Immoral Equivalence
In March 2004, a group of Israel Defense Force soldiers founded Breaking the Silence, a nongovernmental organization ostensibly seeking to hold the military to its own stated standards of warfighting conduct. In theory, such a group could serve an important role in checking abuses. In practice, however, Breaking the Silence is something different. It has dubious sources of funding, pursues explicitly leftist political aims, and routinely misrepresents facts to paint Israel in the worst possible light.Exposing the Media’s Lies About Israel
Kingdom of Olives and Ash, a new collection of essays edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, features 26 different writers—all of whom visited Israel on delegations organized by Breaking the Silence. The book is a latticework of propaganda, pieced together by distortions and half-truths. The writers are talented, so there are no misplaced commas even though there are plenty of misguided ideas. The felicitous, compelling prose that makes this collection so readable is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
In their introduction, the married novelists Chabon and Waldman explain that they had long avoided the conflict: “Horrified and bewildered by the blur of violence and destruction, of reprisal and counter-reprisal and counter-counter-reprisal, put off by the dehumanizing rhetoric prevalent on both sides; we did what so many others in the ambivalent middle have done: we averted our gaze.” This claim is belied by the fact that Chabon wrote a novel 10 years ago featuring an entire counter-history of the Jewish state, while Waldman, the daughter of a Sabra émigré, has spent a decade fulminating about Israel’s misdeeds on social media.
No, Chabon and Waldman are neither ambivalent nor in the middle. Their insistence to the contrary is an attempt to gull the uninformed reader into believing they came into the project in innocence and came away sadder and wiser and ready to speak truth to power. They claim to have had “no political expectations of these writers,” but their partnership with Breaking the Silence tells a different story. The only scintilla of honesty comes in the form of punctuation: the two quotation marks with which they set off the word “security” when they ask whether Waldman bears “some measure of responsibility for the crimes and injustices perpetrated in the name of [Israel] and its ‘security.’” Since checkpoints, border walls, and police raids might all be justified when the security of civilians is at stake, Chabon and Waldman are compelled to imply that “security” is a mere ruse, that something far more sinister lies at the heart of these unfortunate realities.
While today’s widespread use of the term “fake news” can be traced to US President Donald Trump claims that well-established facts are not actually facts, Israel has long had to grapple with the phenomenon of media outlets bending the truth for political gain.Mark Pellegrino: What Makes A State
Indeed, the mainstream media often blames Israel for all the problems in the Middle East, and this trend has only been exacerbated by the explosion of social media networks and alternative online outlets. Yet instead of complaining about this unfair treatment, organizations such as Israel’s Tazpit Press Service (TPS) are providing real-time, accurate and reliable news stories for international media outlets seeking coverage of Israel and the Middle East.
“Foreign agencies come to Israel with their own perspectives. No one is completely objective,” says Amotz Eyal, the CEO and founder of TPS. TPS employs “Christians, Arabs, Druze and Jewish experts who provide accurate stories about Israel,” Eyal says. “Our goal is to expose stories that other services do not cover — not just terrorist attacks, but stories about the different communities in Israel.” Since its establishment in 2012, TPS has broken stories on a wide range of topics related to economics, security, politics, technology, scientific developments, agriculture and more.
With regard to Reuters, The Associated Press and other leading wire services, the TPS CEO isn’t worried about taking on the industry’s Goliaths. “We’re not trying to compete by size, but rather by quality,” Eyal said. “We have 250 photographers all over Israel. We have more people on the ground here than any other service. As a result, we get to the stories more quickly than any other news agency.”
Mark Pellegrino is an American actor of film and television, best known for his work as Lucifer in Supernatural, Paul Bennett in Dexter, and Jacob in Lost. He is co-founder of The American Capitalist Party.
When it comes to Israel, people generally fall into two categories of thought. The first, is that Israel is an artificial construct of victorious European powers; that it is a result of imperialism and has no claim to legitimacy, and thus no right to exist. The second, is that Israel was founded by Jews thousands of years ago and has every right to exist as a Jewish state regardless of its modern origins. Which perspective is right? Both sides claim a kind of squatter’s status to the land. The first claims an Arab majority has lived in the region for millenia and that this majority cannot be removed by legal fiat. The second claims a historical connection to the land dating back to the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages which entitles an entire people – via a kind of historical deed – to resettlement and re occupation of a geographic area. Though I sympathize with this latter view in terms of verifiable ancestral origins making a clearer tie to the land; and though the idea of migration from one place to another seems, to me, to be a fundamental human right, I find neither argument (from indigenousness) suffices to establish legitimacy in the eyes of those who are undecided on the issue. Furthermore, the fact that indigenousness or the artificiality of redrawn borders is not much mentioned in the establishment of the legitimacy of any Arab state in the Middle East (which were almost universally formed in the same ‘arbitrary’ way as Israel) leads me to believe that something may be rotten in the state of Denmark with such a standard. So, perhaps it’s not the origins of a state that makes for its legitimacy, but rather something else entirely. And perhaps it is the evasion of this fact that shifts the argument constantly to indigenousness as a standard for the establishment of a rightful ‘state’.
Let’s face it, like ALL human knowledge the concept of the state has evolved over time; and, despite the resurgence of statism in the early and mid twentieth century, the idea that the state’s function is the protection of this little thing called ‘right’ has been a nearly impossible discovery to avoid. Even vile statist regimes must play to the notion that they are servicing rights by violating them, and spend much blood and money upholding that illusion. The inflation of rights and the establishment of modern democracies has been the mechanism by which statists maintain this fiction. But the awareness that such a fiction need be maintained shows an evolution. The evolution is this: that even statists recognize protection of right as the function that legitimizes a state. Anything other than rights protection is illegitimate. In other words, any state that practices rights protection is legitimate and has a right to exist (since its right is predicated upon the protection of rights). Any state that does not, or actively violates those rights is illegitimate (for the same reason).