Israel is the Ultimate Anti-Imperialist State
In his recent anti-Semitic rant, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas repeated the lie that Israel is a “colonial project”. This is part and parcel of a long Muslim Arab tradition to wipe out the Middle East’s indigenous pre-Islamic civilizations.The New Israel Fund Harms Israel, Yet Still Gets Support
Imagine if mainstream voices in the 21st century demanded that all non-German Europeans ”integrate into proper Europe” by embracing German culture, language, identity and the Lutheran religion. In a post-Second World War Europe, it would be rightly considered unacceptable supremacist racism. By contrast, many “liberal” Jew-haters demand that Israel “integrates into the proper Middle East” in the name of “peace” by letting itself be swallowed up by the surrounding Muslim Arab world.
In an era of Western post-colonial guilt, the Middle East is often presented as a hapless victim of former European imperialism. This myth was successfully promoted by the late Arabist Edward Said and his influential propaganda book “Orientalism”, which was enthusiastically embraced by numerous Middle East departments at Western university campuses.
It is a frequently ignored fact that former European imperialism in the Middle East was preceded by Islamist imperialism. In his book Islamic Imperialism: A history, professor Efraim Karsh, documents the long and violent history of Islamic imperialism. At its height, Islamist imperialism carved out a giant Muslim empire stretching from Spain in the West to India in the East. This once mighty empire eventually fragmented and the last Muslim empire collapsed with the end of Ottoman rule in 1917.
However, Islamist imperialism largely succeeded in wiping out pre-Islamic indigenous civilizations by imposing Islam and Arabic as the new norm across the Middle East and North Africa. The Jews were one of the few indigenous nations that managed to survive Islamic imperialism and maintain a separate identity and culture.
For centuries, Jews were the ultimate “other” in a predominantly Christian Europe. Today, the reborn Jewish state is the ultimate “other” in a predominantly Muslim Arab Middle East. Persians, Turks, Kurds and Berbers have largely embraced Islam but maintain separate cultural and linguistic identities from the surrounding Arab majority.
Ancient Christian and Zoroastrian communities are oppressed and threatened under Islamic rule. Israel stands out as the only remaining independent non-Arab and non-Muslim state in the wider Middle East region.
Anti-Jewish history revisionists often claim that Israel is a “foreign body” in a “Muslim Arab” region. In reality, the reborn Jewish state is the only remaining viable and indigenous fragment that survived the onslaught of Islamic imperialism.
A fundamental component of all strands of Judaism is supporting Israel as the Jewish state. Whether one believes in Orthodox or Reform Judaism, follows Shabbat, etc., believing that Israel should be the Jewish homeland is something that all Jews must believe in.
That’s why I don’t understand how American Jews can support the New Israel Fund (NIF) — an organization that harms Israel on many fronts. The latest development is a joint press release from Adalah (which received more than $2 million from the NIF from 2008-2016) and Hamoked (which received more than $700K during the same period). The press release claimed that, “it is illegal upon international law to impose upon East Jerusalem residents an obligation of loyalty to the occupying power.”
As the press release notes, these organizations sent a comprehensive letter to the Interior Ministry “detailing their grave concerns regarding a newly-proposed bill to amend the Entry into Israel Law. This new bill will allow the revocation of residency status of East Jerusalem Palestinians on three possible grounds: for ‘breach of loyalty’; in cases where the status was granted on the basis of false information; and in cases where ‘an individual committed a criminal act’ in the view of the Interior Ministry.”
The new bill was drafted following the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision in September 2017 denying the revocation of permanent residency of four Palestinian parliamentarians from East Jerusalem — on the grounds of “breach of loyalty.”
These organizations argued that East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory under international humanitarian law (IHL), and that its Palestinian residents are a protected civilian population. The groups claim, therefore, that it is illegal under IHL to impose upon them an obligation of loyalty to the “occupying” power — let alone to deny them permanent residency status on this basis.
The lowdown on Israel’s foes
HOLDING aloft Alex Ryvchin’s new book, The Anti-Israel Agenda: Inside the Political War on the Jewish State, Colonel Richard Kemp, one of its contributors, referenced Benjamin Netanyahu’s Munich speech in commending the collected essays to attendees at its Victorian launch.
Kemp described Netanyahu’s February 18 appearance at the Munich Security Conference, where the Israeli PM held up a piece of an Iranian drone fired on Israel from Syria, warning the Jewish State’s enemies not to “test Israel’s resolve”.
Waving the book, the visiting Briton exclaimed, “That is also a weapon — that is a weapon you need to arm yourself in your fight to defend the State of Israel.”
The former chief of command for British forces in Afghanistan, whose testimony before the UN Human Rights Council probing the 2014 Israel-Gaza war is detailed in Ryvchin’s new work, paid tribute to the Ukrainian-born Australian writer and lawyer, who is the public affairs director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).
Liberal and Labor MPs, including Michael Sukkar (Deakin), Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports), Tim Wilson (Goldstein), and Victorian senators Kimberley Kitching and James Patterson, were on hand for the launch, co-hosted by ECAJ, the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the Zionist Federation of Australia and Zionism Victoria.
Sukkar described Israel as “the frontline of freedom in the world … yet there’s no nation probably on the earth that’s under a greater existential threat … works such as what we’re launching tonight … are so important in pointing that out”.