Getting Israel Right.

 

As the annual hate-circus known as "Israel Apartheid Week" pitches its tent again, it is incumbent on us once more to reconsider what Israel actually is.

by David Solway

Any open-minded person who has either visited Israel, kept apace of the documentary evidence, or honestly examined the tainted "bona fides" of Israel's accusers would realize that Israel has been set up as the target for what is nothing less than an illegitimate campaign of delegitimation. Orwell's Hate Week has escaped the boundaries of the novel, whose "Enemy of the People" is someone with the surname — what else? — Goldstein. (Oddly, the enemy of the Jewish people is someone with the surname Goldstone.) And as Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate period instituted by the Party, "Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room."

Watch the YouTube video of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren addressing a group of students at UC Irvine for real-world confirmation.

A triple alliance comprising leftist ideology, Islamic anti-Semitism, and vast commercial interests has coalesced into an aggressive bloc of anti-Zionist calumniators and malevolent defamers of the one genuine democracy in the Middle East. The international left sees Israel as a colonial outpost of the detested United States and a resolute defender of the national patriotic spirit which the left believes is obsolete. Islam continues to prosecute its 1400-year war against the Jews. And powerful economic interests are concerned with opening export markets and preserving and expanding their ties with the oil-rich Muslim states — it truly is all about oil: "Arab oil is thicker than Jewish blood," Robin Shepherd pointedly writes in his important new book, A State Beyond the Pale.

The favored strategy to reduce Israel to a pariah state and thrust it beyond the international pale operates via what Hitler and Goebbels called "the big lie," manifest fictions and canards reiterated often enough to lodge in the public mind as indisputable verities. In Goebbels' words, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The promulgation of sophistries is quite extraordinary. As in the 1930s, the "big lie" has become a palpable and ubiquitous public institution. "Latter-day anti-Semitism," as Shepherd puts it, is "a new organizing force in world politics."

Thus Israel is repeatedly condemned as an apartheid state when the truth of the matter is that Israel is a diverse, multicultural country whose Arab citizens are equal before the law, have the vote and elect representatives to the Knesset, enjoy freedom of worship, and count disproportionately large numbers in Israeli universities. Even lefty columnist Larry Derfner, no friend to Zionism, acknowledges that "another brightly-lit sign that Israeli Arabs aren't living under anything like apartheid is their wall-to-wall opposition to becoming citizens of a Palestinian state." Check! The apartheid slander would be accurate, ironically, were it levied against Muslim nations where Jews and Christians are systematically persecuted.

The situation for Jews and Israel is plainly more precarious in Europe than it is here. One gets the distinct impression that significant elements in the European Union have already arrived at a covert decision to sacrifice Israel on the composite altar of political ideology and economic profit, having, as Bat Ye'or has meticulously recorded, established a de facto entente with the Islamic world. They are quite ready to let Israel go, frequently vote with the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the United Nations, fund adversarial NGOs, and impeach Israeli officials as war criminals. (Although, to give them their due, they might shed a few crocodile tears if Iran carried out its threat to obliterate Israel.)

One detects similar worrying signs in the behavior of the current American administration which came down hard on Israel, forcing a building freeze in long-standing Israeli communities and demanding Israeli concessions to a Palestinian negotiating team that was (and is) not prepared to reciprocate. And probably a healthy, or rather, unhealthy, majority of many Western populations — certainly the case in Europe — would have little objection to the disappearance of the Jewish state, oblivious of the extent to which they are Israel's beneficiaries.

This last statement might appear counter-intuitive but a closer look at this small, beleaguered, and heroic nation will provide ample justification for it. Readers who are familiar with either my Hear, O Israel!, George Gilder's The Israel Test, or Dan Senor and Saul Singer's Start-Up Nation (with its cheeky, implicit, and very-Jewish pun on "upstart nation") are no doubt already in the know. Otherwise, what follows are a few facts they should be aware of.

The Israeli contribution to the modern, high-tech world is second only to that of the United States and closing rapidly. Its major exports derive from the fields of advanced cybernetics, desalination projects, hydrology, energy technology, productive agricultural methods, and life-saving medical technology, in all of which it is among the world's recognized leaders.

Windows XP and Microsoft Office were developed in Israel. Virus protection software and firewalls, cell phones, voice mail, instant messaging devices, Intel microchips, and Pentium microprocessors were also developed in Israel. Google runs on Israeli search algorithms and Google's new super-search algorithm, Orion, launched on March 24, 2009, was developed by an Israeli doctoral student, Ori Allon. One of Israel's newest technological breakthroughs involves the mobile Internet, where it is once again a global forerunner. The multi-jacketed Modu cell phone, which has made the Guinness World Records, has brought user functionality to a new level, unmatched anywhere in the world. The first wireless LAN (Local Area Network) was developed in Israel. Indeed, Israel is fast becoming the new Silicon Valley.

It doesn't stop there. Whether it is the Israeli pharmaceutical company, Teva, the world's foremost supplier of antibiotic medicines, including its "flagship drug" Copaxone treating multiple Sclerosis; or the Weizmann Institute's bioinformatics computer project that will enable Eastern Europe and Asia to access the online molecular biology resource network, which even UNESCO has singled out for praise; or Tel Aviv University's research into microRNA molecules that regulate gene expression and protein production, promising a cure for deafness, whether age-related or genetic; or the recently developed biomarker, called placental protein 13 (PP13), a pre-diagnostic for various severe fetal diseases; or the world's tiniest medical video camera developed by two Israeli companies, Medigus and Tower Semiconductor, to be used for disposable endoscopes; or the Arava Power Company, one of the most advanced solar enterprises in the world, working towards the preparation of large-scale megawatt fields, an exportable technology; or Israel's Epcon, a world pioneer in wind-turbine technology; or Ormat Technologies opening up the field of geothermal energy, operating eleven plants in five countries, and presently constructing a 340-megawatt geothermal power project in Indonesia; or the world's first hybrid solarized gas turbine power station which runs on solar energy by day and biofuel by night, in process of assembly by the AORA company; or the fact that Israel is now working toward the development of an environment-friendly electric car network for which Israel Corp, a pace-setter in "green electricity," will supply the power, a venture called Project Better Place; or Israel's state-of-the-art desalination, drip-irrigation and water technology programs that benefit much of the world, including its Arab neighbor, Jordan — considering all these and more, a boycott against Israel would be something of a catastrophe for many countries. And I am only skimming the surface.

Meanwhile, the abominations proliferate: Israel Apartheid Weeks, boycott movements, lopsided UN resolutions, Walts and Mearsheimers galore, public anti-Israel demonstrations, the machinations of the Human Rights industry, Middle East departments manured with Arab money, current American diplomacy, mini-pogroms throughout western Europe, Holocaust memorial and cemetery desecrations, synagogue arsons, blood libels, and shrill denunciations of Israeli efforts at self-defense. Those who denigrate Israel — and that includes many diasporite Jews and many leftist, post-Zionist, revisionist Israelis — are living in a state of false consciousness or outright bigotry. Much that they take for granted in their advanced lifestyles would disappear along with Israel if they had their way. But bad faith never troubled a true believer.

 

 

David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.