Here in the UK we are witnessing a very unhappy phenomenon, Jews turning against Israel. It is of course happening elsewhere, not least in the United States, but I can only discuss what goes on in my own country.
I don't think the Israeli government or people have much idea just how pervasive this is becoming, or how dangerous it is. Yes, I hear of one initiative after another to influence world opinion, but there has long been the view that, well, they hate us anyway so it doesn't matter what we do. I have two Israeli sons, and that is their unchanging mantra. I get it, and I understand the temptation to shrug one's shoulders, but shoulder shrugging cannot go on indefinitely.
That, in fact is the first problem, the attitude that everyone hates us no matter what we do so why should we change what we do? I hear this from Israelis, and I hear it in the UK from non-Jews, who tell me everyone hates Israel. Well, I've got news for those people, everyone does not hate Israel. Almost no-one in the world's two most populous nations, China and India, hates Israel. Almost no-one in most sub-Saharan African countries hates Israel. And most people in Russia, north America and Australasia don't hate Israel. That's a lot of people who don't hate Israel. And we can add to them the silent majority in most of Europe. So Israelis need to lose the mentality that they are universally despised, because they are not.
There are of course many nations, particularly small ones, who have no animus against Israel but consistently vote against Israel in the UN and its subsidiary agencies, but they do this not because they hate the country, they are simply doing what is politically and / or economically expedient, because they depend on the big countries, especially the oil exporters, and they do as they are told. They don't care one way or the other about Israel, Neither, probably, do they care one way or the other about the Palestinians. It is highly unlikely that many people in some tiny island in the Pacific have a clue who the Palestinians are or what their problem is.
Having said that, I do understand why Israelis feel despised, because the people who DO hate Israel are extremely vocal. They want everyone to know what they think, and most of them are on a mission to spread their hatred. There is more misinformation about Israel and the Palestinians than perhaps any other conflict, past or present, and misinformation in this context is another word for propaganda.
Let us take, for example, the use of language. A report by the Department of Sociology, City University London, entitled 'The Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel', gives a detailed analysis of the response by British Jews to a number of questions that supposedly explore how they feel about Israel. Some of the questions are as instructive as the answers.
Many of them refer to the occupation. Now, of course, if you are asking questions that require tick box answers, you can't say, for example, 'What do you think about the ongoing conflict over the disputed territories, often referred to as the occupied territories?', so you just use shorthand and call them the occupied territories. How would I answer questions of that kind? Well, I would have to ask what the questions mean, which would, I expect, invalidate all of my answers. My point here is that the disputed territories are referred to as the occupied territories, as if the use of the word is not in dispute. Well, it SHOULD be in dispute. Without going into international law concerning the west bank, let's just examine the United Nations' and the UK government's definition of the Gaza Strip as occupied.
My dictionary's definition of occupation is, 'Taking or holding possession of … a country or district by military force.' Since Israel has no military forces in Gaza the strip is the most unoccupied occupied territory in history. Well, people say, what about the siege? Yes, siege. Referring to my dictionary again, siege is defined as, 'Operations of encamped attacking force to take, or compel surrender of, fortified place'. Whilst it is true that Gaza is fortified, I have never heard of a siege in which 800 lorries each day are allowed in and out with supplies. That is an odd siege indeed.
So what we have is two words, occupation and siege, both in common use, even by the United Nations, but neither of which is true, which means they are propaganda words, which means they are weapons.
How do I feel about my government using words as weapons against Israel? Not great, I can tell you. More importantly, how do other British Jews feel about it? Well, I can't answer that with any precision, but what I can do is look at the result, according to the above-mentioned report and my own observation, which is that increasingly British Jews are buying into the truth as it is told by our government and the media and the result of that is that British Jews are starting to doubt the State of Israel.
And now I have to ask the question, who benefits from that doubt? I have to ask that question because whoever it is who benefits is very probably the party that promotes and perpetuates the myths that come between Israel and British Jews.
The National Union of Students has elected as its president Malia Bouattia, who is openly and aggressively hostile to Israel. Following that, one of the candidates for the presidency, believe it or not, of the Union of Jewish Students, is an extreme anti-Zionist Israeli. Why? Why is this even possible? Well, they do say for a lie to be believed it simply has to be repeated often enough, and the result of that, here in the UK at least, is that young people are starting to believe what they hear and read ad nauseam ad infinitum, that Israel is an occupier of Palestinian territory.
The question for many young Jews, even those who consider themselves to be supporters of Israel, is not whether Israel occupies Palestinian territory but what needs to be done about it. What the propagandists have succeeded in doing is to get people asking the wrong questions. Now, many British Jews are saying, 'I support Israel, but …'. They are saying that if it weren't for the settlements …. They are not asking whether the settlements are an issue, because that is taken as a given, because the British media have that as their starting point. The Arab world, which uses the Palestinians as pawns, learned its propaganda skills from the experts, Nazi Germany, and one of the rules they learned is that you have to get people worrying about what you want them to worry about, no matter how untrue or irrelevant it is. The National Socialists persuaded ordinary Germans that their nation and their national culture were under threat, from the Jews, from the Communists, whoever, in order to create enemies to go to war against. Muslim rabble-rousers tell ordinary Muslims that their religion is under threat, which of course it is not, in order to arouse them to fear, the first stage in arousing them to aggression. Take, for example, the propaganda over cameras on the Temple Mount. Muslims became aroused to anger about something that wasn't happening. They didn't ask IF it was happening, they just got angry about it.
Israelis might not like to admit it, but they are dependent on the support - financial, political, diplomatic and moral - of Diaspora Jews, not least in the US and Europe. The enemies of Israel (let's call them Muslim supremacists) are playing a long game. They know they have to separate Diaspora Jews from Israel. If it takes generations, it doesn't matter, and this is why they concentrate their efforts on our universities, where left-wing teaching staff are willing accomplices in the alienation of Jewish students from the national homeland of their own people.