Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column
I am sitting at my desk on a quiet day. There are no screaming sirens. Hezbollah isn’t bombarding us with its tens of thousands of missiles, and Hamas tunnels aren’t disgorging terrorists near kibbutz dining halls. Nobody has been stabbed yet today (as far as I know) by an Arab teenager. Iran’s nuclear project is not yet complete and the Islamic State is occupied with devising more ingenious ways to kill people. Bashar al-Assad is bombing hospitals, but they are in Syria, not here.
Nevertheless we are at war.
Israel is under severe and sustained bombardment from its enemies in the Muslim world and also Europe, the UK and the US, in two main non-physical spheres of combat.
One is the propaganda war, in which the world is saturation bombed with lies about how we are the vilest imaginable creatures who are constantly committing the most sadistic atrocities, particularly against angelic Palestinian children who only want to grow into peace-loving Palestinian adults.
The world is told that we entered this land that wasn’t ours and viciously dispossessed those aforementioned peace-lovers, punishing them for the sins of Hitler, which actually weren’t sins since we ourselves are worse than Hitler and deserved everything we got. Justice, it is told, requires that 11 million ‘Palestinians’ be allowed to come ‘back’ to the land they never saw and take our nice cars and buildings and rape our women, because everything belongs to them.
People hear that our communities are illegal (according to laws and interpretations they invent as they go along) and we are white Ashkenazi racist colonialist exploiters whom it is acceptable – obligatory – to ‘resist’ violently. Not only that, but we have hooked noses and are descended from apes and pigs.
Any means of resistance is legitimate, but anything we do to defend ourselves is illegal, because it is European white colonialism. Even if some of our skins are black and most of us are not from Europe.
There is also the BDS movement, which tries to weaken the state economically while at the same time driving home the lesson that we are so depraved, so subhuman, that civilized people mustn’t engage in any kind of intercourse with us, not in commerce, sport, academics, the arts or anything else. BDS is presented as a grass-roots movement, but it is organized with the support of the usual suspects, mostly European.
Somewhat more subtly, almost all of the American ‘mainstream’ media push a line according to which Israel is intransigent, its government is extremely right-wing and it has no interest in peace. It is suggested that our PM is afraid to take risks for peace and needs to be pushed. This is despite the fact that the government is precisely in the center of the Israeli political spectrum, and has made concessions to the Arabs more or less continuously since the Oslo accords were signed, including a total withdrawal from the Gaza strip. At the same time, the Palestinians have barely altered their positions – in some ways they have hardened them – and at present refuse to sit down with us at all.
All of these propaganda themes can be shown to be false, irrational or both. But it doesn’t matter. Other ‘occupations’ throughout the world, as well as actual genocides, sieges and horribly bloody wars get little or no attention. Only Israel is singled out. Accusations against Israel are often believed with no proof, but when Israel establishes that they are false, it is ignored.
The function of this assault of lies is to prepare the people of the world for the ultimate violent destruction of the Jewish people and their state, to make it understandable, even welcome, to them.
The other non-physical ‘war’ employs a multifaceted strategy of subversion inside Israel herself. Israel has an open society with a free press and a commitment to democratic governance and personal liberty. So our enemies dedicate massive amounts of money and manpower to exploit those characteristics in order to disrupt and destabilize our country.
Money is provided to anti-state extremists to support and nurture their organizations and allow them to carry out operations to feed the propaganda campaign, to promote conflict between Jewish and Arab citizens and to provide raw material for diplomatic and legal warfare against Israel in international forums. Anti-Israel activity by Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is financed and encouraged, including illegal construction in areas supposedly under Israeli control. Demonstrations are organized with the intent of provoking security forces; international activists are pleased to provide video cameras to record the confrontations.
Attempts are made to influence our elections and to destabilize governments that the US administration and Europeans see as insufficiently compliant. The last election saw a major effort against Netanyahu, “V15,” run by a former advisor to President Obama. Financing for the project was murky, but a predecessor to V15 got a grant from the US State Department, “to promote coexistence.”
What we are planning is so important to the administration that in 2013 the CIA called Israel one of its main targets of surveillance – along with China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba! We should be flattered to be in such company.
Especially in the US where there still remains some support for Israel, a more subtle tactic is popular: loving us to death. Groups like J Street, the Israel Policy Forum, the Union for Reform Judaism and now even the ADL insist that they can’t possibly be any more pro-Israel, but then attack Israel’s democratically elected government and argue that they have a right to pressure Israel to change its policies. Naturally the changes they want are territorial concessions that will make our state indefensible. These groups are all close to the Obama Administration and follow its lead. It used to be possible to assume that Jewish organizations would be pro-Israel. Not anymore.
We mustn’t forget the international support for the Palestinians themselves: the billions given to UNRWA, whose task is to maintain and expand the population of Arabs claiming refugee status (they are the only group in history for whom such status is hereditary). UNRWA schools are used to teach Hamas ideology, and sometimes to store rockets that will be fired at Israel. More billions are fed to the Palestinian Authority, which uses them in part to pay salaries to convicted terrorists in Israel’s jails and for propaganda against Israel (much of the rest is simply diverted to the bank accounts of the ruling elite).
Finally, the Obama Administration has just concluded a process to strengthen Iran, the oft-declared enemy of both Israel and the US, which glories in its intention to destroy us both. Although the arrangement is supposed to serve American interests, it seems highly unlikely that it will benefit the US for Iran, where “death to America” is chanted by crowds on a daily basis, to be a nuclear-armed power in control of the entire Middle East. What is absolutely certain is that Israel’s survival has been made more difficult.
Next week there will be an international conference in Paris where several big nations will decide on ‘parameters’ that they would like to impose on Israel. The parameters will involve the usual concessions to render Israel vulnerable.
Yes, it’s paranoia. But not insanity. Much of the world is conspiring against my country. To be precise, there is a decentralized network of conspiracies, with centers located in the White House, Teheran, Riyadh, Paris, London, Ramallah and other places. Some of the participants are enemies of the others, but on this they seem to be able to cooperate: the anti-Zionist Left, the Jew-hating Right and the Muslims all agree that we have to go.
Has the world ever worked together so well for a cause? Such a massive common effort devoted to trying to accomplish one thing (in this case, our destruction)? Would they cooperate this well if an asteroid were heading for the earth? Think what the resources devoted to us could do if applied to problems like hunger, climate change, illiteracy or disease!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
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