Why Are We Under Trial?

From Media Backspin: UK Journalists Union Boycotts Israel. Quoting The Guardian:

The union’s national executive committee has been instructed to support organisations including the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Jews for Justice in Palestine and the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

Thus is the state of mainstream reporting (neutrality can go to hell), of peace movements (the end justifies the means, including giving aid to suicide terrorists) and of human rights organizations (pick on the one state you know isn’t going to order the execution of your activists). Our age epitomized: no good deed goes unpunished, no evil unrewarded. We have once again been put in the dock, in the defendant’s seat, in a trial forced on us. We can defend ourselves, we can exculpate ourselves, we can produce alibis galore, but I have to ask: why do that at all? Why do we have to play by rules rigged against us? To the root of it all: why are we on trial?

We started coming in the 19th century to inhabit a land which, apart from being ours by ancestral inheritance and divine title deed, was then nearly bereft of people: a few old cities (Jerusalem, Safed and the rest), scattered Arab villages here and there, but all the rest was rocky, barren wasteland and malaria-infested swamps.

We began to make the barren land bloom after so many centuries. Arabs from outside said, “Look, the blessing is with the Jews”, and settled (yes, settled! You though only Jews did that, right?) on the land. By rights we could have driven them out then already, but instead, following upon Abraham our father in buying the tomb for Sarah from Ephron, we bought lands from those settling Arabs.

The British promised us this land in 1917, to be given after vanquishing the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they first ripped out the land east of the Jordan River for the sake of the alliance with the Hashemite ruler, and then, throughout the years, including the critical World War II years, made various moves to allot us an even smaller proportion of our land, and published the White Book laws prohibiting us from inhabiting what has always been ours. Yet we agreed to partition the land between us and the Arabs; we agreed to have an area much smaller than the original.

We agreed, then, to the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arabs would not hear even of that, and started war. We defended ourselves. If one considers that, in such a war, of two groups of people on the same land fighting neck to neck, the outcome is usually a massacre (see: Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur), then one comes to the conclusion that the actual outcome, that of many (but certainly not all—how often that is overlooked) of the Arabs having to flee to beyond the 1949 Armistice Line, was very fortunate. Such consequences for a war they started are seldom to be found in history. Yet we are condemned for that.

We watched Egypt, Jordan and Syria make all the preparations and issue all the statements with the intent of wiping us off the map in 1967, yet we were expected to just sit idly by, waiting for the blow. But back then we had a government with something of a Jewish consciousness, so we carried out our sages’ precept, “Rise up early to kill him who stands up to kill you”, and HaShem handed us a magnificent victory. A multitude of states used that as an excuse to cut off their ties with us. Sorry for continuing to exist!

In that war of 1967, we could have, by rights, pressed on the attack and laid waste to the capitals of Egypt, Jordan and Syria—such is what normal nations have done to enemies in a position of weakness. Instead, we took Sinai, Gaza, Judea and Samaria and the Golan, and nothing more. In 1973, following a reversal of fate after the prospect of defeat in the Yom Kippur War, we were poised to take out Cairo and Damascus, but we did not, out of misguided mercy cloaked as “pragmatism”. A fat lot of good that did us: we are still the aggressors.

Rockets from Lebanon came raining upon our north from the late 1970’s onward. The world’s expectation? That we just grin and bear it, and solve the problem through talks, negotiations, concessions etc. In 1982 we had enough, and decided to do away with the source of the terror, the “Palestine Liberation Organization” in Lebanon. We got condemned for the fact that some of the warring sects in Lebanon decided to piggyback on our expedition for settling their old scores.

We decided to “give appeasement peace a chance” by recalling that same PLO, headed by the same two-legged beast, from Tunis in 1993, to do a retry of 1947, partitioning the land once again. The result? Bus bombings in the streets of Israeli towns within the 1949 Armistice Line. We held through numerous airtight cases of casus belli, right until 2000, when we offered the other side nearly everything—Gaza, Judea and Samaria, even the eastern part of Jerusalem, with all the ethnic cleansing of Jews that those steps entailed. The reaction? The Second (Al Aksa) Intifada, with murders of Jews in the 1967 territories, and rioting on part of the Arabs within the 1949 Armistice Lines.

In August 2005, although 9/11 had made it clear that the other side was part of a global menace and not an isolated, local adversary, our clueless government topped everything with the greatest gamble yet: the uprooting of all the Jews of the Gaza Strip. Kassam rockets upon Israeli Jewish towns within the 1949 Armistice Line soon followed, launched by the order of democratically-elected (i.e. reflecting the will of the man in the “Palestinian” street) Hamas, prompting us to return the IDF for preventive action in Gaza. To this, the reaction from the “enlightened” world to this day is:

“Gaza? Was a matter of removing settlers and sending IDF in. Unilaterally.” – commenter “Eiron” on Daily Kos, from April 10, 2007

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Condemned for holding on to the land, rebuked for having to defend ourselves after abandoning it has backfired.

In July 2006, replaying 1982, we get rockets from Lebanon onto our north again. Our government suddenly remembers its old consciousness, and deploys the army, navy and air force to remove the threat, this time from Hizbullah. But that flashback is only temporary, for once the world screams in condemnation of Israel for striking at civilians that Hizbullah put as human shields, the government slithers back into full weakling mode, accepting a UN ceasefire agreement, and, ever since, doing nothing to stop either Hizbullah in the north or Hamas in the south from rearming for the next war.

Nor quelling the fifth column within. Muslims and their Christian Arab useful idiots within the 1949 Armistice Line heap the same vitriol on Israel as those on the outside, and the government does nothing, out of fear of world opinion crying, “Racism!”—as if they aren’t doing that already, as if the comparison of Israel to Apartheid South Africa isn’t already mainstream. Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement preaches taking hold of the Temple Mount; in a normal state, he would at the very least be thrown in the slammer, but he remains free. Azmi Bisharah, Arab Knesset Member in that “apartheid state”, voices publicly his thought that “Israel is the greatest daylight robbery carried out in the 20th century”, and visits the enemy state of Syria to sing Assad’s praises (no, Hijab Nancy wasn’t first, sorry); in a normal state, he would be tried for treason and put in front of a firing squad, but the state of Israel, because of its fear of world opinion, because of its feeling of being under trial and needing to defend itself from a guilty position, does nothing.

This is our story in a nutshell: in the Middle East, a region known from time immemorial to be one where cruelty and pitilessness rule the day, we have acted as humanely as could possibly be here, although we could have been far less merciful and that would be our right, and yet, we are condemned day after day for not living to an impossible ideal, an ideal which even for Christians does not apply to states, only to individuals.

And we are under trial?! Us, who live in the eye of the storm?! Us, who were the first to receive what the rest of the world is only now beginning to taste?! Us, who have set up the only sane state in this entire hell-whole of a region?! Us, who are the only reliable ally the Western world has in this region—the only state in which it is not true that a single bullet is the only thing between a pro-Western regime and a sponsor of worldwide terrorism (see: Iran before and after 1979)?!

From this summary survey of our history, it ought to be clear that we should not be sitting at the defendant’s seat. It ought to be manifest that we have nothing to apologize for. We are accountable to G-d, as indeed are all nations and all men. We can and should voice contempt for this rigged court of international law that holds us to an impossible, not to mention wicked, standard.

“Defending Zionism from its detractors” is my goal. But, since I recognize that those detractors are operating from an ultimately irrational basis, since “anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism”, I do not pursue my goal through apologizing for Israel’s actions, through admissions of guilt. In this case, the only (not just best) defense is a good offense—“Let the other side apologize for a change”. I aim to put our enemies under trial, to show how they are guilty of crimes and sympathy toward criminals, of horrors, of atrocities and complicity with atrocities, of evil.

For we are not the ones who said, “You love life; we love death”. We are not the ones who riot and pillage and burn and murder on the sight of a few crude line-drawings. We are not the ones who raise our children to be “fire bombs”. We are not the ones who believe every unfounded rumor and latch onto every baseless conspiracy theory. We are not the ones who shut down every form of normal life, every abode of art, music and entertainment, in order to leave no alternative to young men but sprees of murder, decapitation and suicide terrorism.

And we are not the ones who brought to the world a system of “social justice” by means of which a new ruling class can steal the earned wealth of the citizenry. We are not the ones who thought up a system of “smoothly-functioning anarchy” that has only given rise to hideous totalitarian dictatorships in which millions were executed. We are not the ones who are so self-righteously “anti-racist” as to advocate righting old racism through “reverse racism”, so self-righteously “feminist” as to show “understanding” for female genital mutilation, and so self-righteously “freethinking” as to exempt from criticism just one religion because the price for such criticism might be a little high.

We are not under trial. Our enemies are. That’s a fact, and we must press on with it. Push them, push them, push them to the defendant’s seat, kicking and screaming. Make them squirm in that seat. Bring out the full humidity of sweat in their faces, as they try to defend the truly indefensible.

And if they persist in defending the indefensible, if they keep to their unrepentant position, the One and Only Just and Incorruptible Judge will try them on His court in the future, whether near or far. And that’s not a threat—that’s a promise.