The Battle for the Zionist Idea Matan Peleg May 2016 | Iyar 5776 1 © This booklet is not for commercial use and may not be copied, duplicated, or reproduced without the express consent from the author. 2 The Battle for the Zionist Idea Matan Peleg To the activists of Im Tirtzu Dedicated to the memory of Rivka Altabef 3 “The State of Israel will be tested not by its wealth, nor by its mili- tary or technology, but by its moral character and human values.” David Ben-Gurion 4 Introduction: Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been faced with two central threats: a physical threat and an ideological threat. The former is expressed via bloody attacks, war, and terrorism, and has but one purpose – to wipe Israel off the map. The latter is expressed via efforts to convince the world that the Jewish state has no right to exist. Therefore, the goals of both these tactics are one and the same. In order to negate the State of Israel’s right to exist in the eyes of the world, international propaganda organizations spread blood libels and lies claiming that the State of Israel was founded in sin and carries out heinous crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, genocide, and an apartheid regime for its Arab citizens. They strive to rally the nations of the world to condemn, boycott, and impose sanctions on Israel. In recent years we have been witness to a growing phenome- non that is no less concerning: the adoption of anti-Israeli ideals among many of Israel’s dominant elite. In academia, culture, the media, and the judicial system, Israel is frequently depicted as a racist state that requires fixing, rather than a spark of light in a dark geopolitical environment bereft of human rights and lacking all hope. Rather than accepting upon itself the historic role to defend the Zi- onist idea that brought the Jewish democratic state into the world – the most humane and moral state ever established in the Middle East – the Israeli elite focuses, at best, on casting doubts upon Is- rael, and at worst, on calling for foreign intervention. As we will see throughout this booklet, this is not the first time in history that the Jewish people have been forced to defend their diplomatic and spiritual character both at home and abroad. This booklet was written with the purpose of drawing the reader’s attention to the titanic battle raging between two ideas: the Zion- ist idea that strives for Jewish independence in the State of Israel, and in opposition, an idea seeking to limit the sovereignty of the Jewish people and to halt its renewed and unprecedented revival in the Land of Israel. Matan Peleg CEO, Im Tirtzu Movement 5 From “In the Kingdom of the Cross” / Uri Zvi Greenberg …Two thousand years the silence burns beneath these trees, A drug that is collected in the abyss – and I will not know the meaning; Two thousand years the bleeding has continued here, silence continues, And yet no mouth has yet spat out the poison spittle. In the books are chronicled all the deaths at the hands of the goyim, But the answer is not written there: our answer to the deaths. 6 A Lethal Obsession* In Those Times “All the nations hate Israel” (Genesis Rabbah 67:7) The magnifying glass of the world has been focused on the Jew- ish people for thousands of years. The attempts to denounce, dis- credit, and harm the Jewish people have been so numerous that it is hard not to suspect that we are dealing with a real obsession. In fact, it is a “lethal obsession” and not “anti-Semitism,” as this inexplicable manifestation has accompanied mankind since well before the term “anti-Semitism” was even coined. Evidence of its antiquity can be easily found. In the year 300 B.C.E. a Hellenist philosopher by the name of Hecataeus of Abdera prop- agated a libel that originated in Ancient Egypt, claiming that the Jews are “a people of lepers,” and were therefore exiled into the desert. The purpose of this libel was to demean and downplay the idea of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt that was so significant in the Jewish ethos.1 A short time later an Egyptian priest by the name of Manetho published a similar libel about the “expulsion” of the leprous Jews from Egypt. The famed Greek stoic Posidonius explained that the Jews were “a people of heretics, hated by the gods.” In the nd2 cen- tury B.C.E., a philosopher named Mnaseas claimed that the Jews worshiped the head of a donkey (considered to be a contemptible animal), and the rhetorician Apollonius Molon (Cicero’s teacher) wrote that “the Jews have done nothing for the good of mankind.” He held in contempt the abstract idea of god and claimed that Moses was an imposter. Democritus and Apion, each in their turn, charged that the Jews had a habit of capturing strangers, fattening them up, and sacrificing them while chopping up their flesh.2 And the list goes on. The Jews have always been perceived as strangers and as out- siders, and as a result have been the targets of dozens of various blood libels throughout history that have legitimized their murder. This has all stemmed from jealousy, frustration, fear, or from the Note: The term “lethal obsession” was coined by Professor Robert S. Wistrich, one of the world’s leading researchers on anti-Semitism. His book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad was published in 2010 by Random House publishing, New York. 7 need for a scapegoat. “The Jews killed Jesus” (4th century); “They prepare matzah with the blood of Christian children” (England, 1149; France, 1171; Germany, 12353); “They are poisoning water wells” (Switzerland, 1348); “They are planning to take over the world” (a plot which was most widely distributed with the writing of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the beginning of the 20th century in Russia4). This obsession and fevered imagination remains alive today. It seems that with time the only things that have changed are the wordings of the libels themselves. After all, it is hard to find a fun- damental difference between the “blood matzah” libel and the libel published in 2009 by the popular Swedish newspaper, Afton- bladet, which claimed that Israeli soldiers are harvesting the or- gans of Palestinians for sale. It is even harder to find a significant difference between the libel that the Jews are the source of all evil in the world, and the poems of German author and Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Grass who accused Israel in 2012 of “endangering world peace.”5 The Jew-hating imagination knows no bounds. 8 Lethal Obsession in These Times “Abraham was on the one side while the whole world was on the other side” (Genesis Rabbah, Lech Lecha, 42) It is important to emphasize that not everyone who obsesses over Israel is necessarily doing so out of ill intent. The international media as a whole is certainly not anti-Semitic, but the attention devoted by leading media outlets to Israel is most definitely out of the ordinary. Matti Friedman, a journalist who worked for the Associated Press (AP) for five years and with other foreign media outlets, was in- terviewed on this matter.6 During his work at the AP, he explained that nearly 40 reporters cover Israel, which is more than the num- ber of reporters who cover China, Russia, or India, and more than all of the reporters who covered all of the 50 countries in Africa combined, including those countries in which the “Arab Spring” broke out. “In three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a cen- tury ago. News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 mil- lion dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close,” summarized Friedman.7 The same phenomenon is highlighted by Israeli journalist Ben- Dror Yemini in his fascinating book, The Industry of Lies. In one example (out of hundreds of notable cases that he presents in his book), Yemini refers to the amount of references to Israel and the treatment that Israel receives in the prominent British newspaper, The Guardian: “In 2011 the newspaper The Guardian mentioned Israel approximately 1,008 times. An average of three times in each issue. In that year 115 Palestinians were killed, most of them terrorists. 9 Iraq was mentioned 504 times. In that year 4,059 civilians were killed in Iraq and 3,021 civilians were killed in Afghanistan. At least 410 of them were killed by forces of which British soldiers were a part of. In that year, on that same soil, 46 British soldiers were killed. But Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of civilians were killed, deaths in which the British were involved both as killers and as victims – were mentioned in the newspaper less times than Israel was.”8 Even the United Nations is not a fundamentally anti-Semitic body, but its obsession towards the State of Israel can be proved using numerical data.