Thousands of demonstrators protested the ‘anti-democratic’ actions of the government Saturday night, in particular the decision to create a Knesset commission to investigate the sources of funding for non-governmental organizations active in Israel.
I’ve already discussed this at length. Regardless of the applicability of this or some other remedy, no country can be expected to tolerate massive foreign-financed subversion.
Here’s how it works:
- Arabs claim that IDF soldiers or ‘settlers’ have committed some kind of atrocity: mistreating Arabs, uprooting olive trees, even burning sheep.
- An NGO like B’Tselem, funded by organizations and countries hostile to Israel — the New Israel Fund, the Ford Foundation, the governments of The Netherlands, the UK and Norway, and various left-wing church groups — ‘investigates’, meaning they uncritically accept Arab claims.
- The NGO holds a news conference or releases a report, which is picked up by the press as fact — period. Even when what is alleged is unlikely or impossible, there is no attempt at confirmation beyond the NGO report.
- Anti-Israel media then present it to the world in dramatic, emotional ways.
- UN commissions add it to their list of verified Israeli crimes. A case is built which can be grounds for future resolutions or, at some point, even sanctions.
- European activists file charges based on universal jurisdiction, so that Israeli officials become fugitives subject to arrest if they land in Europe.
This process is ongoing. Every day there are new incidents. It’s a highly leveraged attack, since it’s trivial to make up stories, but responding to them takes actual investigation, which is time- and resource-consuming, and in many cases nearly impossible. Anyway, even when they are proven false, the damage is done.
The demonstration, which was organized by a coalition of left-wing political groups and some of the same organizations that are at the center of the funding controversy, was aimed at Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose Israel Beitenu party introduced the bill to investigate the NGOs into the Knesset, and who has spoken strongly about the issue.
Lieberman was also attacked for championing a loyalty oath for Israeli citizenship, which his opponents consider ‘racist’.
Lieberman gives voice to a reaction against increasing — and increasingly damaging — anti-Zionist activities by extreme left-wing Israeli Jews and Arab citizens of Israel. In my opinion, such a reaction is justified and has been a long time coming, although perhaps Lieberman presents himself in a way that many see as demagogic.
Nevertheless, Israel is a small and vulnerable society and cannot survive if there are absolutely no limits on subversive behavior within the state.
There is now a counter-reaction from the Left, which is also spilling over into the US, with numerous articles springing up like mushrooms after a rain, all viewing with alarm various ‘undemocratic’ phenomena in Israel. As usual, Israel is expected to be more tolerant of ‘dissent’ than any nation in history, even when the ‘dissent’ is paid for by its enemies and involves deliberate violent provocations, such as occur every week at Bili’in.
In fact there is something profoundly undemocratic in Israel, but it is not the democratically elected center-right government. Rather, it is the undemocratic proclivity of the Left to try to deny the fact the Israeli public democratically kicked them out of power and reduces their influence with every succeeding election.
The public, who were the targets of the suicide bombers of the intifada, who continue to be the targets of Hamas rockets, and who will probably bear the brunt of casualties in the next war, understand that the ‘peace process’ failed because the Arabs didn’t want peace. They voted. The precipitous drop in the number of seats held by Labor and left-wing parties was a mandate that said: don’t inflict this on us any longer.
Those politicians, extreme leftists, anarchists and paid agents for the hostile European governments, who simply will not accept the verdict of the public, and who insist that the ‘peace process’ has to be jammed into them no matter what — they are the ones who are behaving undemocratically.
Barack Obama once said “elections have consequences,” but the establishment that ruled Israel from its founding until the shocking upset of 1977 has never understood this. They have always believed that they know better than the voters, and often made Faustian bargains with the Europeans or the NIF, for example, to get their way.
But — as literature has told us ever since the theme came into being — any profit from making a deal with the devil is short-term at best. Ultimately, you lose your soul.
And this is why, per a post on another recent FresnoZionism.org article, I call myself a “recovering liberal”.
At least on domestic policy issues, I would have called myself a liberal up until around 2006. On foreign policy, I was never “liberal” as this is commonly understood, though during the period bracketed on one side by the end of the Cold War and Gulf War One, and the 9-11 attacks on the other side, I tentatively entertained the notion that maybe my hawkish views could be obsolete.
Two phenomena/personal experiences converged to effect my “conversion” to conservatism.
First, I noticed beginning with the presidential race of 2004, that the Democratic Party was being co-opted by extremely anti-Israel segments. I noted with particular alarm how, during the convention of that year, it was so hard for ANYBODY to even utter the word, “Israel”. I knew that many anti-Israeli organizations were strongly supportive of Kerry, even though his stated views did not seem to support their agenda.
I decided that if the Democratic Party was going to compromise/obfuscate on such a clear-cut issue as support of Israel, if their moral compass was that screwed up, then they must have no moral compass at all, and were not worth supporting.
Yeah, the peace-love-and-dope Dems just love everybody…except those liberal secular democratic Jews who have the audacity to defend themselves against outright barbarians…er, excuse, me, “poor oppressed Palestinians”.
Through the candidacy of Gore – who took the staunchly pro-Israel (well, more or less..) Joe Lieberman as his runing mate, there was no question but that support for Israel was bipartisan, and up to that point in time, the Democrats generally had a better track record than the Republicans. But by 2004, there was a fundamental change.
Also, by 2006, I had obtained my MBA. Before that, I already had two liberal arts-related degrees from top schools, but had no business education whatever, and by the time I had completed my first two degrees, not a lot of private sector work experience.
But by 2006, between “real world” experience and my business education, I learned an amazing fact: Business people, by and large, are not a bunch of evil greedy Scrooges, as they are typically portrayed in the liberal arts academic community. They aren’t all saints, either, and some really are downright exploitative jerks, but most are just people trying to make a living and stay in business. They aren’t really out to screw anybody, they are just trying to survive and prosper, perfectly human prerogatives. Nothing “evil” about that.
Most of the people who are violently against “capitalists”, it seems to me now, with the perspective of age and experience, are people who are either sadly clueless as to the nature of being truly productive, or who think they are “too good” to have to be objectively productive (that’s for the “peasants”), and are looking for a “short cut” to entitlement based on developing a phony persona of “knowing what is best” for the rest of us, a self-appointed mantle of authority that is supposed to be justified by not being “tainted” by “crass profit motives”. It is all b.s.
Today, as showcased by the dynamics described in the article above as just one of many examples, it is clear that the liberal/left is the most closed-minded and even nihilistic element on the political landscape of the West. They are inherently anti-democratic insofar as they no longer even attempt to convince others of their views; either you are “with it” like them and support the program, or you are a backward reactionary who needs to be put down in any manner available to them. They make common cause with the enemies of the societies they inhabit because hatred of their own society is integral to their belief system, such that anyone else who hates the society in question (e.g., Islamists) has got to be onto SOMETHING, and thus must be given a pass (i.e., “of course they attack us…WE DESERVE IT).
What Lieberman is supporting is the bare minimum of what needs to be done. It is about time Israel is waking up and trying to defend itself from these clowns. We need to wake up, here too. So does the rest of the West….(good luck, that).
well said, rob. while i voted democratic in the last election–and will probably continue to do so if the republicans propose raping this country’s economy in favor of the rich, i more likely will no longer be able to stomach voting at all, something i never thought i’d say.
also–while i understand that the antizionist left are masters of the brutally surreal in a post-palin world–how does anyone get away with doublespeak like ‘we can’t have transparency; it would be undemocratic!’
Thank you for the ‘This is How it Works’ part of this article. I had never connected the pieces in the way this analysis does. I actually had reacted as if each ‘event’ was a ‘spontaneous new happening’ and not a pre- manufactured propaganda move.