Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.(Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)
We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East.(From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948) With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last.(Friends of Israel Initiative)
" engages, educates and empowers young Jews to connect with Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people with award-winning feature documentary films, short films, film-based and immersive educational experiences, and Israel education thought-leadership videos ....
Jerusalem U's award-winning Feature Films engage, educate and empower young Jews to find themselves in the story of Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel.Our documentaries and Video Classes, together with our uniquely formulated educational experiences - such as the exclusive Core 18 young adult leadership program, immersive Gap Year course, and intensive professional development workshop for educators - provide a platform to connect to the fundamental values, identity, and goals of students and teachers alike...."
Its website is brimming with invaluable resources, but is labyrinthine (I'm a mere novice at navigating it!), and best checked out in this respect at leisure, for there's so much to see and so much to miss if in a hurry.
There are blogs a-plenty, including the useful current one above
The videos are top-notch, and there are brainteasers such as these, aimed at engaging and empowering students faced with campus hostility to and vilification of Israel.
Click on each thumbnail's caption to view the video concerned
(Actually, I've a hunch he looks more like the handsome one in this detail from a famous painting by the British Gentile Zionist Holman Hunt):
He's a master poster-maker, with offerings such as this:
And this:
And this:
So it's not surprising that the mega-star of the pro-Israel blogosphere features prominently in an article by Tibor Krausz on blogging in defence of the Zionist Entity, and has some interesting things to say about the role and status of those of his ilk:
'Much of political blogging,' observes Krausz,
'is the online equivalent of pamphleteering, an unabashed form of partisanship masquerading as informed commentary. The blogosphere is home to a ceaseless cacophony of invective and hyperbole; and a myriad of virulently anti-Israel bloggers — white supremacists, conspiracy nuts, self-styled “friends of Palestine” — find common cause in demonizing the “racist,” “Nazi,” “apartheid” state of “Israhell.”
On mainstream media sites, meanwhile, the comments sections under even the most innocuous news items about the Jewish State invariably become hotbeds of vicious rants against the country, drowning out the rare dispassionate voices....
A cartoon by US blogger Elder of Ziyon illustrates the hypocrisies inherent in some popular views about Israel (courtesy: Elder of Ziyon)
Pro-Israel bloggers clearly have their work cut out for them, but that doesn’t faze perhaps the most influential one of them. “We definitely make a difference,” insists the New York-based IT professional who goes by the cyberspace nom de guerre of Elder of Ziyon and enjoys regular attention from mainstream media outlets for his investigative scoops.
Elder, who chose his pseudonym to poke fun at cockamamie conspiracy theories about Jewish power, began frequenting Yahoo message boards a decade ago to challenge the views and logic of Israel’s garrulous detractors. “Arguing one-on-one with people emotionally invested in hating Israel was a big waste of time,” the blogger, who prefers to remain anonymous and describes himself as a “fairly ordinary middle-aged Jewish guy,” tells The Report. “I looked for alternatives where I could write more freely and expansively for a larger audience.”
So in August 2004, he started his own blog. After a first few tentative steps of simply reposting items from the mainstream media, he soon came into his own as a seemingly indefatigable one-man operation, armed only with a computer, chutzpa and stamina. In several new posts daily, except on Shabbat, the blogger — who reaches some 10,000 readers a day and has many fans far and wide, Israel included — links to the latest articles of interest on the Middle East, parses media reports for inaccuracies and overt biases, provides satirical rebuttals to Israel’s fiercest critics, and highlights the Jewish State’s little-publicized achievements. “It takes up a few hours a day; but then again, that’s less time than most people spend watching TV,” he says.
He spends some of that time digging up archival records about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and perusing damning reports by NGOs and the UN on Israeli policy to verify the credibility of their sources and double-check their conclusions. Recently, after delving into a UN document and poring over photographs of damaged buildings in Gaza, he discovered that two Palestinian children whose deaths had been blamed on Israel during its week-long Operation Pillar of Defense offensive against Hamas militants last November, including the much-publicized death of a local BBC correspondent’s young son, had in fact been killed by Hamas rockets. His findings made the headlines.
“Pro-Israel bloggers have served as a sort of ‘information Iron Dome,’” says Dovid Efune, a British Jew who edits the New York-based weekly The Algemeiner Journal, whose website hosts some 500 Jewish bloggers. “During Israel’s Pillar of Defense, they were at the forefront of exposing and intercepting routine bits of misinformation by Hamas before they could land. Hamas and other anti-Israel actors were routinely releasing pictures of bloodied, maimed or dead children with the aim of whipping up anti-Israel sentiments. In many cases, the pictures [some of which were picked up by the mainstream media] were false, taken from different conflicts or scenarios. Larger news organizations [rarely bother combing through] Twitter feeds or translating Arabic Facebook pages.”
But Elder of Ziyon does. Running regular Google News searches on keywords in Arabic, then turning to his trusted aide, the Google Translate tool, the blogger scours the Arab-language news media for reports and op-eds about Israel, mocking, exploring and deconstructing the foibles of anti-Israel firebrands from Iran’s Press TV to Al Jazeera to the Palestinian news agency, Ma’an.
“At this very moment, I did an Arabic news search for ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” he explains. “It came up with five articles. One was from a Baathist website saying the US involvement in Syria is just like the Jewish/Freemason methods detailed in the ‘Protocols’ for taking over the world. The second was from a Jordanian columnist who sees the ‘Protocols’ behind Turkey’s current troubles. The third came from Egypt’s Al Wafd [a supposedly liberal daily], which claims to have uncovered a nefarious plot by the singer Madonna to convert the world to Judaism through [her study of] Kabbala. She’s also of course using the ‘Protocols’ as her playbook. There’s always some good material there!”
In March, the blogger revealed that the Arabic version of the website of MIFTAH, an EU-funded “moderate” NGO headed by prominent Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, ran an article promoting the old libel that Jews used the blood of Christians and Muslims for their matza at Passover. Cue an international hue and cry. MIFTAH lashed out at the “obscure pro-Israeli” blogger over his “smear campaign” before issuing an apology, in English, a few days later.
“Many pro-Israel bloggers are doing cutting-edge work,” stresses
Benjamin Weinthal, a veteran American journalist who is The Jerusalem
Post’s correspondent in Berlin. “They’re breaking stories either on
their blogs or on social media sites like Twitter.” Weinthal first took
notice of Elder’s work in September 2009, when the blogger revealed that
Marc Garlasco, an American official for Human Rights Watch and a fierce
critic of Israel, turned out, under closer inspection, to be an avid
collector of Nazi memorabilia.
“I’ve written several articles based on [revelations by] pro-Israel
blogs,” Weinthal says. One of those articles revolved around findings
that Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian activist for the pro-Palestinian
International Solidarity Movement who was murdered by Islamists in Gaza
in 2011, called Jews “rats” and posted anti-Semitic cartoons on his
Facebook page.” He adds: “Bloggers have carved out new territory for
themselves by zooming in on stories that remain in the cracks or on the
edges of mainstream news coverage. They bring these stories front and
center into the mainstream.”
Elder himself downplays his influence. “I’ve been fortunate that some
of my posts do bubble up to [the mainstream media] but too much of the
stuff we bloggers do stays stuck in our little world,” he remarks.
But there’s plenty of eye-opening stuff, almost daily, in that
“little world” of pro-Israel bloggers....
As with journalists, so with bloggers, credibility is an important issue. Operating without any editorial control in the Internet’s raucous free-for-all, freelance bloggers can blow hot and cold as they please. “Any way you slice it, a regular person will instinctively trust Reuters as being less biased than someone called ‘Elder of Ziyon,’” the eponymous blogger says. “I try to substitute transparency for my anonymity, so I back up my arguments with references to original sources.”
In the end, whether they are toiling away in relative obscurity or breaking out into the mainstream, pro-Israeli bloggers will keep chugging along, doing what they do best — standing up for the Jewish State in a largely hostile world. “These bloggers can serve as our eyes and ears on the ground throughout the world,” Efune says. “We need more of them to break the mainstream media’s monopoly on reporting.”
Read the entire article here
Hat tip: one of my favourite British pro-Israel bloggers, the cerebral, always-good-value Edgar Davidson
For all I know, some people might feel that their author gilds the lily, but these are surely essentially wise words from Australian Gil Solomon, which appear under the title "A Terrorist's Dream – To Have Jews As The Enemy". Convinced they're worth sharing beyond the Antipodes, I've taken the liberty of reproducing them here from the invaluable antipodean source J-Wire.
Writes Gil Solomon:
'It must be any Arab terrorist’s dream come true that they have Jews as their enemy.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you can fire rockets by the thousands and finally receive a response you know will end prematurely and inconclusively. You face an Israeli enemy which, during a war, gives advance notice by flyers and phone calls to apartment residents that a specific building is being targeted, giving so called “innocent” civilians and yourselves enough time to escape with your life.
Recently a US drone targeted a known terrorist in Pakistan and according to media reports even after confirming the man’s wife and extended family were present, the missile launch went ahead killing the terrorist and nine of those present with him and not a peep from anyone. This should serve as an example of the blatant experiences Israel should highlight the next time she faces her accusers. No country on the face of the earth goes to the extent Israel does in trying to avoid civilian casualties but one must ask, what benefit has it gained?
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you can fabricate stories of a supposed massacre (e.g. Jenin), knowing full well that nothing occurred but that it will cast dispersions on an enemy which foolishly states that it will investigate the claim and thereby, to the rest of the world, implies there may be something to the story. In this regard, if you are a terrorist you know that in respect to your Israeli enemy, that they have not a clue how to counter the Hasbara war you are waging against them and wouldn’t even know that Hasbara is a war.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will certainly know that her enemies can make the most outrageous and heinous statements, such as, according to media reports that “Jews are the offspring of pigs and apes”, knowing full well that the Israelis will still offer to sit down with you in talks with no preconditions! Not even the demand that the indoctrination of children in hate must stop. If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that if captured, as in the case of case of Barghouti, a terrorist “with blood on his hands” sitting in an Israeli prison, you can still be given access to the world media!
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will rejoice in that country’s decision of allowing the Muslim Waqf to take control of the Temple Mount after the 1967 war, all for a dubious halachic ruling which is not universally accepted today. This will allow you to go on excavating under the Temple Mount with a bulldozer, destroying any remaining Jewish artefacts in order to rid the place of any trace of the first and second Temple periods and in the process build a mosque there for future proof of claim to the land.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that so successful is your propaganda, that your enemy will still be held responsible by the world media for so called settlement “expansion” even though it is clearly only building a new house or an extension to an existing home but within the boundaries of the existing settlement.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that no nation in the Western world will call you to account for your ongoing perpetrated myths and lies.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you know that your enemy will indulge your ludicrous and incessant claims and still be willing to sit down with you in good faith.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you should pray that your enemy will continue treating you as they do now, that is, not as any “normal” country would do. If your enemy was a “normal” country like Russia, China or the USA facing barrage after deadly barrage of missiles, you could rest assured that parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank would have been reduced to rubble long ago.
Finally and most disgusting of all, if you are a terrorist facing Israel you will know that within the Jewish Diaspora, you will have countless numbers who have fallen for your propaganda, fallen for your attempts to rewrite history, who will flock to your side and denounce Israel for every step it takes in its defence. In short, you will be able to count on many of those who you call the “offspring of pigs and apes” who will defend your every move and pronouncement. If this is not obscene enough, these same “offspring of pigs and apes” will devise ways of bring economic hardship to Israel by such devious campaigns as a BDS.'
"With events that have taken place in recent times, one can only come to the conclusion that Israel is a democracy gone insane," lamented an exasperated Australian friend of Israel this past week.
"I don’t know what the answer is. We see the spectacle of an Arab member of the Knesset who participated in the Gaza flotilla a few years ago who, after having been stripped of her Knesset membership for an act of treason, applied to the Supreme Court and had her membership reinstated. We see in Israel, supposedly Zionist organisations siding with Arabs and other motley groups trying to lay claim over parts of the Negev. All in the name of political correctness, we see Israeli children being taught the Palestinian propaganda narrative of the birth of Israel – Al Nakba (the catastrophe). We see an Israeli professor in Beersheba make the claim that Israeli soldiers are racists because there has never been a case of rape against Arab women. Excavations are proceeding relentlessly under the Temple Mount by the Islamic Waqf (whom Israel put in charge after the 1967 war). This holiest of Jewish sites is an archaeological treasure trove that should be excavated with a toothbrush but is being bulldozed by the Waqf to rid the area of any remnants of a Jewish presence during the first and second temple periods. Who knows what has already been lost forever. There is no doubt that Arabs are constructing a massive Mosque under the Temple Mount in order to lay claim to the area. The Israeli electoral system is a shambles and is in need of a first past the post electoral reform where winner takes all. We have the disgraceful scenario where Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid has the audacity and sheer disrespect to state that if his conditions for coalition participation are not met “In a year and a half, I’ll replace him (Netanyahu) as Prime minister”. Going by past performance, everyone in the newly formed coalition will babble on about his own agenda and speak on issues that are not in their portfolio. It is time for all to shut up and speak only if authorised. How many times have we seen cabinet ministers bag and denigrate their Prime Minister on the world stage at every opportunity? They can’t even be united in the face of an existential threat! Finally we have the spectacle of Sudanese being aided and abetted by Egypt to make their way through the desert and actually allowed to cross the border into Israel where they are given food, water and shelter but where the deportation issue is always challenged by some group or another. The Egyptians are obviously trying various ways of bringing Israel to its knees. Making sure that approximately 100,000 illiterate Sudanese flood into Israel is one way to go about it. For Israel to have fallen for this trap is another example of stupidity passing for policy.
One of the greatest tragedies of all is the pathetic “Hasbara” efforts by Israel. It has a worldwide platform, but its spokespeople have no idea how to counter the propaganda. When it comes to Hasbara, Israel is like a ship without a rudder adrift on the sea. Hasbara has to come from representatives of the Israeli Government and right now they hardly speak with one voice on anything and when and if they ever do, it is ineffectual. For once I’d love to see an Israeli Govt. spokesman start by saying to the PA in particular and the world at large: “How dare you issue such blatant lies, now here are the facts.” One way or another, Israel better get its act together pretty quickly."
Meanwhile, ahead of "Israel Apartheid Week," here's a man who's challenging blatant lies, and presenting the facts. More power to Dennis Prager:
This interesting interview with the articulate Dr Dvir Abramovich, director of the Centre for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Melbourne and chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission in Victoria (about which, with examples of its work countering antisemitism, he talks here), took place towards the end of last year against the background of Operation Pillar of Cloud (Defence). His opinions are well worth heeding, not least by the kind of Jew alluded to (by the wonderful Ben Stein) in my previous post. But not by Jews only, for as Dr Abramovich says, both Jews and non-Jews who value liberty should advocate for Israel, a beacon of liberty in the Middle East. And though in some quarters Hasbara has become a pejorative term, interpreted (I suppose) as "spin," it should be remembered that it means "explaining," and that explaining the truth about Israel to counter misconceptions should be seen as a necessary obligation.
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'The "Friend Request Pending..." campaign aims to engage students and campus communities, highlighting the Israeli commitment to peace and demonstrating that a lasting solution requires cooperation between the parties, not unilateral moves.
The campaign has a Facebook motif, demonstrating that Israel has tried to make 'friends' with its neighbors, but the friendship has rarely been reciprocated. The campaign includes a series of entertaining, informative cards and posters for display and distribution on campus; a sensational viral video; and an emergency mobilization guide that includes talking points, ways to take action, and additional resources.
"Friend Request Pending..." communicates that Israelis want peace, and have proven it. The obstacle to Middle East peace is the lack of a responsible peace partner in the Palestinian leadership. Bypassing direct talks with Israel and defying the United States, the Palestinian leadership is turning its back on previous commitments to cooperation, in an effort to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish State.'
Last June, in my very first blogpost, I stressed the long overdue and urgent need for Israel to establish a satellite television channel of its own, and warned of the baleful effects of failing to do so in a world that receives so much of its information about Israel from biased and even hateful sources. http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/06/israel-needs-satellite-english-language.html
Now, it looks as if that long-overdue but vital necessity will be realised. It's reported in the Jerusalem Post that USSR-born Israeli billionaire and philanthropist Alexander Mashevich plans to establish a "Jewish Al Jazeera," a pro-Israel news channel that will "represent Israel on an international level, with real information".
Observed Mr Mashevich at the Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal conference in Washington DC:
"Every day and every hour people get negative information about Israel. Therefore, the most important thing is to represent Israel on an international level, with real information....
I think this idea should be implemented. I already spoke about it several years ago with Israeli government officials and with influential people in the Jewish world, and everyone agrees that such a channel is necessary," he said.
Let us fervently hope that the idea meets no setbacks and speedily comes to fruition. The monetary expense is enormous, but the penalty for failing to establish such a station is more enormous still.
In that searingly brilliant and courageous way of hers, Melanie Phillips, the renowned British columnist, broadcaster, and author of Londonistan and other trenchant analyses of the malaise and the challenges that the West faces today, gave an incisive and insightful address to the Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media on 30 December.
Entitled “The Challenge of Public Diplomacy vis-à-vis the Delegitimisation of Israel”, it identifies the “war of the mind being waged on a battleground [Israel] never even acknowledged it was on” – a war whose protagonists reach “across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes” as “nothing short of a multi-layered civilisational crisis”.
For example,
“In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel. ...
The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.”
Ms Phillips says, futher:
“Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups – those without power – can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today – Jews are held to be all-powerful as they ‘control’ the media, Wall Street and America.
So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel’s own fault."
And she warns:
"It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.
In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews’ legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west’s response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.
And despite the Arabs’ repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them – while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.
It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilised world of no other country."
While Ms Phillips does not discount the notion that giving back some land in the disputed territories might be in Israel's interests, she goes on to observe:
"But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy’s narrative.
Even many of Israel’s friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the ‘settlers’, but that Israel is not taking action to remove the ‘settlers’ – and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.
Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.
That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor – the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.
Yet since Oslo, Israel has meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn’t make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?
To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position – the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.
For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.
What Israel has failed to recognise is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it – and to which it needs to respond in kind – is psychological warfare.
The Arab and Muslim world long ago realised if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralise its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.
There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.
And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this – the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled."
Ms Phillips prescribes the following, of which Israel and its supporters must take heed:
"So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.
They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel’s security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; and which – as did the British Government recently - turn Israeli self-defence against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.
Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.
They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.
They should be asking so-called ‘progressives’ – including Jewish ‘progressives’ – why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.
They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.
Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas’s PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas’s Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler’s supporters in Palestine.
As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.
They should be telling the Jews ‘own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing – the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel’s population. It’s good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world’s attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under the feet of those demanding the ‘right of return’ for Arabs.
They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.
They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.
At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilised into a global fighting force.
They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.
They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the ‘progressive’ left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.
And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimisation and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.
In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defence and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologise. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defence intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.
It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel – the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.
Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home – including within Israel – and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.
In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel’s seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.
For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.
It’s time for Israel to realise that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.”
Israeli diplomat and statesman Abba Eban (1915-2002; pictured), born Aubrey Solomon in Cape Town, took his stepfather’s surname following his mother’s move to Britain following his father’s death. A Zionist from his youth, Cambridge-educated Eban served in 1947 as liaison officer with the UN Special Commission on Palestine and was a member of the Jewish Agency delegation to the UN General Assembly. On 18 May 1948 – just four days after the proclamation of statehood – Israel’s provisional government appointed him as its representative in the UN.
His mellifluous eloquence and conciliatory persuasiveness, assisted by his urbanity and command of many languages, proved highly effective at critical moments in Israel’s formative and subsequent history. For decades he was for millions around the world the face and voice of Israel, which was undoubtedly fortunate to have such a spokesman.
But there were other symbols of Israel ...
If you can’t remember the '60s, you may be unaware that among the icons of that decade, particularly in Europe, were the attractive and talented Israeli husband-and-wife singing duo, Abi and Esther Ofarim. Abi, born Abraham Reichstadt in Safed in 1937, provided the exquisite-voiced Esther with guitar accompaniment and backing vocals. Also a native of Safed, born there in 1941 into a Sephardi family called Zaied, Esther had a small role in the major movie Exodus (1960). She married Abi around that time, and they performed in Ivrit at international folk festivals, later taking Europe by storm – here they are performing Morning of My Life in Germany in 1967:
And here’s a video of them lip-synching and dancing to their big international hit, Cinderella Rockefella, in London in 1968.
Those were the days, my friend ... we thought they’d never end ... (as another '60s singer sang...)
In 1968, Israel, freshly victorious from a miraculous swift victory over the armies of the rejectionist Arab states, basked in a glorious well-deserved hero status; the Palestinian Arabs had yet successfuly to reinvent both themselves and the historic narrative in order to accomplish what repeated aggression by Arab states had failed to do; the British capital’s transformation into Londonistan was years away, and probably not even a glimmer in a jihadist’s eye. After all, it was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that set the crazies in motion – and which promises to be even more far-reaching in its effects on other nations than was the French Revolution of 1789 if the West does not fully awaken soon.
But I digress.
If a couple of Israeli entertainers attempted a variety routine on the streets of London today, they’d require a thick cordon of police to protect them from a howling mob of usual suspects – unless, of course, their act consisted of denigrating their country.
During the 1960s, when you thought of Israel, you were liable to think not only of Abba Eban, Yigael Yadin, Moshe Dayan Golda Meir – but also of Abi and Esther Ofarim. They captured the imagination. They symbolised a nation.
Judging by early photographs of her, definitely raven-tressed, Esther by the time she made it big in Europe she had – how shall I put it? – somewhat modified her “exotic” mizrachi looks. But she was still a stunning dark beauty – in fact, a breath-taking one. (I’m not a bloke, but I defy any red-blooded male to disagree!)
In 1961 Esther recorded the beautiful, haunting Avi Avi (“Father, Father”):
And here she is singing the Yiddish folksong Oyfn Pripetchik (“At the Fireplace”):
Those two videos are worth a look, because they contain some interesting – and in the case of the last, poignant – photographs.
So – why am I making a song and dance about the Ofarims?
Well, in my very first blogpost, back in June, I expressed my long-held conviction that Israel needs to establish its own satellite television station in order to counter the demonic, delegitimising propaganda being spewed out over a myriad airwaves. I stand by that view. Israel simply must explore every avenue in order get its just case through.
Among other challenges, it’s imperative that Israel gives the lie to the erroneous impression, encouraged by the demonisers who refer to it as a European colonial-settler state, that Israel is a homogenous "white" nation – it needs to confound its enemies and kindle some cognitive dissonance by opening a new window on reality through choosing to represent itself with as wide a variety of spokespeople as possible.
We have such people as Mark Regev and Avital Leibovich, and it’s a fine, arduous job they do, countering malice and misinformation in their calm, masterly way. But we need a much wider variety of spokespeople, so long as – for this is absolutely crucial – they also speak fluently in today’s lingua franca, English.
The beguiling double act of Esther and Abi Ofarim reflected the dual make-up of Israel: the ingathering of the exiles from both east and west. Today, some 50 per cent of Israelis are of Sephardi heritage, yet the outside world rarely gets to see or hear them – they do not, as a rule, figure as Israeli media spokespeople. It is vital that this situation changes.
The world needs to hear the voices and see the faces of Jews whose families were not light-complexioned Ashkenazim - people who reflect the reality of Israel’s richly diverse composition and whose very appearance transmits the message that Israel is an integral part of the Middle East and is in the region to stay. So let’s see and hear more of the descendants of around 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands, that exodus so conveniently overlooked by Israel’s mortal foes, and let’s see and hear Israelis of Ethiopian and Indian background too.
Oh – by the way, there’s a fragrant, full-petalled orange-blend rose known as “Matador” in some countries. But in others it’s known as “Esther Ofarim”, named as such on its introduction in 1970 by Reimer Kordes, of a well-known German firm of rose hybridisers. The variety’s name honours the renowned Israeli singer (here posing, appropriately enough in the colours of the blooms, for a German magazine in 1969).
But what to do if you’re a member of the barmy BDS brigade and – quelle horreur! – you suspect or discover that the orange-blend rose growing in your garden is “Esther Ofarim”? Well, you can always change its name to “Esther O’Farim”, as some clueless rose firms in their catalogues have done. But don’t worry unduly. You can still enjoy its beauty, guilt-free. For the royalties for the rose went to the German firm that bred it – not to The Zionist Entity.
There are two observations that some historians make about post-Reformation Britain. The first is that the sixteenth-century abolition of Romanish superstitions and of medieval cults such as that of “Little St Hugh”, the boy allegedly ritually murdered by Jews at Lincoln and venerated as a martyr, and that century’s introduction of the Bible in the vernacular into parish churches, prepared the way for the philosemitism that underlay Cromwell’s decision formally to admit Jews to England in 1656. The second is that antipathy to the Church of Rome and its adherents has always been far stronger in modern Britain than antipathy to Jews; in other words, that anti-Catholicism has been the British equivalent of continental antisemitism.
I believe this interpretation of British history to be broadly true, and we might perhaps cite the so-called 1904 Limerick “pogrom” (an exaggeration, to be sure, since it lacked bloodshed), which entailed rioting and a mass boycott of Jewish shopkeepers following a local priest’s ranting that Jews were usurious “leeches”, as an example of Catholic prejudice in the non-Protestant component of the United Kingdom.
Nevertheless, since Pope John XXIII’s Nostra Aetete document of 1961, which absolved Jews from the “deicide” calumny and asserted that Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God”, there have been Roman Catholics – such as the late Irish-born Father William Smith, who headed Australia’s Institute of Social Order, and the Sisters of Sion – who have worked tirelessly to forge robust links with Jewry.
This photograph shows the non-Catholic judeophile Margaret Thatcher (remember her attachment to the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, and to the Conservative Party intellectual Sir Keith Joseph, and how her Cabinet was jocularly said – by a former prime minister, Harold Macmillan – to contain “more Old Estonians than Old Etonians”?) in Rome last year; flanking her are two notable judeophile British Catholics – on her right, former New Statesman editor Paul Johnson, an acclaimed historian of Jewry, and on her left, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor Charles Moore.
I’d like to share with you extracts from some of the superb articles that Mr Moore, who writes an occasional op-ed piece for the Telegraph, has written – they are magnificent in the case they make for traduced and beleaguered Israel, and deserve to be more widely known. Please note especially Moore's observations on Israel's poor PR efforts, which I quote at the end.
‘As a boy ... I cheered as Israeli courage swept away the outnumbering Arabs who tried to destroy it again and again. I bought books about the Six-Day War, many of which carried pictures of glamorous female Israeli soldiers.
But then a different narrative supervened. People called "the Palestinians" began to be mentioned. Once upon a time, the word "Palestinian" had no national meaning; it was simply the description on any passport of a person living in British-mandated Palestine. During the 19 years to 1967 when Jordan governed the West Bank, the people there had no self-rule, and no real name. UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to leave territories it occupied in 1967, does not mention Palestinians; it speaks only of "Arab refugees". Palestinian nationality came along, as it were, after the fact, a nationality largely based on grievance.
Since then, the story has grown and grown. Israel, which was attacked, has come to be seen as the aggressor. Israel, which has elections that throw governments out and independent commissions that investigate people ... became regarded as the oppressive monster. In a rhetoric that tried to play back upon Jews their own experience of suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause began to call Israelis Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is disapproved of by many Muslims because it ignores the supposedly comparable "genocide" of the Palestinians.
Western children of the Sixties like this sort of talk. They look for a narrative based on the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid. They care little for economic achievement or political pluralism. They are suspicious of any society with a Western appearance...They buy into the idea, now promoted by all Arab regimes and by Muslim firebrands with a permanent interest in deflecting attention from their own societies' problems, that Israel is the greatest problem of all.
...All I want to ask my fellow Europeans is this: are you happy to help direct the world's fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours? And are you sure that the fate of Israel has no bearing on your own? In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is "the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance", the world of the West. He is busy building his country's nuclear bomb. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.../How-did-we-forget-that-Israels-story-is-the-story-of-%20the-West.html
In 2006, when Tory backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell claimed that Israel’s attacks on residential districts of Beirut during operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon were "a war crime grimly reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw", Moore responded, inter alia:
‘Here is a man who has been in public life for more than 50 years (he was an assistant to Anthony Eden in the general election of 1955), and yet he compared Israel's attack to the most famous genocide of the 20th century. What possessed him?
I ask the question, not because I am interested in Sir Peter ... I ask, rather, because his remark seems to me a symptom of a wider unreality about the Middle East, one that now dominates. It tinged the recent Commons speech by William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary[now foreign secretary in the Cameron-Clegg coalition]. It permeates every report by the BBC.
.... European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by something else - a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully.
.... It is as if, having relinquished power, we Europeans now wish our own powerlessness upon the rest of the world. We make vaporous and offensive Nazi comparisons. We preach that unilateral action is always wrong. That position can be maintained only by people who do not have to make life-and-death decisions. It is cheap and immoral.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.../The-tall-story-we-Europeans-now-tell-ourselves-%20about-Israel.html
Regarding the abduction of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, held in Gaza for 114 days on 2007, and forced to make two propagandistic videos by his captors, Moore mused:
‘I found myself asking what it would have been like had he been kidnapped by Israelis, and made to do the same thing the other way round.
The first point is that it would never happen. There are no Israeli organisations - governmental or freelance - that would contemplate such a thing. That fact is itself significant.
But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?
There would have been none of the caution which has characterised the response of the BBC and of the Government... The Israeli government would immediately have been condemned for its readiness to harbour terrorists or its failure to track them down.
Loud would have been the denunciations of the extremist doctrines of Zionism which had given rise to this vile act. The world isolation of Israel, if it failed to get Mr Johnston freed, would have been complete.
If Mr Johnston had been forced to broadcast saying, for example, that Israel was entitled to all the territories held since the Six-Day War, and calling on the release of all Israeli soldiers held by Arab powers in return for his own release, his words would have been scorned. The cause of Israel in the world would have been irreparably damaged by thus torturing him on television. No one would have been shy of saying so.
But of course in real life it is Arabs holding Mr Johnston, and so everyone treads on tip-toe...
Throughout Mr Johnston's captivity, the BBC ... continually emphasised that he gave "a voice" to the Palestinian people, the implication being that he supported their cause, and should therefore be let out. One cannot imagine the equivalent being said if he had been held by Israelis.
...what he says [in the videos] is not all that different from what the BBC says every day through the mouths of reporters who are not kidnapped and threatened, but are merely collecting their wages.
... Alan Johnston, under terrorist orders, spoke of the "absolute despair" of the Palestinians and attributed it to 40 years of Israeli occupation, "supported by the West". That is how it is presented, night after night, by the BBC....
You get precious little investigation of the networks and mentalities of Islamist extremism - the methods and money of Hamas or Hizbollah and comparable groups - which produce acts of pure evil like that in which Mr Johnston is involuntarily complicit.
The spotlight is not shone on how the "militants" (the BBC does not even permit the word "terrorist" in the Middle East context) and the warlords maintain their corruption and rule of fear, persecuting, among others, the Palestinians.
... The doctrine is that Israel practises "apartheid" and that it must therefore be boycotted.
All this is moral madness...How can we have got ourselves into a situation in which we half-excuse turbaned torturers for kidnapping our fellow-citizens while trying to exclude Jewish biochemists from lecturing to our students?
‘England can make the dubious boast of being the first country to have expelled the Jews en masse, in 1290. It also invented one of the strangest types of anti-Semitism, the blood libel. In the Middle Ages, Jews were massacred in York, Lincoln and elsewhere because of claims that they had kidnapped and killed Christian children for the blood of ritual sacrifice. This image of horror is still used against Jews. Modern newspaper cartoons – it is often in cartoons that the underlying visceral feeling appears most clearly – quite often depict Israeli leaders as deliberately killing children, and sometimes as vampiric. By a peculiar twist in our politics, such cartoons are now much more likely to appear in grand Leftish papers – such as the Guardian and the Independent – than in Right-wing popular ones.
...In our time, the more important anti-Semitic lie is the denial of the Holocaust....In this country, the Muslim Council of Britain, while not actually denying the events of the Second World War, objects to what it sees as the privileged status the words "the Holocaust" confer on Jews. It will only mark the Holocaust if other genocides are commemorated too, and many extreme Muslims pretend that Israel is itself genocidal.
....Polls suggest that large minorities of Muslims believe that "the Jews" blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Such madness is not confined to ignorant Muslim masses stirred up by fanatics: I have heard it seriously advanced by non-Muslims at a respectable dinner party....
In the psycho-drama of Muslim dispossession, Israel fills a central role. In a weird ideological alliance with Islamism, the secular Left now tries to argue that Israel is an "apartheid" state. There are many criticisms that can justly be made of Israeli policy, but criticism of Israel is often quite different from that of other countries involved in violent political conflict. It is existential criticism. It is against the Jews – seeing them, yet again, as the problem. This is anti-Semitic, and it is growing here, like litter, as Julius puts it, on our English lawns.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.../Anti-Semitism-creeps-back-on-to-English-lawns.%20html
And regarding the world condemnation of Israel’s actions towards the Mavi Marmara:
‘Things could have been so different if Israel had set the stage. These convoys, after all, are not new. Their propaganda for extremism is well known, but Israeli intelligence, so expert at tracing the networks of actual violence, seems strangely weak in following their wider ideological background, so the world was not told nearly enough about the people on board. Weeks ago, Israel could have been warning about the flotilla. It could have lobbied populations and governments about the unholy alliance between human rights groups and Islamist fanatics.
.... The failure, above all, is in what is now called ... “the battle of the narratives”. I am grateful to the latest Joint Doctrine Publication promulgated by our Chiefs of Staff (Security and Stabilisation: The Military Contribution) for two telling quotations. One is from the Principles of War, drawn up by Hezbollah, Hamas’s murderous cousins in the Lebanon. One principle states: ''The media has innumerable guns whose hits are like bullets. Use them in battle.’’ The other is from General Keightley, who commanded the ill-fated British operation in the Suez crisis in 1956. ''The one overriding lesson of the Suez operation,’’ he said, ''is that world opinion is now an absolute principle… and must be treated as such.’’
Israel has fought so long, and usually so well, in real battles, but it seems to have forgotten how to fight in verbal ones. On the day of the flotilla incident, all the outraged governments were on the airwaves almost before anything had happened. But it took five and a half hours before the Israeli Ambassador in America appeared in public. Quite a lot of articulate people spoke up in Israel’s support – it really will be a black day when there are no articulate people to be found to defend the Jewish state – but they had no clear, coordinated, Israeli government message, and so their ''innumerable guns’’ were pointing in different directions.
By contrast, the ''humanitarian’’ narrative was constantly repeated with all the efficient dishonesty that terrorists, when they use that word, deploy so well.
What has gone wrong? Experts tell me that there is no proper co-ordination, that no one person is in charge of shaping and communicating Israel’s message to the world, and that no one is sacked. It is most odd that the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who came to fame 20 years ago during the first Gulf war precisely because he knew the importance of talking to the outside world, is so quiet. He seems trapped in the government machine. Somewhere down the years, Israel allowed itself to forget that its greatest weapon is the story it can tell about itself.
Israel is understandably obsessed with security, but its greatest security lies ultimately not in the Israeli Defence Forces, but in political warfare. In the Six Day War of 1967, what swept all before it was the combination of military might and a story the world wanted to hear, that of David beating Goliath. Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism.
Sometimes you hear Israelis say: “It doesn’t matter what we say. The whole world is against us.” You can see why they say it, for they are indeed unfairly treated. But when they say it, they are uttering a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they won’t say what needs saying, no one else will say it for them.' //www.telegraph.co.uk/.../Why-has-Israel-disarmed-itself-in-the-battle-for- world-opinion.html
Can you remember the 1960s? I can! It was a time when the entire western public seemed to be in love with Israel. The state now so reviled was the miracle nation which, against all odds, had survived repeated onslaughts by surrounding countries bent on its destruction; it was the land of plucky pioneers who had made the desert bloom; it was the land of Jaffa oranges, of kibbutzim, of the venerable Ben-Gurion, of Yigael Yadin, Daliah Lavi, and Esther and Abi Ofarim.
How my entire class of girls yearned to follow the example of our young non-Jewish teacher, who had spent her summer vacation picking fruit on a kibbutz! How vividly I recall the thousands of non-Jewish young men who on the outbreak of the June 1967 War volunteered - nay, clamoured - to fight for the little Jewish State; how vividly I recall the numerous non-Jewish men and women (many of them of very modest means) who - with touching spontaneity - sent unsolicited gifts of money to Israeli embassies and Jewish communal institutions for the war effort of a people that appeared to be on the brink of a second Holocaust. When, in just six days, the imperilled David achieved a stunning victory against Goliath, most of the western public appeared to rejoice. A one-eyed general captured the imagination; so did the now iconic press photo of Israeli troops at the Western Wall, awed and exhilarated at having liberated the Jewish holy site to which Jordan had forbidden access since 1949.
Forty-three years later, although plenty of people can see through the false guise of Islamic fundamentalists posing as "peace activists", decades of subtle and not-so-subtle bias against Israel by left-liberal media outlets has worked its mischief. Not only do such outlets give scant coverage to the Israeli governmental viewpoint, in many instances they ignore it altogether.
Inexplicably, Israel has been singularly maladroit in meeting this challenge. Once upon a time it had an effective and urbane spokesman in the late great Abba Eban, whose mother tongue was English. Then came an unfortunate period in which the voluble Hanan Ashwari made a personable communicator for the other side, while with the notable exception of Bibi Netanyahu a series of lacklustre spokesmen with a poor command of English were trotted out by Israel. It is, of course, in English, the lingua franca of our times, that the battle for hearts and minds is won or lost.
And while Israel now has a cogent and unflappable media spokesman in Mark Regev, his advocacy is not enough. Fine representatives of Israel's cause such as he can only be as effective as the airtime they are allowed. Israel's pressing need is for its own English-language television channel broadcasting to the world, a channel countering lies, misconceptions and distortions by detailing Israel's history and showing the true image of Israel's vibrant democracy and culture in all its aspects - not least the medical breakthroughs and humanitarian initiatives of which few people outside Israel are aware because a media obsessed with portraying a mere sliver of a country facing existential threat as a ruthless and imperialistic military leviathan seldom if ever reports such developments.
An English-language TV channel acting as the world's window on Israel would be expensive. But in a world which receives the bulk of its Israel-related news from the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and Press TV, failure to go ahead with such a project will prove costly in ways that no friend of Israel would wish to contemplate.
