Barbara Amiel: Only the Jews themselves can destroy Israel

Israel at 75: Never has the State of Israel faced such savage opposition from sections of the Jewish community — at home and abroad

By Barbara Amiel,  National Post

As Israel marks the 75th anniversary of its founding this year, the National Post is hosting a five-month celebration of the “startup” nation, telling the remarkable story of its rebirth and resilience against all odds.

My generation, the last to have been born before the State of Israel was created and while the Holocaust was in progress, is all but an anachronism now. Faint British childhood memories are of blackout curtains, air-raid sirens and my grandfather showing me the crater that a German V-2 rocket had created overnight on the nearby heath.

When the war ended, my mother worked with the British Red Cross, helping to place Holocaust survivors with families in Britain. Though it must have been a grim business for her, for me, it had little meaning. The one or two people she took me to see sat in rooms with curtains often pulled and spoke in languages I did not understand. They were, I was told, coming from the “camps.” Whether they were seaside camps, concentration camps or refugee camps, it was all the same to a child.
Still, “DPs” was an acronym I learned very early. “Displaced persons,” my mother explained, “Nowhere to go.”

“They should go to Palestine,” said my Russian-born Zionist grandmother. “Are you mad,” said my German-Jewish grandfather. “What’s there but sand and a lot of Arabs who will hate them?”

My grandparents lived to see Israel come into being in 1948, a poster-boy country in those early years for Jewish gumption, morality and the rather odd ability, I thought, to grow vegetables in the desert. In those early days, Israel was admired, even revered, in the West. Until suddenly it wasn’t.

The change came in stages with the wars. When the Arab world rejected the United Nations’ offer of a Palestinian homeland in 1948 and instead declared war on Israel, the astonishing victory of the world’s newest state against five Arab armies was a subject of admiration.

Over the years, there were several more battles — only one was not a defensive battle but rather involved the recruitment of Israeli troops in 1956 by British Prime Minister Anthony Eden in a harebrained scheme to retake the Suez Canal together with the French. When the fiasco ended — thanks to Canada’s suggestion for a peacekeeping force to be sent in — Israel gave Egypt back the area of the Sinai it had captured.

In the three subsequent wars of aggression launched against it, Israel was victorious, though it got no peace. But wars of aggression have consequences and if you lose them, you are likely to lose territory. At one point, Israel gave back the Gaza Strip, which turned out to be a dreadful mistake, as in this case the “land for peace” equation turned out to be a no solution equation and Gaza turned into a terrorist launchpad for Hamas rockets into Israel.

After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel took the West Bank — and east Jerusalem — which extended its vulnerable 14-kilometre wide middle to over 48 kilometres. These new territories (“disputed” land in Israel’s eyes and “occupied” in the nomenclature of its enemies) are being held by Israel both as a bargaining chip and for security purposes until a real peace and accepted borders are negotiated — though now there seems to be no one to negotiate with.

Friendship with Israel was severely tested after extreme Islamic jihadists discovered the effectiveness of international terrorism. In 1972, two Lufthansa jets were seized, ransom was paid by the Germans and terrorists were exchanged for hostages. The same year saw the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich.

Travel and ordinary life beyond the Middle East became something of a nightmare. Airports and big events became mazes of security lineups and it was all because of — as French Ambassador Daniel Bernard said at my London home — “that shitty little country Israel.”

Various treaties offered the Palestinians a state of their own, but no term was adhered to by the Arabs, and no offer of land was accepted. Instead, there was a Palestinian chorus of “Throw them into the sea,” most recently made again on Hamas state TV on March 8 by Gaza-based Islamic scholar Wael Al-Zard, who mentioned they had teams planning what to do with the “multitudes of Jews” left after conquering Israel. “What are we going to do with them? Should we throw them into the sea and make them food for the fish?” he jovially asked.

When Britain’s Sunday Times sent me to spend time with Palestine Liberation Organization spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi, then minister of education for the PLO and advisor to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, I asked her why the Arabs would not copy the example of the Jews who had accepted David Ben-Gurion’s dictum of never saying no to any offer of land, however small. Ashrawi looked at me with contempt: “We are not like the Jews,” she said. “We are an all-or-nothing people.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-of-centre Likud party and Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, was an economic wizard as finance minster from 2003-2005. He turned the country firmly in the direction of capitalism instead of sclerotic socialism, unleashing Israelis’ extraordinary talents for innovative technology. But clever as he was, he was equally deft at making enemies.

Today, the most unlikely and dangerous of Israel’s detractors are other Jews — the left-wing progressive Jews in Israel who lost the election and the leftish diaspora. As if the Israelis don’t have enough enemies, now, in the name of “friendship” and “telling you for your own good,” Jewish voices have begun adopting the tactics of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, while western Jews are openly mourning the “threat” to Israeli democracy posed by Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms.

Or paying for full-page ads in newspapers to voice their misguided notion that the reforms on which some members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and coalition partners campaigned in the last election — and won — are somehow going to impair human rights or destroy the democracy those very elections reinforced. One suspects this of your local antisemitic student administrative council or the Israeli Histadrut unions but not responsible Jews.

In synagogues, at universities and in the media, these Jewish critics of Israel use their ethnicity as a flag of convenience for their negative assessment of Israeli policy, and especially Benjamin Netanyahu. He has become the devil.

Reform Jews would once have tossed any rabbi speaking of Israel’s prime minister as a man with a “hardened heart” — one of the most vicious things you can say in Judaism as it references the biblical pharaoh “hardening his heart” to decree the murder of all first-born male babies of the Israelites — but today, many such rabbis accuse Netanyahu of precisely this while leading large, wealthy congregations.

Such people, in my view, fear two things: they are terrified of the old canard of dual loyalties and have the globalist’s distaste of “nationalism,” which they consider the main cause of all wars (Hitler, in particular). As well, in the name of “tikun olam,” the classic rabbinical edict to repair the world, they see the Palestinians as an oppressed group to be saved — not the authors of their own misfortune, but victims of a successful Jewish state.

Establishment Jews in Canada who currently bemoan the policy and election results of the State of Israel remind me a little of the court Jews (Hofjuden) of the 17th and 18th centuries, who achieved recognition by establishing themselves as “exceptions” or “privileged Jews.”

Our Hofjuden establishment Jews head up the big Jewish organizations and want to sit at the right tables, dine with their progressive, leftist political colleagues (in Canada, the Liberal party elites). They monopolize big Jewish donors and reinforce that while they are Jews, they are quite distinct from the cunning Netanyahu and the less westernized right-wing Mizrachi (Sephardi) and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews that now make up around 50 per cent of Israel and are members of Netanyahu’s coalition.

Gradually, Israeli politics have moved right after decades of left-wing coalitions. This shift is giving the left (academia, media, all the usual suspects) at home and abroad glottal stops. First up, the battle over judicial reform.

Israel has no constitution. The country has a set of Basic Laws, which are administered by the judiciary. Unlike elsewhere in the western world, the power of Israel’s judiciary is nearly unlimited, with very few checks and balances. It can (and did) bind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a conflict of interest agreement that his enemies are now trying to use to get the High Court to prevent him from speaking out publicly on judicial reform to the nation, even though masses of Israelis are gathering in the street either protesting or supporting his proposed reforms.

This, it is alleged, would be a conflict of interest with his own indictments. Those indictments are pegged on a preposterous notion of translating a normal if slightly sleazy effort to obtain supportive press coverage into “bribery.” As a former newspaper editor, I can testify to the number of politicians seeking supportive coverage, usually from the publisher but sometimes the editor. If they were all charged with bribery, Canada’s political class would fill our prisons.
Under the present Israeli judicial system, every minister and department must have a legal advisor — not of their choice, but appointed by tender. Their word is law — literally.

Theoretically, they can tell the army not to engage in a specific manoeuvre and, if necessary, to quote distinguished Toronto businessman Joe Nadler, they can veto the appointment of the manager of the Knesset dining room. Legal advisors have a seven-year term and incoming ministers have no say in who they inherit. Meanwhile, Supreme Court judges all but self-appoint their own colleagues and there are no juries in Israel. Likud made judicial reform a key point in the recent election and like it or not, Likud won.

This win and this issue is being translated by the left as egregious as the destruction of the third temple (if the there were one).

In the 1990s, Aharon Barak, president of the Supreme Court, woke up one morning and unilaterally declared a “constitutional revolution,” asserting that changes to the Basic Laws had turned them into a quasi-constitution. Decisions by the court would be subject to tests of “reasonableness” and “proportionality” — two highly subjective principles.

Not all of Netanyahu’s proposed reforms may be wise — the “override” of Supreme Court decisions by the legislature may require a more substantive majority than 61 votes out of a 120-seat Knesset — but the proposed reforms have more good in them than bad and would benefit from serious discussion, not street demonstrations or Israel Defence Forces reservists not showing up.

The other major reform Israel clearly needs is its electoral system. Forty parties submitted lists in the last election, and three-quarters of these are not in the Knesset because they did not get the 3.25 per cent minimum needed under proportional representation to get a seat.

Parties shift alliances and join one another to hit the 3.25 per cent threshold. So it’s not hard to see why Netanyahu’s coalition today embraces six parties — none of which he likes very much, being left-of-centre himself on some social issues, such as same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights.

So everything is a battle. Every election. But never has the State of Israel faced such savage opposition from sections of the Jewish community — at home and abroad. We Jews are, as the Bible says, a “stiff-necked people” and a disputatious people. In his later years, my grandfather mused that, “Only the Jews themselves can destroy Israel.” He died in 1961, but sadly, his words have a prophetic ring.