Time for Israel’s supporters to remake the cultural weather
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The European Commission released on Tuesday its first official strategy on fighting antisemitism and promoting Jewish life.
The programme is intended to prevent antisemitism in all its forms, promote Holocaust research, education and remembrance, and initiate programmes to raise awareness about Jewish life and culture in Europe.
The commission says it will lead the creation of a network of organisations across Europe to flag antisemitism content online, and will develop “counter-narratives.” It will also work with tech companies and retailers to prevent the online sale of Nazi-themed merchandise.
Yet the European Union continues to funnel money to the Palestinians even while they pour out antisemitism and remain committed to eradicating Israel. Their educational materials, for which the EU helps pay, promote hatred of Jews and incitement to murder Israelis and steal their land.
The EU also enables the Palestinian Authority to pay the families of terrorists for murdering Israelis. Last December, the PA announced that the EU had contributed 54 per cent of the cost of benefits for “needy” families.
By so substantially helping provide for the “Palestinian needy,” the EU allows the PA to use its own funds in order to pay rewards for terror. The purported wall between welfare assistance and “pay-for-slay” is an illusion.
The EU is also pouring money in to create a de facto Palestinian state, regardless of the Palestinian strategy of using such a state to destroy Israel — and while the EU condemns Israel for “illegally” building homes for Israelis in these disputed territories.
The Palestinian news service Wafa recently reported that Germany had pledged 100 million euros to the Palestinian Authority over the next two years for projects in the Gaza Strip, eastern Jerusalem and Palestinian settlements in “Area C”.
This was merely an instalment of a 3 billion euro spending plan by 2030 designed to advance the creation of a Palestinian state, with different countries being allocated different areas in which to concentrate their funds.
According to Wafa, the Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh “expressed … his appreciation and thanks to the government and people of Germany for their generous and continuous support and continuing commitment to the rights of the Palestinian people to liberation, independence, and to establish their independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, and the right of return for refugees”.
Like others in the west, the EU refuses to accept that the poster-cause of the progressive world is itself a major driver of attacks on Jews in Israel and the diaspora.
Along with other western liberal hypocrites, it is eager to dwell upon dead Jews and be seen to combat Nazi-themed antisemitism. Yet it channels money to the Palestinian Arabs who propagate Nazi-themed antisemitism week in and week out.
It refuses to accept that the Palestinian cause is fuelled by exterminatory, Islamic antisemitism. And so it refuses to acknowledge that support for this programme is the overwhelming reason why western progressives either actively promote or are indifferent to the current pandemic of antisemitism in the west.
In attempting to defend Israel, however, its supporters suffer from a particularly perverse and crippling problem. This is the relative absence of support from Israel itself in promoting an effective counter-narrative.
Of course, Israel is continuously engaged on the diplomatic level. From time to time it expresses public outrage, for example over the genocidal antisemitism of the Iranian regime or the attempts by the Polish government to airbrush Poland’s historic antisemitism from its public records.
Yet when it comes to the west, the Israelis not only fail to grasp the eye-watering depth and extent of the hatred — many express shock and amazement when they come up against it in Britain — they also don’t try to understand it.
Although they are obviously all too aware of the international diplomatic and legal onslaught against Israel fuelled by this animus, they don’t seem to want to address head-on the myths that fuel it.
Naturally, they are preoccupied by the constant and severe threats to their physical security concerns. But their approach also reflects a deficient attitude to the world. They have complacently assumed that America will always have Israel’s back.
The rashness of this assumption, given the coolness towards their interests and worse being displayed by the Biden administration, is currently becoming apparent — so much so that a public discussion has started in Israel about the need to depend far less upon America.
Both among American liberals and in Britain and Europe, malicious myths about Israel’s allegedly illegal or oppressive behaviour and the rights of the Palestinians have gained alarming traction as axiomatic truths.
Yet Israel is reluctant to say what needs to be said in order to challenge these lies and put important facts into the public domain. It takes instead a defensive position, generally protesting that the human-rights offences of which it is being accused are untrue.
But there are certain things that need to be said because they address the beliefs upon which the entire campaign against Israel is based — that the Jews are interlopers in the land of Israel, that they are in illegal occupation of the disputed territories, and that the Israelis are riding roughshod over Palestinian rights.
Israel should be declaring loud and clear, for example, that its actions in the disputed territories are entirely legal, and it should provide chapter and verse of the relevant treaties to prove it.
It should be trumpeting the historical fact that the Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. It should be reminding the world that the international community therefore decreed a century ago that the Jews should be resettled in their ancient homeland, consisting of what is now Israel, the disputed territories and Gaza.
It should point out therefore that the Jews are the only people with any legal or historical rights to that land at all.
It should be rubbing western noses in the relentless, paranoid Jew-hatred promoted by the Palestinians and their unceasing attempts to erase the Jews from their own history.
It should condemn Britain and Europe for grossly misrepresenting international law to damage Israel, in order to service the rejection of Israel in the Arab and Muslim world. And it should accuse the EU of funding NGOs that spread blood libels to bring Israel down.
When asked why Israel never says any of these things, Israeli diplomats give a number of reasons.
Why should we alone have to justify our existence? they ask. What, we should try to convince the British after what they did to us in mandate Palestine? Or the Europeans after they sent us up in smoke? Why do you assume, they ask bitterly, that anything we say would make any difference to such people?
True, antisemitism can never be eradicated. But such a strategy would nevertheless change the atmosphere. It’s more difficult to maintain the fiction that propaganda lies are the truth when truth itself is put into the public domain. It would at least start to alert people to a story of which they are wholly ignorant.
It would mean, above all, playing offence rather than defence. For playing defence means arguing on ground chosen by the enemy — and that means the argument is lost from the start.
Israel says such an aggressive strategy would be undiplomatic and it’s important that it plays the diplomatic game by the rules. But it is indeed a game, and Israel has lost many lives as a result.
Israel’s foes have hijacked language to present Israel falsely as malign. Its supporters need to show truthfully that it’s the enemies of Israel who are malign.
What’s needed is not so much education as an attempt to remake the cultural weather. All it needs is the will to do so.
Truth must be told! If we don’t stop using the term Palestinians as if there is such a people, we are doomed to lose the argument — and who knows what else! Palestinian Arabs are just that — Arabs. Can you imagine German Jews claiming they are a people separate from the Jewish people? Iraqi Jews could have claimed being a separate people? but who would accept that story! The Arabs of Palestine or no different a people than the Arabs of Egypt, or Morocco or Tunisia. They are part of the Arab people.
The creation of the fiction of a Palestinian people was brilliant propaganda. Once accepted, we are on a slippery slope that we will not be able to save ourselves from.
During Succot, an Ambassador to Israel from a European country and his wife, visited my daughter and joined us in the Succah. We got along very well and he even took it upon himself to subscribe to my newsletter.
My daughter was an Israeli diplomat for 12 years. During her post to the diplomatic mission to the EU she met them both and became good friends. He is now living in Israel.
I send him this article and asked for his comment. I will let you know if he writes.
I also sent him our symposium on what’s in it for the EU and the US to support the Palestinians.
pdale5 is right 100%.
The EU, et al. are doing this not because they don’t understand what Israel’s legal rights are.
They do it because destroying Israel and the Jews by brute force didn’t work and now they are trying a softer approach, i.e., “they speak softly but carry a big stick” or, rather, hiding a big knife behind their back and using the Arab proxies to accomplish their aims.
Israel and the Diaspora must return to the true Zionist ideology and practice (that is what, ironically, the “Palestinians” are doing now)..
Diplomacy is, of course, necessary but using diplomacy only is suicidal.
Phillips is absolutely right when she states that “when it comes to the west, the Israelis not only fail to grasp the eye-watering depth and extent of the hatred — many express shock and amazement when they come up against it in Britain — they also don’t try to understand it”.
One can say the same thing about the Jews in the rest of the world – imagine if the same antisemitic attacks that have occurred in France, England, and the US, to name just a few, happened in Russia recently?
There would be no end to the indignation, accusations, calls for sanctions, etc.
Remember the campaign to save the Soviet Jews in the 70s?
The Soviet Jews were subject to government discrimination, emigration restrictions, etc. and there was the grass-roots antisemitism but they were not subject to anything like the violent physical attacks and violent propaganda at the grass-roots level that we see in the Western countries now.
It looks like history is repeating itself.
It can never happen here? Think again.
Enough with trying to explain Israel’s claim to all its ancient land borders. The internet is littered with videos and talks and explanations of historical fact. The result is no change whatsoever. Nor will this approach ever work because opponents have no interest in facts from history.
Israel must do the following: it’s no use trying to play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules when the other sides do not.
1. Re-establish its authority over Judea and Samaria.
2. Wean itself from dependence on the US for funding–especially for defence.
3. Go after the international NGO’s and pressure groups which support the Arab occupiers.
4. Pressure the high tech giants which are setting up offices in Israel to pressure governments in the West to change their policies towards Israel. These companies have already shown that they will bend the knee to any well-organised group.