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When Anti-Zionism Tunnels Under Your House

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - In 2002, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, noted that the creation of the State of Israel had spared his followers the trouble of hunting down Jews at "the ends of the world." Tony Badran of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tracked down the original recording of the speech, in which Nasrallah carries on about "occupied Palestine" as the place appointed by Allah for the "final and decisive battle" with the Jews. By "occupied Palestine," he wasn't talking about the West Bank. Sometimes anti-Zionists are homicidal anti-Semites, too. In recent days, the Israeli Army has discovered at least three tunnels dug by Hizbullah into northern Israel, intended to infiltrate commandos under the border. Given the depth of Hizbullah's fanaticism, it's fair to assume other tunnels will be found. What would Hizbullah do if it got its fighters across? In 1974, three Palestinian terrorists crossed the border from Lebanon and took 115 hostages at an elementary school in the town of Ma'alot. They murdered 25 of them, including 22 children. Another infiltration from Lebanon in 1978 left 38 Israelis dead. All this is to say that Israelis experience anti-Zionism in a different way than, say, readers of The New York Review of Books: not as a bold sally in the world of ideas, but as a looming menace to their earthly existence, held at bay only through force of arms. Today, anti-Zionism is a call for the elimination of a state and those who currently live in it. Anti-Zionism is ideologically unique in insisting that one state, and one state only, has to go. By a coincidence that its adherents insist is entirely innocent, this happens to be the Jewish state. The good news is that the conversation about anti-Zionism remains mostly academic because Israelis haven't succumbed to the fatal illusion that, if only they behaved better, their enemies would hate them less.
2018-12-14 00:00:00
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