Landmarks

As my positions on Israel continue to evolve "landmarks" frequently present themselves. One such landmark, for me personally, anyway, was the Mavi Marmara incident. What most caught my attention about the flotilla-thing was that it was clearly a case in which western leftists literally, physically, and economically, joined with actual Jihadis in attacking Jews. That is what we saw. The Mavi Marmara was a Turkish vessel carrying people, as we saw on video, who wished for martyrdom in a violent confrontation with Jews and they were aided and abetted by western secular leftists. It was the first time that I really came to understand there is, in fact, a Left-Jihadi alliance at work. This is not to say that all leftists are part of that alliance, but that there is a segment of the western progressive left that supports Jihadis over Jews.

Strange, but true.

Another landmark has taken place just recently. With the current failure of the peace talks, a failure that anyone with a pulse saw coming many months ago, the left, including much of the Jewish left, blames Israel for that failure. This shows me that Jewish liberals are generally weak in their support for the Jewish state. There are things that Israel can be blamed for and things that Israel cannot be blamed for. One of the things that Israel cannot be blamed for is the failure of current negotiations. The reason that Israel cannot be blamed for the failure of negotiations is because it was not the Israelis who refused to negotiate, but the Palestinians who refused to do so.

When Netanyahu first came into office he called for negotiations without preconditions. The Palestinians refused. As a compromise in order to demonstrate good faith, Israel instituted a ten-month settlement freeze in the hopes of bringing the Palestinians to the table, but the Palestinians still refused to negotiate. Now that the settlement freeze is over they are demanding an extension of the freeze, despite the fact that they would neither negotiate throughout most of the period of the freeze, nor negotiate without the freeze. But the bottom line is that Israel called for negotiations while the Palestinians rejected negotiations.
And, yet, many Jewish "progressives" blame Israel for the failure of those negotiations. Does that make even the least little bit of sense? How can Israel be at fault when it was the Palestinians who refused to negotiate whether there was settlement-building or not?

To the extent that Jewish progressives blame Israel on this question is the extent to which those individuals suffer from what I call Jewish Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome, of course, means taking on the political outlooks of one's captors. Jewish Stockholm Syndrome is when Jewish people, whether supporters of Israel or not, ingest the so-called "Palestinian narrative" and view the I-P conflict, at least in some measure, through that narrative.

At the heart of the Palestinian narrative is perpetual Israeli guilt and perfect Palestinian innocence. When Jewish supporters of Israel blame the failure of negotiations on Israel they are expressing something that is not only irrational, but that fits the Palestinian narrative of never-ending Israeli guilt.

They thus suffer from Jewish Stockholm Syndrome.

As with so much else, it's obvious, but they'll never see it or acknowledge it.