They honestly think that Jewish people are monsters.
It is the only final explanation that I can come to.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and other such affable neighbors blanket Israel in bombs - thousands and thousands of bombs over the course of years - ruining the lives of tens of thousands of young people throughout that part of the country - and the western-left, which claims to care about human rights, simply does not care about those human rights.
They honestly, sincerely do not care and, thus, have never minded Arab-on-Jewish violence... or, really, anybody on Jewish violence.
Israel is both one of the smallest countries in the world and the single most bombed country in the world for its size and the very people who claim to stand for human rights and social justice, could not care less.
On the contrary, they honestly believe that we deserve it. They believe, that despite our history, that, yet again, Jews deserve a good ass-kicking, apparently for not being respectful enough to our former masters.
That is why as soon as the Jewish people stand up for ourselves, against a much larger majority population, western-leftists leap to their feet and call us "Nazis" and murderers and claim that we have sacrificed our very souls out of some irrational, racist fear of the harmless, indigenous "other."
They mock and demean our efforts to protect ourselves and our children out of some shallow, vaguely understood, but emotionally-satisfying political ideology. They portray, in exceedingly caustic terms, our efforts at self-defense as an unjust form of aggression against those who hand out candy at the joyous news of the killing of Jewish teenagers.
The Jews of the Middle East are six million people swimming in a very small bay within a much larger ocean containing between 350 and 400 million Arabs who, for the most part, do not want us there and are not the least bit shy about letting us know it.
And sometimes they do so in exceedingly direct terms, such as nearly chopping the head off of a three month old Jewish baby girl.
Throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East imams and ayatollahs stand before their people, raise their fists, and cry to the heavens for anti-Jewish violence. They spread the blood libel. They tell the world that the Jewish people are monsters who must be confronted, if not killed, wherever we may be found.
Sometimes they claim that we send Zionist sharks into the waters of the Mediterranean for the purposes of ruining Egyptian tourism or that we send vultures into Saudi air space as Zionist spies. Or that we breed diseased Zionist rats to be let loose into Arab villages in Judea or Samaria.
So, who is this "they" that I speak of? Generally speaking, it is the Arab-Muslim world within the Middle East, but it is not only the gracious neighbors of Israel who contribute to this irrational racism and hatred toward us.
The Arab Middle East has its allies.
The First Horrible Ring of Hatred
Think of the conflict as comprised of concentric Rings of Hatred around the Jews of the Middle East.
The innermost ring is the most intense. At the innermost ring are Arabs willing to sacrifice their own children for the Holy Sport of killing Jews in the name of Allah and the Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Unto Him). These are the people that are currently getting their asses whooped, and for very good reason, in the Gaza Strip, and they are also the same people who generally believe that Jews are fair-game for violence and murder.
I honestly do not know what to say to the local Arabs beyond, "Stop inciting hatred and endeavoring to kill Jews." If they would kindly follow that advice they would find the Jewish people to be their very best friends in the world. Jews would certainly be far better friends to them than their Arab-Muslim brothers who locked them up in refugee camps throughout the Middle East since 1948 to be used as weapons against us for religious reasons.
The Second Horrible Ring of Hatred
Beyond them, of course, is the larger Arab-Muslim Middle East wherein the most blood-curdling forms of outright Jew hatred are perfectly acceptable in day-to-day discourse. And this, in truth, is where the battle will eventually be won or lost. The day may come when the Arab accepts the Jew, but until that day comes the violent pressure from the great Arab majority against the small Jewish minority will continue and the conflict will go on and the western-left, which was practically invented by Jews, will continue to blame the Jewish people for the violence against us.
This, needless to say, brings me to the next Ring of Hatred.
The Third Horrible Ring of Hatred
The United Nations, the EU, and the Western Left.
The UN hardly even needs to be considered. We all understand that the UN is dominated by the Arab / Muslim bloc and that while they spend considerable time and resources seeking to undermine Israel's ability to function as a fellow member of the community of nations, it almost never condemns the far worse human rights violations of other members in good standing.
As for the EU and the western-left, they need to be considered as one. They hold the same values and their organizations from the biggest, such as the EU, itself, to the smallest, tend to represent those values. And, it should be noted, that in theory these are highly commendable values. They include the values of social justice and universal human rights as they emerged in the twentieth-century following the great conflagrations of that century and following nineteenth-century industrial abuses of labor.
It was these classically liberal values that led to something approaching full equality for black people in the United States. It was these values that eventually allowed women to gain a voice and a vote and a share of the public square. I grew up with such values in a Democratic home. We were pro-Civil Rights, pro-Women's Rights, anti-war, pro-environmentalism, and pro-Israel. None of that seemed the least bit contradictory.
Sadly, however, the western-left is no longer a friend to the Jewish people. On the contrary. They, instead, provide a seat at the progressive-left table for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists who would see the Jewish people robbed of autonomy and self-defense.
Times have changed.
At the long-term prodding of Arab and old Soviet propaganda the western left increasingly sees the Jews of the Middle East as villains. The left has constructed a "narrative" of Jewish imperial racism in conflict with indigenous rights. This narrative has nothing to do with history and almost nothing to do with the current Arab-Muslim war against the Jews of the Middle East.
They have invented a morality play in which the Jewish victims are portrayed as aggressors against the innocent, indigenous population who lived idyllic, pastoral lives, tending their Sacred Olive Groves in pastoral tranquility until those vicious, European Jewish marauders rode through in the twentieth-century and stole their land and refused to rape their women out of clear and obvious Zionist-Jewish racism.
That, in a nutshell, is the way much of the western-left views the Jews who live in our ancestral homeland and if that is what they think of them, just what do they think of us?
They think that the Jews are thieves who stole Judea and Samaria from the "native" Arab population. And not only are we told that we stole the land of our ancestors, the land where Jewish people have lived since before recorded history, but we stole it from the "indigenous" conquerors of the 7th century who immediately placed the Jewish people under the conditions of dhimmitude where we lived for 13 long centuries before freeing ourselves with the Movement for Jewish Liberation known as Zionism.Of course, upon freeing ourselves from persecution under the imperial system of dhimmitude, with the fall of the Ottomans upon the completion of World War I, our former oppressors launched a war against us that continues to this day.
And, yet, western-leftists, who claim to believe in "universal human rights" and "social justice," side with the hostile majority Arab-Muslim population against the besieged Jewish minority in the Middle East and do so within living memory of the Holocaust.
All I can say at this point, with, as I write, the bombs now dropping on Gaza - as well as on S'derot, Ashkelon, and throughout the rest of the country - is G-d Bless the IDF and may it keep the Jewish people in the Middle East, and all Israelis, safe from harm.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.