If you are the Palestinian media (or members of the world media who are either intentionally biased or willing to be duped by anti-Israel propaganda), you repeatedly report on supposed Israeli human rights violations, such as an alleged “massacre of the 21st century,” a horrible war crime and example of “genocide” committed by Israel in 2002 against Palestinians in the village of Jenin.
You talk about the Israeli security barrier as an “apartheid wall” and describe it as a massive, soaring, unbroken division through Palestinian neighborhoods and communities, overlooking the fact that the wall is towering and solid concrete only in those regions that have been repeatedly assaulted by terrorists, and that 90 percent of the hundreds of miles of barrier is comprised merely of wire fence.
You use the “apartheid wall” image to create a broader misconception about the Palestinians living under a South African-style apartheid regime, disingenuously equating race restrictions that blacks lived under in Soweto with the open society of Israel in which Israeli Arabs have more rights than in any Arab state and are asked only not to murder Israeli Jews.
On campuses where coddled and insulated professors often express antipathy for the perceived ills of capitalism and teach students about the usurpation of “Palestine” by Israel, “land grabs” through occupation, and the denial of the civil and economic rights of the Palestinians, you contend that Israel’s very existence is not at all about self-determination (something you deem appropriate only for the Palestinians) and all about greed, globalism, colonialism, exploitation, and undeserved political and economic might.
No longer able to fight apartheid in South Africa, you now try to transmogrify that racist social system onto Israel, holding rallies and encouraging the signing of petitions which call from divestiture from companies doing business in Israel.
You fund Middle Eastern Studies centers on university campuses and use them as anti-Israel, anti-U.S. “think tanks” where scholarship is tainted with ideology and singularly focused on the Palestinian cause. You fund the active and vocal Muslim Students Association on campuses across the country that hold Israel Apartheid Week and Holocaust in the Holy Land festivals at which propaganda, Jew-hatred, apologies for terrorism, and further demonizing of Israel take center stage.
In the Arab world, you play fast and loose with history in your attempt to create a historical narrative conforming to your own political agenda, erasing any link between Palestine and the Jews. Though Jerusalem is mentioned not once in the Koran and close to 700 times in the Jewish Bible, you claim Jerusalem is now the “third holiest site to Muslims”; that, as Yasir Arafat announced at Camp David in 2000, the Temple Mount was never a Jewish site; that Jews now “occupy” Muslim lands; and that the archeological and historical evidence that confirms an uninterrupted 3,000-year presence of Jews in the Holy Land is merely a “construct,” yet another lie promulgated by Israeli historians and archeologists as way of erasing and obscuring an Islamic past.
If you are in the traditionally Arabist U.S. State Department, or in the “realist” school of diplomacy, or part of the European Union, and you have an insatiable need for oil, you overlook the tyrannical nature and unfaithfulness of our Middle Eastern “friends” and ask nothing of them, but demand that Israel, the only democracy in a sea of despotism, continually prove its loyalty to us and embrace policies that could potentially threaten its own security.
You write academic books decrying the strength of the “Israel Lobby” and wonder out loud if Jewish influence and wealth force us to lose credibility and threaten our national security on behalf of Israel.
You do all of these things as part of a concerted effort and also as random, independent efforts on the part of Israel’s enemies, and you do it for the 60 years of Israel’s existence, and then you are shocked – shocked – when Israel is shown to rank unfavorably in surveys which measure the public’s perception of nations and how they compare to one another in the world community.
But you are pleased, because you know if Israel cannot be annihilated with armaments and rockets, perhaps you can make it cease to exist simply by getting the world to loathe the false construct of it that you’ve worked so hard to create.