Peloni: Tobin once again provides clarity for the path facing Israel:
“Those who care about Israel must take these lessons to heart and realize that the only solution to its current situation is for Jerusalem to ignore its critics and push through to victory, no matter how difficult that might be in terms of its military and diplomatic challenges.”
The answer to the Jewish state’s diplomatic dilemma is victory. Heeding the world’s demands to stop the war and let Hamas win will only make it worse.
Jonathan Tobin / JNS / March 29, 2024
Israeli flag. Credit: Pixabay.
Israel’s critics and outright foes are right about one thing: Nearly six months after the Oct. 7 massacres, its isolation is growing. With each day that the war against Hamas continues, more allies of the Jewish state are turning into critics, and more critics are turning into outright enemies. And those enemies are increasingly open about their belief that the problem isn’t so much the supposedly brutal tactics of the Israel Defense Forces in pursuing the elimination of Hamas terrorists as it is their belief that the one Jewish state on this planet is illegitimate.
The sense of impending doom is accentuated by press coverage such as the recent cover story in The Economist titled “Israel Alone.” Such articles are practically a daily feature in The New York Times with the latest being a report claiming that Germany is gradually getting over its post-Holocaust guilt and starting to distance itself from its traditional diplomatic posture of support for Israel.
It’s accentuated by the vicious nature of the anti-Israel protests we see in places like New York City. The scene outside Radio City Music Hall in Midtown Manhattan this week as a mob raged against a campaign rally for President Joe Biden, where he was supported by former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, spoke to the way open antisemitic hate has become normalized. Not even Biden’s pivot away from a position of support for the war against Hamas was enough to persuade those demanding victory for the terrorist organization to stand down or cease their expressions of hate for Jews.
The reason why so many people around the world are moved to demonstrate their sympathy and solidarity for the perpetrators of the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust isn’t much of a mystery.
Double standards and antisemitism
That Israel is being judged by standards applied to no other nation on earth is obvious. Even if the Hamas casualty statistics that are accepted by the mainstream corporate press are utterly bogus—and they are—it’s true that the post-Oct. 7 war has taken a terrible toll on the Palestinians in Gaza. Still, the scale of the fighting is nothing when compared to other recent wars fought in Syria or the Congo. And although pro-Hamas propagandists and their fellow travelers call what is happening a “genocide,” the human cost of conflict is minuscule when measured against actual genocides, such as those that have occurred in recent decades in Africa or the ongoing campaign by China against its Muslim Uyghur population.
Suffice it to say that there was no international movement—let alone mass demonstrations—in the streets of the world’s cities about any of those conflicts and genocides. Even the reaction to the illegal and brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to the United States and Western Europe responding with a massive effort of military aid the cost of that dwarfs the assistance the Americans have given Israel over the years, has not been quite so uniform. (Russia has maintained the support of China and many Third World countries, as well as Iran.) It also hasn’t generated the same kind of intense passion in the form of public demonstrations from those who call themselves “progressives.” Nor has the cause of Ukraine lit a fire from students on college campuses in North America and elsewhere.
The near unanimity about the awfulness of Israeli conduct at the United Nations isn’t surprising since the world body has specialized in singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium almost from its inception. But that drumbeat of incitement in the international community and the support for lawfare aimed at further isolating Israel in agencies like the International Court of Justice in The Hague is increasing.
All of this points to the conclusion that there’s only one kind of fighting that international opinion considers truly beyond the pale—and that is the wars waged by Israel. It’s true even when they are in response to clear violations of international law, not to mention the sort of barbarism that deserves to be compared to the Holocaust, like the Oct. 7 atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Jewish communities in southern Israel.
Illogical proposals
Of course, many who say they are for a ceasefire in Gaza claim to be supporters of Israel. The Biden administration and the increasing number of congressional Democrats who seek to limit military aid to Israel and force it to accept a Palestinian state when the war ends fall into this category. Yet there’s something particularly baffling about the illogic of a position that is predicated on support for Israel’s security but equally insistent that a Hamas state in Gaza, whose only purpose is to destroy the Jewish state and slaughter Jews en masse, be essentially reconstituted and allowed to take over the even larger areas of Judea and Samaria, something that would be made inevitable by a ceasefire.
It’s not quite so baffling, however, when this position is viewed as being impelled by a campaign of antisemitic incitement against Israel, rooted in misinformation about the war being conducted by progressives who have enormous influence over American journalism, popular culture and sway over the activist wing of the Democratic Party.
To the chattering classes who are pushing for Israel’s isolation, the answers to its dilemma are clear. They believe that Israel should end its war on Hamas, enabling those who planned and carried out the largest mass slaughter of Jews since World War II and the Holocaust amid a spree of rape, torture and kidnapping that occurred on Oct. 7 to get away with their crimes. They say this is the only way to end the suffering of the Palestinian people and to rebuild Gaza. And they believe that this must be followed up by a renewed push for peace that will be based on the idea of creating an independent Palestinian state in Gaza, as well as Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem.
Few Israelis are ready to buy into this scenario. While there was broad support in the Jewish state for the 1993 Oslo peace accords that were based on the “land for peace” formula, three decades of Palestinian terrorism and rejection of Israeli/U.S. offers of statehood have sobered Israelis up about the intentions of their Arab neighbors. The Second Intifada—five years of Palestinian suicide bombings of civilians on buses, and in restaurants and schools from 2000 to 2005—the creation of a Hamas state in Gaza after the total Israeli withdrawal from the Strip in the summer of 2005 and now the horror of Simchat Torah last fall have created a broad consensus mandating both the elimination of Hamas and opposition to Palestinian statehood for the foreseeable future.
But those carrying on about how isolated Israel is—in sanctimonious tones in which they claim to be speaking more in sorrow than anger—are not interested in any of that. Nor do they care about Palestinian culpability for the war or the fact that polls show that an overwhelming majority of them support Hamas, as well as the atrocities of Oct. 7. That the same is true of those cheering the spilling of Jewish blood on the streets of New York and college campuses is also not taken into account when discussing this anti-Israel consensus among the so-called enlightened left.
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