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[Big_Bird]

Here is a rather interesting opinion piece from the Haaratz. I think it might be of particular interest to our friend The Urban Myth.

The country that wouldn't grow up

By Tony Judt



.....

Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West.

.....

The Israeli nakba

But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists.

Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless.

Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes.

Collective cognitive dysfunction

But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy.

....

Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

For full article click here

Edited in order to comply with the 'not too long' rule.

[Boodleheimer]

i love your posts, bb. they really raise issues!

hugs from Taebaek.

[Pligganease]

Does criticism of any Islamic country equal anti-Islamic bigotry?

[Scaggs]

TLDR

I am Jewish, my sister is an Israeli, I criticize Israel sharply. I am not a self-hating Jew. I don't hate Jews. I feel like both parties have commited grevious faults and continue to do so. I can go into more detail, but the simple answer to a simple question is no.

[Ya-ta Boy]

It depends on the delivery.

If the criticism is part of a career of criticism of the same group, then it is more than just disagreement with a policy or action.

[Gopher]

[Junior]

Why doesn't Iran grow up? I think stoning women to death for minor infractions is a bit naughty. Or even Syria, which has been brutalising and oppressing its kurds. and so on.

Should Arab nations be held to the same high standards of scrutiny that Israel is constantly under? Someone farts in Tel Aviv and theres an international outcry.

Why does the media pay more attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict than they do to the more bloody and equally long-standing conflicts in the Sudan and Somalia?

In the last year alone, more people died as a result of internecine warfare in Darfur than in the entire Arab-Israeli Conflict.

[ChuckECheese]

[Scaggs]

[Big_Bird]

[Junior]

[Big_Bird]

[Junior]

[Boodleheimer]

citations, please.

[Junior]