In 2006 Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote a column arguing “[t]he greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake.”
The argument, that Israel should not have been created as a Jewish state because the Muslim Arabs never would accept it, now is echoed by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:
It is tone-deaf to create a Jewish state in the middle of the Middle East and then behave as if it had been there for ever.”
It is, in essence, the argument made by Helen Thomas when she stated that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” and go back to Europe.
And it all plays into and is a byproduct of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s strategy to portray the end of Israel as a natural progression to correct a historical mistake:
As Iran’s leadership prepares to dispatch a Red Crescent flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its propaganda organs are spreading one message throughout the Muslim world: the Jewish state, branded by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “the Zionist stain of shame”, is heading for its inevitable destruction.
But the argument is based on a series of falsehoods.
Half of all Israelis are refugees or descendants of refugees from Muslim lands, a fact glossed over in the portrayal of Israel as a European implant.
This fight is not about Europe versus the Middle East. It is about Jew haters against Jews, as witnessed by the recent statement by the Syrian representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council:
“Israel…is a state that is built on hatred…Let me quote a song that a group of children on a school bus in Israel sing merrily as they go to school and I quote ‘With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood.'”
Cohen and Sullivan can dress it up all they want, and claim that they simply are being realistic as to the current state of affairs, not delegitimizing Israel. But the bottom line is that they are engaging in historical denial every bit as bad as that for which they blame supporters of Israel.
Israel Matzav has the history, and more, debunking the historical “mistake” theory of Israel.
The Palestinians did not exist as an identifiable national group until a few decades ago, and the land now claimed for Palestinians never was controlled by Palestinians prior to the creation of Israel. There has been a Jewish majority in Jerusalem for centuries. And so on and so on.
The falsehoods are not only national, but also personal.
I have documented how a prominent Palestinian-American law professor, and advocate for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, has created an exaggerated narrative of the loss of his ancestral home in Jerusalem. In fact, his ancestors were not indigenous to Jerusalem or any part of what now is Israel, lived in Jerusalem for only a short period of time, and left voluntarily for business reasons before the Israeli War of Independence. Yet this law professor’s family narrative forms the emotional basis for his cottage industry of articles about the loss of Palestine to the Israelis, which are posted and re-posted on the blogs of “peace groups” of the type which organized the Gaza flotilla.
Jordan was created out of whole cloth. Almost all borders in the Middle East were artificial creations of European colonial empires, and ethnic minorities rule numerous countries, such as Jordan and Syria.
In this region of artificial national boundaries, of nations run by ethnic minorities, of displaced Muslims and Jews, why is it that only the Jewish state run by the Jewish majority is the mistake?
Because that is how it’s being done in the Salons and Atlantics of the world, among columnists and bloggers who are so worn down by the unrelenting hatred of the Jews in the Middle East that they now blame the victim.
Taylor Marsh wrote in response to Sullivan’s post, the Israelis “brought it on themselves” by being too aggressive in self-defense.
It is so much easier to ask Israel to yield, to pull back, to give in and give up, than it is to face up to the premeditated, unrelenting war against the Jews.
That is what is has come to.
Update: Rick Moran, Israel’s Critics and Hollow Lies:
What is it you would have the Israeli government do to protect itself?
Indeed, what marks the critic of Israeli policy is a disconnect between the perilous reality of Israel’s exposed position vis-a-vis the Palestinians and those nations that support them. They hold a pie-in-the-sky belief that if Israel would only remove the irritants the Palestinians suffer on a daily basis, that the animosity felt by Israel’s enemies would magically disappear.
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Related:
Malmö Syndrome
Law Professor Continues His Personal Intifada
What If Palestinians Were Settlers?
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Comments
Golda Meir said that the world loved the Jews when they were massacred and hates the Jew for surviving. But that she would rather be alive and hated then dead and loved. Me too.
The only mistake that was made in creating Israel is that the world turned a blind eye to Arab anti-semitism and continual attemtps at genocide. I suppose Sully and Cohen will also blame women for rape as well. I suggest they go join their Islamists friends. Oh wait they can't, ones gay and would be horrifically murdered, the other is a Jew and would have his head sawed off. So much for those morons.
The problem is larger than just Israel. Israel is just the canary in the coal mine.
Islam–and Arabs are the most fanatic of the bunch–believes that no lands controlled by Islam should ever by taken back by any other religion. Israel, by virtue of being right in the middle of lands conquered by Arabs in the 7th century AD, is the most prominent of these lands.
Furthermore, Islam is a xenophobic and intolerant religion (as well as being misogynist and homophobic) that has yet to come to its own reformation, let alone Enlightenment. Tolerance in Islam is a duplicitous thing–it only lasts until the infidel is converted, enslaved, or killed.
What we really face is a war of world scale proportions on these barbarians. Just because they are barbarians doesn't mean they are unable to bring down civilization–particularly if civilization refuses to defend itself. Islam in general needs to be brought–forcibly if needed–into the 21st century. Or eliminated as a viable force.
But the West doesn't see it that way. Too many think appeasement of the fanatics in this religion as the way to avoid conflict. They are wrong, but that won't do Israel any good.
"[t]he greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that [it was a mistake to bring blacks to America."
"It is tone-deaf to [bring blacks to America] and then behave as if [they] had been there for ever."
Besides the fact that the underlying facts are wrong, I just don't understand this logic. They seem to only use it against Jews. It's very selective.
Great post and some good comments. This all boils down to the lack of spine and courage that the "baby boomer" generation suffers from. The idea of having to sacrifice anything, especially from their own personal lives, is something they avoid at all costs. It also explains our debt issues, our unfunded mandates issues. Thomas Friedman wrote a short article several weeks ago confessing this very weakness.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2010/05/09/tom-friedman-tells-the-truth-the-only-explanation-is-he-was-hit-by-a-rock-during-the-greek-riots/
Israel demands constant sacrifice. The left thinks if they give her up the radical Arabs will go away. This is a fool's dream which is already proven such by the very words of the same people who want to exterminate Jews then kill or convert all the Christians.
This is a Crusade, sadly this time only one side is fighting.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2010/06/09/here-we-go-biden-was-right-they-are-going-to-test-obamas-inner-strength/
"I am a Palestinian, but don't like the name. Palestine is a name the Romans gave Eretz Yisrael with the express purpose of infuriating defeated Jews… Why should we use a spiteful name meant to humiliate us?… Christendom inherited the name from Rome and the British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine. Local Arabs picked it up as their nation's supposed ancient name, though they couldn't even pronounce it correctly, and turned it into Filastin, a fictional entity."
Gold Meir