Today the Washington Post reports Israel’s feeling of isolation is becoming more pronounced:
Israel is no stranger to feelings of isolation. It weathered years of Cold War-era Arab and Soviet hostility. Books have been written about the United Nations’ perceived antagonism toward the Jewish state. A well-known decades-old song, “The Whole World Is Against Us,” is invoked today by Israelis who argue that no matter what the country does, it will be shunned.
The feeling has become more pronounced in recent weeks. With the peace process stalled, the international community turning a skeptical eye toward Israeli shows of force and pro-Palestinian groups eager to jump on the nation’s missteps, the stage was set for a furious reaction when commandos killed nine activists aboard a Turkish aid ship heading for Gaza on May 31. Since then, Israelis have engaged in a heated national conversation about how and why the country has become so isolated.
First of all, if after all that is known, Janine Zacharia still refers to those killed on the Mavi Marmara as “activists,” that demonstrates a significant part of the problem. They were an organized group who had decided to throw the Jews into the sea. I think, by now, that referring to the “activists” as “terrorists” is fully justified. The failure to do so is an act of willful misrepresentation.
So too is this:
U.S. diplomats worked with special envoy Tony Blair to pressure Israel to revamp its Gaza policy and limit its blockade to weapons and related material. The United States also lobbied to allow more construction materials into the territory, which is ruled by the Islamist Hamas group. Rather than parrot the Israeli language that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, U.S. officials described the situation there as “unsustainable and unacceptable.”
But when my eyes tell me that there’s plenty of food in Gaza and it’s been reported that even during the full blockade that the price of cement fell, the “unsustainable and unacceptable” description of the situation is willful misrepresentation.
Rather that “parroting the Israeli language” U.S. officials adopted the propaganda of Hamas.
So yes, Israelis have good reason for feeling isolated. It’s been nearly seventeen years since Israel legitimized the PLO and signed the Oslo Accords. Israel has withdrawn from most Palestinian population areas in Judea and Samaria and totally from Gaza. For its troubles Israel has suffered several organized terror campaigns (in early 1996, from 2000 – 2003, including one from Hezbollah in the north and in 2008), and yet continued to seek peace. The Palestinians, to this day, even the moderates, still refuse to acknowledge Israel’s legitimacy and yet the Western world finds fault primarily with Israel as Shelby Steele wrote yesterday (via memeorandum)
In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians—and by implication the broader Muslim world—into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace.
And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world’s great problems today—whether in the suburbs of Paris and London, or in Kabul and Karachi, or in Queens, N.Y., and Gaza. The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West. This is the problem we in the West have no easy solution to, and we scapegoat Israel—admonish it to behave better—so as not to feel helpless. We see our own vulnerability there.
And the West – as described by Mr. Steele – is abetted by reporters like Janine Zacharia who are willing to suppress Israel’s goodness and present Israel as flawed if not as the root cause of the violence and suffering in the Middle East.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
