RUTHFULLY YOURS

When it comes to opining on Israel and the ongoing tensions and deliberations between Israelis and Palestinians, the views of the likes of President Jimmy Carter (his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid) and Secretary of State Kerry among other dignitaries and pundits are not far apart. Their host of scribbles and public posturing serve to fortify each other: that the Israelis are intransigent, unbending and worst of all, by bandying those freighted words ‘colonizers’ added to Carter’s and now John Kerry’s ‘apartheid’, serving to portray Israel’s presence in the West Bank as both an occupation and worse, imbuing it with the trappings of a colonial subjugation thereby helping to rationalize and validate any and all attempts at Israel’s delegitimization.

What is routinely overlooked by these pundits, is that Israel’s presence on the West Bank is the consequence of the massive mobilization of Arab armies on Israel’s borders poised to attack Israel, thereby sparking the onset of hostilities in 1967. Israel’s presence on the West Bank is referred to misguidedly and simply as “won by Israel in the 1967 war..” (Please see Thomas Friedman’s New York Times Op-ed “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend“) with no mention that the genesis of the 1967 war was to defend the integrity of the Israeli state against a brace of Arab armies intent not only on eliminating Israel, but one could surmise — given the myriad examples of Arab intolerance between Shia and Sunni in contemporary Syria and Iraq, the ongoing slaughter in Syria, given the teachings of Wahhabi scripture, Salafist indoctrination or the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jew hatred taught in Arab madrassas or the vile bile emanating from Hamas Palestinians as well as from Hezbollah among others — that a successful invasion by Arab States over Israel might well have resulted not only in the elimination of the Jewish State but also in the murderous destruction of its Jewish citizenry.

Far fetched you say? One needs understand in the deep consciousness of virtually every Jew is the reality of history, namely the profound perversity of Deutschland’s Auschwitz.

Certainly there are many issues that both sides need to accommodate, but pundits rationalizing the isolation of Israel will only make the Palestinians more intransigent and the Israelis more fearful of the long shadow of history and their sworn determination that it will happen “Never Again.”