Why Progressives are Clueless on I-P

{Cross-Posted at Pro-israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

There are reasons why the progressive-left likes to smack around the Jewish state and one of the foremost of such reasons is their near total misapprehension of the source of the conflict. Progressives tend to think that the reason for the never-ending, and increasingly annoying, I-P conflict, is that the Jews of the Middle East are mean.

In the plainest terms possible, that is it. Progressives, as a rule, think that Israel is mean. The mean Jewish Israelis are oppressing the innocent "indigenous" Palestinians and they need to stop it. This represents the essential mental process of most progressives when they bother considering the Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East. It's all about underdogs. Whoever holds underdog status is considered to be the righteous "good guy" among the vapid progressive activist types.

In the summer of 1967 the Jews of the Middle East successfully defended themselves from Arab aggression and, in doing so, acquired the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the "West Bank" from Jordan. After both those countries refused to take back that land in return for peace, as they told us with the three famous "no's" at Khartoum, the Soviets, the Arabs, and their western progressive allies have successfully turned the Jewish David into the Israeli Goliath.

Of course, they get a little cognitive help among people who are paid to encourage them to think this way. NGOs, the United Nations, and various journalists and academics who specialize in spreading hatred toward the Jewish state... and G-d only knows how many anti-Semitic anti-Zionist bloggers who do it not for pay but out shear self-serving righteous indignation combined with willful ignorance of the subject... continually paint Israel as a racist, apartheid, imperialist, colonialist, rogue state.

So what is your average American liberal to think?

Day after day after day Israel gets clobbered by people either emotionally or financially invested (oftentimes both) in doing everything that they possibly can to demean and defame that country for its alleged crimes against the Palestinians and they are almost always on the left.  This is, in fact, the product of untold billions of dollars in Arab oil revenue over the recent decades as a source of funding for non-stop anti-Zionist propaganda directed at gullible, usually well-meaning, western liberals.

If this were not true, surely Israel's defamers would not be defamers, but instead would be honest critics. For if they were honest critics they might note the 1,300 years of Jewish persecution in Muslim and Arab lands that directly preceded the long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East from the 1920s until today.

But they don't.

The only way to make the acidic progressive case against the Jewish state, and thus against the Jewish people, is to ignore centuries of Jewish history in that part of the world. Unless you ignore the long centuries of Jewish second and third class citizenship under Muslim rule, it is impossible to portray the Jews merely as the callous oppressors of the innocent Palestinian-Arabs.

In truth, you have to ignore all sorts of things to maintain the typically progressive stance that the Jews are guilty and that the Palestinians should be free to react in any violent manner possible because they are the righteous victims.

Not only do you have to ignore 13 centuries of dhimmitude to paint the Jews in roguish colors, you also have to ignore all the various times that the Palestinian-Arabs have refused to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. If you admit, as the historical record shows, that the Palestinians have never accepted a peaceful resolution to the conflict despite ridiculously good offers for statehood, such as the Peel Commission proposal of 1937, then you must conclude that the reason for the ongoing problem is not the Jews, but persistent Arab intransigence to this very day.

Yet the Jewish state is the only country on the planet that suffers daily attack in the progressive press and they do so under the guise of "social justice" and "human rights." 5.5 million people are dead in the Congo over the last 15 years, but the progressive-left does not care. Tibet remains under the brutal Chinese occupation, decade after decade, but the progressive-left does not care. In Darfur Muslims slaughter black Africans and use rape as a weapon of war, resulting in the dislocation of millions of people, but the progressive-left does not care.

And I am supposed to take progressive anti-Zionist hatred toward the Jewish state as something other than anti-Jewish racism?

Oh, please.

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