the 1800 years of our loss of political sovereignty. I know of no popular book tracing the continuum of Jewish residency in our homeland under Roman, Arab, Mameluke and Ottoman imperial rule.

And as for the matter of pro-Palestine propaganda that they either preceded the Jews by thousands of years as Saeb Erekat once claimed or lived here for only 3000 years, too many pro-Israel advocates feel uncomfortable in denying those prevarications. They neither confront the fact that Arabs were themselves a mighty colonialist power as well as engaged in the slave trade, the sins of which they accuse their opponents.

In essence, those portraying Zionism as an evil force suffer from their own warped psychological requirement to see Israel’s actions as evil which allows them to be evil. People seeking to be evil need to see others as evil.  It was Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality who argued that the concept of evil stems from the negative emotions of envy, hatred, and resentment.

This latest development in the anti-Zionist campaign is savage: savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds.

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