MONTREAL — Delegitimizing, criminalizing and demonizing Israel may be rampant worldwide, but some well-known Israeli Jews do the same, says Emmanuel Navon, who is emerging as one of the Jewish state’s most prominent voices on the right.
Emmanuel Navon
Navon, who teaches political science at Tel Aviv University, announced he is running in the upcoming Likud primaries.
He includes former Knesset member Avraham Burg and the New Israel Fund (NIF) and historians Ze’ev Sternall, Avi Shleim and Benny Morris – all highly respected figures in Israel – on his list of those he feels constitute “enemies within.”
Navon called their criticism of Israel “the Jewish tendency towards self-destruction.”
From Burg advocating to “repeal of the Law of Return” to the NIF, which “funded 92 per cent of the testimony against Israel in the Goldstone Report,” Israel risks becoming a “post-Zionist” entity where the founding principles of Zionism and Jewish identity are abandoned in favour of “universalism,” Navon told a group of about 100 people recently at Beth Israel Beth Aaron synagogue.
He said the mindset of people like this is that Israel has to “adapt to a theoretical moral purity” and make a choice: “Do Israelis prefer peace without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without peace?”
The former, Navon fears. While Sternall is indeed a Zionist, people like him are contributing to creating an “intellectual monopoly against Zionism,” he said.
As well, “more and more [Israeli] academics are turning their backs on Judaism,” he said.
Navon, 39, who was born in Paris under the family name Mréjen, made aliyah in 1993. He wears a kippah. He has an ambitious website, navon.com, listing his activities that include teaching, business consulting, public speaking and blogging.
The “public speaking” link on his home page has a window marked “praise,” citing the many flattering words that have been directed his way.
Despite Israel standing “head and shoulders” above other countries in terms of being a free society composed of dozens of ethnic and religious groups, it is the supreme “paradox” that its right to exist is constantly undermined, Navon said.
And why?
Because since Israel couldn’t be defeated militarily, economically or by terrorism since 1948, the world had to resort to treating it as a criminal, illegitimate, and demonic entity.
It has not helped matters, Navon said, that Israel has been so incredibly “lousy at PR.
“The propaganda has worked,” he said, “because it has had the desired effect.”
The perception so much of the world believes, including in academic and journalistic circles, such as in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, is that Israel is a racist, apartheid, criminal, and colonialist state.
“And therefore, it [Israel] is illegitimate,” Navon said. “The campaign has mostly been achieved.”
Elements contributing to this perception, he said, include the International Criminal Court (ICC), which questioned Israel’s security barrier to block terrorist infiltration and Israel’s naval blockade of weapons to Gaza, and the Goldstone Report on the Gaza conflict, which stated that “Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.”
Navon said that “it took the Goldstone Report for Israel to finally realize that the media war [against Israel] was not simply a PR contest.”
To a certain extent, Jews in the Diaspora and Israel will determine Israel’s fate only by “fighting back,” Navon said.
Increasingly, “post-Zionists are being put on the defensive,” he said, and more and more young people are coming to realize that the fight to defend Israel is not based on what one sees on the World Wide Web or Twitter.
“These young people have decided to save Israel from itself,” Navon said. “We will try to win not through technology, but psychology.”
Navon’s visit to Montreal, sponsored by Congregation Or Hahayim, the Fédération Sépharade du Canada and the Communauté sépharade unifiée du Québec, also included talks at Or Hahayim, Hautes Études Commerciales, and the Université du Québec à Montréal.