The Israeli Left’s Delusions

 There are two streams of the Israeli left. One is the radical left, which views Israel’s “occupation” as the root cause of the conflict. At least much of it is opposed to Israel’s right to exist. There is a moderate stream of the Israeli left, which understands that Palestinian terror groups seek Israel’s destruction. Though it doesn’t view Israel’s “occupation” as the root cause of the conflict, it still pushes for suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. The moderate left believes that if Israel makes more territorial concessions, then the terrorism on Israel will decrease, despite the fact that the history showed otherwise. For from 1995-1996, when 98% of the Palestinian people were no longer under Israeli rule, terrorism on Israel dramatically increased. And it even included deadly suicide bombings. It resulted in the Israeli public electing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1996 in the hope of getting more security. And the Israeli disengagement of Gaza also resulted in an increase of rocket attacks into Israel. It resulted in Gaza turning into a terror base and even set the stage for Hamas to take over Gaza two years later in an illegal coup.

The radical left in Israel has no basis in fact. The moderate left, though it sounds more reasonable, also has delusions, as shown above when it comes to territorial concessions. Israeli leftists also distort the history of Israel, where the Jewish State is the bad guy. The Israeli leftists who do that are called the “New Historians”, who are revisionist “historians”.

The New Historians

The New Historians are a group of leftist “historians” who see Israel as the bad guy. They purport to be a legitimate group of historians who “debunk” the “official” history of Israel. They legitimize the Arab side of the story, where Israel is the bad guy. A New Historian Avi Shlaim says this about the New Historians:

-The official version said that Britain tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; the “new historians” claimed that it tried to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state

- The official version said that the Palestinians fled their homes of their own free will; the “new
historians” said that the refugees were chased out or expelled
- The official version said that the balance of power was in favor of the Arabs; the “new historians” said that Israel had the advantage both in manpower and in arms

-The official version said that the Arabs had a coordinated plan to destroy Israel; the “new historians” said that Israel is primarily to blame for the dead end.

So in other words, the New Historians blame Israel for the conflict. Many in the media have even believed that the  New Historians were a group of historians who brought you the true history of Israel. Arab propagandists wet their pants over this. For here were a group of Israeli “historians” who claimed that Israel was the bad guy. Scholars have shown that the new historians distort quotes and quote people out of context. One of the worst among the New Historians is Ilan Pappe, who is from the Israeli Communist party. He holds the radical leftist views in Israel that I talked about in the beginning of this article. He believes that Israel’s Security Fence is the “Apartheid Wall”, believes that there should be sanctions imposed on Israel [Pappe called for that in John Pilger's distorted anti-Israel film "Palestine is still the Issue"], calls for Israel’s destruction and, in the Doha debates, he argued for the right of return for Arab refugees, which would demographically destroy Israel. Pappe stated this [this is one of the only statements he made that contain some truth]:

There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened.

Pappe is in the forefront among those who claim that Israel ethnically cleansed the Arabs in 1948 and among those who claim that Israel is still ethnically cleansing the land of the Palestinians. He believes that the claim that Israel ethnically cleanses the land of Palestinians is an indisputable fact and that the debate in Israel is about the morality of ethnic cleansing. Yet the demographics show that if Israel did want to ethnically cleanse Israel or the disputed territories of Arabs [Israel did not seek to ethnically cleanse Israel or the disputed territories of Arabs], then Israel did a very poor job at it. For the Arab population in Israel increased. In fact, even before the creation of Israel, when Jewish settlers came to rebuild the land, their rebuilding projects caused Arabs from surrounding areas to come to the holy land. After 1967, when the disputed territories were under Israeli rule, the quality of life improved. As a result, the Arab population in the disputed territories also increased. Thanks to Israeli policies of combating diseases and of providing Palestinians with excellent medical care, Israel’s “occupation” actually saved Palestinian lives. It was under Israeli rule when diseases in the West Bank and Gaza were nearly eliminated [if not totally eliminated]. So even the demographics debunk the ridiculous claim that Israel is ethnically cleansing the land of Arabs.

Despite having been a professor at the University of Haifa, Pappe is an advocate of boycotting Israeli universities. Ilan Pappe also believes that there was an Israeli massacre in Tantara village during the 1948 war, even though that allegation was discredited.

Michael Oren, author of the book “Six Days of War”, reviewed the book “1967″, which is by another New Historian by the name of Tom Segev. Oren reported that Segev believed that Israel did not have to fight the 1967 war. Oren reported:

Though it is never explicitly stated, Segev’s thesis is clear. Israeli fears of an Arab attack “had no basis in reality,” he argues; “there was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it.” Rather than responding to an imminent Arab threat, Israelis were reacting out of a deep-seated trauma born of years of Jewish suffering. Referring to the digging of graves in anticipation of mass Israeli casualties, for example, he writes, “Only a society drenched in the memory of the Holocaust could have prepared so meticulously for the next one.” Segev also faults the economic crisis of 1966 that sensitized Israelis to perceived perils, and castigates Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for failing to stand up to his warmongering generals. Indeed, the belligerence of military leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin was, for Segev, the primary cause of the war: “They clung to the Israeli culture of youth; they were like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny.”

So in other words, Segev blamed Israel for the 1967 Six day war. According to Oren, Segev had nothing to say about public calls for Israel’s destruction by Arab leaders and media:

But the most telling omission relates not to the Israelis or to any foreign power but rather to the Arabs. Segev’s book is all but devoid of Arab calls for Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its citizens. There is no mention of pro-war demonstrations, of Egypt’s willingness to use poison gas against its enemies, or of the detailed Arab plans for conquering Israel. Segev even ignores the Khartoum resolution after the war, in which the Arab states refused to negotiate with Israel and to grant it peace and recognition. These omissions inflict an injustice on the Arabs by treating them as two-dimensional props in a solipsistic Israeli drama.

So in other words, here’s another New Historian, who, though not as bad as Pappe, still blames Israel for the Six Day War. Here’s what Tom Segev said in an interview:

You can not really understand 1967 unless you understand why and how Israelis reacted. It’s a lot about Israeli society, it’s a lot about Israeli psychology. Israelis genuinely believed that Egypt is going to destroy them and the question is why did they believe that. They believed that because this crisis of May ‘67 struck at the worst point in Israel’s history from a psychological point of view. The society was very, very weak. There was economic recession, unemployment. More and more Israelis were leaving the country than Jews coming to live there. … When this crisis began, they foresaw another Holocaust.

So Tom Segev blames Israeli society, rather than Egypt’s acts of war, for Israel’s attack on the Egyptian Air Force. The fact is that then-Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the UN peacekeepers and sent troops near the border with Israel in order to prepare for an invasion, in which his troops would lead the coalition. Egypt blocked Israeli shipping in the Strains of Tiran, which was vital for Israeli shipping. Arab leaders and media including those in Egypt bragged about destroying Israel. But apparently, Segev leaves that out and instead chooses to blame Israeli society for the heroic preemptive attack.

I even have an article that discredits claims made by the New Historians here. The New Historians are portrayed by themselves and their supporters as a legitimate group of Israeli historians who “reexamine” the history of Israel. But they make all sorts of distortions. Benny Morris, another New Historian, wrote in page 15 of his book “Making Israel”:

The “Old Historians” lived through 1948 as highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth. They were unable to separate their lives from this historical event, unable to regard impartially and objectively the facts and processes that they later wrote about.

Well, the New Historians are not “impartial”. They are leftist propagandists who distort Israeli history. For example, you got to be an anti-Israel propagandist in order to call Ilan Pappe objective [even while, as shown here, Pappe himself admitted that he isn't objective]. But to get to Benny Morris, Ephraim Karsh has made some articles [see one here] that show Benny Morris’s errors including his misquotations. To be fair to Benny Morris, he is far better than Ilan Pappe, who is perhaps the worst of the New Historians.

Distortions of the leftist Israeli writer Amos Oz

Amos Oz is among those on the relatively moderate left. He is for suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. He’s a critic of Israeli settlements and holds Israel partially responsible for the conflict. He made crazy claims before. For example, he said that the Likud party was “the best collaborator that Hamas could hope for”.

However, for his crazy distortions, he does make more reasonable points. For example, he is nowhere as wacky as Ilan Pappe. Amos Oz still considers himself to be a Zionist [though a left-wing Zionist to be exact], supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, opposes the right of return [since it would demographically destroy Israel], and blames Hamas for the 2008-2009 Israel-Hamas war. However, he also blames the refugee problem for the terrorism that Israel deals with. He still gives some blame to Israel for the conflict and for the failure of the Oslo accords:

On the Israeli side there is a fixed tendency to increasingly reject the “core issues” of the conflict: Refugees. Jerusalem. Borders. Settlements. This rejection was perhaps what led to the failure of the Oslo Accords, and it obviously doesn’t contribute to current negotiations: Israel’s tendency to avoid talking about core issues sparks founded suspicion on the Arab side, which argues that Israel is indeed seeking calm but is not ready for a comprehensive solution.

As stated, Oz blames the terrorism and conflict that Israel puts up with on the refugee problem:

Both from moral and security standpoints Israel should seek a solution to the 1948 refugee issue. It would involve a financial burden that would have to be met by Western states, Israel and the wealthy Arab states.

In such an eventuality, the level of violence would drop, and the desperation that breeds extremism will begin to wane once the occupants of the refugee camps begin hearing that their lives in the gutters are about to end.

From Israel’s point of view, even if we sign agreements with all our enemies – as long as the refugee plight is not addressed, we shall have no calm.

In that column, Oz makes no mention of how Arab leaders including the leaders of the PA [Palestinian Authority] use the refugees in order to manipulate people’s emotions and to hold an emotional leverage against Israel. More importantly, Oz makes no mention of the incitement promoted by Arab states and the PA [Palestinian Authority]. The root cause of the terrorism and bloodshed against Israel is the anti-Semitic incitement, not the refugee problem [though it is true that Arab leaders and Palestinian terrorists exploited the refugees bad condition in order to get them to fight Israel]. There was conflict between Jews and Arabs even before a single refugee left. What caused the failure of the Oslo accords was the culture of violence that then PA President Yasser Arafat promoted. Israel sought to have a solution to the refugee problem. In fact, in Camp David in 2000, Israel offered to give the Palestinians a state on all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank and to even give away the Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, as well as a limited right of return for Arab refugees [but not enough to demographically destroy Israel] and for the ones not included in the right or return to be resettled. That offer also stated that Israel would dismantle most of the settlements and that they’ll give 3% of Israel proper to compensate for the 3% of the West Bank that Israel wanted. That offer would’ve also put the Temple Mount under the control of Yasser Arafat’s PA. Arafat said no and made no counter offer. A few months later, the terror uprising known as the Second intifada started. The liberal “mainstream” media and Palestinians claimed that the second intifada started as a result of Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. However, the PA Communications Minister Imad Faluji confessed that the second intifada was planned by Arafat since he returned from the Camp David summit; in other words, since he rejected one of the most generous Israeli offers in history. Israel made the same offer in Taba in 2001. It was again rejected. Yet Oz mentions none of this and chooses the leftist course of blaming Israel.

Oz is a propagandist for the Labor party in Israel and is fiercely anti-Likud, which he said was “against any kind of peace”.Yet the funny thing was that those intense anti-Likud absurd points was made a few decades after the 1979 Camp David accords, when Israel, under the Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, gave the Sanai, which was 91% of the territory Israel won in 1967 and which was bigger than Israel proper, back to Egypt. The Likud party generally opposes suicidal territorial concessions to the Palestinians, although sometimes they contemplate making suicidal terriorial concessions in the hope of peace.

The time when Oz called the Likud party the “the best collaborator that Hamas could hope for” and said that it was “against any kind of peace” was in 1995, when the leftist Israeli Labor-Meretz Coalition government sought to portray those who opposed Oslo even on strategic grounds as anti-peace and as bad as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two of which were sending the suicide bombers.

In 2002, Amos Oz wrote an article for the Independent, which called for the Israeli public to topple the “settlers’ government”. Unlike the last Amos Oz article that was mentioned in this column, he did call for an end to the widespread anti-Semitic incitement that called for Israel’s destruction. He also said that it would be better for Israel to face an enemy Palestinian state than to continue the “occupation”, despite the fact that it was two years after the second intifada began and despite the fact that the second intifada began when most Palestinians were under the jurisdiction of the PA [Palestinian Authority]:

Militarily and morally, it will be easier for Israel to face an enemy state than to continue fighting a cluster of armed gangs.

Yet Oz said that despite the fact that an enemy Palestinian state would mean that Palestinian terrorists would get a terror base to strike at Israel, which is now the result of any Israeli withdrawal.

So Oz is far better than Ilan Pappe. Oz is in the moderate left. But he still makes some absurd points and is a strong advocate for suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. He’s one of the guys who would call you anti-peace if you oppose premature Israeli withdrawals.

Delusions from Peace Now

Peace Now is in the forefront for suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. In fact, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sang before a Peace Now rally before he was assassinated by a Kahanist extremist. Peace Now is a fierce critic of the Israeli settlements. For one thing, Peace Now even exaggerates the amount of privately owned Palestinian land that is used for Israeli settlements. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America [CAMERA] had two reports [see here  and here] that debunked a Peace Now study. CAMERA stated:

Peace Now, for example, claimed that 86.4% of Ma’ale Adumim was built on private Palestinian land. But according to Dror most of the Palestinian claims to this land were filed by the Jahalin Bedouin tribe, and were rejected by the Israeli courts after a thorough investigation.

The Jahalin have been making claims about the land of Ma’ale Adumim, and squatting on state land assigned to the community, since the 1980’s. They have been warned many times by successive Israeli governments that eventually they would have to move. Most of the Jahalin eventually agreed that they did not have rights to the land. For example, according to a January 29th, 1994 Los Angeles Times article, “no one, not even Hairsh (Mohammed Hairsh, a Jahalin leader) claims that his tribe has a legal right” to the land they have been occupying.

On the Ma’ale Adumin settlement, Peace Now claimed that 86.4% of it was built on privately-owned Palestinian land. Peace Now later claimed that only 0.5% of that settlement was on privately-owned Palestinian land, as the Haaretz reported:

The Peace Now report did indicate, however, that contrary to numbers released by the movement in November, little private land was seized from Palestinians to build Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank.

The new numbers are vastly smaller than numbers Peace Now issued in an earlier report based on leaked information.

The group claimed in November that 86 percent of Ma’aleh Adumim, which has more than 30,000 residents, was built on private Palestinian land.

After successfully petitioning the court to see the database, the group reported Wednesday that data show only 0.5 percent of the settlement is built on private land.

Peace Now believes that Israel not making concessions is why there is no peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Distortions from leftist Israeli ”human rights” groups

Israeli “human rights groups” have been promoting the idea of Israeli human rights violations in the disputed territories and, on many instances, even relied on Palestinian allegations. They worked with Palestinian human rights groups to report on alleged Israeli human rights violations.

One of the Israeli “human rights” organizations is B’tselem, which calls itself “The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories”. However, at least much of it is disinformation, as CAMERA reported:

In a number of cases, B’Tselem maintains that civilians were not participating in hostilities even though the circumstances surrounding the death are disputed or unclear. For example:

1) B’Tselem reports that Muhammad Mahmoud Rajab a-Jarjawi, 19, killed Nov. 23 in Beit Lahiya, “Did not participate in hostilities when killed. Additional information: Killed while on his way home from prayers, which ended at five in the morning.” Yet the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency Web site (as supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring) reported that day:

Our Gaza correspondent reported that an Israeli reconnaissance plane launched a rocket at a group of armed Palestinian resistance men who were confronting the invading Israeli tanks east of Bayt Lahiya. One of the men, Muhammad Jarjawi, 19, was killed and many others were injured

2) B’Tselem recounts that Tha’ir Hassan ‘Abed al-Masri, 16, killed on Nov. 18 in Beit Lahiya, North Gaza district, “Did not participate in hostilities when killed. Additional information: Killed while working on his family’s land.”

3) B’Tselem also reports that the same day, Sa’id Salem Suleiman Hajaj, 20, was killed in al-Qaraya al-Badwiya Maslakh, North Gaza district. He also, reportedly, “Did not participate in hostilities when killed. Additional information: Killed on his way to work, not knowing there were soldiers in the area.”

Yet, according to the AFP, he was a member of a Palestinian terrorist group and may have been armed:

Said Hahjuj, 20, a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed in Umm Nasser, on the northernmost border, the DFLP said.

Thaer al-Masry, 16, was later shot dead in the same village, medical sources said. . .

The army, which has been operating in northern Gaza since Friday as part of a campaign to halt daily rocket salvos against the Jewish state, said both victims were armed. (“Two killed in Gaza after UN urges end to violence”)

4) Likewise, B’Tselem reports that Muhammad Salamah Hussein Hamidan, killed Nov. 16 in ‘Ein Beit al-Maa Refugee Camp in the Nablus district, “Did not participate in hostilities when killed. Additional information: Killed during an army operation while he was standing in his house next to the window.”

Yet, according to wire stories on the incident, Hamidan, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, may have been armed when he was killed. AFP reports:

Mohammed Hmeidan of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was shot twice in the chest at the window of his home in the Ein Beit Elma camp near the northern town of Nablus, the sources said.

Palestinian security sources and witnesses told AFP that the 25-year-old militant, who was on Israel’s wanted list, was killed by an army sniper.

An army spokeswoman said troops operating in the refugee camp had come under fire from Palestinians. “They identified an armed man and opened fire towards him,” she said.

Also, the AP reported:

Relatives said Mohammed Ahmedan, 25, was standing on the porch of his home in the al-Ein refugee camp, near Nablus, watching the Israeli military operations when he was shot two time and killed. They said Ahmedan was unarmed.

But the army said an initial inquiry into the incident found that soldiers had identified and shot an armed man.

On what basis does B’Tselem accept as fact a family member’s version of events over the army’s?

5) B’Tselem claims that Wahib Musieh Nayef a-Dik, killed on Dec. 14, 2006 in Kafr a-Dik:

Did not participate in hostilities when killed. Additional information: Killed when restoring the ancient palace in Kafr a-Dik. Soldiers who came to the site claimed that stones had been thrown at them from the site. One of the soldiers fired at him when he opened the door on the top floor of the palace.

Yet, the AP reports on the incident as follows:

The Palestinian officials said the man was throwing stones at two army jeeps that entered the village of Kufr al-Dik around noon Thursday when he was shot by troops. He was wounded in the chest and died on the way to the hospital, they said.

The AFP reported:

Construction worker Wahib Misleh, 25, was hit in the chest and arms after Israeli soldiers opened fire at stone-throwers in the village of Kafr Al-Didk, they said. Witnesses said he was not among those throwing stones.

The army said soldiers had fired at a person who was getting ready to throw a concrete block on the troops from atop a building.

There are conflicting Palestinian sources on whether or not a-Dik was involved in hostilities at the time he was killed. The Israeli army insists that he was involved in violence at the time of his death. How then can B’Tselem definitively state that he was not involved in the hostilities?

NGO Monitor is a group that shows anti-Israel bias and falsehoods that are presented by “human rights” and “peace” groups all over the world. 

There are plenty of other Israeli “human rights” groups that, like their Palestinian counterparts, makes distortions of Israeli human rights violations and dresses their anti-Israel crusade as a struggle to bring human rights. As a result, Israeli “human rights” groups are embraced by the media as legitimate sources and their figures are published in newspapers all over the world.

Taayush is another one of these “peace” groups that dresses their anti-Israel crusade as a struggle for co-existence. In it’s about page, it states the following discredited claim:

We — Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel — live surrounded by walls and barbed wire: the walls of segregation, racism, and discrimination between Jews and Arabs within Israel; the walls of closure and siege encircling the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip; and the wall of war surrounding all inhabitants of Israel, so long as Israel remains an armed fortress in the heart of the Middle East.

Really? Segregation? Arabs and Jews are allowed to go to the same hospitals, to the same towns, same restaurants and same buses. There is no segregation in Israel. This just goes to show how screwed up claims by self-described Israeli “human rights” or “peace” groups can be.

Suicidal policies made by left-wing Israeli Governments

Suicidal concessions made by left-wing Israeli governments began during the Oslo period. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin’s left-wing Labor-Meretz Coalition government saved Yasser Arafat and his PLO terrorist organization, which no longer controlled the terror war on Israel and was thusly losing influence in the political climate in the disputed territories. That didn’t mean that the Palestinians who wanted peace got any sort of control of the situation. In fact, to the contrary, it was radical Islamic groups like Hamas that got more control. As a result, there was intense Islamization of the Palestinian cause.

The Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir opposed negotiations with the PLO, which he called “the enemies of our people”. Yitzhak Rabin came in promising to get peace with the Palestinians once and for all. So in 1992, he became Prime Minister. In Oslo, Norway, after Rabin became Prime Minister, there were secret negotiations between PLO officials and Israeli officials. The talks were mediated by then-US president Bill Clinton.

In 1993, both Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo accords on the White House lawn. One year later, the Israelis gave up Jericho and 90% of Gaza to Arafat’s PA. One year later, the West Bank was divided to Area A, which was under the security control and civil Administration of the Palestinian Authority [PA], Area B, which was under the civil Administration of the PA; but under Israeli security control and Area C, which was under Israeli security and civil Administration. 98% of the Palestinian people were under the jurisdiction of Yasser Arafat’s PA.

From 1995-1996, there was a dramatic increase in terrorism. The Israeli government promoted the perception that Islamic Jihad and Hamas carried out the terrorist attacks to derail the peace and that the answer to it was to make more concessions. The left-wing Israeli government also viewed the Likud and those who opposed suicidal concessions to the Palestinians as being as bad as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, because to the Israeli government’s perception, they also sought to derail the “peace” process. That perception was promoted by groups like Peace Now and by the leftist Israeli writer Amos Oz. In 1994, Shimon Peres threatened to reveal Arafat’s violations of the Oslo accords and stated that it would “kill the Palestinian story in the American congress”.

By making Yasser Arafat’s PLO Israel’s new “peace” partner, the left-wing Labor-Meretz government saved that terror group from being faded away. Arafat’s PA turned the territories that Israel gave him into a terror base and promoted a culture of violence. To the left-wing Israeli government, anyone who revealed those facts were “anti-peace” and were like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, because like them, they also sought to “derail” the “peace” process. In 1995, after leaving a Peace Now rally where Rabin sang about peace, the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir assassinated him. As a result, he was sent to jail for the rest of his life. The nation of Israel mourned for the death of Rabin. But Shimon Peres then became Prime Minister and continued with the same policies, as well as continued to promote the same perception that opponents of suicidal concessions to the Palestinians including the Likud party were as bad as Hamas and Islamic Jihad because, like those two Islamist groups, they sought to “derail” the “peace” process. The Israeli government continued to call opponents of suicidal concessions to the Palestinians anti-peace.

But the constant suicide bombings and other barbaric terrorist acts by genocidal Palestinian terrorist groups caused the Israeli public to elect Benjamin Netanyahu in the hope of bringing security. He did bring more security. At the same time, he also continued the Oslo accords. Under him, Hebron was handed over to the Palestinian Authority thanks to the Wye accords in 1998. But in 1999, Ehud Barak became Prime Minister. Despite Arafat’s violations, which included anti-Semitic incitement that called for Israel’s destruction and that included his support and involvement in terror activity against Israel, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, Ehud Barak offered Arafat a state in 97% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, control of the Temple Mount and also a limited right of return for Arab refugees [but not enough to destroy Israel] while those not included would get resettlement. Arafat could’ve taken it and used it to even escalate the terror war on Israel; since his incitement and support of terror showed that peace with Israel was never on his agenda and that he just pretended to be at peace with Israel in order to survive politically. Arafat said no and didn’t even offer a counter offer. As stated, PA Communications Minister Imad Faluji confessed that Arafat planned the second intifada since he returned from the Camp David Summit. So that means that he felt ready to escalate his terror war on Israel. All it needed was an excuse; so the world wouldn’t know the truth. That excuse came a few months later in September, when Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Since the second intifada started, suicide bombings and other terror attacks increased to levels that were never before seen in Israel’s history. As a result, the Israeli public elected Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister. The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] found documents that proved that Arafat supported terrorism against Israel. So Israel, and later even then-US President George W. Bush, stopped trusting Arafat. And in the Roadmap, Bush called for the Palestinians to elect a new leadership that doesn’t support terrorism. Mahmoud Abbas took over Arafat’s role in pretending to be Israel’s peace partner. He was soon embraced by George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. In 2005, in the  hope of getting peace, Sharon conducted a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. All Israelis [both Jews and non-Jews alike] in Gaza were expelled. Many Jewish settlers and IDF soldiers felt traumatized. Some Jewish settlers even fought the IDF soldiers, who came to expel them. The extremists even called the IDF soldiers “Nazis”. Sharon even said to not go after the IDF soldiers who enforce his disengagement order; but to go after him since he was the one who imposed it. 

Israel also left greenhouses for the Palestinians to develop their economy. The Palestinians tore down the greenhouses. Instead of getting more peace, Gaza turned into a terror base. Rocket attacks on Israel increased. Two years later, Hamas took over Gaza from an illegal coup and turned it into an Islamist dictatorship that essentially became a colony of Iran and Syria. Gaza still continued to be a terror base. 

Suicide bombings were nearly eliminated because of the security fence. Palestinians didn’t give up that tactic and continued to send suicide bombers. However, Israel was better at stopping them, thanks largely to the security fence. 

The disengagement in Gaza even got Sharon out of the Likud party. The Likud party opposed the disengagement; since it was a suicidal concession. It also boosted the morale of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Rejectionist Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas claimed that it was their “resistance” that drove the Israelis out of Gaza.

The disengagement from Gaza got Sharon and other Israeli politicians to form the Kadima party, which is also a leftist party. One year later, Sharon had a stroke and was replaced by Ehud Olmert, who also was from the Kadima party and who left the Likud party during the disengagement. 

Then one year later came the Anapolis “peace” summit, where the Israeli government was secretly considering giving up parts of east Jerusalem. 

At least near the end of 2008, despite Abbas’s violations, which include his terror activity and promotion of the same culture of violence that his predecessor Arafat promoted, Olmert offered a similar offer to Abbas. In the offer, east Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state and they’ll get 93% of the West Bank. The Israeli offer would’ve enlarged the Gaza Strip to compensate for the West Bank land that Israel would retain. Abbas rejected the offer.

The move to impose a far-left agenda

Like America, the radical left in Israel also hates their own country.  Much of the radical Left in Israel [if not most or all of the radical left in that country] calls for a binational state, which is a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. This is an important article that reports on the radical left’s call for Israel’s destruction. Here is an article by a left-wing radical. It even portrays Israel as bad as the Palestinian Authority when it comes to democracy:

The price of occupation within Israel was also cited in the closing moments, when a Coalition member noted that the Israeli government is demanding “democratic reform” of the Palestinian Authority, while our own democracy has been severely eroded.

So this should bring the question of: Does Israel lynch people suspected of collaborating with the Palestinians with no trial like with what the Palestinians do to their fellow Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel? The answer is obviously a big fat no. The PA regime is authoritarian. It even intimidates journalists, as Jerusalem Post columnists like Khaled Abu Toameh reports. Israel trains her soldiers not to intimidate journalists. This goes to show the insanity between leftist moral equivalences between totalitarian societies and imperfect democracies, even while Palestinians themselves admit that Israel is better than the PA and while polls show that out of all democracies in the world, the one that Palestinians have the most respect for is the Israeli democracy.  That article was written by a far-leftist who talked about her experiences at a far-leftist protest. It is very much like the radical anti-war movement at home in America.

In that Israel-Insider article [see the last hyperlink], it makes no mention of the Palestinian goal of Israel’s destruction. It is by Gila Svirsky, who is from the radical leftist group Coalition of Women for a Just Peace. On Israel-insider, when you see the biography of the author, it says that the group is “a coalition of eight Israeli and Palestinian women’s peace organizations that advocate for resolution of the conflict in the Middle East”. But when you research it, it seems that the group is more of a bash Israel radical left-wing group. It defines its principles as such:

An end to the occupation.
Establishment of the state of Palestine side by side with the state of Israel based on the 1967 borders.
Recognition of Jerusalem as the shared capital of two states.
Israel must recognize its responsibility for the results of the 1948 war, and find a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.
Opposition to the militarism that permeates Israeli society.
Equality, inclusion and justice for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Equal rights for women and for all residents of Israel.
The full involvement of women in negotiations for peace.
Social and economic justice for Israel’s citizens, and integration in the region.

Nowhere mentioned there is the goal of ending Palestinian incitement. The “occupation” would end when the Palestinians have a leadership that promotes peace and discourages terrorism. The 1967 “borders” are an armistice line, so the boundary of the Palestinian state is to be negotiated. It calls for having Jerusalem as the “shared capital” despite the fact that it is the historic capital of the Jewish nation. When it comes to the 1948 war, it holds only Israel responsible for the refugee problem. To be fair, it is true that in a handful of cases, Israel did expel some of the refugees in strategic areas that are vital to Israel’s survival and to be able to save besieged Jews who were surrounded by Arab villages, as well as to help send the convoys to Jews in Jerusalem without having them attacked. At the same time, Arab states, not Israel, are the ones primarily responsible. If the Arab states and Arab leadership accepted the creation of the Jewish state and did not try to prevent the creation of it or fight for its destruction, there would be no refugee problem and there would be a Palestinian state right next door. In fact, in many cases, Arab leaders encouraged Arab refugees to flee for a while so they’d get out of the way when the Arabs tried to destroy the Jews. Then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said said:

We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.

And the Israelis [or Jewish leaders] encouraged Arabs to stay in many cases. In many cases, Arabs fled to get away from the fighting and believed that once the Arabs destroy Israel, they would come back to their homes. So it was caused by the wars that the Arab states and the Arab leadership started, not by Israel. Even many Arab refugees, Arab leaders and Arab newspaper columnists blamed the refugee problem on the Arabs.

Here’s what Haled Al-Azm, who was Prime Minister of Syria from 1948-1949, said:

Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.

And here’s what Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently President of the Palestinian Authority, wrote in the PLO journal on 1976:

The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the
Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to
emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political
and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the
ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.

The grandson of one Arab refugee who fled said:

Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]. I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the “Catastrophe” [establishment of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion from the land], our district officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel [ today known as Ashkelon, which is in Southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor.

An article in the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida states:

The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the “Catastrophe” in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long, and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those “Arkuvian” promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events…

Yet the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace chooses to blame Israel. It claims to oppose the “militarism that permeates Israeli society”. But militarism “doesn’t “permeate Israeli society”. Israel is focused on her military strength; but that’s from having to defend itself from forces dedicated to her destruction that are all over her borders. The Hatikva, Israel’s national anthem, doesn’t call for violence. The Palestinian national anthem does incite violence. It says that “I will live as a guerrilla, I will go on as guerrilla, I will expire as guerrilla until I will be back” and calls palestine “my revenge and the land of eternal”.

Why can’t this radical left-wing group oppose the culture violence that’s promoted by the PA?

Next it calls for equal rights for Arab citizens in Israel. Arab-Israelis already have equal rights. They can vote, serve in the Knesset, form political parties [Arab political parties have some seats in the Knesset], serve as Supreme court justices, serve in the government, serve in the army and in the police.

This far-left group has nothing to say about Palestinian Christians who are persecuted by the PA and by radical Muslims and the fact that Palestinian Christians have to hide their identity to talk about it or else they risk their safety. It calls for equal rights for women and all residents in Israel. All residents including women already have equal rights. Israel is pretty much the only Middle Eastern country where women have equal rights. In the Arab states and Iran, women are treated like second-class citizens and need a male “guardian” to allow them to travel. In Iran and Arab countries, honor killings are not treated as a serious crime. In Israel, it’s treated like a horrible crime. Add to that, Israel had a woman [Golda Meir] as Prime Minister. It calls for the full involvement of women for negotiations for peace. There are women who do help with the negotiations. It implies that Israel has a policy of excluding women from negotiating for peace. That assessment is absurd [to say the least].

 Coalition of Women for a Just Peace calls for “social and economic justice” for all Israeli citizens. Israelis have equal economic opportunities [though wealth is uneven, as any successful society would have]. So that last part, in other words, calls for a radical Socialist agenda to be imposed on Israel. Israel suffered an economic crisis when the Labor Zionists had its monopoly on Israel and after a Socialist economy was imposed. As Israel moved more toward Capitalism and free-markets, it also got more prosperous.

To get back to that article on Israel-insider, it also says the following:

Bless Kvisa Shchora [black laundry] for their ever-imaginative and defiant resistance to the combined oppressions of occupation, social injustice, and homophobia.

Yet Israel is not promoting homophobia. On the contrary, Homosexuals have equal rights in Israel. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. In Arab countries, Homosexuals are persecuted. In the PA, they’re persecuted and often suspected of being collaborators of Israel and end up being lynched. Many Palestinian homosexuals, as a result, illegally hide in Israel. Also, in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Homosexuals are killed. Islamo-Fascism, which now leads the terror struggle against Israel, is Homophobic to the core. It is also sexist, anti-Semitic and racist to the core. Israel is a free-democracy.

The Israel-Insider column claims:

We filled the street opposite the Prime Minister’s residence, and compelled the police to stop traffic there, although the commander threatened to “disperse us with force” if we did so. Most women came dressed as Women in Black, but it was a colorful crowd, with many posters left over from Jerusalem’s first gay pride day, held the day before, and bearing provocative anti-occupation slogans such as “Free condoms, Free Palestine,” “Transgender, not Transfer,” and the simple “Dykes and Fags Against the Occupation.”

Yet I already explained the irony. As I already explained, gays are oppressed by the PA, radical Muslims, and by Arab governments. Same is true for women. What about the modesty police in Iran? Look at what the Hamas regime in Gaza did to Asma al-Ghoul and how women who wanted to swim in the ocean are forced to wear their veils and can’t even wear a bathing suit. Yet this radical leftist group “Coalition of Women for a Just Peace” and the Homosexuals at the radical leftist demonstration have nothing to say about any of this. Instead, they bash the only country in the region that gives them their rights.

Many on the radical left seek to impose a radical Socialist agenda on Israel and even to destroy Israel. Here is a list of leftist Israeli groups. Notice that at least many of them are radical anti-Israel groups. One of them is the Israeli Black Panthers, which supports the divestment movement. It alleges that Middle Eastern Jews in Israel were treated as second-class citizens and is there to purportedly fix that. It’s model is the black Supremacist Black Panthers party in America. The Israeli Black Panthers identify with those who launch a terror war on Israel, that is the same ones who expelled the Jews in the Middle East or who at least promoted the anti-Semitism that got many of them to flee. It was Israel that took the Middle Eastern Jews in and integrated them.

Conclusion

At least much of the left in Israel pose a threat to Israel’s national will to defend itself. It’s appeasement policies are what fuels the idea of giving strategic land to Iran, Syria, their terror proxies and other rejectionist terrorists that result from Israeli withdrawals that are there in the hope of getting peace. A case can be made that groups like Peace Now essentially help Iran. Because they are at the forefront in promoting premature Israeli withdrawals that, result in rejecitonist terrorists taking control and that can even result in them turning into colonies of Iran. Peace Now backed the disengagement from Gaza that resulted in Gaza turning into a terror base and then even into a colony of Iran, with the illegal Hamas coup two years later on June 2007. I’m not saying that Peace Now or groups like it are pro-Iran. Groups like Peace Now don’t intend to strengthen Iran or to give the territories to rejectionist terrorists. But they favor premature Israeli withdrawals that result in the territories falling into the hands of rejectionist Palestinians and even to Iran. Of course, there are Palestinians who want peace with Israel and who are willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state. Unlike their leaders, they prefer to have better lives than to fight to destroy Israel. Those Palestinians who do want peace with Israel are not in control of the political situation and certainly won’t get any control of the territories from any Israeli withdrawal.

During the first decades of Israel’s existence, Israel had plenty of national will to defend itself and to act on behalf of the Jewish people. And the international community understood that Israel was under siege and that it just sought to defend itself. World opinion on Israel changed. As David Meir Levi showed, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] got training from the Soviets to portray their terror war as a war of “national liberation” against the Israeli “occupier”. It was after the Six Day war. So world opinion changed to sympathize with the Palestinian cause. The context was a lot of the time omitted, as Israel was portrayed as a brutal occupier. To world opinion, Israel’s “occupation”, not the terror war to destroy Israel, was the root cause of the conflict, despite the simple fact that the conflict started decades before Israel got the West Bank or Gaza.  It was there even before Israel’s creation.

In Israeli society, the national will to defend itself was under siege. Leftist groups and individuals rewrote the history of Israel where Israel was the bad guy and also blamed the conflict on Israel’s “occupation”. Like the international community, Israeli leftists also believed that, if Israel goes back to the pre-1967 borders, then the conflict will end. During the late 1980’s, the New Historians blamed Israel for the conflict. They portrayed themselves as legitimate historians who sought to “debunk” the “official” history. The media became the echo chamber of the New Historians, who were then seen as credible historians. Also, Israeli “peace” and “human rights” groups like Taayush and B’tselem were also seen as legitimate groups and also had the media as their echo chamber. Yet this is despite the fact that B’tselem and other “human right” groups does make errors. This is despite the fact that Taayush makes one of the most discredited anti-Israel libels on its about page, as this article quoted. As CAMERA’s Alex Safian stated, “Quoting Taayush, and affording them credibility, on the Israeli-Arab conflict is like quoting the KKK on race relations”.

The Israeli left also brought in an ideology known as “Post Zionism”, which is essentially anti-Zionist. The propaganda from the Israeli left about Israel’s supposed “wrong-doing” even got many IDF soldiers to refuse to serve in the disputed territories to defend their country. Those soldiers became known as Refuseniks.

The political left in Israel is very much like the political left in America. The American equivalent of the New Historians are the anti-American revisionist American historians who claim that the American founding fathers were white oppressors. I think that Ilan Pappe is the Israeli version of Howard Zinn. Zinn’s essential carreer is to bash America. His anti-American propaganda is even in a book called “A People’s History of the United States”.

Oslo was also another event fueled by Israeli leftists and post-Zionist ideology. Israel made suicidal concessions to Yasser Arafat in the false hope of peace. Those “anti-peace” critics of Oslo were proved to be right. They understood that Oslo would not bring peace, but would give a terror base to Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The 1990’s and the early 21rst century was when leftist post-Zionists dominated the political climate. They sought to appease terrorists in the hope of getting peace. Instead of getting peace, they strengthened rejectionist Palestinians and the imperialist terror regime in Tehran. They even contemplate giving the Golan Heights to Syria, despite its support for terror and despite the fact that the Golan Heights is a hill that overlooks Israel. Prior to the Six day war, the Syrian regime used the Golan Heights to fire on Israeli villages, farms and kibbutzim. I’ve been on the Golan Heights when I visited Israel in 2007.

Yet the Syrian regime is a terror regime that oppresses its own people, supports terror against America and Israel and has expansionist ambitions. Syria doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of Lebanon and carried out a brutal occupation of Lebanon until it was driven out by freedom-seeking Lebanese in 2005. The Lebanese freedom fighters’ victory against Syria in 2005 became known as the “Cedar revolution”. Yet Syria still doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of Lebanon. And post-Zionist Peace Now-like Israeli leftists are willing to give the same terror regime in Damascus control over the Golan Heights.

The deadly appeasement policies advocated by post-Zionist Israeli leftists and groups like Peace Now are similar to the appeasement policies that US President Barack Obama carries out. Obama seeks to make things right by apologizing for America. Post-Zionist Israeli leftists seek to do the same thing when it comes to Israel. It can be said that post-Zionist Israeli leftists are successors of Diaspora Jews who sought to appease anti-Semitism in order to improve their conditions. During the Diaspora, many Jews sought to appease anti-Semitism by embracing the accusation and by encouraging reforms. Those moves actually “legitimized” the anti-Semitic accusations, which never had any grain of fact. The Diaspora Jews who advocated appeasement policies formed groups like Haskalah. In fact, Kenneth Levin, in his book the “Oslo Syndrome” shows the similarities between post-Zionist pro-appeasement Israeli leftists and Jews who sought to appease anti-Semites. There is an element of anti-Semitism within the Israeli left. Israel Shahak was a self-hating Israeli Jew. He was from the Israeli left. He compares anti-Semitic movements with liberation movements and blames the suffering that Jews put up with, not on anti-Semitic bigotry, but on the Jewish victims themselves:

All Jews who really want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past must face the question of their attitude towards the popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past, particularly those connected with the rebellions of enserfed peasants. On the other side, all the apologists of the Jewish religion and of Jewish segregationism and chauvinism also take their stand—both ultimately and in current debates—on the same question. The undoubted fact that the peasant revolutionaries committed shocking atrocities against Jews (as well as against their other oppressors) is used as an “argument” by those apologists, in exactly the same way that the Palestinian terror is used to justify the denial of justice to the Palestinians. 

Our own answer must be a universal one, applicable in principle to all comparable cases. And, for a Jew who truly seeks liberation from Jewish particularism and racism and from the dead hand of the Jewish religion, such an answer is not very difficult. 

After all, revolts of oppressed peasants against their masters and their masters’ bailiffs are common in human history. A generation after the Chmielnicki uprising of the Ukrainian peasants, the Russian peasants rose under the leadership of Stenka Ryazin, and again, one hundred years later, in the Pugachev rebellion. In Germany there was the Peasant War of 1525, in France the Jacquerie of 1357-8 and many other popular revolts, not to mention the many slave uprisings in all parts of the world. All of them—and I have intentionally chosen to mention examples in which Jews were not targets—were attended by horrifying massacres, just as the Great French Revolution was accompanied by appalling acts of terror. What is the position of true progressives—and, by now, of most ordinary decent educated people be they Russian, German or French—on these rebellions? Do decent English historians, even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasants rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as “anti-English racists”? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered? To ask the question is to answer it. But to ask a similar question of many “progressive” or even “socialist” Jewish circles is to receive a very different answer; here an enslaved peasant is transformed into a racist monster, if Jews profited from his state of slavery and exploitation.

The anti-Semitic self-hating Israel Shahak also made this false claim:

Dishonouring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, an especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church.

So basically, at least much of the Israeli left basically attacked Israel’s national will to defend itself. It is at the forefront of suicidal territorial concession that, though based on good principles, actually end up being disastrous. Instead of getting peace, these territorial concessions result in an escalation of terror attacks on Israeli men, women and children. They result in giving a base to terrorists and colonies to Iran and Syria. As the saying goes,”The road to hell is paved by good intentions”. This saying applies when it comes to premature Israeli withdrawals. The “hardline” Israelis, who warn about the consequences of premature withdrawals, turn out to be right. As I said in this article, there are Palestinians who want peace with Israel. It doesn’t get rid of the terror threat Israel faces nor does it get rid of the fact that the threat becomes worse with premature Israeli withdrawals. After all, not all Germans were Nazis. But Hitler was still a global threat to the world. He was the one in control. Real peace with the Palestinians, if it gets achieved, would be great. At the same time, I oppose premature Israeli withdrawals, since it gives terror bases to rejectionist terrorists, who do control the political climate, and since it gives colonies to the terror regimes in Tehran and Damascus.