We must support Israel

Editorial

When it was announced that Palestinians worldwide, including those here in Vancouver, but especially in areas adjacent to Israel, would mark the 63rd anniversary of the creation of Israel with protest rallies and calls for a “third intifada,” it was obvious that someone was going to get hurt. And so, it came to pass, as if dead Palestinians were not precisely the PR principle behind the event.

Playing his role, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insists the deaths Sunday were well worth it. “The blood of the Naqba fatalities was not spilled in vain,” he declared. “They died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.”

Of course, they need not have died. Almost every death since 2000 is a result of Yasser Arafat’s upturning of the negotiating table. Indeed, pretty much every death since 1948 is a result of the Arab world’s total blind rejection of Israel. It is not the occupation of 1967 that these people were protesting, remember. It is the “occupation” of 1948. This distinction, as Member of Parliament Libby Davies demonstrated last year, is the line between legitimate discourse seeking a two-state solution and the extremist, frequently genocidal, position that a Jewish state has no right to exist.

Since before Israel’s birth, the entire Arab world has opposed it, not because of the acts in which the Israel Defence Forces must engage to counter an enemy that recognizes no rules of engagement, nor because of the occupation of 1967, nor because of borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements or any of the other straw dogs they raise to divert from the real cause of their hatred. They oppose Israel because it is a Jewish state – the Jewish state.

Their intent is to “wipe the Zionist entity from the map,” to “erase Israel from the pages of time.” These may be the easily dismissed words of the crazed Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but they reflect the Arab, Muslim and now even the “progressive” mainstream, as evidenced in rallies worldwide Sunday.

Ahmadinejad is not the radical fringe of the Muslim world. On the issue of the eradication of Israel, he is entirely typical. Every Arab government except Jordan and pre-revolutionary Egypt has already wiped Israel from the maps they use to teach their children. Hamas and Hezbollah have the elimination of Israel as core principles. Fatah, but for a few rhetorical qualifications, has the same end goal. There are even Jews who mourn the naqba (catastrophe), betraying their own interests and people, sometimes even collaborating with modern-day Hamans in the process.

The greatest Haman of our era, of course, set out to destroy our entire people and succeeded in destroying European Jewish civilization, thousands of communities, millions of lives and so, so much potential. Incredibly, just six decades later, this is contested terrain. Whenever the Shoah is raised in a discussion about Israel, censure emerges immediately that the Zionists are attempting to negate criticism of Israel by invoking our catastrophic history. This ignores not only the millennia-long connection between Jews and the land of Israel, but the connection between Jewish statelessness and the Holocaust. Millions died because no country would take them – not Canada, not any country in Europe or Latin America or anywhere, no place, not even the great “Mother of Exiles,” the United States, as idealized by Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Those who survived the Holocaust submerged themselves into the renewal of our Jewish homeland, a state that would serve as a refuge for all time, and a place to husband the remnants of our people. As survivors made lives for themselves individually, the surviving Jewish people collectively – even now still just 15 million worldwide – also diverted our grief from the destruction and threw our energies, hopes and lives into the rebuilding of our national and spiritual homeland.

After 63 years, Israel remains the repository of Jewish history and hopes. Whatever else it may be – high-tech phenomenon, cultural paradise, multicultural democracy, blooming deserts – it is the manifestation of Jewish civilization. When forces attack from all sides, as they did literally on Sunday, or as they do figuratively every day at the United Nations, we recognize this phenomenon as part of a long tradition: the negation of Israel is the attempted denial of Jewish continuity and existence.

So, yes, we will defend this tiny of piece of redemption in the face of all condemnation and assertions of disproportionality. As a response to a world that sees our very existence and survival as a naqba, we will – as soldiers, as overseas advocates or in any way we can – ensure that one tiny refuge for Jewish people remains in a world that is still irrationally and unremittingly hostile. This is not “uncritical” support for Israel, as the common accusation goes. It is critical.

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