Justice for Jews and Israel

Handbook of Israel Advocacy

Download the Israel Advocacy handbook as a PDF File

Following are samples of the anti-Israel narratives and anti-Israel rhetoric. Though the content is a bit different in each case, the goals are the same:

• Delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people
• Establish Palestinian demands as "rights"
• Establish the pro-Arab worldview - Israel came into being by "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and is an illegitimate state
• The Jewish people do not have a claim on the land, either because there is no such thing as the Jewish people or because the Jews of today are not the legitimate heirs of ancient Judaism.
• Zionism is variously depicted as a religious movement, or as based on a myth of strict descent of the Jews from Abraham.
• Zionism is colonialist and inherently evil, rather than being a legitimate national liberation movement.
• The 1948 war occurred through no fault whatever of the Arab states or the Palestinian Arabs, and was caused by the conspiracy of the Zionists to eliminate the Arabs of Palestine. The "Nakba," the 1948 defeat, explained as the fault of the Zionists, is a key event in the anti-Israel narrative. 

A respectable Journalist: Rami Khoury

Rami Khoury is a respectable journalist who writes for the Daily Star in Lebanon. He is considered a moderate. This article is typical of the most moderate and sophisticated version of the Palestinian narrative. He will not admit outright that his goal is the destruction of the Jewish state, but falsifies history in order to discredit Zionism and make others reach this conclusion.

For an alternative Arab view of the events of 1948, see this article on the Palestinian Nakba.

Note that Khoury uses the formulation "Arab East Jerusalem," a Palestinian propaganda slogan meant to imply that there is a part of Jerusalem that is exclusively Arab.

dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=104963

A juxtaposition of several simultaneous events this week indicates just how difficult it is going to be to achieve any meaningful progress in Arab-Israeli peace talks, when the heart of the conflict is land that Israelis and Palestinians both claim as their ancestral patrimony. The four events are the American drive to secure confidence-building measures from the Arabs in return for Israel’s freezing of its settlements in occupied Arab lands; Israel’s demand that Arabs recognize it as a "Jewish state"; the Israeli government’s forcible eviction of Arab families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district of Arab East Jerusalem; and the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, unconvincingly showing that he understands how the creation of Israel in 1948 was such a "trauma" for Palestinians, who were made homeless and forced into exile.

These events simultaneously highlight that ever since 1947-1948, the conflict has been and continues to be defined by Zionist-Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs that generates sustained Arab resistance. It remains totally in the realm of fantasy to expect the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world to formally recognize and live with Israel as a "Jewish state" when it evicts dozens of Palestinians from homes they own in East Jerusalem and replaces them with Jewish settlers. Such actions capture the single most sinister aspect of Zionism that Arabs have fought, mostly unsuccessfully, for the past 60 years or more.

Israelis now defy the United States along with the rest of the world in continuing their settlement and colonization of Arab lands occupied in 1967. The Obama administration will soon have to make the choice that has confronted all other recent American leaderships: Does it try to force Israel to comply with international law and United Nations resolutions and live according to rules that all countries are asked to honor? Or, does it succumb to Israeli obstinacy and the threats of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and instead seek the easier route of demanding more concessions from the Arabs in order to placate Israel?

The problem with demanding more Arab concessions and "confidence-building" measures in order to make Israel feel secure enough to comply with the dictates of law and morality is that this approach has failed consistently. Israel continues to kill, imprison and expel Palestinians, and colonize their land. The Arabs, not surprisingly, no longer will accept to play the fool by making gestures to accept Israel while Israel keeps cleansing Jerusalem of its Arab inhabitants.

The most depressing aspect of all this, going back to the 1940s, is that Israelis refuse to acknowledge that what they see as the miracle of the birth of their state came at the expense of the indigenous population. About half the native Arab population of Palestine was exiled in 1947-1948, and they and their descendants now comprise the 4.5 million refugees who mostly reside in lands adjacent to their ancestral Palestine. Israel refuses to admit any role in the creation of the refugee issue, despite extensive documentation by Israeli, Arab and international historians of Israel’s extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns that deliberately drove out or caused over 700,000 Palestinians to flee during the fighting.

Reuven Rivlin this week once again accentuated the Israeli collective blind spot when it comes to acknowledging major responsibility for the dismemberment and exile of the Palestinians. In remarks delivered Monday, according to a Haaretz newspaper account, he called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel, urging the founding of a "true partnership" between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of "the special needs and unique character of each of the sides."

In his speech, Rivlin was to say that "the establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel’s Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line – a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for."

That’s it? Rivlin admitted that the wholesale dismemberment, occupation and exile of Arab Palestine was something that "accompanied" the creation of Israel, but he would not admit that the two were causally linked. Native Americans also experienced some trauma when the American colonies were created and expanded into an independent country, but were these two independent and unrelated experiences?

If Israelis really want to coexist with the Arabs, they will have to summon the courage and honesty to admit how Zionism dismembered Arab Palestine in 1947-1948, and Jews everywhere must finally break the ugly bond between Zionism and colonialism.

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Articles/General/Story2289.html

Israel's struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbors, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands it military occupies by force. Israel's desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive and deeply psychological. With few exceptions, prominent Zionist leaders since the inception of colonial Zionism have desired to establish peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs whose lands they slated for colonization and settlement. The only thing Israel has asked for, and continues to ask for in order to end the state of war with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, is that all recognize its right to be a racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere. The resistance that the Palestinian people and other Arabs have launched against Israel's right to be a racist state is what continues to stand between Israel and the peace for which it has struggled and to which it has been committed for decades. Indeed, this resistance is nothing less than the "New anti-Semitism".

Let us start with why Israel and Zionism need to ensure that Israel remains a racist state by law and why it deserves to have that right. The rationale is primarily threefold and is based on the following claims.

1. Jews are always in danger out in the wide world; only in a state that privileges them racially and religiously can they be safe from gentile oppression and can prosper. If Israel removed its racist laws and symbols and became a non-racist democratic state, Jews would cease to be a majority and would be like Diaspora Jews, a minority in a non-Jewish state. These concerns are stated clearly by Israeli leaders individually and collectively. Shimon Peres, for example, the dove of official Israel, has been worried for some time about the Palestinian demographic "danger", as the Green Line, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is beginning to "disappear ... which may lead to the linking of the futures of West Bank Palestinians with Israeli Arabs". He hoped that the arrival of 100,000 Jews in Israel would postpone this demographic "danger" for 10 more years, as ultimately, he stressed, "demography will defeat geography".
    
2. In December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre in Israel held its first of a projected series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel, especially with regards to maintaining Jewish demographic majority. Israel's president and current and former prime ministers and cabinet ministers were all in attendance. One of the "Main Points" identified in the 52-page conference report is concern over the numbers needed to maintain Jewish demographic and political supremacy of Israel
    
3. Jews are carriers of Western civilization and constitute an Asian station defending both Western civilization and economic and political interests against Oriental terrorism and barbarism. If Israel transformed itself into a non-racist state, then its Arab population would undermine the commitment to Western civilization and its defense of the West's economic and political interests, and might perhaps transform Jews themselves into a Levantine barbaric population. Here is how Ben Gurion once put it: "We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the [European] Diaspora." [Ben-Gurion never made any such statement.] Indeed Ben Gurion was clear on the Zionist role of defending these principles: "We are not Arabs, and others measure us by a different standard ... our instruments of war are different from those of the Arabs, and only our instruments can guarantee our victory." More recently, Israel's ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, stressed that: "We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not -- we are basically the white race."
   
    
4. God has given this land to the Jews and told them to safeguard themselves against gentiles who hate them. To make Israel a non-Jewish state then would run the risk of challenging God Himself. This position is not only upheld by Jewish and Christian fundamentalists, but even by erstwhile secular Zionists (Jews and Christians alike). Ben Gurion himself understood, as does Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, that: "God promised it to us." [Ben Gurion never made any such statement]

It is important to stress that this Zionist rationale is correct on all counts if one accepts the proposition of Jewish exceptionalism. Remember that Zionism and Israel are very careful not to generalize the principles that justify Israel's need to be racist but are rather vehement in upholding it as an exceptional principle. It is not that no other people has been oppressed historically, it is that Jews have been oppressed more. It is not that no other people's cultural and physical existence has been threatened; it is that the Jews' cultural and physical existence is threatened more. This quantitative equation is key to why the world, and especially Palestinians, should recognize that Israel needs and deserves to have the right to be a racist state. If the Palestinians, or anyone else, reject this, then they must be committed to the annihilation of the Jewish people physically and culturally, not to mention that they would be standing against the Judeo-Christian God...

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