I don’t know how many posts I’ve written about anti-Israel Jews — J Street, Israeli intellectuals, leftist anti-Zionists, etc. I even thought about creating a special category called “With Jews like these, who needs Arabs?”
The inimitable Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine, for example, recently gave an award to Richard Goldstone because… get ready for this — “the peace community both in Israel and around the world see Justice Goldstone as upholding the best ethical values of the Jewish community”. Ethical values?
It doesn’t work anymore to say “Oh, Michael Lerner (or Chomsky, or Finkelstein, or half the faculty of Tel Aviv University, etc.) is crazy. If the problem is mental illness, it’s an epidemic.
The latest is a new European organization called “JCall“. Like J Street, JCall claims to be “unfailingly” committed to the Jewish state, but nevertheless holds that “Systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous and does not serve the true interests of the state of Israel,” and calls for the EU and the US to “put pressure on both parties” to achieve a “solution” to the conflict.
I suppose it’s worth saying again why ‘putting pressure on both sides’ won’t end the conflict (a more complete argument is here):
- While it’s possible to force Israeli concessions — viz. the recent ‘secret’ Jerusalem construction freeze — they are never matched by any softening of the Palestinian side, which will not even go so far as to agree that the Israel that will be left will belong to the Jews.
- As long as Hamas is in control of Gaza where 40% of the Palestinian Arabs live, no agreement will be worth anything.
- The Palestinian Authority has very little support. It’s famously corrupt, and is dominated by the Fatah ‘old guard’. There is almost no interest in permanent peace with Israel among any of the Fatah members, old or young, who tend to see agreements only as a stepping stone to ultimate victory.
- Therefore, an imposed agreement would not ‘solve’ anything. Rather, it would simply create another hostile entity right next to the most heavily-populated part of Israel, making a three-front war almost a certainty.
This is not rocket science. If you are pro-Israel, you do not invite the 1000-pound gorillas of the EU and the US to sit on Israel and impose a solution that serves their own narrow interests.
As Barry Rubin pointed out in the ‘freeze’ article linked above, Israel’s government is in essence a unity government which includes the left-wing Labor Party of Ehud Barak. It is not a right-wing extremist government whose policy doesn’t serve the “true interests” of the state, as JCall implies. Israelis, who elected this government and who either fight to defend the state or send their children to do so, don’t need European Jews to tell them their business.
But the fact is that J Street, JCall, Tikkun, etc. are not pro-Israel, even though some of their donors are uninformed or stupid enough to accept their facile arguments. Their fully conscious members have to realize this, just like Richard Goldstone has to realize by now that he was snookered; and if he really were deserving of an ethics award he would admit it.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Jews, JCall, GoldstoneÂ