Talking to Israel’s critics
Prof. Shlomo Avineri, a former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and a leading political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, wrings his hands in Haaretz about the growing rift between Israel and the Diaspora.
Not that Diaspora Jews have any right whatsoever to tell Israel what to do, Avineri writes, but now even Diaspora Zionists are fed up with Israel.
What's going on? The answer is simple but painful. For the first time we have a government that's succeeding, in its statements more than its actions (since the government has not done all that much ), in causing the rest of the world to hate us...
This isolation from other countries worries Israel's friends and is responsible for the rift with Diaspora Jews, hence Israel is losing its inimitable voice as the representative of the Jewish public. One of the most important achievements of Zionism is being taken away from us.In light of the trend, outrage and condemnation are not enough. Another path is open: trying to talk to Israel's critics. Not by pulling rank or patronizing or accusing them of being self-hating Jews, and not by making do with self-righteousness and fiery speeches at an AIPAC conference - but by holding genuine dialogue.
Only one public figure can initiate a dialogue like this: President Shimon Peres. Precisely because Peres lacks formal political authority, both he and the presidency itself have the ethical authority to attempt to close the fissures and initiate an international Jewish conference on Israel-Diaspora relations.
I have not deluded myself into thinking that each side will convince the other, but they should be sitting around a table in Jerusalem to listen to each other instead of attacking each other, to the joy of Israel's enemies. Perhaps the government will recognize that it also has a role to play in the estrangement, and perhaps the critics will see that reality is slightly more complex than they realize.
It isn't simple, but a situation in which Jews for whom Israel is a significant part of their lives feel alienated from the state of the Jews is simply intolerable - from an Israeli perspective as well as a Jewish one.
Full column here.
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Avineri has a very short memory. Remember the extraordinarily hostile European reaction to Israel’s acting in self-defense against thousands of Gaza rockets, during Israel’s previous government led by the Labor and Kadimah parties? Remember the general lack of sympathy shown by Europe to Israel’s self-defense Lebanon campaign against Hezbollah rockets and terrorism in 2007, when again Netanyahu was not Prime Minister? Remember the world’s reception of Ariel Sharon, back in 2001, when he was blamed by Arafat for Arafat’s instigation of the Intifada, and the world fell into line with Arafat again after having previously almost abandoned him for his torpedoing the Camp David peace offer of 2000? Remember the non-"genocidial massacre” of Jenin, in 2001, with Sharon portrayed even on the covers of The Guardian and The Economist as a Nazi child-eating fiend, all of this really a creation of leftist-Palestinian propaganda that again the world bought holus-bolus, until the alleged “massacre” was disproved by a U.N. investigative commission? For that matter, remember the long and consistent record of European cowering to Muslim extremist regimes and Palestinian demonizations of Israel, extending over decades? Remember the eager way leftists in Europe adopted rabid anti-Zionism after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, following the furious defamations unleased at the time in the U.N. and on the world stage by the Soviet Union?
Where has the supposedly learned academic Avineri been over the past six decades?
It is well-known that he is a leftist himself, and therefore unsympathetic to right-center political figures as such. Netanyahu is therefore being blamed by him in scapegoating fashion for things completely unrelated to him. The problem does not lie with Netanyahu, who has an overwhelming majority of Israel’s population solidly behind him. If anything, the problem lies with the utter failure of the leftist peace opium-dreams of the past, and the intransigent refusal to accept peace or work towards it by the Palestinians and Muslims world-wide. But Avineri would never want to admit that, any more than Europe would. Pipe dreams lead to scapegoating and self-harming, blaming one’s own side for the failures caused by the vicious other side.
It is noticeable that Brith Shalom, the Yishuv-period ancestor to the current discredited Peace Now (with which Avineri is so associated), was a group of intellectuals who simply could not find any Arab intellectuals ready to sit down with them or join their group. Brith Shalom, adamantly unwilling to admit Arabs were to blame for any of their violence and intransigence, sought to ignore this inability to find Arab interlocutors, and instead blamed the Yishuv leadership for the ongoing terrorism and conflict. This has remained the strategy, if you can call it that, of Peace Now types up to this day. Abbas refuses even to sit down with Netanyahu in peace negotiations? It is due to Netanyahu’s alleged intransigence and alleged refusal to accept a 2-state solution (both false claims), never Abba’s. Etc.
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Nelson Magedman
05/12/10 04:59 AM
I no longer stand and recite the Kaddish D’Rabbanum. The Rabbis of today do not have the qualities of the ancient sages of Jewish learning and in my opinion they only want to protect their turf. Go ask Hitler “who is a Jew? I do not object to standards that are realistically set; however, where only one group or person sets the standard, then there is no fairness.