Liberal Jewish Myopia

Mike L.

{Cross-posted at Israel Thrives and Pro-Israel Bay Area Bloggers.}

I used to spend quite a bit of time covering the Arab-Israel conflict as it was discussed on the popular screaming-left political blog Daily Kos, but have slowed down that coverage due to the fact that Daily Kos, itself, has been moving away from the discussion.

Still every now and again I come across either a comment or a "diary" that I feel a need to point out. Here is a comment from JNEREBEL that cries out for a response:

The two-state solution is the only real solution (0+ / 0-)

to the issue which has haunted the area for decades.

It will come to pass as it is the only option available except for war which no one wants to see occur.

There is plenty of blame on both sides as to why it has not happened as of yet and fruitless to debate going forward.

Each side should stop with the pre-conditions and sit down to negotiate the final status treaty for two states for two peoples.

by JNEREBEL on Thu Jul 05, 2012 at 11:20:15 AM PDT

JNEREBEL is one of the few remaining pro-Israel people left on Daily Kos and I certainly have nothing whatsoever against him or her, except for the endless naivete and the refusal to understand that times are changing. Let's dissect the comment a little.

The two-state solution is the only real solution to the issue which has haunted the area for decades.

Decades?

The truth of the matter, of course, is that "the issue" is Arab-Muslim Koranically-based hatred toward Jews and it has being going on not for decades, but for 14 hundred years. The Long Arab War against the Jews has been ongoing since the 1920s, but the issue, itself, is far, far older.

Further, is the two-state solution the only real solution? It might be, but none of us really know that, we just constantly tell one another that. Personally, I still favor the two-state solution, but no longer believe that it can possibly come about through a negotiated agreement for the simple fact that the Arabs have consistently and persistently refused a Palestinian state through a negotiated agreement in peace next to Israel.

At a certain point we must come to finally understand that NO MEANS NO.

It will come to pass as it is the only option available except for war which no one wants to see occur.

Does no one want war? I do not think so. Polling of the Palestinians has consistently showed that large numbers of them are perfectly fine with violence against us "children of apes and pigs." In fact, both of their prevailing political parties, i.e., the PLO and Hamas are grounded in ideologies of war and a devotion to destroying the Jewish state of Israel, so please JNEREBEL spare us this well-meaning nonsense that no one wants war. The enemies of the Jewish people most certainly do want war and many of them reside on Daily Kos, itself.

There is plenty of blame on both sides as to why it has not happened...

This is what I mainly have issue with. I am just so sick to death of this never-ending liberal Jewish moral-equivalency nonsense. I even know one "progressive Zionist" who thinks that the Likud is more or less the moral equivalent of Hamas. It's always "both sides." But this can only be true if one entirely ignores the fact that the Arabs have refused offer after offer after offer for a Palestinian state on historically Jewish land.

We have got to stop blaming ourselves for Palestinian and Arab intransigence and their ongoing violent campaign against the Jews of the Middle East. The problem here is not that both sides are intransigent, but that the Arab side is. The problem here is not that Jews oppose Palestinian sovereignty, but that the Arabs and the Palestinians oppose Jewish sovereignty on any bit of land that was at any time part of the Umma.

I understand that it is in the best liberal tradition to try to be as fair as possible... even though they almost never are... but one needs also to be fair to one's self and to one's own people. JNEREBEL would have us believe that after 1,300 hundred years living under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism in the Middle East, followed by 100 years of war against the Jews due to the movement for Jewish sovereignty in Israel, that the fault lies equally between the Jews are their tormentors.

It doesn't.

The problem here is not with the 6 million in Israel, but with the fact that their neighbors (who outnumber them by a factor of 50 to 1 in the Middle East) simply will not allow them to live in peace. The ongoing war against the Jews will never end so long as the world thinks that the tiny minority of Jews who live in the Middle East are to blame for their own persecution. They aren't. And when good-hearted liberals like JNEREBEL repeat the nonsensical canard that "both sides" are to blame they make it impossible for the Jews of the Middle East to free themselves from 1,400 hundred years of oppression.

It would be something akin to saying that "both sides" were responsible for the slavery of the Africans in the Americas. Well, I'm sorry, but just as the ancestors of Black Americans bare no responsibility for the fact of African-American slavery, so the Jews of the Middle East are not responsible for centuries of dhimmitude and for Koranically-based hatred toward Jews by the vast majority in the Middle East.

The false moral equivalency that we constantly find within "I-P" discourse on the progressive-left is mirrored in JNEREBEL's next claim:

Each side should stop with the pre-conditions and sit down to negotiate...

Each side.

This is absolute nonsense. It was not the Israeli side that placed preconditions on the current round of non-talks, but the Palestinian side, at the encouragement of US president Barack Obama, who did so. The Israelis have been calling for negotiations without preconditions for years, but it was Obama and his dull-minded, counterproductive requirement of "total settlement freeze" that ruined the possibility of negotiations through the insistence upon a precondition.

But JNEREBEL means well.

The never-ending persecution of the Jews in the Middle East continues decade upon decade, century upon century, but well-meaning liberal diaspora Jews simply cannot bring themselves to understand that the Jews of the Middle East did not ask for this and they do not want it. It is the Arab-Muslim belief in the inferiority of the Jewish people and our essentially demonic nature that is at the core of the reason why they will not stop harassing us. They cannot accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land because it is humiliating to the Umma and thus they launched a war which continues to this day.  Furthermore, if the Palestinians are suffering it is because they are the front-line troops in this unjust and unnecessary aggression against us.

But what Jewish people throughout the world must come to understand is that their aggression against us... Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East... is not the fault of those Jews and claiming otherwise is an exceedingly dangerous lie.

We usually call it, with much disparagement, blaming the victim.

I very much wish that JNEREBEL, who is pro-Israel and who I am guessing is probably Jewish, understood this.