Truth is in the mirror

Editorial

Time magazine arrived in mailboxes this week with the cover blazing: “Why Israel doesn’t care about peace.” Sadly, its message is not the exception.

Time makes the case that Israelis are getting along quite nicely – buying expensive apartments, lounging with nargillah on sunny beaches, generally having a ball – why should they be concerned about making peace with their neighbors?

“Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask), don’t Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity?” asks the article. “Well, not exactly. Asked in a March poll to name the ‘most urgent problem’ facing Israel, just eight percent of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty.”

Forgive the Israeli people for not believing in fairy tales. National security (number three, evidently) is, for all intents, what Israelis settled on when it became clear, a decade ago this month, that peace (still, somewhat marvelously, number five) is a dream not shared by their neighbors.

The only reason that Israelis are able to get on with their lives at all is that, after six decades of striving for peace and receiving in return only genocidal war and randomly exploding extremists, sensible governments finally built a barrier between their people and the uncontrollable, irrational rage carefully cultivated by successive Palestinian and Arab leaders.

Yet Time reflects a global trend, epitomized at the United Nations and amplified in various media, which sees this tiny sliver of Jewish civilization, not defending itself from existential threats, but instead as the main obstacle to peace. As if Jews, of all people, having not had enough of war, seek to prolong it.

The double standard is striking. While Israelis who “go on” with their lives are generally considered to be immune to the pain of other human beings and evidence of something horribly wrong with the Jewish/Israeli psyche, Palestinians who produce art, visit a water park, surf or go shopping are praised for their indomitable spirit or their extraordinary ability to live life under the “occupation.” Two upcoming local events highlight this phenomenon.

Among the offerings at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (Sept. 30-Oct. 15), for example, is Checkpoint Rock: Songs from Palestine: “Amid the backdrop of persecution and occupation, they film performers who use music as both a balm and a vehicle for their political discontents”; “the vivacity on display puts paid to any preconceived notions of life under occupation.” In Zindeeq, “it is ultimately the medium of art that provides a means of reconciliation. As he [the protagonist] shows a Gaza street kid the correct way to point and shoot a camera, he says, ‘We, we make films, not wars.’” And, in Gaza Hospital, where, during “the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982,” people sought safe haven, “it is the humble and quiet spirit of the people, rebuilding and carrying on with their lives, that is the film’s most enduring and powerful quality....”

Then there’s the national book tour of Michael Keefer, author of Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, which arrives here next week (Sept. 23). Keefer’s book is a sort of culmination in the campaign of denial that has consumed the left in the past decade. Antisemitism, it maintains, does not exist. “Real” antisemitism is history; if not ancient, at least not recent. The “imagined” antisemitism is all fresh and current, but exists only in the conniving, perverse mind’s eye of Jews who exploit (alleged) empathy for the Jewish experience as a weapon, in order to “silence” criticism of Israel.

While conventional plots contend that antisemitism is merely a persecution complex (millions dead notwithstanding), the thesis underlying the work of Keefer and the position of his hosts on this tour is that antisemitism isn’t even perceived by the victim, but is completely pretend, utterly made-up for ideological or psychological reasons. Try to imagine the reaction from so-called “progressive” Canadians if any other cultural group in this country opened up to address its experience with discrimination and a movement erupted to declare, “That’s not discrimination. We’ll tell you what discrimination is and when you’ve experienced it.”

The scapegoating that for millennia was unburdened on Jews is now unburdened on the Jewish state. Is Israel faultless? Are Jews faultless? Is any country faultless? Is any human being? No. Israel, like any country, is guilty of imperfection. Jews, like all people, are imperfect. Yet Jews and Israel are held to radically different standards. Instead of being heralded, their resilience is seen to be proof of their innate cruelty and their inability to feel empathy and other basic human emotions.

Antisemitism is, indeed, alive and well. Those who declare it a chimera need only look in the mirror. They are its face.

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