The Plaza at the Western Wall, Jerusalem, at Shavuot
Nearly 4 million people visit Israel yearly. This is cause for concern to those who have worked hard to delegitimize the Jewish state. With so many people driving, touring and nosing around the country, hard-won stereotypes are at risk. Current popular thought holds that 13 million Jews (one in every 500 people worldwide, 7 million in Israel) threaten the earth’s remaining 6 billion citizens by controlling money and governments, starting and profiting from wars, bullying Arabs and plotting to rule the world.
You don’t have to search hard to find accusations that Israel is Apartheid, Fascism, and Ethnic Cleansing.
The current politically correct approach to attacking Israel manages to avoid the charge of antisemitism: one does not oppose Jews, that would be racist, one opposes Jewish settlements. (Even many Jews are comfortable attacking Israel in this light, Noam Chomsky, for example.) And so we are to believe that the greatest threat to world peace today is not Iran’s nuclear program, not thousands of rockets launched in Gaza, not mass murder in Syria, not Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power, not even Global Jihad, but Israeli apartment building in Judea and Sumeria. Make sense?
No. Which begs the question, with so many visitors free to look around the land, can these purposeful fictions be maintained? [Read more…]
