RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forget the alphabet soup acronyms of a thousand organizations. The pro-Israel community has only three elements.

There’s the anti-Israel side of the pro-Israel community. This misnomer calls itself Liberal Zionism even though, like the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither liberal nor Zionist. Instead illiberal anti-Zionist groups such as J Street provide a comfortable pathway from the pro-Israel community to the anti-Israel left by selling the illusion that it is possible to be pro-Israel while opposing the survival of Israel.

These illiberal anti-Zionists, like most domestic abusers, claim to be providing “tough love” by pressuring the Jewish State to make the “tough decisions” it needs to make in order to “end the occupation”.

These “tough love” and “tough decisions” though all translate into appeasing and aiding terrorists. The only people that the illiberal anti-Zionists, who clutch fistfuls of dirty Soros cash while hiding behind the blue skirts of the pro-Israel community, are willing to get tough on are Jewish victims of Islamic terror.

Somehow Abbas and Hamas never seem to come in for any tough love from these lovers of Israel who instead relish showing their tough love by kicking and beating the Jewish State at every opportunity.

And then there’s the great center of the pro-Israel community, which is not quite anti-Israel nor quite pro-Israel. Instead it hovers moderately and indecisively in the glorious middle. The center of the pro-Israel community is not really pro-Israel. Instead it’s for a two-state solution. It’s for Israel and for the PLO. It wants foreign aid for both. It wants peace. And no amount of terrorism will change its mind.

The marshmallow center of the pro-Israel community is the best recruiting ground for the anti-Israel left because its worldview is hypocritical and incoherent. It lobbies for arms for Israel and yet insists that peace is inevitable. It concedes that both sides have good arguments, but that Israel’s argument is slightly better. Or perhaps slightly less worse. It evades the issues to talk up Israel’s tech sector or the gay bars in Tel Aviv. It believes in boosterism, but not in Israel’s right to finally end terrorism.

The best and brightest culturally liberal youth naturally see through this nonsense and leave. And why shouldn’t they? On campuses they hear from one side that Israel is the devil while their side tells them that Israel is flawed, but basically means well because it is tolerant enough to concede most of the arguments of the other side. You don’t need to be a debate champion to see the trouble with this.

When its younger crowd is through singing “Shalom, Salaam”, it will go either left or right.

The center of the pro-Israel community is actually liberal and Zionist, but it is too liberal to be Zionist and too Zionist to blend well with the left. And so it is a walking contradiction that stands for nothing. It calls for tolerance and applauds its own humanism. It raises money for Israel, but it lacks all conviction when it comes to defending Israel. It is not pro-Israel in any way that truly counts.

Finally, there is the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community. It is a testament to the perversity, neurosis and insecurity of the Jewish establishment that the pro-Israel wing is the smallest part of the pro-Israel community. The pro-Israel wing is easily overshadowed by the anti-Israel wing which lunches at the White House and the organizational behemoth of the center which pretends that it doesn’t exist.

The pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community consists of far smaller groups such as EMET, ZOA, AFSI and many others. It relies heavily on volunteers like the elderly men and women who spent years protesting the PLO deal, gathering in small groups on street corners and handing out fliers in the rain.

It is unglamorous. It is obscure. It is mostly unheard. And it will still save Israel.

My previous post tells of the adoption of a Palestinian activist’s play by the powers that decide the curriculum in the Aussie state of Victoria, aimed at teenagers. Quite a coup, leading to enormous satisfaction on the anti-Israel mob’s part.Where has the Aussie Jewish “leadership” been meanwhile?

Have they protested? Have they been fobbed off with the fact that also on the VCE playlist for 2016 is a play that uses an Aboriginal leader’s 1938 protest to the German Embassy over Nazi persecution of Jews as a peg on which to hang its themes? If so, they are woefully mistaken, for the latter play is in no sense a trade-off.

Soon to be launched, in Adelaide, is a novel by pro-BDS stalwart Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees of Jake Lynch’s Peace Centre.

Like the Palestinian activist’s play, Rees’s novel would appear to have a love story as hook on which to hang a political message.

The book is to be launched in May by Adelaide barrister Paul Heywood-Smith QC, a founding member of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA).

For Palestinian Christians, the destruction of the ancient Byzantine church ruins is yet a further attempt by Palestinian Muslim leaders to efface both Christian history and signs of any Christian presence in the West Bank and Gaza, under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas. A growing number of Christians feel they are being systematically targeted by both the PA and Hamas for being Christians.

Bulldozers were used to destroy some of the church artifacts; some Palestinian Christians accused both Hamas and the PA of copying ISIS tactics to demolish historic sites.

“Where are the heads of the churches in Jerusalem and the world?… Where are the Vatican and UNESCO? Where are the leaders and politicians who talk, talk, talk about national unity and the preservation of holy sites? Or is this a collective conspiracy to end our existence and history in the East?” — Sami Khalil, a Christian from the West Bank city of Nablus.

The plight of Palestinian Christians does not interest the international community. That is because Israel cannot be blamed for demolishing the antiquities. If the current policy against Christians persists, the day will come when no Christians will be left in Bethlehem.

Palestinian Christians are up in arms over the destruction of the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church that were recently discovered in Gaza City.

The protest, however, failed to win the attention of the international community, especially United Nations agencies such as UNESCO, whose mission is to secure the world’s cultural and natural heritage.

The ruins of the 1800-year-old church were discovered in Palestine Square, in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, where Hamas is planning to build a shopping mall. The dramatic discovery of the antiquities did not seem to leave an impression on the construction workers, who removed artifacts and continued with their work at the site.

Three momentous events mark 1979 as the year in which modern jihad, having evolved over the course of the century, emerged as a global movement: the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran, the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the conditions for an Islamist explosion had existed for a long time, these events were the spark.

On April 1, 1979, following the overthrow of the shah and the return of the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France, the Shiite populace of Iran voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic republic. A new constitution outlined the central role of divine revelation in determining Iran’s laws, which would be based on the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions of Islam. Then on November 4, a crowd of student protesters who were loyal to Khomeini and committed to taking their revolution to the “great Satan,” America, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Most of them would remain in captivity until the day Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s place in the White House. Focused on rescuing their imprisoned countrymen, Americans had a poor understanding of the broader picture in Iran. The elderly Khomeini was not seen as a serious alternative to the royal Pahlavi family, who were friendly to the United States. But the revolutionary cleric and his new guard of religious fanatics were able to exploit the ancient Persian reserves of pride and resilience, quickly imposing a Shia version of theocracy in which Islam and politics were totally reintegrated. The mullahs of Tehran became the center of political as well as religious power in Tehran.
Mideast Two Revolutions

Demonstrators hold up a poster of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini during an anti-shah demonstration in Tehran in 1978 / AP

The Shia of Iran thus demonstrated to the world—including the Sunnis, many of whom would be envious—that the theocratic caliph- ate was viable in the modern world. It also demonstrated that Muslims not only should but could reject the Western separation of politics and faith. Modernity’s separation of Allah’s writ and governance could be reversed.

Just as important, the success of the Iranian revolution and the embassy attack proved that the United States, and by inference all other great powers, was not invulnerable. The Muslim world did not have to be the powerless victim of Western machinations, such as interference in Iran’s domestic affairs and overarching control of the geopolitics of the Middle East.