- At times like these, I envy the people who passionately,
frankly, with all their hearts, despise Israel.
-
- Hate Israel enough, and the Jewish state's failings and
blunders, its self-satisfied blindness and its resultant self-destructive
policies, cause not pain, but delight.
-
- Hate Israel enough, and you're spared all inclination
to try to fix what's wrong, to work to set it right. On the contrary, hate
Israel enough, and you may come to believe not only that that the country
deserves to be punished to the point of replacement by a different state
- Israel may well do the job all by itself.
-
- This is one of those times.
-
- I have made my peace with the fact that this is not the
same country I moved to, so long ago. I learned when I first came, that
Israel was not the country I'd thought I was moving to.
-
- But this is different. This time is a test for every
Israeli, and so far, we are failing.
-
- There was once a time when Israel longed to be a member
in good standing of the community of nations. There was a time when one
of its fondest goals was to end its status as a nation in quarantine, boycotted,
unrecognized, unwanted, kept firmly at arm's length.
-
- No longer. Without asking its people, without a second
thought, Israel, at its highest level, has taken an executive decision.
Unable to beat the forces who want to see Israel as one of the world's
primary pariah states, it has resolved to join them.
-
- Determined to take our fate into its own hands. Israel,
at its highest level, has decided that the job of delegitimizing the Jewish
state must not be left to foreigners and amateurs. Showing itself desperate
to be a pariah state, Israel will now get it done on its own.
-
- What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been been
unable to bring off - a sense among Israel's allies that Israel has become
a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning
- the far-right in Israel's own government, and in particular, its Foreign
Ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full.
-
- We should have known that something like the Dubai assassination
debacle was going to happen. The process of de-legitimizing Israel from
within was going too slowly.
-
- It was not enough choose a pathetic side issue, a Turkish
television show with anti-Israel scenes, as grounds to humiliate with infantile
malice the highly respected ambassador of Turkey - a nation whose relationship
with Israel, though troubled, remains crucial from every strategic and
diplomatic standpoint.
-
- It was necessary for Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon,
who as the recently returned former ambassador to Washington certainly
knows much better, to compound the insult on the eve of a fence-mending
visit to Turkey by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, by declaring diplomatic
war on the rest of the world:
-
- Referring to the bellicose, confessed and convicted (http://info1.court.gov.il/Prod01/ManamHTML.nsf/7990A9BFEC001F5242256AD20060A
81B/$FILE/D925DA0750B1314242256AD200242994.html?OpenElement) disgrace who
is his foreign minister and superior, Ayalon told Channel Two, "His
policy is proving to be effective. We will not allow a situation where
every country will kick us. If there will be an attack [even if verbal
or cultural] on Israel, we will leave all options open, including the expulsion
of ambassadors."
-
- It wasn't enough to threaten our relations with the United
Kingdom, Ireland, France, Austria and the whole of the European Union,
as well as the emirates and other moderate Muslim states, by apparently
violating the basic conventions of all civilized states in the Dubai murder.
-
- It was necessary to stage a quick follow-up, for the
sake of balance, perhaps, in going after our relations with Israel's indispensable
ally. In a gratuitous move breathtaking in its haughtiness, its ignorance
of and disrespect for the United States and the American Jewish community,
the Foreign Ministry - spearhead of Israel's campaign against boycotts
abroad - elected this week to boycott a meeting with five U.S. Congressmen
visiting Israel.
-
- Why? The representatives were visiting under the auspices
of J Street. J Street, in the ministry's eyes, is guilty of the crime of
explicitly calling itself pro-Israel, while not agreeing wholeheartedly
with everything the government of Israel says and does.
-
- I have come to envy the people who hate Israel. They've
got every reason to smile.
-
- There was a time when you could reasonably blame Israel's
execrable public relations officials for much of Israel's bad press. No
longer. No one can defend this anymore. There's too much that looks bad,
and much too much of it is true.
-
- Like so many of Israel's recent actions, the motives
for the Dubai assassination are debatable. The negative impact is inarguable.
-
- My heart goes out to the people who care about Israel.
My wife, who cares about this country as deeply as anyone, was singing
this morning, but with a smile I have come to recognize as a sign of pain.
" ... And they call the wind Pariah."
-
- All those years of isolation, of quarantine, are coming
home to haunt us. Now it turns out that the contempt for the rest of the
world that it bred in Israeli Jews, extended to contempt for immigrant
Jews as well.
-
- The response of many Israelis to what appears to be officially
sanctioned theft, exploitation, and ruin of the identities of immigrants
to Israel, was terrifying in its good humor, with morning talk-show hosts
making fun of their Hebrew, even as they made light of their plight.
-
- There are times when I envy the people who hate Israel.
There is no sense of betrayal, not a tinge of loss. Only simhah la'ed,
a vengeful joy in our sorrow.
-
- This is what I have learned about the government of this
place, and many of the voters who put it there. Intelligent people who
are too smart to be able to see themselves clearly, render themselves stupid.
-
- And countries which cannot bear to look, even if they
have good reasons, render themselves dangerous - first of all, to themselves.
-
- This is not the country I first came to. But I still
care about it, even if I know it may care much less than I would like,
about me.
-
- I have come to envy the people who hate Israel, because
they cannot feel the tragedy in the phenomenal possibility, the depth and
breadth of humanity that is going to waste here.
-
- Someday soon, if only because Avigdor Lieberman is indicted
for money-laundering in countries which hate us, this is going to begin
to turn around. I believe that.
-
- I have to.
-
- My father did not flee the Soviet Union just so his son
could one day have the chance to live in a place just like it.
-
Comment
Anonymous
2-19-10
-
- Hey Bradley,
-
- It's a real bummer that your leaders can't play nice
with the other boys and girls and your wife smiles in pain. Has it ever
occurred to you that many people hate Israel because it was born out of
terrorism against the Palestinian people and for 60 years Israel has been
murdering, humiliating, stealing the land of, destroying the homes of,
uprooting the olive trees of, committing genocide and ethnic cleansing
as well as displacing the Palestinians? My mother was a refugee in '48;
her family lost everything... their home, their belongings, my grandfather's
pharmacy and their hometown of Haifa. Israel will never deserve to exist
in peace...that's just impossible.
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