Why Does the Israeli Left Hate Israel?

I ask that question through the left-wing media. Mainly, I ask it via what is considered the "elite" media of the country: Haaretz. It is this left-wing paper that is considered the most "intellectual" paper in all of Israel. If this is the case, there is as much wrong with the "intellectual elite" in Israel as there among the "intellectual elite" in the West and especially the United States.

In one of the most thorough analysis I have ever read, Francisco Gil-White does an amazing historical investigation into one article released by Haaretz, DURING the war. This article, written by Gideon Levy and and entitiled "The Real Estate War", is the typical example of the mind-set of the left-wing "elite" in Israel. There are so many things wrong with the piece, that Mr. Gil-White goes through the article, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, and extrapilates and proves every historical farce and contradication that lays within it. I would love to post the whole thing, but it's very long. However, any-one is at all interested in seeing how coilly the myths are intertwined with a hint of fact and how to actually unravel the lies, MUST read this article.

[...] Amazingly, much of the Israeli media also attacks Israel with lies, printing articles that the Arab media can exceed only cosmetically, with volume and tone.

To convince you of this, I will make an extreme claim, and then I will proceed to defend it, with evidence. My claim is that Gideon Levy’s article, published in the middle of the war against Hezbollah (8 August 2006) in the important Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz with the title “The Real Estate War,” and containing Gideon Levy’s analysis of the war in Lebanon among related topics, does not contain one true claim, and moreover that every single one of its many errors is designed to attack the Israeli Jews.

Below I will examine Gideon Levy’s article in full, omitting nothing. It has to be seen to be believed. My demonstration of Gideon Levy’s outright lies and fabrications will raise the question: Why was anything like this published in a major Israeli newspaper? The next piece will attempt to answer this question, and that will require an examination of some major issues in Israeli and Diaspora Jewish politics.READ THE REST...
[...]
Next Levy writes:

“For years, Israel has waged war against the Palestinians with the main motive of insistence on keeping the occupied territories. If not for the settlement enterprise, Israel would have long since retreated from the occupied territories and the struggle’s engine would have been significant[ly] neutralized. Not that a non-occupying Israel would have turned into the darling of the Arab world, but the destructive fire aimed at Israel would have significantly lessened, and those who continued to fight Israel would have found themselves isolated.”

But the historical facts are as follows.

Before the PLO was brought into the Jewish state Israel was not “waging war against the Palestinians.” On the contrary, these were the best of times for the so-called ‘Palestinians,’ who prospered as they never had before under the benign Israeli administration (skeptics should consult the footnote).[15] What Gideon Levy characterizes as a “war” has in fact been a process of continuous capitulation to PLO terrorism, with veritable hordes of antisemitic terrorists released from Israeli jails (other criminals do not enjoy such Oslo largesse -- in the Jewish state, you have to be a non-Jewish murderer of Jews in order to get a free pass out of jail). In addition, the Israeli government brought the PLO into the Jewish state in order to advance the Oslo ‘peace’ process that would gradually relinquish the West Bank and Gaza in exchange -- supposedly -- for no more terrorism. But Levy claims to see an Israeli “insistence on keeping the occupied territories.”

And notice that Levy is writing shortly after Israel handed Gaza to the terrorists unilaterally, which is to say in exchange for...nothing. Or else, Israel handed Gaza in exchange for more terrorism, because that is precisely what it got.

In yet another contradiction, Levy admits above that turning over these territories will not, in fact, buy Arab goodwill. And yet he claims that evacuating these territories “would have significantly lessened” the attacks on Israel. How does that follow? And even if it did follow, what would have to be the underlying principle in Levy’s moral reasoning? Applied to the personal level, it would mean that Levy would give the keys to his home to a criminal who had publicly promised to murder Levy's entire family, on the theory that by capitulating to the criminal this latter would spare Levy's children, though he would still kill Levy’s wife. Levy cannot be sure of this outcome, but he thinks the risk is worth taking (and the wife expendable, in any case).

Another problem is that Levy writes in the conditional: “[if we had produced a] non-occupying Israel...the destructive fire aimed at Israel would have significantly lessened.” This is like watching a parent wonder what kind of adolescents his already thirty-something children will make. We have hard historical data, already, on what a “non-occupying Israel” produces: the terrorism from Gaza increased after the so-called Disengagement, and this terrorism in fact helped produce the current war in Lebanon.[16] [...]

What is most amazing in the above is that Levy should characterize Ehud Olmert -- who was rushing to abandon the West Bank to the terrorists before Hezbollah forced him to retaliate lest he face a revolt in the Israeli officer class -- as somehow obsessed with real estate for Israel. Consider that, in the middle of the missile exchanges, Ehud Olmert committed what was reported as a 'gaffe' when he “suggested to an interviewer that the war in Lebanon could provide an impetus for his planned withdrawals from the West Bank.”[20] In other words, Ehud Olmert was undeterred by Hezbollah’s dramatic exposure of Israel’s vulnerability, and he was stll hoping that he could get away with the cleansing of the West Bank Jews. The terrorist enemies of Israel were delighted to hear this, and in their view the significance of Olmert’s statement was that “[We are in] the beginning of a new era in the region [that] will break the psychological wall in the idea that Israel is invincible.” The statement is attributed to “Abu Maamun, a senior leader in Jenin of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group... the declared ‘military wing’ of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.”[21] Since Ehud Olmert, under terrorist attack, endorsed the policies preferred by Israel’s terrorist enemies, the ruling elite controlling the Jewish state may be described as allied with Israel’s terrorist enemies even when politically impractical. It follows, therefore, that the Israeli ruling elite is not waging a “war for the settlements” but against them. Anybody accusing the Israeli government of waging a “war for the settlements” must be, therefore, either an imbecile or a liar.

And I should point out that Levy’s chest-pounding nostra culpa that the land “does not belong to us” is again historically incorrect. The West Bank and Gaza were going to be part of the Arab state that the United Nations voted to create alongside a Jewish state in 1947. The Arabs refused this state, preferring to exterminate the Israeli Jews instead.[22] The genocidal attempt failed but Jordan managed to establish itself as an illegal occupier of the West Bank, and Egypt as an illegal occupier of the Gaza Strip. Egypt and Jordan then lost these territories after they used them as launching pads for yet another genocidal attempt on the Israeli Jews in the Six Day War of 1967.

Given,

1) that the Arabs (including, importantly, the so-called ‘Palestinian’ Arabs) first refused a state in these territories, preferring to murder Jews;

2) that neither Jordan nor Egypt were the least bit concerned about creating a ‘Palestinian’ state when they controlled these territories; and

3) that Israel gained these illegally occupied territories defending herself from a genocidal attack launched from them,

we may state, therefore, that if anybody has a right to this land, it is Israel.

If Gideon Levy has trouble with this argument we can ask him to imagine a personal version of it. He could imagine, for example, that he was accosted in the street by a man with a knife, intending to slit his throat, but Levy managed to grasp at the man’s wrist and, after a struggle, to wrest it from him, gaining the upper hand. Imagine further that Levy does not make an attempt to injure the man, who, from a distance, barks at Levy, “Okay, now give me my knife back.” Does this man have a right to get his weapon back? Certainly not. And Levy would be a suicidal imbecile to return it. In parallel fashion, when a piece of land is the platform to launch a genocidal attack, that piece of land is a weapon, just like the knife, and if the genocidal attacker loses it trying to exterminate your people, then he has no right to get it back. Period. (empahsis mine)
[....] READ ALL OF "What is wrong with the media? (Part 2)...

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