The 'good people' and the Jews - Giulio Meotti

by Giulio Meotti

By ceaselessly delegitimizing, boycotting, criticizing Israel, the “good people” are justifying an additional step, one in which Israel will disappear.

The “good people” feel it is natural, even logical and just, that Israel accept the offenses launched on its territory and people. And there are many offenses: the terror attacks, the diplomatic attacks and the attacks on Israel’s legitimacy.

The Jewish State is not really considered sovereign: Jews are only guests of history. “The Gaza Strip” and the “West Bank” have become the set of a Palestinian TV production about the “Israeli repression”. This is the paradox of public opinion: anti-Semitism is most intense among the “good people”, the media, the NGOs, the bureaucratic machine, the churches. The fate of Gilad Shalit never raised one tenth of the concern these “good people” feel for the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. Why?

By ceaselessly delegitimizing, boycotting, criticizing Israel, the “good people” are justifying an additional step, one in which Israel will disappear.

Challenging the very existence of the State of Israel, through the daily war waged on its borders, is equivalent to accusing all the Jewish people because Israel embodies, in fact, the future of the Jews as a people. Apart from the prosperous but assimilated United States’ Jewish community, a demographically and politically relevant Jewish life is impossible today in the Diaspora.

That is why “Zionism” has become a code word for evil. In Prague, in 1952, during the “Slansky trial,” for the first time, Israel’s enemies made use of that word “Zionist” in a derogatory, demonic sense. The Communists used it to murder some of his men (Jews and non-Jews). Otto Sling confessed that he had never been able liberate himself from the evil Jewish influence. Instead of Slansky, today's anti-Semites accuse the State of Israel.

Seventeen years later, in the summer of 1969, Europe saw the first manifestation of this new form of hatred. A conference was planned by the Ambassador of Israel in Bonn, Asher Ben-Natan, in the auditorium of the University of Frankfurt. Ben-Natan was an Austrian Jew who was to represent Israel on German soil. He was to speak on the subject “Peace in the Middle East”, but he was prevented from speaking. Two thousand students insulted the ambassador. Manifestations of intolerance began at the arrival of Ben-Natan. When the diplomat entered the hall, most of the young people welcomed him with slogans like “Down with the occupation,” “Zionists out of Palestine” and “Nazis away from Germany”.

Three times, between late June and early July of that year, groups of students prevented Ben-Natan from speaking - in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Nuremberg. The very same universities from whence the Nazi ideologues had declaimed the need to get rid of all the Jews for the benefit of Germany. In a moment of relative calm, Israel’s ambassador was able to pronounce one sentence: “If you can prevent the discussion today, this will be a historical event. The same thing in fact took place in Germany exactly 34 years ago”.

Since then, the desired effect of hatred and isolation of Israel in international public opinion has been easily obtained: how many professors, journalists and intellectuals today have the courage and integrity to stand up for Israel?

The “good people” can not reconcile themselves to Israel’s existence. And they show it by refusing to accept that there is a deep connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel.

It is the claim stated by Gilles Deleuze, a famous intellectual and French scholar who reached worldwide fame in 1972 when he wrote the “Anti Oedipus”, a critique of dogmatism in psychoanalysis that became a bestseller. Destined to be one of the masters of ‘68, Deleuze wrote an essay for the “Revue d’études palestiniennes”, in which he explained that “Israel has never hidden its goal, creating a vacuum in the Palestinian territory”. And again: “In many ways the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel”.

From Jaffa to Amona, there is no deception more lethal than that of denying that Israel has roots in its land. It is easier to push the Jews into the Mediterranean.


Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20152

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