Maligning Israel

"[Increasingly now Left views] seep, albeit in diluted form into the mainstream. [And the] anti-Israel camp does not need to win America fully to its side. Merely to neutralize it would radically alter the balance of power and put Israel in great jeopardy."
"[Should] Israel's enemies succeed, the result could be a second Holocaust."
Joshua Muravchik, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Studies

"Britain's centre-left Labour Party often sympathizes instinctively with the Palestinian cause."
International Herald Tribune, Britain

"[Arab armies would] destroy Israel ... This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation."
Gamal Abdul Nasser

An Israeli policeman stands on guard near the scene after a car rammed a group of pedestrians at the Ammunition Hill tram stop, which lies on the seamline between west and occupied east Jerusalem. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

When a terrorist last week drove his car directly at a crowd at a light-rail station in Jerusalem, a baby was killed outright, eight other victims were injured and a 22-year-old woman died a few days later. The man driving the vehicle fled the scene, with police in close pursuit. He was found at his home, confronted police and began shooting, then was shot dead. He was declared by the Palestinian Authority spokesman as a 'martyr'.

The first AP report carried the headline: "Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." That was followed soon afterward by the headline: "Car slams into east Jerusalem train station". And a third amend headline appeared eventually after protests appeared on social media: "Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station."

According, however, to the moderate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the man who committed deliberate vehicular homicide was really a "heroic martyr" whose faith in Islam had led him to have "executed the Jerusalem operation which led to the running over of settlers in the occupied city of Jerusalem."

This is Fatah at its inner core. This is the Palestinian Authority's president, the man whom the West celebrates as a moderate, a man of reason and the right person in the right place at the right time to present as the partner to bargain with Israel toward a peace arrangement which would lead to statehood for the Palestinians. But why bother with peace, why not go directly to statehood? Sweden is all for it.

If there is anything seemingly out of whack with expectations of peace and Palestinian propaganda claiming that Israel has no wish for peace and is genocidal in intent toward the Palestinians, making it an unfit neighbour, in light of any of the above, nothing has been revealed in the media to focus on it or to try to puzzle out the ingredients of truth and reality nestled within the propaganda.

The Left, academics, the United Nations, human rights organizations, some of the mainstream Protestant churches and the media seemingly wholesale, have become fairly unsympathetic to Israel's continued status as a state whose raison d'etre is that of a haven for Jews. A state, moreover, where Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin have the equal status of citizenship and entitlements of the state.

But within the State of Israel, with its mixed population there is no iron-clad assurances of safety for Jews against the predations of some of their fellow citizens. Nor may Jews pray at their most sacred religious site, for it is monopolized by Muslims under the guise that it represents the third-most holy site in Islam.

Israel may have successfully defended itself time and again from combined Arab military attacks meant to destroy it, and amply demonstrated since then that it remains the sole democratic and free country in the Middle East whose economy is not dependent solely on oil wealth, but the advance of science and technology, but it has failed to convince the world that it deserves its status as a Jewish State or that as such it has a right to peace and security.

When Israel sent the IDF into Gaza in the vain hope that it could defuse the constant bombing from Gaza into Israel the result was Hamas's success in portraying itself the victim alongside the 'civilians' whose deaths the IDF caused in their zeal to continue slaughtering the Palestinians just for fun and gain.

In the popular Western press it was Israel that was vilified not the cowards hiding behind human civilian shields bringing them death, or the bombers of Israeli border communities or the builders of tunnels meant to invade Israel and kill unsuspecting civilians and soldiers alike.

The narrative the Left has shaped in complicity with the Palestinians who will always view Israel as an illegal interloper into Arab and Muslim territory, is that the Palestinians have been victimized by a zealous oppressor. And the Palestinians in their turn rise righteously against the colonialist oppressors who have turned the Middle East into the bloodbath that Syria and Iraq have succumbed to.