by Caroline B. Glick
The problem with politics of hate is that hate is a hard habit to break.
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| Israelis block the Ayalon Highway and clash with police in Tel Aviv,
during a protest calling for the release of Israelis held hostage by
Hamas terrorists in Gaza on Sept. 1, 2024. Photo by Tomer
Neuberg/Flash90. |
Sept. 13, 1993 was the day Israel’s ruling
class abandoned Zionism. That day, when then prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin stood in the White House Rose Garden and officially recognized the
Palestine Liberation Organization—to the rapturous applause of his
supporters back home—was the moment Israel’s elite collectively
abandoned their attachment to their nation.
The PLO was many things. It was a
terrorist organization. It was the architect of modern terrorism,
including airline hijacking, kidnapping, the murder of families, the
mass murder of children, the assassination of diplomats.
The PLO trained everyone from Khomeini’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Japanese Red Army, the Baader
Meinhof Gang and the Black Panthers. It brought terrorists from every
ideological line together and forged them into a revolutionary
conglomerate united in their desire to destroy the United States, the
West, the Jews and their state, Israel.
The PLO was a political warfare group. It
brought genocidal Jew hatred to the West’s radical left. It used the
media to romanticize barbarous acts of mass murder and brutal torture as
it carried them out.
Through its Western lackies, barely 20
years after the Holocaust the PLO was able to reinstate Jew hatred as a
tool for political mobilization and a major cultural force. Through its
propaganda operations, the PLO convinced ignorant young people with
guilty consciences that their Nazi parents were really victims. Zionism
was demonized as a new Nazism—worse than the first one. And in 1975, 30
years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the U.N. General Assembly
passed Resolution 3374, which designated Zionism a form of racism.
Zionism is often defined as the Jewish
national liberation movement. And that is true enough, but that
definition obfuscates more than it reveals. Zionism is simply Judaism.
Judaism has three foundations—the Torah,
the nation of Israel and the land of Israel. There have been centuries
of campaigns to forcibly convert the Jews to other faiths, replete with
mass burnings of sacred books aimed at wiping out the Torah and
annihilating Jews by physically destroying their sacred texts and
spiritually capturing them through forced renunciation of their faith.
Campaigns to annihilate the Jewish
people—whether through genocide, mass expulsions, the Napoleonic code or
Communist dictates that required Jews to renounce their national
attachment to one another—aimed at disappearing the Jews by either
physically destroying them or forcing them to reject the relevance of
their own identity.
Zionism predated both the Torah and the
people of Israel. Judaism began the moment that God told Abraham to
leave the land of his fathers and move to the land of Israel where he
would become a nation, organized around the laws God prescribed. The
Jewish nation was born in the land of Israel. And the faith of Israel
was born there. Neither the law nor the people make sense without the
land of Israel.
And that’s the thing—each of the three foundations of the Jews are inextricably linked to the others.
The PLO had three founders—Yasser Arafat,
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the KGB. For Arafat, the PLO
was a means to inherit the mantle of the founder of Palestinian
nationalism, Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini. Husseini spearheaded the
modern jihad against the Jews and the British throughout the Arab world.
And he used antisemitism as a means to persuade the British and others
to support his efforts against the Jews even as he directed his
followers to wage war against Britain.
With the help of his Soviet sponsors,
Arafat carried out a similar political operation among Western radicals.
And like Husseini, Arafat also sought to solidify pan-Arab support for
the annihilation of Israel over the long term.
The PLO served Nasser’s purpose in two
ways. When he founded the terror group in 1964, Nasser envisioned that
the terror group would reinforce his position as the undisputed head of
the Arab world. After his stunning defeat in the Six-Day War three years
later, he viewed the PLO as a proxy force that would serve as the
avant-garde of the pan-Arab war to annihilate Israel and keep it in the
headlines while the Arabs rebuilt their forces and organized for a new
round of war.
For the Soviets, the PLO was a means to
undermine the U.S.-led West’s sense of the morality. The Jewish state
was the paradigmatic foundation of the Western nation state. The U.S.
founding fathers aspired to build a new Jerusalem in the New World,
based on God’s law and a belief in man’s inherent fallibility.
The PLO, which asserted that Israel was a
racist, colonialist outpost, was a tool to delegitimize Israel and
through it the United States and the Western world. If Israel was born
in sin, then the Bible was a lie and the United States itself had been
founded on immoral belief in nothing more than racist, European
supremacism.
As far as Israel was concerned, the PLO’s
dual terrorism and political warfare operations were geared toward
Balkanizing Israeli society. PLO surrogates and sympathizers assiduously
courted first leftist American Jews and then leftist Israeli activists
to peel them away from the vast majority of American Jews and Israelis
who recognized the insidiousness of the PLO’s political actions and the
pure evil of its terrorism. The idea was to convince them that “peace”
would reign if Israel would simply accept the legitimacy of the PLO.
These activists in turn began campaigns in
the American Jewish community, and within Israel, to demonize Israelis
who rejected the PLO as atavistic warmongers. Over time, their efforts
paid off. As the Israeli right rose to power for the first time in 1977
with the support of religious and working class, overwhelmingly
Sephardic Israelis, legitimizing the PLO increasingly became the means
to unify the left into a cohesive opposition and social class.
Given the nature, goal and modus operandi
of the PLO, at its foundation, accepting the legitimacy of the PLO meant
rejecting the legitimacy of Zionism, or of the state of the Jews. For
Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora, that translated into social and
political activism geared toward legitimizing hatred of the Israeli
communities whose members refused to attenuate their attachment to
Judaism. This was the case whether that attachment was to the
traditional Judaism of the Sephardic Jews, the ultra-Orthodoxy of the
haredim or the attachment to the land of Israel, particularly Judea and
Samaria, of the national religious community in Israel.
Rabin’s decision to accept the legitimacy
of the PLO at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993 transformed this
hateful, anti-Jewish approach to the people of Israel and their national
identity into the national strategy of the Israeli government.
In the event, it failed completely.
It failed completely for two reasons.
First, the PLO’s goal was never peace. It was always the annihilation of
Israel—all of Israel. So it could never be a true partner to any
Israeli, no matter how far to the left, who wasn’t convinced that Israel
should disappear completely. And even those had a problem. Because it
turned out that the PLO was just a gateway drug to Hamas, which wouldn’t
even pay lip service to the distinction between post-Zionist and
Zionist Jews.
The second reason it failed is because the
narrative of Israeli criminality and immorality was never true, and
most Israelis never bought it. Most Israelis also never accepted the
distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews. They never agreed that there
was something morally depraved about Zionism, or the Torah or the people
of Israel. No matter how hard the left tried, it could never get a
majority of Israelis to agree with the fundamental principle that guided
its policies and actions.
Sure, Israelis want peace. But they don’t
think they are the reason peace has eluded the Jewish state and people.
They refuse to blame themselves for the aggression and hatred directed
against their people and country.
The problem with politics of hate is that
hate is a hard habit to break. If you have been conditioned to believe
that your future is dependent on defeating the object of your hate, the
only way your opinion is likely to change is if you stop hating. Since
1993, the PLO proved over and over that it is Israel’s enemy, not its
peace partner. But accepting the truth meant accepting that the left had
brought disaster on the country, and the objects of its hatred—the Jews
who refused to renounce any aspect of their identity—had been right all
along.
In other words, accepting failure required
them to either redefine their class identity or abandon it. The left
opted to reinvent itself. It embraced the concept of “Start-Up Nation”
as a way to secure its economic and cultural power while maintaining its
detachment from the rest of society. By seizing control over the new
elixir of high-tech, the left joined the global elite, with its capitals
in Davos and Silicon Valley.
But you have to pay to enter the realm of
the new globalist elite. The overlords aspire to a post-nationalist,
internationalist form of governance. Their ideological roots are not
American capitalism. Rather, schooled in elite universities drenched in
Soviet-rooted anti-Westernism, the leaders of the new global ruling
class are post-nationalist and fully on board with the Soviet view that
Zionism, the apotheosis of nationalist aspirations, is illegitimate. To
join their club, Israel’s tech titans have been required to disavow
their allegiance to their “violent settler” and “ultra-Orthodox”
countrymen.
In other words, even when they tried to
walk away from the PLO elixir that brought about the disaster of the
Palestinian terror state in Israel’s heartland, they were faced with the
same choice.
It worked, more or less, until Oct. 7. On
that day, two things happened. First, Palestinian terrorists, with their
paragliders, Toyota pick-up trucks, RPGs and sadistic blood lust
exploded the myth that technology will free Israel of our need to defend
ourselves with the brothers the left desperately hoped to abandon. All
the military applications of the Start-Up Nation—the high-tech sensors,
signals intelligence, the smart fence, the air force—failed completely
on Oct. 7. The only thing that worked that day was the raw heroism and
patriotism of the Jews—civilian and security forces who rushed to the
south unbidden to save the families and communities being overrun.
The second thing that happened is that the
international jet set, the global elite, dropped all distinction
between “good” and “bad” Jews. The photos of the hostages from Be’eri
and Kfar Azza were torn down with the same hatred that had long been
directed toward “violent settlers” or “identifiable Jews” alone. The Jew
haters on campuses no longer felt the need to pretend that some
Israelis were acceptable.
For the past 11 months, members of the
post-Zionist sector have been struggling to get their heads around the
shattering of their delusions. Their leaders are trying to double down.
But their insistence that the problems lay with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, or the haredim, or messianic settlers, or imbecile yokels who
get teary-eyed at songs about Am Yisrael, has fewer and fewer
takers. Every protest fizzles after a few days. The thrill is gone. With
no “peace” or “Start Up Nation” fig leaves to hide behind, the hatred
is all that is left.
Thirty-one years since the left embraced the PLO and hate, it must finally abandon it. Israel’s survival depends on it.
Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of
the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator
for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is
the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security
Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of
Statesmanship. She appears regularly on U.S., British, Australian and
Indian television networks, including Fox, Newsmax and CBN. She appears,
as well, on the BBC, Sky News Britain and Sky News Australia, and on
India's WION News Network. She speaks regularly on nationally syndicated
and major market radio shows across the English-speaking world. She is
also a frequent guest on major podcasts, including the Dave Rubin Show
and the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Source: https://www.jns.org/as-oslo-turns-31-the-left-must-abandon-its-hatred/
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