Bahai shrine in a garden in Haifa, Israel

Israel Looks Good

By Greg Sheridan
The Australian, May 6, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

The Israel I see in most of the Western media is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion and to Palestinian suffering.

Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously democratic, and has a vibrant left wing. It is intellectually disputatious, multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is the only society in the Middle East with all the institutions of a democracy, the only national expression of the Western values of democracy and human rights.

Second only to the United States, Israel is the most acute object of intellectual hostility to the West. Official Iranian propaganda has described the United States as the "Big Satan" and Israel as the "Little Satan". In the West, this is a view mostly found on the ideological Left.

Israel is many things. It is capitalist, Western, an ally of the United States, uses military force when necessary to maintain its security, and rules over an occupied Arab population. Israel is also the homeland of the Jewish people. This last role gives it a special place in the estimation of those who love and admire Jewish culture.

Anti-Semitism is once more a growing force in the world. Anti-Semitism has a long and shameful history in Western civilization. The world owes monotheism to the Jews, but classical Western anti-Semitism began with the view of the Jews as the people who rejected Jesus.

This Christian hostility to Jews developed over centuries. Many Christian thinkers struggled to work out their relationship to the Jews. In the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church issued its definitive instruction: "Although the church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the holy scriptures." But a culture cannot easily eradicate ingrained anti-Semitism.

The most powerful elements of classical Western anti-Semitism were the contentions that Jews wielded vast and malign "money power", manipulated politics for their own benefit, corrupted the morals of Western societies, were disloyal to the nations they lived in, and were behind the rise of international communism.

In 1975, the United Nations passed an infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. More than 15 years later this was rescinded. Now, Israel is frequently called an apartheid state. The foundational basis of Israel is argued to be illegitimate.

But nobody declares Saudi Arabia an illegitimate state because it has no democracy or human rights, and its doctrinaire Wahhabi Sunni establishment rules over a marginalized Shia minority. Nobody declares Turkey an illegitimate state because it has a disgruntled Kurdish minority, some of whom aspire to statehood.

Anti-Semitism is raging across the Arab world. The Al-Gomhuria newspaper in Egypt published a cartoon of a serpent strangling Uncle Sam, with the caption: "The Jews taking over the world." Throughout the Arab world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion figure in popular culture. Throughout Gaza and the West Bank, an extravagant anti-Semitism is a central part of the Palestinian discourse.

Israel is the licensed grievance for Arab regimes. A few years ago, a committee of Arab intellectuals working under the auspices of the UN produced a devastating indictment of the Arab encounter with modernization. In its own view, the Arab world possesses the one true religion and the greatest culture, as well as much of the world's oil, yet its societies are impoverished and dysfunctional. All this is explained by invoking anti-Arab conspiracies centered on the United States, Israel, and the Jews.

This Arab anti-Semitism is a huge obstacle to peace. If Israel is not just a nation like any other but the most visible and offensive manifestation of a giant Western and Jewish conspiracy against Islam and the Arabs, then making peace with it is not honorable but despicable.

United Nations majorities constantly condemn Israel's alleged human rights abuses but never address human rights in Iran or Saudi Arabia or China. The hysterical criticism and denunciation of Israel has little to do with actions any Israeli government could reasonably take.
 

AR  I think Sheridan is right here. The Western Left's sympathy for Arab anger is shameful and unworthy of its own social achievements and intellectual heritage.