It is by now a hard blow to the solar plexus of the supporters of Israel. Irrespective of the facts or the context or the history or the truth of the conflict with the Palestinian people and the Arab world, the Jewish state and all who believe in the justice of its cause increasingly fight for the favour of public opinion that is simply not there.
An article that appeared last week in the New York Times illustrates the dilemma. It was headlined “After Gaza, Israel Grapples with Crisis of Isolation.” The reporter wrote that Israel “is facing its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades.” The reason for this is the increasing hostility it faces in the world. It can expect more hostility, he suggests, if the country installs “a hawkish right-wing government.” Israel’s foreign ministry has undertaken a campaign to “improve Israel’s image through cultural and information diplomacy.” But the effort would be futile, the author suggests.
“Of course, for Israel’s critics, including those who firmly support the existence of a Jewish state, the problem is not one of image but of policy. They point to four decades of occupation; the settling of half a million Israel Jews on land captured in 1967; the economic strangling of Gaza for the past few years, and the society’s growing indifference toward the creation of a Palestinian state as reasons Israel has lost favour abroad…” (our emphasis).
Such critics of Israel point to this noose-like string of knotted allegations, but they never point at all to the Palestinians or their leaders. The Palestinians have firmly entrenched themselves in the minds of Israel’s critics as the hapless, pitiful victims of Israel’s very existence. Remove the sovereign Jewish existence, their leaders tell them, and the victimization will end.
For these critics of Israel, the history of the conflict began only in 1967. There are no pages in the book before June 1967. Yet they mysteriously ignore some of the most revealing post-67 pages: the accords of 1993; the Camp David frustrations of 2000; the suicide terror unleashed against Israel; the Gaza withdrawal of 2005, and the unremitting genocidal war, despite the withdrawal, directed at the Jewish state by the rulers in Gaza and their distant sponsors.
Israel’s critics absolve Israel’s enemies from even minimal standards of decent, humane behaviour. A “minor” example illustrates the point: that Gilad Schalit was kidnapped by the Gaza regime; that he has remained captive for more than 1,000 days; that his Hamas kidnappers have refused the Red Cross to ever visit him, and that they taunt and torture his family without even a whisper of condemnation from Israel’s critics betrays the futility and the moral recklessness of Israel adopting policies merely to please those critics.
We buckle at times to catch our breath and we are weary, too, from the constant, unabating anti-Israel condemnations from both the highest and the lowest stations of the intelligentsia. But Israel’s enemies and its critics need to know that, though weary, we will neither despair nor withdraw from constant, unabating support for Israel’s cause. There will be no isolation from this just cause.