RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bizarre, is it not? That a tiny country –  the size of Wales or Tasmania or New Jersey –  and occupying just one-sixth of one per cent of the land occupied by the Arab powers, a tiny country that is still the only true democracy in the Middle East, should be the focus of such relentless scrutiny and hostility?

Thus some of the most corrupt and inegalitarian countries in the world, including those which deny basic rights and freedoms to women, to foreign workers, and to members of minority faith, were responsible for the obscene United Nations resolution of 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.

And although that infamous resolution has since been rescinded (thanks in no small measure to the initiative of Australian Zionist leader Mark Leibler, brother of the great Isi Leibler who is so consistently a prophet for our time) the repellent characterization of Zionism as racism persists.

That zealous promoter of replacement theology and inveterate critic of Christian Zionism Stephen Sizer, an Anglican clergyman in Surrey, has been quoted as saying that Israel is “fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race” and “even worse than South Africa,” and that it too will hopefully be “brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people.”

What vile, shameful rot. In fact, it’s so mendacious and so outrageous that I will go so far as to label it racist. South African apartheid was based upon the premise that white people by virtue of their genes are inherently superior to black people.  Yet in striking contrast to that twisted philosophy Israel consists of Jews of all skin colours. And whereas non-whites in South Africa were denied civil rights, in Israel non-Jews are equal before the law.

The Arab minority in Israel (20 percent of the country’s total population) enjoy all the rights of citizenship. One of the best-educated Arab populations in the Middle East, it, like the Druze, has representatives in the Knesset, and elsewhere in public life.

Israel, from the outset in 1948, became the first country in the Middle East in which Muslim women were entitled to vote. In vast swathes of the Middle East women are still treated almost as sub-human, yet for reasons best known to themselves Western women in their thousands ignore the plight of those women, and concentrate instead on vilifying Israel, where women are as free as any in the developed world.

The so-called “apartheid wall” is a favourite metaphorical target of their ire, in common with their anti-Israel menfolk. Yet, as I showed in a previous post, Israel’s wall (in reality mainly a fence) is a security barrier that has many counterparts in the world http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/which-wall-would-that-be.html.

Its purpose, which it has served admirably, is to prevent terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet it alone preoccupies the left and other critics of Israel, who evidently believe that Israelis are not entitled to defend themselves as other peoples are.

The scene above is apartheid.  So is the scene below.

You won’t find discrimination against minority religions in Israel:

Nor against non-heterosexuals:

And as for Apartheid Week, how about this?

Or this?

Not even a squeak of protest out of the anti-apartheid crowd, eh?  Now isn’t that strange!

Hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav (“Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations”) declares the Torah (Numbers, 23:9).

Whatever interpretation religious commentators put on that phrase, politically, in our day, during these dark and troubling times through which we are passing, it has a familiar resonance.  It invokes the spectre of antisemitism, which we in the West had once so naively, so optimistically, yet so naturally assumed had been laid to rest by the Nazis’ demonstration of the depths of degradation and depravity to which that unfathomable disease called Jew-hatred can lead.

How wrong – how unpredictably wrong – we were.

Make no mistake: as Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University has observed, “Labeling Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right of equality and self-determination among the nations”.

See also: http://walloflies.org/
And, of course, h/t to Elder of Ziyon for most of the great posters I’ve reproduced here.