Reconciliation, jihadi-style
Palestinian officials met in Doha on Sunday, as part of a Qatar-led initiative to cause rival factions Fatah and Hamas to bury the literal and figurative hatchet. Turkey was also in on the act, ostensibly interested in getting the leaders in Ramallah and Gaza to present a united front for the sake of an agreement with Israel.The Yasser Arafat school of Zionist history is poisoning the Zionism narrative
This is amusing, to put it mildly, since the only thing on which Fatah and Hamas actually do agree is the ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state.
They are at odds about everything else, including the pace at which their shared aim should be carried out. But mainly, they -- like the rest of their Islamist brethren throughout the region and the world -- are engaged in a deadly power struggle.
So perpetual is this battle that the so-called unity deals the two groups signed in the past, most recently in April 2014, have unraveled before the ink on their contracts was dry. But the signatures did serve an unwitting purpose: to show those who still could not see that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a partner for jihad, not peace with Israel.
Like environmental sludge seeping into the groundwater, anti-Zionist toxins are poisoning standard discussions about Zionism. The latest example of how the campaign delegitimizing Israel insidiously undermines the Zionist narrative is a serious, non-polemical New York Times article quoting nine Zionists and no anti-Zionists. Steven Erlanger’s article “Who are the true heirs of Zionism” reflects the new (ab)normal: an inability to discuss Zionist history without wrapping it around the Palestinians’ self-serving, one-sided tale of national woe. Increasingly, consciously or unconsciously, many American elites, including Jewish intellectuals, are parroting the Yasser Arafat school of (anti-)Zionist history at worst, or the equally wrong, if less genocidal, post-Zionist school at best.Israeli, French envoys face off online
Just as environmental engineers construct clay barriers to prevent seepage into the soil to protect the groundwater, we need substantive Zionist education to detect and refute these distortions. Zionism has truth and fairness on its side. American history isn’t just about Native Americans or African Americans – and Zionism isn’t all about Palestinians.
The Times article begins by charging that “Zionism was never the gentlest of ideologies. The return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there have always carried within them the displacement of those already living on the land.” Erlanger then provides this bizarre, distorted perversion of Zionist history: “The earliest version of Zionism based the creation of a Jewish nation on the revived language of Hebrew, to unify the huge variety of dispersed Jews. Beginning in the 1920s and especially with the Holocaust, suggests Bernard Avishai ... came the idea of ‘political Zionism,’ which required a state and a military both to protect Jews against anti-Semitism and to transform them into a modern state, to defend themselves and, if necessary, to defy the world.”
Erlanger’s crackpot chronology is like starting the history of the American republic with Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, three decades after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
It's its not everyday that two senior ambassadors debate on one of the world's most popular social networks. But that's exactly what happened this week when the French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud and his Israeli counterpart Ron Dermer, exchanged barbs in front of everyone on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It all started with tweets by the senior French ambassador, who was formerly French ambassador to Israel and the United Nations. Araud retweeted statements made by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in conversations on achieving peace in Syria, which stated that "there can't be a political negotiation when one side is murdering the other."
Israel's ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, responded in kind to Araud's tweets, implying hypocrisy on the part of the French ambassador. "hmmm. Wonder if that wisdom will one day be applied to when Jews are being murdered in Israel," read his sarcastic tweet.
Araud waited a day and chose not to respond directly to Dermer, but his indirect response was sufficient:"Israel/Palestine. So predictable that any pretext leads one side to declare that the other one is evil."
After users responded to his tweets, including some Israelis, Araud addressed the subject with another tweet: "A tweet on Syria. An unrelated reaction on Israel/Palestine and an outpouring of one-sided tweets without any link with the first tweet." Araud later posted a third tweet: "Israel/Palestine. Feeding the passion instead of analyzing the situation from both sides is a good way to escape the real issues."