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The War Against the Jewish Story

(Times of Israel) Yossi Klein Halevi - How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people's story of triumph over annihilation? The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of Zionist and Israeli history. The very origins of Zionism were transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state - turning Zionism, a movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum, into a racist ideology and reducing a complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy. Now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard. To turn Israel into the world's arch-criminal requires erasure of the connection between the Land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists. The relentless war against Israel is also erased. There is never any context to Israel's actions. Only by erasing Hamas' atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war. Campus protesters are providing cover for Oct. 7 denial: The atrocities didn't happen, you deserved them, and we're going to do it again. Another form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer - an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of Israeli communities - was ever sufficient. The writer is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
2024-05-09 00:00:00
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