Diary
The warped thinking of the Israeli left
2 July, 2010
To gain an insight into the warped thinking of the Israeli left, you can do no better than read the latest diatribe from Larry Derfner, an op-ed contributor to the Jerusalem Post. Derfner has a real problem accepting that most Israelis want peace.
While opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Israelis want peace with their neighbours, Derfner argues that his fellow countrymen are saturated with bigotry and prejudice. They are ‘blindly contemptuous of everybody and everything Arab, ‘drawn to confrontation’ and ‘intractably closed minded.’
He goes on: ‘If Israelis thought they could get away with expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and the Israeli Arabs from Israel, they’d support it.’ This is an amazing diatribe, even by the perverse standards of the Israeli left. Just what evidence does Derfner actually produce to support such contentious assertions? Those who value evidence, facts and logic will be disappointed at this stage. All Derfner can muster from his 25 years of Israeli life is one anecdote. And here it is:
“Soon after I came to this country 25 years ago, I learned that among my relatives, “Tali” was the real Arab-hater, the most extreme right-winger in the family. “For Tali, the only good Arab is a dead Arab, right?” one of my cousins ribbed her one Friday night. “Wrong,” she said. “For me, dead isn’t good enough – he’s got to be buried 40 meters underground, too.”
He then goes on to say that the said relative would vote Labour, not out of a liberal conscience but because of pragmatism.
“Look,” she explains, “I don’t want to live with the Palestinians, and we can’t get rid of them, so the only thing to do is divide the land, let them live in their country and I’ll live in mine.”
In other words, the polls are misleading. Israelis want disengagement despite their bigoted view of Palestinians; the stench of prejudice is still there.
Now of course it would be wrong to pretend that all Israelis are saints or all Arabs sinners. Some Israelis are bigots, though most are not. But Derfner’s argument that the widespread support for peace comes from a hatred of Arabs is his assumption only. He provides no evidence to back up this claim and it is therefore of a piece with his left wing prejudices.
It is more likely that Israelis see the value of a two state solution on pragmatic grounds. They know that in the long run, the alternatives are just not viable. Yet Derfner leaves no room for this kind of steely pragmatism.
He assumes that Israelis have to want peace for the right reasons, namely out of a feeling of brotherly love towards the Palestinians. What planet is he living on? The Israeli nation has been subjected to years of unceasing, relentless bloodshed by Palestinian terrorism. As Derfner himself admits of Israeli cynicism:
It comes from traumatic bouts of violence and bloodshed at the hands of Palestinians who don’t accept the Jewish state by any means. Israelis have every right to be cynical.
Yet somehow for the left, none of that should be allowed to alter the Israeli mindset. Peaceniks should turn guns into plowshares despite all the suicide bombings. This is naivety of the most malodorous kind.
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