The whole world is wrong

I don’t really want to encourage the anti-Israel troll from my previous post, but there is a concept that he brought up that bears further examination. It is the world’s contention that Israel must be wrong, because the whole world is against her. From the troll’s comment:

Israel’s moral stature is crumbling by the day, Meryl. Even former hasbara diehards like Jeffrey Goldberg and Tom Friedman are leaving the rat infested sinking ship (The Jewish Homeland). Do you really want to stay on board with moonbats like Pamela Geller and Leon “anti-Semite!” Wieseltier?

Besides the lies that Goldberg and Friedman are abandoning Israel (they most assuredly are not), he brings up a theme that the Israel haters bring up constantly. If the whole world is against you, you must be wrong.

No. We’re not wrong.

Rabbi Dov Fischer wrote an essay in response to that very sentiment by Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, who said in 2002:

The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.

Here is part of Rav Fischer’s response:

At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?

[…] We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children’s blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

Read it all. It’s a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There are now, and have always been, those who hate Israel simply because she is the state of the Jews. Look again at what the troll wrote. Look at the derision in his description of Israel as a “rat-infested sinking ship.” That is the underlying reason for Israel’s vilification in the world. If it were a state of any other people, it would not generate a fraction of the attention—and hatred—that is generated. Israel was right in 2002—and has been proven so. And Israel is right today.

It’s the whole world that is wrong.