Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 10
Israel has been threatened with political and physical annihilation every day of her existence
Try this thought experiment: imagine how the world would react if a small country like, say, Denmark, was denounced by her neighbours as a cancerous tumour deserving nothing but total extirpation, accompanied by the massacre of most of her citizens? Furthermore, think of the consequence of Denmark being subjected to actual physical assault, in the name of a ruthlessly annihilationist ideology based on alleged grievances about her rule over Greenland, on a near-daily basis?
Such egregiously aggressive behaviour towards a member state of the UN would, in normal circumstances, prompt global political condemnation, emergency meetings of the Security Council, the application of punitive sanctions, the establishment of commissions of enquiry, referrals to the International Criminal Court, and relentlessly critical media coverage.
But “normal circumstances” is a concept relevant to all nations except Israel. The dire reality of the Jewish state’s struggle for survival in the face of ceaseless attacks on all fronts is ignored by most media, politicians, academics, religious leaders, trade unions, NGOs, the UN, and an enormous army of full-time human rights activists, all of whom seem to suffer an unaccountably defective capacity for human compassion when it comes to Israel.
Unlike other conflicts over territory around the world, Israel's enemies have expressed their declared aim of obliterating the country. They do this in the name of antiZionism, the denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. That is, in itself, a racist policy that violates a fundamental principle of the UN charter. But it gets worse; in addition to politicide, genocide has long been firmly on the agenda. Extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, aided and abetted by Iran (of which more later), regularly and publicly declare that their avowed aim is to destroy Israel and massacre most of her inhabitants i.e. Jewish Israelis who comprise 75% (chillingly around 6 million) of the country’s population.
The threat of annihilation is not new. Shortly before Israel declared her independence, Azzam Pasha, the Arab League’s secretary-general, promised a “war of extermination and momentous massacre.” He was as good as his word – during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-49, the attacking Arab militias and armies deliberately targeted civilian settlements wherever they could. This was a pattern of officially-sanctioned Arab anti-Jewish violence that has ancient historical roots and is one that has continued to the present day.
What motivates this murderous ideology? In a word: antisemitism. It has three overlapping elements: the traditional bigotry towards Jews in the Arab and Muslim world from the 7th century that was revitalised by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s initially in Egypt and then spread as violent Islamism throughout the Middle East; a noxious brand of Nazi-inspired hatred that was imported from Europe, also in the 1920s, to turbocharge “political” antiZionism; and far-left conspiracy theories that were injected into the conflict following Stalin’s lurch into antisemitism just before his death in in the early 1950s.
These three strands of Jew-hatred became mutually reinforcing. The centuries-old dhimmi status of minorities in Muslim lands, where Jews were obliged to wear distinctive clothing or patches, inspired the Nazis to introduce the yellow star as a means of identification of European Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialism amplified each other’s conspiracy theories about Jewish plans for world domination and forged a toxic alliance that, among other troublesome consequences, propelled Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arab bestseller lists where they have remained ever since. Both Marxist-affiliated Arab nationalists and ultra-reactionary jihadist terrorists are prone to chant the homicidal war cry: Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud – “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.” Khaybar was the site of the Prophet’s victory in 628 in which hundreds of Jews were killed.
Specifically Palestinian Arab antisemitic violence may be traced back primarily to the sinister figure of Haj Amin al-Husseini who was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921. This self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine was not merely a Nazi sympathiser; he forged an agreement with Hitler to extend the Final Solution to the Middle East and eradicate every Jew – not just the ones in British Palestine but all the Jews in all the Arabs lands. When Hitler committed suicide in the Berlin bunker in 1945, the Mufti was undeterred in his pursuit of a posthumous victory for his beloved Führer – the obliteration of the old-new archenemy, the Jews.
All of this lethal hatred long antedated the Six Day War of 1967, the “illegal occupation” and the settlements. Blogger Mark Pickles [1] calls it the Nazi elephant in the room: “The primary and sustaining cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is genocidal antisemitism; the rest is footnotes. It’s as simple as that. And it’s as serious as that.”
Joining the dots between antisemitism of the past and present is rarely done. Even rarer is an acknowledgement by Western observers that antisemitism has played any part in the dynamics of Arab/Iranian-Israeli conflict. That failure is, arguably, itself a form of antisemitism for it legitimises a poisonous world-view that denies the lived experience of the Jewish people. At the very least, it represents a shocking moral failure on the part of the international community. How else can we explain the nauseating sight in January 2020 of world leaders solemnly intoning Never Again at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, then immediately beating a path to embrace the Holocaust denying Mahmoud Abbas who rewards terrorists financially in proportion to the number of Jews they kill? Or European powers, led by Germany, of all countries, straining every sinew to rescue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran’s Islamo-fascist dictatorship that has not ceased for a single day to reiterate its intention to wipe Israel – “the little Satan” – off the face of the earth?
Iran presents Israel with the greatest existential threat in her history. Even before the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Obama-sponsored nuclear deal, Iran unveiled its first international “Hourglass Festival” that is designed to count down the clock to the day of Israel’s destruction predicted, by Supreme Leader Khamenei, to occur by 2040.
The mad mullahs’ target is not merely “the Zionist entity” but Jews worldwide. The well-documented call for the murder of all Jews in the founding charter of Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that has ruled Gaza by force since 2007, is hardly an isolated example. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy militia in Lebanon, came perilously close to offering ironic support for the Zionist “ingathering of the exiles” when he explained in 2002 how convenient it was that “the Jews were gathering in one place – and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”
Any country facing this degree of unremitting danger would do the following: establish military deterrence through the readiness of its armed forces; ensure that hostile intentions on all fronts are continuously monitored and, if showing signs of becoming active, quickly subdued; and determine that any withdrawal from captured enemy territory doesn’t jeopardise the security of its citizens. That doesn’t mean that Israel will never take risks to achieve peace – on the contrary, she has frequently demonstrated a willingness to do just that. As Brett Stephens [2] wrote in 2019 in the New York Times: “In proportion to its size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any state in the world.”
Yet the world’s commentariat treats Israel as if the dark shadow of annihilationist antisemitism simply doesn’t exist. Ignorance can hardly explain this oversight as the evidence is easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. More likely, it’s an inconvenient truth that undermines the near-universal narrative of Israeli blameworthiness for the absence of peace.
A touch of political bias here and there is barely significant, but wilful blindness to threatened genocide is potentially catastrophic. Shining a bright light on this murky corner of reality is probably the single most important thing that anyone genuinely seeking peace between Israel and her neighbours can do.
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/opinion/sunday/israel-progressive-anti-semitism.html
Israel has been threatened with political and physical annihilation every day of her existence
Try this thought experiment: imagine how the world would react if a small country like, say, Denmark, was denounced by her neighbours as a cancerous tumour deserving nothing but total extirpation, accompanied by the massacre of most of her citizens? Furthermore, think of the consequence of Denmark being subjected to actual physical assault, in the name of a ruthlessly annihilationist ideology based on alleged grievances about her rule over Greenland, on a near-daily basis?
Such egregiously aggressive behaviour towards a member state of the UN would, in normal circumstances, prompt global political condemnation, emergency meetings of the Security Council, the application of punitive sanctions, the establishment of commissions of enquiry, referrals to the International Criminal Court, and relentlessly critical media coverage.
But “normal circumstances” is a concept relevant to all nations except Israel. The dire reality of the Jewish state’s struggle for survival in the face of ceaseless attacks on all fronts is ignored by most media, politicians, academics, religious leaders, trade unions, NGOs, the UN, and an enormous army of full-time human rights activists, all of whom seem to suffer an unaccountably defective capacity for human compassion when it comes to Israel.
Unlike other conflicts over territory around the world, Israel's enemies have expressed their declared aim of obliterating the country. They do this in the name of antiZionism, the denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. That is, in itself, a racist policy that violates a fundamental principle of the UN charter. But it gets worse; in addition to politicide, genocide has long been firmly on the agenda. Extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, aided and abetted by Iran (of which more later), regularly and publicly declare that their avowed aim is to destroy Israel and massacre most of her inhabitants i.e. Jewish Israelis who comprise 75% (chillingly around 6 million) of the country’s population.
The threat of annihilation is not new. Shortly before Israel declared her independence, Azzam Pasha, the Arab League’s secretary-general, promised a “war of extermination and momentous massacre.” He was as good as his word – during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-49, the attacking Arab militias and armies deliberately targeted civilian settlements wherever they could. This was a pattern of officially-sanctioned Arab anti-Jewish violence that has ancient historical roots and is one that has continued to the present day.
What motivates this murderous ideology? In a word: antisemitism. It has three overlapping elements: the traditional bigotry towards Jews in the Arab and Muslim world from the 7th century that was revitalised by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s initially in Egypt and then spread as violent Islamism throughout the Middle East; a noxious brand of Nazi-inspired hatred that was imported from Europe, also in the 1920s, to turbocharge “political” antiZionism; and far-left conspiracy theories that were injected into the conflict following Stalin’s lurch into antisemitism just before his death in in the early 1950s.
These three strands of Jew-hatred became mutually reinforcing. The centuries-old dhimmi status of minorities in Muslim lands, where Jews were obliged to wear distinctive clothing or patches, inspired the Nazis to introduce the yellow star as a means of identification of European Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialism amplified each other’s conspiracy theories about Jewish plans for world domination and forged a toxic alliance that, among other troublesome consequences, propelled Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arab bestseller lists where they have remained ever since. Both Marxist-affiliated Arab nationalists and ultra-reactionary jihadist terrorists are prone to chant the homicidal war cry: Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud – “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.” Khaybar was the site of the Prophet’s victory in 628 in which hundreds of Jews were killed.
Specifically Palestinian Arab antisemitic violence may be traced back primarily to the sinister figure of Haj Amin al-Husseini who was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921. This self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine was not merely a Nazi sympathiser; he forged an agreement with Hitler to extend the Final Solution to the Middle East and eradicate every Jew – not just the ones in British Palestine but all the Jews in all the Arabs lands. When Hitler committed suicide in the Berlin bunker in 1945, the Mufti was undeterred in his pursuit of a posthumous victory for his beloved Führer – the obliteration of the old-new archenemy, the Jews.
All of this lethal hatred long antedated the Six Day War of 1967, the “illegal occupation” and the settlements. Blogger Mark Pickles [1] calls it the Nazi elephant in the room: “The primary and sustaining cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is genocidal antisemitism; the rest is footnotes. It’s as simple as that. And it’s as serious as that.”
Joining the dots between antisemitism of the past and present is rarely done. Even rarer is an acknowledgement by Western observers that antisemitism has played any part in the dynamics of Arab/Iranian-Israeli conflict. That failure is, arguably, itself a form of antisemitism for it legitimises a poisonous world-view that denies the lived experience of the Jewish people. At the very least, it represents a shocking moral failure on the part of the international community. How else can we explain the nauseating sight in January 2020 of world leaders solemnly intoning Never Again at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, then immediately beating a path to embrace the Holocaust denying Mahmoud Abbas who rewards terrorists financially in proportion to the number of Jews they kill? Or European powers, led by Germany, of all countries, straining every sinew to rescue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran’s Islamo-fascist dictatorship that has not ceased for a single day to reiterate its intention to wipe Israel – “the little Satan” – off the face of the earth?
Iran presents Israel with the greatest existential threat in her history. Even before the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Obama-sponsored nuclear deal, Iran unveiled its first international “Hourglass Festival” that is designed to count down the clock to the day of Israel’s destruction predicted, by Supreme Leader Khamenei, to occur by 2040.
The mad mullahs’ target is not merely “the Zionist entity” but Jews worldwide. The well-documented call for the murder of all Jews in the founding charter of Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that has ruled Gaza by force since 2007, is hardly an isolated example. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy militia in Lebanon, came perilously close to offering ironic support for the Zionist “ingathering of the exiles” when he explained in 2002 how convenient it was that “the Jews were gathering in one place – and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”
Any country facing this degree of unremitting danger would do the following: establish military deterrence through the readiness of its armed forces; ensure that hostile intentions on all fronts are continuously monitored and, if showing signs of becoming active, quickly subdued; and determine that any withdrawal from captured enemy territory doesn’t jeopardise the security of its citizens. That doesn’t mean that Israel will never take risks to achieve peace – on the contrary, she has frequently demonstrated a willingness to do just that. As Brett Stephens [2] wrote in 2019 in the New York Times: “In proportion to its size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any state in the world.”
Yet the world’s commentariat treats Israel as if the dark shadow of annihilationist antisemitism simply doesn’t exist. Ignorance can hardly explain this oversight as the evidence is easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. More likely, it’s an inconvenient truth that undermines the near-universal narrative of Israeli blameworthiness for the absence of peace.
A touch of political bias here and there is barely significant, but wilful blindness to threatened genocide is potentially catastrophic. Shining a bright light on this murky corner of reality is probably the single most important thing that anyone genuinely seeking peace between Israel and her neighbours can do.
