T. Belman. Three cheers for Tobin. As Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish News Service, he takes a very bold position in debunking all the smears. I am surprised and heartened by it. It is important to note that the jns is not a typical voice of progressive Jewry. Instead it had boldly planted itself on the Right.
by Zev Jabotinsky, 1911 (translated from Russian by Boris Shusteff
We constantly and very loudly apologize… Instead of turning our backs to the accusers, as there is nothing to apologize for, and nobody to apologize to, we swear again and again that it is not our fault… Isn’t it long overdue to respond to all these and all future accusations, reproaches, suspicions, slanders and denunciations by simply folding our arms and loudly, clearly, coldly and calmly answer with the only argument that is understandable and accessible to this public: ‘Go to Hell!’?
The claim that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will make life hard for Diaspora Jews ignores what motivates Zionism’s foes and other anti-Semites. Op-ed.
(JNS) As Benjamin Netanyahu begins forming the next Israeli government following his victory in the latest Knesset election, some on the left have begun a last-ditch effort to prevent him from forming a coalition with the parties that ran as his allies. Their argument is that anything must be done to keep the Religious Zionist Party and especially Itamar Ben-Gvir out of power.
Barring an unlikely last-minute change of heart on the part of either Yair Lapid or Benny Gantz—whose parties fell short in the election and who have pledged to go into opposition rather than serve with Netanyahu—the jeremiads about the necessity of stopping Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the titular leader of the Religious Zionists, out of the Cabinet are falling on deaf ears among those who could actually do something about it.
Yet while Israeli politicians are ignoring these arguments, that won’t be the last we’ll hear of them. That’s because they will provide the foundation for renewed efforts to delegitimize Israel’s government abroad.
While the supposedly substantive reasons for excluding the Religious Zionists don’t withstand serious scrutiny, this discussion matters because of the claim that Israel’s leaders will be undermining and even endangering Jews in the Diaspora.
As the leader of the Conservative movement of Judaism in Israel put it in Haaretz, having Smotrich and Ben-Gvir around the cabinet table won’t just impact life in Israel. It will also hurt Jews elsewhere. Citing a much-discussed New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, Yizhar Hess claimed that a right-wing government will mean that Jewish students, already under siege by anti-Zionists, will no longer be able to credibly speak up on behalf of the Jewish state.
That’s because the presence of these so-called “fascists” in Netanyahu’s cabinet will, in this telling, mean that the “good Israel,” that nice Jews feel comfortable about defending, is now either gone or about to be legislated out of existence. In its place will be a different country, run by extremists and horrible people who oppose peace and want to oppress minorities. Even if the people in this new bad Israel will be Jews, they will be the sort of Jews no self-respecting American Jew will want to be associated with.
In this scenario, the new government will mean that Jewish kids as well as the activists who have formed the backbone of organized Jewish life will be effectively silenced. And those who continue to advocate for Israel will be increasingly regarded as outliers who will themselves deserve to be shunned.
Those who will try to preserve the U.S.-Israel relationship as well as the one between American Jews and the Jewish state will now be forced to become part of a new “resistance” to Netanyahu’s government, in which they will advocate for American pressure that will help resurrect the “good” Israel.
The main problem with this gloomy scenario is that everything that the doomsayers are claiming that the new government will mean for Israel in America is already true about the Jewish state’s critics.
Everything that can be alleged about Smotrich and Ben-Gvir has already been aired out endlessly by left-wing critics of Israel in their efforts to undermine and delegitimize past Israeli governments including those run by the Israeli left.
For decades, left-wingers have been falsely claiming that Israel’s governments didn’t want peace and that the decisions of Israel’s voters should be either ignored or overridden by American governments that took up the cause of “saving Israel from itself.”
Let’s remember that J Street, the left-wing lobby which has dedicated itself to that dubious cause, came into existence in 2007. Netanyahu’s Likud was in the opposition and a government led by Ehud Olmert was engaged in yet another futile attempt to trade land for peace with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
When Netanyahu became prime minister again in 2009 and in the 12 years that followed, when there was no thought of Ben-Gvir being a minister, the same arguments about Israeli policies being oppressive and alienating American Jews were heard over and over again.
During this time, as the antisemitic BDS movement gained footholds on American college campuses and on the left-wing of the Democratic Party, there was no talk about Ben-Gvir or the evils of Israel being governed by right-wing and religious parties.
To the contrary, the so-called centrists of Israeli politics—Lapid and Gantz—were just as reviled by those who spread the “apartheid state” smear as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are today. The same claims about a mythical old “good” Israel being destroyed were made by those who opposed Netanyahu.
Those who think one Jewish state on the planet is one too many didn’t need Religious Zionists in Israel’s cabinet to be convinced that Israel shouldn’t exist. American Jews who are embarrassed by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were already embarrassed by Netanyahu and even some of his left-leaning opponents in the Knesset. Their failure to magically make the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs disappear has been cited by those who note a decline in support for Israel in the years since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, and even before that while the delusion that it might succeed was still alive.
This goes beyond the fact that the claims that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are fascists is without real substance. As I’ve noted previously, the talk about the winners of last week’s election being enemies of democracy is just an echo of the Democratic Party talking points about Republicans in the U.S. and just as specious. Whatever one may think of either man, their party doesn’t oppose democracy.
None of that matters because this discussion isn’t rooted in the facts about Israel or those who will make up its next government. It is an expression of unease with the reality of a Jewish state that must deal with a messy and insoluble conflict with the Palestinian Arabs as well as one where the majority of its Jews don’t think or look like your typical liberal Jewish Democrat.
Israel-haters will work for its destruction no matter who is its prime minister or the composition of the government. As has always been the case, the anti-Semites don’t need any new excuses for their efforts to besmirch and delegitimize the Jewish state.
One needn’t support Netanyahu or his partners to understand any of this.
Rather than apologizing for Ben-Gvir or the other aspects of Israeli reality that make readers of The New York Times cringe, those who care about the Jewish state and its people need to stop longing for an Israel which looks like them and embrace the one that actually exists. By buying into the disingenuous claims that this government will be less worthy of their support than its predecessors, they are merely falling into a trap set for them by antisemites.
Those who support the right of a Jewish state to exist should stop apologizing for it not conforming to some idealized liberal vision of Zionism, and understand that the people who voted for Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are just as deserving of respect and representation as they are.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
Edgar,
“When you start talking about G-D and Torah, know that this is absolutely counter-productive. The largest part of the world is either atheistic, normative Christian or animist. This argument has traction only amongst frumme Yidden and Born Again Christians, which are, together a truly small minority”
I partly agree with your statement, but in reality, the only claim the Jews have on the land is the claim that God gave it to Abraham and his seed. If you’re putting your faith in the UN and some legal numbo jumbo your goona loose. The nations have never lived up to their agreements. Yes, nations / neighbor’s have to work together and try to get along, but there comes a time you have to stand your ground and let the nations “go to hell”.
@dr david Nice post. Small correction, San Remo was in 1920. The Palestine Mandate which reaffirmed it – minus what became first Transjordan then Jordan, 77 percent of the original mandate designated as the Jewish National Home, which Churchill lopped off and gave to a branch of the Saudi Hashemite family – was in 1922.
SKEEZIX
When you start talking about G-D and Torah, know that this is absolutely counter-productive. The largest part of the world is either atheistic, normative Christian or animist. This argument has traction only amongst frumme Yidden and Born Again Christians, which are, together a truly small minority
It “turns people off”, and they think…”is this all you’ve got”.
A claim of ancestral grounds, and the San Remo- L of N British Mandate for Palestine, plus US Unanimous acceptance, plus UN Art.80. has far more purchase, BUT people NEED to be educated to it. They mostly never heard of it. This includes a majority of Jews I believe.
But is would would be far stronger, and places Israel’s rights to the Land on solid Legal Grounds.
In a way it even shows that Jew-hate is a “baseless hatred”/
The alleged “Palestinian People” were invented in 1964 by the Soviet KGB with help from its Romanian counterpart, the Securitate. The notion that the Palestinians are a “people” is THE foundational myth successfully “messaged” by the leftist (and now Globalist) corrupted media, educational “influencers,” and Jew haters currently at large and in positions of power in many countries. This first fabrication supports the entirely disingenuous Palestinian “narrative” with complementary Palestinian myths alleging that Israel 1) exists as an illegitimate, colonialist power, 2) operates as an oppressive Apartheid state, and 3) is committing “genocide” on the purportedly victimized Palestinian people.
The realities are that:
1) Israel came into being by the a legitimate vote, under existing international law of the League of Nations (LON) at the San Remo conference in 1922. The LON devised a Mandate system that was formulated to end colonialism, which it did very successfully. To wit, all countries in the Middle East shed the overseeing Mandatory powers (i.e., the French left Lebanon and Iraq and the British exited Trans-Jordan and Israel) as soon as the former distant provincial colonies of the defeated Ottoman (Turkish) empire in WW 1 demonstrated the ability to run their own states. The decision to reconstitute Israel as the national ancestral home of the Jewish people had nothing to do with Europe’s (again alleged) post-Holocaust guilt, given that Britain’s Palestine Mandate for the task was established 17 years prior to the advent of the Second World War. British recalcitrance doomed millions of European Jews to the Holocaust.
2) Israel is the antithesis of an “Apartheid state.” Not only are none of South Africa’s heinous Apartheid laws, or anything remotely similar to them, to be found anywhere in Israeli law, but Israeli Arabs participate at all levels of Israeli society in an integrated and safe environment. Israel’s Supreme Court has an Israeli Arab justice, Israeli Arabs are professionals and academics in the fields of medicine, law, engineering, business and serve in the Israeli army and police forces, and have prospered. Under Israeli law, they practice Islam and Christianity freely. Intermarried couples live without any legal consequences, although neither Muslim nor Orthodox Jewish clerics will officiate at mixed marriages because of specific religious prohibitions that exist in both religions. Religiously mixed couples marry outside of Israel, typically in nearby Cyprus, and then live in Israel. Consequently the entire foundation of the BDS movement is simply another set of antisemitic lies.
3) The Israeli Arab population has increased steadily since Israel’s founding in 1948. Indeed, the Palestinian propaganda machine has suggested that Israel fears democracy because it contends (falsely again) that Arab Israelis will out-populate Jewish Israelis in time. This is another example of the Palestinian practice of sucking and blowing at the same time. Pick your lie and stick to it. Genocide doesn’t increase population numbers! You can’t voice contradictory lies and expect anyone with an attention span of more than 3 minutes to attach any credence to your claims.
It is sad that many Jews, primarily on the Left of the political spectrum, apparently choose to remain ignorant of these realities. There are numerous histories documenting all of the above. Still, the demonization of the world’s sole Jewish state by forces who abhor traditional Western democracies and freedom of the individual from the domination of tyrannical despotic forms of government apparently resonates more with these individuals who proudly tout their support for the allegedly oppressed Palestinians, who openly call for the destruction of Israel and annihilation of all of its Jewish residents, than the reality that it is Palestinian leadership, whether in Ramallah or Gaza, who seek a Judenfrei, Apartheid “Palestinian state” that would disappear into oblivion the day after its diabolical political aspiration might G-d forbid, occur.
Yes, Ben Gvir wants to keep Israelis safe from Terrorists. That is not racism. It is reality. Regrettably, too many people, cannot see this distinction but fall for the counterfactual, emotionally induced, pseudo-narcissistic virtue signalling.
Ignore US liberals and the whole left.
Be a Proud JEW
Stand up for God and Torah
The reality that Jews have lived in Israel for over 3000 years.
Do not bend, bow or apologize to the Enemies of the state and the people.
90 or more of Secular Jews are Am Haaretz…
Simple.