Could Israel be hated more?

Submitted by SJB (Australia), Apr 4, 2006 at 22:39

I'm in accord with Dr RJP above. Israel couldn't be in a worse PR position despite pussyfooting around with the Arabs for over three decades and generally exercising a degree of tolerance and indulgence that beggars belief. I can recall the widespread and impassioned outrage at Rabin's call to break the bones of Palestinian stone-throwing demonstrators.One alternative was, as I said at the time, a shoot to kill policy. Pandering to world opinion is, for the Jewish state, counterproductive.

An extraordinarily high proportion ( well over 50%) of Europeans, even higher with the Dutch and the Germans, believe that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. With North Korea, Iran, China, Pakistan etc etc in the same world that notion is simply ludicrous.Clearly decades of a Western diet of anti-Israel journalism has worked a treat. If the educated West believes such nonsense why would Israel bother caring any more. Consider the Jenin operation: Israel refrained from using air-strikes as its principal tool, sacrificed the lives of scores of its soldiers to save Arab lives and got hammered in the Western media for a " massacre". Consider the Mohammed Al Dura shooting.

The only downside for Israel in taking radical action against the Palestinians is a higher degree of world ostracism ( which will probably fade over time in the West ), a trade boycott by the EU and getting kicked out of the UN. Switzerland is not a UN ( nor EU ) member and it does just fine.

Imagine if in 1948-49 the IDF had driven over the Jordan at gunpoint all but the most compliant Arabs ( Of course a large, but silent, proportion of Arabs then in Mandatory Palestine would have perfectly happy to have formed an ethnic minority in a democratic and soon-to-be-affluent Jewish commonwealth - the leadership of this faction was murdered through the 1930's and 1940's by the goons of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And Arafat repeated the policy)

What would be different today (apart from a peaceful Judea and Samaria dotted with Ariels, swathes of forest and flourishing agricultural land )? There would still be incessant bleating by Western softheads, Jew-haters those who choose to remain wilfully ignorant of the facts of the Middle East in preference for the Palestinian victim-underdog narrative. Arab-Muslim crocodile tears would still be shed over such refugees and the Zionist entity excoriated.

Imagine if in the 67 war some rogue Israeli pilot had launched a missile or two into the Dome of the Rock compound and Israel afterwards said " Well, we didn't plan it but since the mosques aren't there anymore we're gonna rebuild our temple on the site." The Soviet bloc would have broken off diplomatic relations with Israel and France would have stopped delivery of Mirages and Super-Entendards that Israel had already paid for; but they happened anyway.

The level and extent of hatred of Israel wouldn't be any deeper or wider now if either one or both of these two things had happened. Jabotinski was right in his Iron Wall thesis - more right now than ever. All else is wishful thinking. Who now thinks Oslo was a good idea?

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".