Why single out Israel?
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Amira Hass revists the question as to why criticise Israel when other countries’ crimes are worse.
She gives many reasons, starting with this one:
- “Because now the responsibility is ours and it is our own handiwork. We, the Jews, the preferred citizens of this country. Our institutionalized violence, with weapons and with laws, both physically and psychologically lethal, has harmed and is continuing to harm millions of people. Even as these lines are written.”
Now read on…
Why Criticize Israel, When Cruelty Elsewhere in the World Is Worse?
Loading article text…
Hass leaves out a big factor, that many other regimes are subject to sanctions and condemnation by other nations in the West, but Israel stands out as acting with impunity and support even though it has racked up numerous UN resolutions against it.
The irony of course is that we are implored to treat Israel like any other nation. Well let’s do it…
The British as the mandate power in Palestine after WW1 until 1948 have a unique responsibility for the acquisition by a religious group for a people”s land. We have behaved disgracefully throughout with current night raids on Palestinians modelled on Wingate’s night raids during the mandate. Ignorance is no excuse.
‘We’ the British have behaved disgracefully? What’s all this ‘we’? Political elites do not represent ordinary British people & it a dangerous inaccuracy to say so, comparable to blaming present day Germany for World War 2
From being a small boy I was taught by my parents that two wrongs can never make a right. Those who make excuses are subverting that principle.
Because ‘others’ are committing Human Rights abuses, that doesn’t give the Israeli government a free pass to commit Human Rights abuses against Palestinians.
Whatever gave them that twisted idea?
Stand up, Israelis! Show the world you are not Human Rights abusers!
You are not China. You are not Myanmar. You are not Russia.
Disown your government’s actions.
Stephen Richards rejects the charge that “we behaved disgracefully” in Palestine and transfers the blame on to “political elites.” That line of argument would carry more weight if Britain did not endlessly boast about its democracy and if Labour MPs (elected by “we, the people”) occasionally had the courage to publicly condemn the racist policies of the Israeli government. But they stay silent – or, like David Lammy, issue grovelling apologies for having been so politically blind as to nominate Jeremy Corbyn.
Just to remind ourselves of the record, the much decorated Orde Wingate was serving in the British army in Palestine when, in January 1937, in a letter to London he wrote: “Palestine is essential to our Empire – our Empire is essential to England – England is essential to world peace…….. [We have] the chance to plant here in Palestine and Transjordan a loyal, rich and intelligent nation with which we can make an everlasting treaty, and which will hold for us the key to world dominion without expense or effort on our part.”
Hmm ?
Wingate and his fellow officers on the British army helped to create the state of Israel by virtue of their religious bigotry and their racist and colonialist values.
We cannot continue to hide behind the line that “we didn’t know what was happening”. In a democracy it is our job to pay attention. British people didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening in Palestine in the 1930s and Labour Party members are not paying enough attention today.
This talking-point is not so much a serious issue as a deflection. Israel is criticised because its behaviour is by any reasonable yardstick abominable. Whether other countries may be described as ‘worse’ is beside the point. In any case those countries — Saudi Arabia, for example — also attract criticism, much of it from those organs of the media that largely ignore Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
If criticism of Israel features prominently on the charge-sheet of many on the left it is because:
(1) the state is treated with kid gloves by so many traditional media outlets;
(2) it claims falsely to be a democracy, the only one in the middle east, while practising apartheid, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the indigenous peoples of the region;
(3) it receives billions of dollars worth of aid from the US, much of which is spent suppressing and bombing the Palestinians, and using them as guinea-pics for the testing of espionage and military technology;
(4) it exemplifies a form of settler-colonialism to which the west turns a blind eye while congratulating itself as having recognised as a murderous and exploitative system;
(5) and because a powerful group of self-proclaimed ‘centrists’ who should know better insist on defending the indefensible, and attacking Israel’s critics with bad faith accusations of antisemitism.
The question we should be asking is not why is Israel singled out for criticism but why, despite the illegality of its settlement policy and openly practised human rights abuses, the world’s media and government continue to give it a free pass.
A cogent argument for why it is mandatory to hold the Israeli government accountable for its human rights violations against Palestinians. I think there is one more compelling reason: to reclaim the ethical and moral values of Judaism from the unapologetic advocates of Zionism.