Monday, February 25, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Continuing from last
time, if you are an aggressor, then it is easy to come up with an
enact strategies and tactics involving being an aggressor against your enemies.
This observation should be obvious, yet we so often fail to
appreciate its converse: that lack of an aggressive goal limits one’s ability
to behave aggressively against others, especially those you have not branded as
enemies.
There are many explanations as to why Israel’s friends have
failed to meet the challenge of BDS and other anti-Israel propaganda campaigns
with adequate force, from weak will among Jewish institutional leaders to historical
factors that lead Jews to value accommodation with non-Jewish
majorities over sticking up for ourselves.
Such criticisms are certainly well founded, but they fail to
take into account that even if we were disposed or led to fight rather than get
along, we would still need a destructive end-point to guide strategies and
tactics that would get us to that destructive goal.
But if you were to ask even the most vocal critics of the
Jewish community’s response to BDS, I suspect you would find almost no one who
wants to see the world’s Muslim’s disbursed, Arab states dismantled, or other
outcomes likely to get large numbers of people killed, despite the fact that dismantlement,
disbursement and death are the fates hoped for and worked towards by Israel’s
enemies.
In fact, both militant and non-militant defenders of Israel
are united in the desire to see Israel left in peace, its citizens unthreatened
and unmolested, and the Jewish condition normalized. But if these are the goals we seek, how can
we be expected to attack those that attack us with matching levels of
ferociousness?
Even if such levels of attack could be initiated, possibly through
campaigns designed to tell the truth about the Arab world (including their
treatment of women, gays and minorities) as incessantly and aggressively as
they tell lies about us, BDS has taught us that such campaigns would need to go
on not for months or years, but decades.
Can a community that longs to live at peace with others be realistically
expected to put in the time, effort, resources and organization into behaving
in such a way for a century?
But it actually gets worse.
For, as readers of Divest This know, BDS does not
limit the damage it causes to Jews alone.
Whenever they import the Middle East conflict onto a college campus, or drag
an academic association, church, municipality, or even a humble food coop into
their campaigns, they do untold damage to everyone making up those communities,
creating needless strife and conflict over an issue that is only on the agenda
because the boycotters want to leverage other people’s reputation for their own
political gain.
Are we ready to do the same?
And how about all the effort the Israel haters have been putting into ginning
up hatred between races and religions in their war against the Jewish state? Are we ready to stop trying to heal rifts in
our society and instead exacerbate the pathologies driving the world to ruin,
just to see enemies harmed?
In addition to our lack of militant goals, another reason we’re
not ready to harm others to get our way is that it is wrong, and even if we (like our foes) are able to delude ourselves
into thinking a descent into evil represents virtue and courage, is this really
who we want to become?
Finally, even if we can distort our souls enough to fight
fire with fire for decades in hope of seeing someone else destroyed, our foes
already have a fifty-year head start on us, not to mention alliances with
dozens of powerful nation states controlling vast wealth and a stranglehold on
organizations like the United Nations and other major institutions. If anyone can explain a strategy for
generating another 49 Jewish states or finding other ways to dominate global organizations,
I’m all ears.
Our inability to take on Israel’s enemies by becoming more
like them should not be considered a weakness, but an opportunity since it
forces us to look for alternative strategies that meet our goals while limiting
our enemy’s ability to achieve theirs. This
is in fact what Israel and, to a large extent, its supporters have done
(however imperfectly) since Israel was founded seventy years ago.
What are the strategies that have left Israel sending
spaceships to the moon while its would-be destroyers sink ever deeper into
genocide, ignorance, poverty and weakness?
They involve manning the walls, celebrating
life over death, and making every Israeli and every friend of Israel count, while
not standing in the way of Israel’s enemies having to live with the
consequences of their own choices.
Thoughts on the strategies and tactics associated with those
four ideas next time.
