The left-wing in Israel is dying and is reaching out to Americans for resuscitation.
The editor of Haaretz, Israel’s bastion for the left and anti-Netanyahu to the nth degree, posted an op-ed in The Daily Beast Friday under the headline, “Can Americans Save Israel from Its Own Extremism?”
Editor Aluf Benn lamented the Netanyahu administration’s actions, such as outlawing the radical Islamic Movement organization, and bemoaned Opposition leader’s Yitzchak Herzog criticism that the Prime Minister should have done so long ago.
Explaining the desperation of Israel’s left wing, or what remains from the glory of the Oslo Accords mirage, Benn wrote:
Progressives in Israel feel powerless and contemplate leaving Israel for good. We need to get out of this melancholy spiral, stand up for peace, democracy and equality and reach out to like-minded people abroad, particularly in the United States, who worry about the direction of Israel in Netanyahu’s fourth term.
This is the same newspaper that has bitterly complained that right-wing Americans promote and often fund nationalist projects such as buying land from Arabs in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Haaretz recently announced it is explaining its presence in the United States, starting off with a conference on Sunday with the New Israel Fund, whose stated mission is to ensure “equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants” and “to advance liberal democracy, including freedom of speech and minority rights, and to fight inequality, injustice, and extremism that diminish Israel.”
The NIF has been active in that field when comes to Arabs. It has been stonily silent while police held right-wing youth, without access to lawyers or freedom to worship or even light Hanukkah candles, on suspicion of involvement in the arson-murder in the Palestinian Authority village of Duma earlier this year.
NGO Monitor has reported that NIF generously funds organizations that have been “active in repeating unsupported allegations of “deliberate, systematic, and widespread targeting of Palestinian civilians’; ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’; ‘grave violations of international humanitarian law,’ and similar claims regarding the 2014 Gaza war.”
Haaaretz’s strategy is to publicly team up with the NIF to get rid of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was the principal target of Benn’s swan song of the left on Friday.
He told Daily Beast readers:
Isolated under Netanyahu, the editors of Israel’s leading liberal newspaper are coming to New York to try to restore a sense of reason…
While Americans will go to the polls and elect their leader for the next four years, Israelis must decide whether the aggressive march toward rightwing extremism led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will be embraced or rejected.
He alleged that since Netanyahu retained the office of Prime Minister after last March’s elections, he “ousted his former conservative self and reincarnated as a radical nationalist with unprecedented power.”
Benn and Haaretz still are infatuated with the “two-state” proposal and cannot accept the fact, which Benn admits, that the former center-left has moved to the right. He wrote:
Israel’s mainstream media parrots Netanyahu’s narrative: the Jewish state faces a permanent threat of annihilation, the Palestinians are the present-day Nazis, and the West is either anti-Semitic or oblivious to the fate of the Jews, just as it was during the Holocaust….
When the Cabinet outlawed the local Islamic movement, against the advice of the Security Service, Yitzhak Herzog, the opposition leader only criticized Netanyahu for not doing it earlier.
Benn seems to understand that it only is matter of time before Israel finally includes tens of thousands of Jews in Gush Etzion and Maaleh Adumim under Israeli sovereignty, with more communities to follow.
He is aghast that “emboldened right-wing politicians…call for annexing the West Bank into Israel.”