RUTHFULLY YOURS

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According to the annual February 2021 Gallup’s country favorability rating, Israel is the 7th most favorable country among Americans, enjoying a 75% very/mostly favorability rating.

Israel’s favorability of 75% – compared to 66% in 2013, 69% in 2019 and 74% in 2020 – is above its 65% average since 2001, and just shy of its exceptional 79% favorability recorded during the 1991 Gulf War, when the US public was exposed to Iraqi missiles hitting Israel. 

According to Gallup, “In the latest poll, 85% of Republicans view it favorably, compared with 77% of independents and 64% of Democrats.”

Iran (13%) and the Palestinian Authority (30%) trail Cuba (45%), and are among the least favorable countries, along with North Korea (11%), China (20%), Iraq (21%), Afghanistan (21%) and Russia (22%).

Israel trails Canada (92% favorability), Great Britain (91%), France (87%), Japan (84%), Germany (84%) and India (77%).

However, unlike these countries, Israel’s 75% favorability is in defiance of systematic criticism (of Israel) by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other key members of the US media establishment, as well as by State Department spokespersons and the United Nations.

Israel’s high favorability rating occurs despite the spike in anti-Israel activities on US campuses, as well as the recent erosion of Israel’s stature on Capitol Hill (especially on the House side), which has been Israel’s consistent ally since 1948.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/is-israel-on-the-verge-of-a-hamas-abetted-civil-war-opinion-668148

Amid the barrages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets – and as young Arab citizens of Israel engaged in riots across the country – Muslim and Jewish medical personnel at the Rambam Health Care Center in Haifa issued a message of unity.

In an uplifting multi-lingual tweet on Wednesday evening, the doctors and nurses of the hospital posted a photo collage in which they are seen standing side-by-side, holding up pieces of paper spelling out the Hebrew sentences: “We overcame the coronavirus. We will all come together again now.” Some members of the team, in scrubs and surgical masks, with stethoscopes around their necks, are bearing signs with drawings of hearts accompanied by the word “peace” in Arabic.
The uplifting social-media post was both welcome and jarring. On the one hand, it served as a reminder of the dedication of Israel’s doctors and nurses of all ethnic and religious backgrounds to saving lives for months on end during the pandemic.

On the other, it constituted a stark contrast to the scenes of anti-Jewish rampages taking place in Jerusalem, Lod, Acre, Jaffa and Haifa, and retaliation by vigilantes out for vengeance against Arabs in Bat Yam, Tiberias and elsewhere.

The brewing of what is coming to resemble an actual civil war, as with the missiles from Gaza, can be attributed to Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip, and to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

https://www.opinione.it/editoriali/2021/04/29/renato-cristin_ostilit%C3%A0-israele-antisemitismo-funzionale-human-rights-watch-onu/

On one thing, the recent report by Human Rights Watch dedicated to Israel is right: “a threshold has been crossed”. Yes, one limit has been crossed, or rather two, but it is Human Rights Watch itself that has exceeded them: on the one hand, its report goes beyond the limits of the caricature and the grotesque (which is inadmissible for an organization accredited to the UN), presenting a political and social reality through the distorting lens of pro-Palestinian, pro-Islamic and anti-Zionist ideology; on the other hand, the border that divides criticism of the work of the State of Israel from antisemitism as the result of an action, an analysis or an opinion has been crossed. Yes, this relationship has introduced a new level: it cleared that form of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish hatred that I call functional antisemitism.

We know that these organizations, protected by the UN, have no problem attacking any government not aligned with the Palace, tarnishing it with hallucinating and often spurious accusations. But towards Israel there has always been, in that Palace and in its ideologies, a special aversion, which can be explained above all by the resistance that Israel opposes to the tendency to annihilate the nations that the UN has always supported and with the refusal Israel to accept the warnings (or rather: the diktats) to behave according to criteria that the UN considers politically correct.

Today, with an apparently isolated but in reality concerted action at the highest level, because it is connected with the orientation of the UN and, as we will see, with the action of the International Criminal Court, this questionable NGO puts Israel in the dock for racism and crimes against humanity (but with what credibility, then?, with what historical heritage, with what spiritual mission, with what political authority, with what popular mandate, with what ideological neutrality?), as if it were Amin Dada’s Uganda or the Central African Republic of Bokassa. Absurd, as in a piece by Beckett or Ionesco.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/holy-war-a-perspective-of-the-arab-israeli-conflict-opinion-668131

Superficially, the conflict is about who has sovereignty in Israel: “the occupation,” “colonialism,” etc. On a deeper level, however, it is about jihad, a religious obligation in Islam that many interpret as a demand to destroy Israel. That is the core and heart of Palestinianism.

From this perspective, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only national, the desire for a state; it is fundamentally a religious conflict. Islamists consider “Palestine” to be part of the house of Islam and Jews as “dhimmis,” a subject religious community, not a nation.

Violence waged by Islamists against Israel, therefore, is not only over enclaves, neighborhoods or territory; it is also a struggle over ideology – Zionism (Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people) and Palestinianism, which advocates Israel’s destruction. As long as Israel denies Palestinianism, there will be violence, promoted by the PLO, Hamas and most Islamist groups as “resistance” or “intifada.” The struggle, therefore, is not only about who has sovereignty, or even about Palestinian statehood; it is about Israel’s existence.

The resurgence of Palestinian violence is inevitable because Islamists have a long-term strategic goal to eliminate Israel. Every move by Israel to assert its authority and sovereignty is a threat to Palestinianism. This is based on the PLO Covenant and Hamas Charter, both of which define the problem as Israel’s existence.

Any recognition of Israel’s right to exist and its sovereignty is seen as a defeat of the fundamental Palestinian narrative, the Nakba (“catastrophe”) – Israel’s creation in 1948, the failure of Arab armies to destroy it, and the flight of Arabs who became refugees. It is also interpreted as a violation of Islamic law. This explains why efforts to resolve the conflict always fail.