Read this brilliant article by Jeremy England on Tablet Mag here…
(See also the reader’s letter printed on the penultimate page of the latest Kedushas Tzion.)
Hasbara is counter-productive!
An excerpt:
I started doing wild things, like learning history and facts and even visiting the region. Somewhat inevitably, I also ended up familiarizing myself with the standard arsenal of arguments for Zionism made by people at universities: Israel is fighting on the front lines to defend the West from barbarian zealots! Israel kicks Jewish extremists out of their illegal settlements and puts Arab citizens on its Supreme Court! Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is entirely both bomb shelter and gay bar! These points captivated me, but there was always something about them that felt off.
I now know what it is.
During the last 20 years, anti-colonialist doctrine more fully replaced critical thinking throughout most of the academy, and it would be easy to attribute the fever pitch of present anti-Israel sentiment on campuses solely to that shift. And to be clear, it’s indeed obvious that many students today at Ivy League schools are badly informed and cannot craft good arguments with whatever information they do manage to come by. And, yes, all of the curricular and pedagogical rot compels them to join the mob pouring its wrath on the Jewish state.
But, as is often the case with politics organized against Jews, the poor quality of the accusations lures well-meaning people into contesting false details while implicitly accepting the enemy’s vocabulary and criteria for judgment. In answering the question of why it feels like pro-Israel voices are losing in the public square, I now think that some of the blame also rests with all the smart pro-Israel arguments—including those I once got so good at slinging myself.
Forget, for a moment, how monstrously wicked Hamas may be, and focus instead on testing each of the common claims and counterclaims made about Israel.
Detractors say Israel is an apartheid state. Yet, since Muslim Arab citizens here vote in elections, enjoy equal civil rights, and hold public office, is this not simply a smear whose sole intention is to lay the ground for dismantling the Jewish state?
Islamist leaders frequently congratulate Muslims who kill Jews in Israel as “the defenders of Al-Aqsa” because of the widely held suspicion that the Jews are about to take over the Temple Mount. But isn’t this propaganda prima-facie absurd, since the current situation at the holy site is one where Israeli police are formally charged with preventing Jews from praying there?
Anti-Zionists, jihadists, and other disinterested humanitarians accuse Israel of killing innocent Arab children indiscriminately, but fact-checkers are quick to produce data on exceptionally good combatant-to-civilian kill ratios and to remind us that the IAF warns residents in Gaza neighborhoods before dropping bombs.
Game, set, and match. Right?
Not quite. Each of these volleys is returnable for the same kind of reason.
The Law of Return in Israel establishes an explicit preference for admitting new immigrants who are Jewish, based on parentage or religious observance. Each year, the increasing number of Jews who ascend the Temple Mount to pray portends major changes there in favor of the normalization of Judaic worship. The war aims Israel has set guarantee it will cause the deaths of many people the state scrupulously labels as innocent. How many innocent deaths are too many?
What is so complicated here is that the accusations are, at one level, untruthful and unfair, and an Israel-loving Jew—one also educated in the halcyon days before critical thinking was defenestrated from atop the ivory tower—cannot resist a public dissection of all the manipulation and inaccuracy.
In each case, though, the point of the accusation is less to sell a lie than it is to bait the hook with an expendable one so that anyone who bites has to agree on what would constitute a crime.
Consider, for example, if Israel were shown to be an apartheid state, a usurper of religious sites, or a bomber of more innocents than permitted by U.N. observers. Even rigorous and right-thinking Ivy League Zionists educated in the twilight of the 20th century would be forced to agree then that the modern State of Israel had lost its right to exist, no? It is debatable whether this maneuver has always been the strategy of anti-Zionists, or whether it just works out this way; certainly, plenty of people who hate Jews just love to peddle outlandish delusions without seeking to entrap anyone. In any case, the typical Western Jew advocating for Israel is usually quite defenseless the moment a shrewder anti-Zionist steps into the debate, having already conceded at the outset that Israel will only be exonerated if it ever gets a fair trial—and by “fair,” these people always mean one judged by Western, and therefore Christian, standards.
I said something similar myself here.
And again:
More importantly, the very idea of the innocent civilian makes sense in an explicitly Christian context: “Render unto Caesar” plus the idea of a universal community of faith that transcends nationality means the conscience of the individual is paramount, and a person cannot so easily be classed as a targetable enemy “just because” of his membership in some nation waging war.
The contrast with the Jewish perspective here is sharp.
One particular Talmudic-era commentary comes to mind. Everyone knows that Pharaoh and his army were on horses as they chased Moses and the Israelites seaward. But it took the genius of Shimon ben Yochai, the sage, to ask where the horses came from. A plague of hail had killed off all the livestock in Egypt, other than that which belonged to upright individuals who held the Lord in awe. What this means, then, is that Pharaoh got his horses from the upright individuals. Ben Yochai concludes: [In times of war], it is correct to kill even the righteous among your enemy (Mekhilta 14:7).
I don’t know where the author is actually holding, but I like his practical advice:
Put into practice in 2024, this means that Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other, begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our homeland.
Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.
Instead of threatening Jews with arrest for praying on the Temple Mount, we should take a hint from the “Al-Aqsa” moniker our attackers gave to their day of savage invasion and let kohanim up there on the hill to slaughter lambs for Passover.
And above all—given that land is nearly all that matters to this death-worshipping foe—instead of repeatedly withdrawing troops from areas we have just taken over so we can deny having unchristian territorial ambitions, we should conquer, annex, and resettle parts of Gaza so that Jews and friendly gentiles both can live there safely.