Israel’s Image

One Comment on Israel’s Image

Rob on Mon, Dec 25th 2006 11:01 AM


I left this comment at Good Neighbours but because I feel quite strongly about this I’d like to share it. Feel free to delete.
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I’ve been reading the posts on the conference here and at Liza’s place and Yaeli’s and all the comments that have been made.

I’m conscious that Lisa said on some post or other that people outside Israel tend to make fools of themselves when commenting on what goes on there. I’m writing as a friend of Israel — though not an uncritical one — living in Australia, so I may well fall into that category.

That said, I want to say a couple of things in defence of Richard Landes and what I think was trying to be achieved in the holding of this conference.

Perhaps one thing we see more clearly than you do is how badly Israel is imaged in the international media, and the way that impacts the legitimacy of Israel in the court of (educated) public opinion. The relentless negativity seeps out from the media’s coverage into community perceptions, with all the implications for political and governmental support that entails. A while back, I said to my wife that I wanted to visit Israel some time in the near future. Why on earth, she asked? To show that I support Israel, I said. She paused: funny thing, that, she said thoughtfully; almost nobody else does.

Do you guys realise that ‘progressive’ public opinion in the west — and I think you would see yourselves as ‘progressive’, right? — has swung way, way over from opposing specific Israeli actions to supporting exterminationist programs? Do you realise that the broad left in the US, Australia and Europe has few problems and no apologies in absorbing classic anti-semitic tropes into its anti-Israel rhetoric? That tens of thousands of people world-wide rallied behind the Hizbollah flag during the July-August war, and chanted ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’, fully aware that what they were calling for was the extirpation of Israel?

Israel’s supporters in the west have real problems with this. (I am sure Israel does too.) But because of the way Israel is routinely portrayed in the west — as a genocidal apartheid state by such luminaries as Jimmy Carter — we’re now a dwindling few. Not one in a hundred thousand who remember the media stories about massacres in Jenin knows that they were shown by the UN itself to be false. Not one in a hundred thousand who responded with revulsion to the media images of the deaths in Qana knows that rockets were fired from there into Israel, or that the recovery of the bodies was staged as a deliberate propaganda exercise. Not one in a hundred thousand who saw the stories about the attack on the Red Cross ambulances knows the stories were false. And virtually none of the millions who watched the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah know the footage was faked. That’s the work that Richard Landes and others have been doing: to try and turn the lies and libels around.

I could not count the number of arguments I’ve had on the blogosphere here in Oz defending Israel, popularly described as ‘a self-contained axis of evil’. How many times I’ve pointed out that it is Israel that accepts a two-state solution, but that Hamas, Hizbollah (explicitly) and the Arab and Islamic states (implicitly — explicitly in Iran’s case, of course) do not. That Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbours, and the fanatics against whom it is ranged simply want to see it cease to exist. Hollow laughs all round, folks.

Richard Landes has been pointing these things out for a long time now. It was disturbing to see him castigated at Liza’s place. Maybe the conference played host to some fanatics on the Israeli side, though Landes was not one of them. But let’s be cautious of naivete. Perhaps if things were as they ought to be, the milk of human kindness would be just what it takes to resolve all the problems of the world. But that’s not the real world and some, inside Israel and outside, can recognise that.

Of course there are many good people on both sides, and it’s truly great to see sites like this one where they can come together and talk. But the men with the power and the guns don’t come here. And the chilling thought is that if they did, they would come here with one intention and one intention only.

Not the right kind of comment for Good Neighbours, I realise that. But Blogger doesn’t let me comment at Liza’s where this contribution more properly belongs.
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Apologies for the rant.

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