In response to those who feel that Palestinians also have rights, in response to those shocked at the permanent regime of terror instituted by the Israeli government, in response to those who see a contradiction between Zionism and democratic values, the defenders of Israel offer not arguments but epithets: “Anti Semite! Self-hating Jew!” To criticize Israel, we are told, is to side with those seeking the destruction of the Jewish people.
But we would suggest that the real threat to the Jewish people comes not from the Arabs, not from the Palestinians, but from within the heart of the Jewish state itself. We suggest that it is from within the heart of the Jewish state itself that the great and distinctive moral tradition of the Jewish people is being obliterated, that special attachment to social justice whose roots are to be found not so much in the religion of Judaism but as a secular response to hundreds of years of persecution, a moral tradition which has given the Jewish people a distinctive and honorable place in world history. It is the Jewish state which has unleashed a spiritual holocaust against the Jewish people with its unbridled chauvinism, glorification of militarism, promotion of conquest, revival of medieval religious obscurantism – and, most tragic of all, the indoctrination of the rising Jewish generation in anti-humanist values.
And we would suggest that the threat to the physical survival of the Jewish people in Israel likewise comes not from the Arabs, not from the Palestinians, but from within the Jewish state itself, which has borrowed so freely from the Nazi arsenal: the super-race theory, the practice of collective punishment, the adoption of conquest as a permanent agenda, the use of mass terror, the technique of the Big Lie. We suggest that the threat to the physical survival of the Jewish people comes from within the heart of the Jewish state itself because no matter how many military victories Israel may gain over its neighbors, no matter how many atrocities it commits against the Palestinians and other Arab peoples, Israel cannot suppress, cannot choke off their national aspirations. And whether it takes 5, 50, or 500 years, those aspirations will be met. What Israel is doing, therefore, is sowing the whirlwind.
Those who cry out against Israel’s ruinous policies, ruinous to the cause of world peace, ruinous to the Arab peoples, and ultimately ruinous to the Jewish people, are obeying a great moral imperative, following thereby in the path of the great Jewish progressive tradition, and it is they who are the real defenders of the interests of the Jewish people.
