"It is Palestinian land and Zionists are squatting on it."We will never get through to most western liberals with our arguments because not only are hard-line anti-Zionists immune to reason, we're not even making the right arguments for the center.
We all understand that there is a radical vocal element, primarily on the left in the west, that is entirely irrational on this topic and who will despise Israel no matter what it does or fails to do. Those people cannot be reached. It does not matter how many times Israelis zoom into Haiti to save lives, people like, say, "Lefty Coaster" on Daily Kos will always-and-forever despise the Jewish people and, thus, despise the Jewish State of Israel.
I am less worried about people like him, I think, than in the political ideological middle. It is the well-meaning center that concerns me. Your average American liberal Democrat. This is a demographic that is highly significant in the American context and anti-Semitic anti-Zionists have been gnawing on them for many years, now.
For the moment, liberal Democrats are maybe 50 / 50 in favorability on Israel and those numbers are probably eroding.
If there is a segment of American society that can be reached via reason, however, this is the segment. Liberal Democrats in the United States traditionally prided themselves on their capacity for reason, even in politics, so let's give it a whirl.
In a recent video of Caroline Glick discussing her book The Israeli Solution she made the following argument, among others, and it is an argument that goes right to the core of Jewish relations with the liberal west.
What she said was this and I paraphrase:
We look at liberal Democrats (or western progressives, more generally) and we think, "Gee, there is no more liberal and progressive country in that entire part of the world than Israel." And then we wonder how it is, therefore, that Israel does not have much support among western progressives? On the contrary, western progressives are far more suspicious of Israel than are their conservative counterparts.
How can this be? Progressives are pro-feminism and Israel has the best feminist record, by a long shot, than any country in the entire region, if not the world!
It does not matter, you stole their land.
Yes and let's talk about Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine, shall we? Did you know that Israel has done more, in a shorter period of time, to advance scientific and medical knowledge than any other country in human history?
It does not matter, you stole their land.
And ethics in war? Anti-Semites spread the blood libel by suggesting that the IDF specifically targets civilians, particularly children - as Lefty Coaster does in the link above - but the fact of the matter is that the Israeli military forces do more to avoid civilian casualties than any army in the history of warfare.
It does not matter, you stole their land.
Alright. Alright. Let's talk about who is inclusive and liberal and who is exclusive and authoritarian. The Palestinian-Arabs want absolutely nothing to do with Jews. Period. The Arab-Muslim State of Palestine needs to be entirely Judenrein. The very idea of Jews living in Judea is an abomination. Meanwhile, in Israel about 20 percent of the population is Arab and Muslim. They have greater civil liberties than do Arabs and Muslims anywhere else within the entire Middle East and elect their people to the Knesset.
It does not matter, you stole their land.
You get the idea and Glick is absolutely correct.
If even we agree with the reality of a concept known as "The Occupation of Palestine" then we have no case. Period. End of story.
If Israel is occupying "Palestinian" land then we should just pack it up and go home, because there is no argument to be made. If the truth is - as the Palestinian-Arabs claim and as their western-left supporters agree - that white European Jews marched onto Jewish land and snatched that land from the indigenous Arab population then history should bear this out.
Thankfully, history tells us a very different story.
The eastern coast of the Mediterranean has no more indigenous people than the Jewish people. We were there thousands of years prior to the Arab conquests. We were there, in no particular order, before the Romans or the Persians or the Babylonians or the Brits. There are no other people on this planet, from an historical perspective, who can lay greater claim to the Land of Israel than the people of Israel, the Jewish people.
Is there really any argument to be made that this is untrue?
Can, for example, San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi - who is building an academic career based on spreading hatred toward Jews among liberals and progressives - honestly argue that Jews have less claim to Judea than do Arabs? Arabs conquered and now control 99.9 percent of the entire Middle East and it is somehow unjust that the native Jewish population hold onto any portion of our historic homeland?
It is entirely absurd, but this is the poison that they are selling.
The best and most straightforward manner of dealing with this nonsense is to remind western liberals that Israel is Jewish land. Just as France is French and England is English and Portugal is Portuguese and China is Chinese, so Israel is Jewish. The very word "Israel" means the Jewish people.
Now, unlike France, Engand, Portugal, or China, we are willing to share that land, but no one can tell us that it is not Jewish land.
And that, my friends, needs to be our clear and obvious red-line and we need to bang it into their skulls.
And Jerusalem will remain united under Israeli rule.
Am Yisrael Chai!
(originally published in Jews Down Under)
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.