(This
article was published in Digital Journal in 2011. Sadly, it is still true
today. The title was borrowed from a dismissive UK official's comment at a dinner-table talk.)
If
a green-eyed Martian landed at the United Nation building, he would report back
to Mars about the wonderful countries populating Planet Earth. Specifically, his
account might describe the block of fifty-six Muslim nations entrusted in
making this planet a peaceful habitat for all humans: Lebanon is on the
Security Council, Libya on the Human Rights Council, Sudan on the Commission of
Human Rights, Egypt and Pakistan on Economic and Social Council, Tunisia and Indonesia
on Population Council, and Iran appointed to the Commission on the Status of
Women.
But then, he would report
about that little pesky country that causes so much trouble. Although humans on
Planet Earth are grouped into hundreds of countries, half of all the United
Nation’s resolutions have been condemning that pesky Israel, yet she would not be
humbled. Among all its neighbors, she is the only one that permits her citizens
to sue their government, her press is free to criticize her, and women are
equal under the law. In fact, she is the only country where “honor killing”—the
neighbors’ family values—is outlawed.
Anti-Israel winds have been
blowing and gathering force around the globe to the point that it is
politically correct to spread misinformation and outright lies. From the academia,
to polite society, Liberal circles and the press, it is politically correct to
demonize Israel
and to apply a multitude of double standards when setting her apart from either
civilized nations or her supposed victims, the Palestinians. It is politically
correct to replace facts with hate-filled narrative.
How do you know when criticism
of Israel
is anti-Semitism? Nathan Sharansky offers the simple 3D test: Double Standards,
Demonization, Delegitimization.
Double standard: Over 30 hot spots of human misery can be found around the globe.
Yet those with bleeding hearts for human suffering focus on one that is very low
on this list while ignoring the heinous trafficking of children in Southeast
Asia, the mass rape of women in Africa, the murders of civilians under military
regimes in South America, and the targeted persecution, expulsion and killing of
Christians in Muslim countries.
Most important, they also
ignore the root causes of the Palestinians’ suffering:
- The Arab League nations refused to
accept the partition plan of 1947 and instead declared a war on the nascent
Israeli state, creating the Arab refugee problem.
- After World War II, over ten million
European refugees and 750,000 Jews from Arab countries have been settled.
Arab nations have steadfastly refused to help or absorb Palestinian
refugees, then also numbering 750,000.
- Today, Lebanon still denies Palestinians
any basic rights, from owning real estate to holding over fifty types of jobs,
including profession such as doctors and lawyers. Children of Palestinian
refugees are denied public education.
- Egypt expels them from its midst.
- King Hussein of Jordan, whose
constituency’s majority is Palestinian, massacred 10,000 of them in Black September—by far more killed than Israel has
ever been accountable for, which was in response to attacks on her
citizens.
- For decades, more Palestinians kill
one another each year than in any Israeli military action. Their Fatah and
the Hamas are arch enemies, and their disputes are being resolved weekly
with blood shed.
- Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were entitled to Israeli
citizenship if they married an Israeli citizen, or reunited with their
families inside the country. (Israel had to halt this
practice when it was proven that many suicide bombers gained an Israeli ID
card under the auspice of family reunification.) Not so in Arab countries;
most impose severe travel restrictions on Palestinians—often denying them
entry under any circumstances.
- Billions of Euros donated by European
countries for Palestinian territories’ development show up either as
mansions right in the heart of Gaza or in Swiss banks of the Palestinian
elite.
- The Palestinian Authority has full and
exclusive rule over the populated areas of the West
Bank, including security. Israeli military is not present
inside Palestinian towns.
- In a Democratic election supervised by
former US president
Jimmy Carter, citizens of Gaza
elected Hamas, a group listed in US-terror list, that now brutally
suppresses them.
- Hamas uses civilians as "human
shields,” placing women and children in harm's way—especially in those
areas from which they launch rockets into Israel—thus deliberately creating
civilian Palestinian casualties.
Focusing
on Israel’s “oppression” as the cause for the suffering of the Palestinians rather
than on the Arab countries that actually created the refugee problem and have exploited
it ever since—along with the brutal rule of the Palestinians’ own elected
ruling party—is nothing more than demagoguery, bigotry and cynicism. Israel
merely controls its own borders. She has only blocked Palestinians’ free entrance
since 2001 rise of the intifada violence and subsequent thousands of terror
acts against her population. Even today, each year over 180,000 Palestinians are treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel has never blocked the supply of
electricity, water, phone services or the movement of food and medical supply
trucks into Gaza.
The moment that the shower of thousands
of Hamas rocket attacks upon Israeli towns ceases, Israel will reopen the borders and
will share her knowledge and progress with the Palestinians—as she did before. Prior to the 2001 intifada, the International Monetary Fund reported that per capita income
in Gaza and the West Bank was the highest in
the Arab world because Palestinian workers were employed in Israel
and enjoyed minimum legal pay and other benefits guaranteed by law.
It is important to note that the
Palestinians’ misery is not total and complete. There is no humanitarian crisis
as anti-Israel propaganda claims. Photographs shown in the media omit Gaza’s new shopping mall, modern office buildings, markets filled with produce, neighborhoods of villas, and beaches
crowded with vacationing families.
Demonization: From cartoons to U.N. resolutions, it is the ultimate
anti-Semitism to continually compare Israel to Nazism. Zionism means the
right of Jewish people for their homeland in the land of Zion.
It is anti-Semitism to disparage the word or to use the name Zionist to mean
evil.
·
No
Israeli military campaign has ever deliberately targeted civilians.
·
Israeli
soldiers do not rape Palestinian women.
·
In Haiti after the earthquake, Israel was the first country to set
up operating rooms whose goals was not the harvesting of organs.
·
Israel cannot send sharks to the beaches of Egypt
as the Egyptian government claimed.
·
Israel is the only country in modern times that
has never bombed enemy capitols in retaliation for bombs dropped upon her own
civilians.
·
It is
demonization to compare Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz.
·
Israel constitutes less than 1 per cent of the
land mass of the Middle East, and it is demonization
to position her as the cause of all the region’s myriad problems.
·
It is
demonization to call Israel
an “apartheid” country.
o Israel has an Arab population of one
million (twenty per cent of the population) that are full citizens and do not
live as Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority.
o As citizens of the State of Israel, they
are the only Arabs in the Middle East living in
democracy with representation in the parliament.
o Due to medical care and social benefits, these
Israeli-Arabs’ life expectancy is the highest and infant mortality the lowest in
the Arab world.
o Arabic is one of two official languages of Israel.
o Arabs serve in the Knesset, representing
their people, are professors in Israel’s universities, and work in the
professional fields, especially as doctors and pharmacists.
Perpetuating lies about the Israel
is nothing more than demonizing a democratic country that has shown respect to its
citizens of all nationalities and reverence for their religious institutions.
With such double
standard and demonizing, the route to delegitimization of Israel is short:
In November 2010, the
UN's cultural body, UNESCO, recognized two ancient Jewish sites, Rachel’s
Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—as
“Palestinian,” thus severing Jewish history from its people. This farce is
a delegitimization of not just Israel as a state, but more so
of the Jews and their history. A nation which negotiates away her cradle
of history is giving away her future.
Yet, there are people who
consider themselves fair-minded while willing to erase a nation’s history
and replace it with myths.
When the Ottoman Empire came to an end in 1918, forty
countries were formed in its collapse. Only one of them, Israel— mandated by The League
of Nations as a “homeland for the Jews” and since then truncated to a fraction
of its originally mandated size—is being put again into question. On the
other hand, Palestinian nationalism was not even a contender in 1918—or
any time before 1967. Now, those who call themselves Palestinians—a name
that used to indicate the Jews in the land—claim to have lived there all
along.
Is it really so?
In 1867, Mark Twain described the land he visited as "…dismal scenery …It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land… Palestine is desolate and
unlovely…."
- Muhammad never set foot in Jerusalem or in the Land of Israel.
- Jerusalem was never a capital of any Arab
entity.
- Jerusalem was not mentioned in the 1964 PLO's
Covenant.
- The “liberation of Palestine”
only became a cause after the 1967 war, during which Israel displaced Amman's
rule in the West Bank and Cairo's in Gaza.
- Arabs never established a Palestinian
state or advocated one prior to the Six-Day War in 1967.
And Jerusalem?
The 1900 census listed the city’s population at 46,500; 28,200
Jews, 8,760 Christians, 8,600 Muslims. Muslims were never a majority in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem
was never a Muslim holy site. Demanding it as a capital is a late 20th
century invention designed to both delegitimize Israel
and to anchor Palestinian claim to all of Israel.
And finally, the argument of
occupation: Israel,
so goes popular anti-Israel fallacy, should withdraw from land it occupies
illegally. Leaving aside the issue of wars launched by the Arab countries which
they lost, thus losing the land to Israel, their “illegal” assertion
quotes a distorted U.N. resolution 242.
Passed in 1967, UN Resolution 242 calls for Israel to return
"territories" captured during its defensive war of 1967. The words
"all" and "the" were proposed by those who advocated a
complete return, but the U.S.
and Great Britain,
which opposed that view, prevailed. More importantly, even partial return of
captured territories is conditioned in resolution 242 on "termination of
all claims of belligerency" and "acknowledgment of the sovereignty… of
every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and
recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."
Resolution 242 does not
mention the rights of non-states, such as the Palestinian Authority, Hamas or
Hezbollah, the latter two of which do not accept the conditions of the
resolution. It is unequivocally wrong for the Security Council retroactively to
rewrite Resolution 242, which is the foundation for a two-state solution—Israel and Palestine—forty-four
years after it was enacted.
Being pro-Palestinian does not
mean to be anti-Israel. Israel
has never objected to the creation of a Palestinian state. It agreed to it in
1947, 56, 73, 93 and in every talk in between and since. Being pro-Palestinian
means supporting a free, democratic Palestinian state that does not teach its
children to hate and would never use its most vulnerable citizens as human
shields.
However, rather of accepting
the two-state solution, the Palestinian charter that called for the destruction
of Israel
was never reversed, even after the agreed-upon 1993 Oslo Accord. Instead, several
Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas, are forging conceptual and tactical
bonds with al-Qaeda.
What government around the
globe is expected to passively render its population vulnerable to
mass-slaughter? Would we, in the United States, sit quietly by as
rockets rained down upon American cities from terrorist sanctuaries outside our
southern borders?
International law is not a
suicide pact. Yet that is what the calls for boycott and divestiture are, which
makes them anti-Semitic to the core. Interestingly, self-servingly, the people
and institutions demanding to punish Israel for defending herself by
boycotting her products do not divest themselves from their own computers, cell
phones or voice mail that run on Israeli chips. They would not give up on using
banking systems that run on Israeli communication technologies, nor do they
stop treating their families to medical care for cancer, Alzheimer, or multiple
sclerosis due to research done by Israeli scientists and doctors.
After learning the facts, the
green-eyed Martian will report to Mars that as a democracy, Israel thrives on criticism. She
has the tools and institutions that permit and support critique and incorporate
the lessons into her life—she has one of the strongest supreme court in the
world with an impeccable record of remedying social, political, economic and
even military ills.
Criticism of Israel should
be comparable, contextual, constructive. It should also give credence to the Israel’s
extraordinary progress these past 63 years, (now 75 years) starting from ground
zero, being inundated by wars and the subject of scorn by a world tolerant of the
murder of Jews—and ready to blame them for their own demise.
# # #
Talia Carner's updated note: A year ago, in September 2022, I travelled to the area around Gaza, and looked over Gaza City. It is not the "open jail" or "concentration camp" that is pushed by propaganda. Here is a photo of city filled with high rises, office buildings, residential neighborhood, and lots of villas. (It is spread far to the right and left of this photo.) It is not as crowded as some other cities, especially in the Arab world, where some cities (like half of Amman in Jordan) don't even have running water.
 |
| Gaza City along the Mediterenean |
Author Talia Carner’s next novel, THE BOY WITH THE STAR TATTOO will be published by HarperCollins in February
2024. www.TaliaCarner.com
# # #
The above article was culled from various sources, among them:
Myths and
Facts: http://mythsandfacts.org/
Middle East Forum: http://www.meforum.org/
The Israel
Project: http://www.theisraelproject.org
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: http://www.jcpa.org
Jewish Virtual Library- Modern History: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewhist1.html
Honest Reporting: http://honestreporting.com/
World Jewish Congress: http://worldjewishcongress.org/
CAMERA: http://www.camera.org/
Canadian Institute for Jewish Research:
http://www.isranet.org/
Zionist Organization of America: http://www.zoa.org/
Stand With Us: http://standwithus.com/
Anti-Defamation League: http://www.adl.org
American Jewish Committee: http://www.ajc.org/
Middle East and Terrorism: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/
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