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Israel's Defenders Need to Attack

(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Melanie Phillips - Last weekend CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, held a conference in Boston on the "war by other means," the global campaign of demonization and delegitimization of Israel. Wall Street Journal columnist (and former Jerusalem Post editor) Bret Stephens said much pro-Israel advocacy isn't very smart because it is conducted from a permanent defensive crouch rather than an offensive position which sticks the accusations into Israel's attackers. So, for example, friends of Israel fret endlessly about whether or not Bibi will extend the moratorium on new building in Jewish communities in the disputed territories, rather than ask the much more germane question of what the Palestinians are offering as an equivalent concession. The answer, said Stephens, is that they say they will keep the lid on terrorism. So their great concession is to stop killing Jews. Which illustrates that while the issue in contention for Israel is land, that for the Palestinians is mass murder. Many self-professed "friends" of Israel position themselves on the ground that defines the conflict as being about the boundaries of two states, Israel and Palestine. Hence the almost exclusive focus on the settlements and the territories. This is demonstrably absurd. The only obstacle to peace is the Palestinians' continued and open refusal to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and thus their continued objective to wage a war of extermination against it. That is why, when the bulk of the territories was offered to them in 2000, their response was to start blowing up Israelis in buses and pizza parlors; that is why, when Jewish settlers were removed from Gaza, their response was to fire thousands of rockets at Israeli towns; and that is why "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas says the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. As Stephens rightly observed, Israel's defenders should be moving the conversation on to the subject of the ill treatment of the Palestinians by the rest of the Arab world - and towards each other. I would ask those who obsess about removing the settlers from the disputed territories why they promote an agenda of racist ethnic cleansing designed to remove every Jew from a putative state of Palestine, while Israel, whose Arab minority enjoys full civil rights, is excoriated for "apartheid."
2010-10-15 10:08:35
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