Last week, the Western media focused on Israel’s 60 years as a nation. They accentuated the positives - business & technology development, growth rate, wealth, democracy – and either looked the other way or made light of its nuclear weapons of mass destruction, the Apartheid Wall that symbolizes occupation, its contemptuous disregard of UN resolutions and its discriminatory treatment of its Arab citizens and Palestinians under its occupation.
Let me focus on one editorial by the National Post. It ran a week-long series of Israel at 60. It makes no bones to hide it far right orientation and its neoconzix leanings. Since it is competing for survival in Canada’s toughest newspaper market and is behind the leading Toronto Star and the Sun, it tried to play fair and gave op-ed space to Jeet Heer and Benny Morris who tried to portray the other reality of Israel. But at the same time it “blared horns” and beat a loud trumpet to tell itself and its readership that it does not agree with Mr. Heer’s views.
At the culmination of this week, it ran an editorial wondering what would be a “fitting” birthday gift to Israel. It railed against those who oppose Israel branding them neurotic, leftists, Marxists and (invoking Godwin) anti-Semites:
Even in the West, it has become intellectually fashionable in left-wing circles to regard Israel as a mistake…Pundits and politicians…cast the Jewish state as a nation conceived in "original sin," and perpetuated as an "apartheid" society. As George Jonas, David Frum and Michael Coren noted in their contributions to our series, these accusations have no basis. At best, they represent the projected neuroses of self-loathing Western intellectuals who are still guilt-ridden over their own ancestors' colonial sins, and still influenced by Marx's toxic doctrines of class struggle. At worst, they are a politicized expression of crass antisemitism. Excising such intellectual bigotry from our societies would make a fitting (if belated) gift in commemoration of 60 years of Israeli survival.
This is the state that drove 700,000 inhabitants out, obliterating villages and cities (Deir Yassin is no longer on the physical map), refusing reparations or the law of return for those driven out, building the wall, ghettoizing and Bantustising what remains of the West Bank, dividing families and their homes and lands.
Citing Rachel Corrie and Muhammed al Durrah, it glides over by suggesting “the Israeli military makes mistakes during the execution of counter terrorist operations.” And then this classic defense of these cold blooded killings – “But what Western fighting force does not?”
Criticizing Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism. States do not exist without an “official” map. Israel has to exist. Its citizens have a right to live in peace and harmony within its defined borders. They forget that to ensure this its neighbors should also have the same rights.
Israel, Palestinians and other states in their neighborhood should come out of knee-jerkism and refrain from the tiresome blame game and extend guaranteed human rights to every citizen in their states.
Both Israel and Palestinians have to demonstrate more effectively that they want to live in peace and do not want to kill, maim, expel from their land. It is for them to deliberate and decide if this should come under One State of Two State solution.
The world should help them reach this decision but should not refrain to remind Israel that it should curb its policies of occupation, subjugation, ethnic cleansing, and terrorising.
We should encourage initiatives that will let all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace, with dignity, justice and guaranteed fundamental human rights in secure borders, as enshrined in the various UN resolutions.
To remove misgivings, doubts and suspicions, international bodies including the UN, the European Union, OIC should be enlisted to provide guarantees. Peace in the region is not to be equated with death for the state of Israel.
