Out of fear over demographics and anxiety over the position of the Obama administration, a good many Jews are prepared for concessions in the West Bank and a temporary cessation of construction in Jerusalem.
But the Jewish public’s deeper instinct remains Zionist. The public knows that the state arose thanks to the settlement of the valleys, the Galilee and the Negev. If it supports – as does the government – accepting American dictates, the public arrived at this point sadly. It certainly does not share the joy with which the radical left welcomes the American dictates. It disdains this left, whose campaign over the years, funded by foreign elements (some of which reject the fundamental existence of the Jewish state ), encourages alienation from parts of the homeland. The obvious outcome of the left’s activity is rising violence between Jews and Arabs and strife between Jews.
For these reasons and others, fewer than 1,000 people (as reported disappointedly by Army Radio, which had earlier worked hard to fill Zion Square ) turned out for the leftist “mass demonstration” under the slogan “Zionists, not settlers.”
Zionists, as every high school student knows, even if he studies civics using the post-Zionist text “To be a citizen of Israel” (and most high school students study from this, as the Education Ministry’s official text ), always settled the land. Without settlement, the State of Israel would not have been established. And the moment the settler movements began to undermine their own foundations and reject the just nature of their historic path, they crumbled socially and economically. The best of its young people left the country, their creation dried up and their impact on the culture and values of the rest of Israeli society faded.
The leftist coalition that organized the rally – “the national left” of Meretz, Peace Now and what remains of the Kibbutz Movement (just before the rally internal dissent forced it to remove its name from the list of organizers ) – broadcast hatred, alienation and denunciation. Hatred and excoriation were woven into almost every section of the “manifesto” of the “national left,” initiated by Eldad Yaniv and Shmuel Hasfari, first and foremost against the settlers. A movement does not emerge from such an insulting and destructive text, even the greatest opponents of the settlers concede. Such a movement certainly does not emerge that is renewing the constructive, unified and pioneering path of the national Zionist left, as its writers and supporters allege (and only in that realm; it has almost no support among the general public ).
Jews, including those who do not pray three times a day “let there be no hope for the slanderers” are revolted by behavior that in the youth movement and the army we called “tattletales”. That function is now being filled by the radical left, including those who planned the demonstration. There can be immense differences over the peace process, but the historic instinct of the average Jew is to recoil from groups and individuals who serve foreign interests, including those who have a clear anti-Semitic record, such as the Ford Foundation, in the struggle against their brethren-opponents.
One recoils even more when groups like the Geneva Initiative, which purport to be movements, are revealed to be organizational skeletons working for, and of course funded by, foreign elements. The Geneva Initiative is the continuation of Oslo, which failed totally, at a heavy, bloody cost. Its founders, mainly funded by the Swiss government, have given it artificial respiration.
Worse than the Geneva Initiative is Peace Now, which serves, even proudly, a foreign agent. Its organizational skeleton – it has long ceased to be a movement – is funded mainly by foreign groups and governments. And so that the funding – its livelihood for the skeleton’s operators – does not stop, it deals in denunciations to the funding bodies, bringing petitions to the High Court against the state. Thus, it also drags Israel’s supreme judicial body, which once enjoyed great prestige, into politicized rulings in the guise of judicial opinions, to the point where the court is seen as being against everything Jewish and Zionist and dances to the tune of the extreme left.
That is the face of the left. And because of it, Meretz has only three MKs, and all the leftist groups together, with massive media encouragement, failed to produce much of a rally whose declared goal, said its organizers, was to be the beginning of a revolution.
They are Political cowards
They are mostly intellectual cowards
They are moral cowards
They are ethical cowards
They are physical cowards
Any way you view them they are cowards.
They are traitors.
They are liars too and anti-semites, even the so called Jewish (sic,)ones!!
The problem with referencing the “radical left” is the absence of the non-radical left.
Pro forma rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, liberals in Israel and America invariably toe the party line.
Obamacare was the subject of much liberal bitching and moaning, but in the end every progressive obediently conformed.
And while Schumer has voiced concern about Obama’s obvious hatred of Israel, that lonely dissent has been painfully weak and unaccompanied by any meaningful action.
Non-radical liberals are like non-radical Muslims.
They exist only in theory.
In the real world, when push comes to shove these “non-radicals” dependably support their radical brethren.