It is hardly a secret, neither is it new, nor even unexpected, that many Israelis are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the current war. Anyone who listens to Israel Radio, or who watches Israeli TV channels, or who reads Israeli newspapers is acutely aware of the debates rife within Israel.Sometimes it feels as though every Israeli and his wife are convinced that they could have brought all the hostages safely home and defeated the Hamas more than a year ago. Everyone has his and her perfect plan.
The overwhelming majority of Israelis have the integrity to keep the debate within Israel.
But on 29th July, a minuscule coterie of Israelis saw fit to smash all acceptable boundaries:
In a letter to the Israel-bashing Guardian, 31 self-proclaimed “Israelis dedicated to a peaceful future for our country and our Palestinian neighbours”, claimed that “Our country is starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the Strip.”
Their solution to this alleged atrocity?
“The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire”.
It is perfectly acceptable to oppose the government’s policies, even in time of war.
But what these 31 signatories have done has been to use one of the most viciously anti-Israel newspapers in the Western world as a platform to defame Israel. The Guardian doesn’t even pretend to be a neutral platform: its hostility to Israel is relentless.
Their outrageous demand is for the world to declare economic warfare on Israel to force it to surrender to the Hamas. This is to say: In time of war, as Israel fights for its very survival, they turn to the global community in the hope of enlisting international support for the Hamas and its war of attempted genocide against Israel.
There is a word for people who attempt to enlist foreign aid against their own country in time of war. Not a pleasant word, but in these circumstances the words “traitor” and “treason” become unavoidable.
They proclaim themselves to be “dedicated to a peaceful future for our country”. Leave aside the deliberate implication that the overwhelming majority of Israelis do not want a peaceful future for our country, their deliberate libelling Israel in this most virulently anti-Israel publication.
The hypocrisy of their self-righteous assertion that they, and they alone, yearn for peace stinks to the very heavens.
Their appeal to notorious anti-Semites recalls the lines from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, maybe the most famous work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the most influential German-language writer ever:
“Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los”: “The spirits that I summoned / I am unable to rid myself of them again”.
This phrase has become almost a cliché, typifying how people turn to perceived allies in the hope that such allies will help them - only to lose control over them, and to be defeated by those spirits whom they summoned.
These “peaceniks” turn to hostile foreign media, seeking allies among the most vicious Israel-haters and indeed Jew-haters in the world. By calling for Israel to capitulate to the Hamas, they inevitably make common cause with some of the vilest anti-Semites who pollute G-d’s earth, whether the Hamas and other Islamists, or neo-Nazis, or the European fanatical left, or any other motley rabble of genocidal psychopaths.
They glibly summon these evil spirits, hoping to defeat Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Right - horribly ignorant that their allies want to destroy them along with all other Jews.
They sanctimoniously announce that they “write this with grave shame, in rage and in agony”. Maybe.
But the sole reason that The Guardian gives its column inches to these misfits of Israeli society is that they direct their rage against their fellow-Jews.
Today they hope for “crippling sanctions” against Israel, no doubt feeling secure in their delusions of having allies in other countries. Yet if - G-d forbid - any of them will ever be forced to relocate because of these crippling sanctions, they will inexorably discover that treason carries no rewards: they will still be Jews, Israelis, and Zionists in the eyes of these spirits whom they have summoned as their allies.
