ZionTruth Has Some Words

Mike L.

Anyone who posts here knows that I like to swipe commentary for front page material. This is because it is way, way easier than creating original content!

I think that this guy is interesting.

ZionT.

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Born and bred in Israel, entire life in Israel except for three of my teen years spent in the U.S.

Apologies, but I don't like to disclose much online. I can say I've gotten more religious and more right-wing over the years, like a lot of Israeli Jews during the 2000s decade, when the hopes of Oslo were dashed.

I'd rather talk about society in general. A lot of the denizens of DailyKKKos fancy Israel as a latter-day South Africa with white majority rule and all, but they're hopelessly out of date even in those cases where there's a tiny grain of truth behind the lies they believe in. I remember when one of the DKos anti-Israel regulars (perhaps "jon the anti-zionist jew," but I don't recall from memory) "proved" Israel to be a "white racist state" from the movie Salah Shabbati. The only problem with his thesis is that Salah Shabbati was made in... 1961.

Israeli Jews today are an increasingly intermarried bunch, where I'm speaking of marriage between European-extraction Jews (Ashkenazim) and Arab-world-extraction Jews (Sephardim). Even without intermarriage taken into account, Israel in this year 2012 is majority Sephardi, meaning non-white. That means the anti-Israel crowd are not just outdated, they're outdated in a way that lays waste to all their assumptions. For instance, Sephardim have no "white guilt" and the canards about Israel as a colonial project simply bounce off them. And more, they tend not to be receptive to the narrative that Jews and Arabs had lived in absolute, idyllic peace together until the coming of Zionism; their long family histories tell a quite different story, you see.

And the Sephardim have always been traditional, if not outright religious. While the age-old compromises with the Ultra-Orthodox still cause much grumbling (for example, over their avoidance of army service), the old "Russian Revolutionist"-like secular fervor of the founders of the modern State of Israel is all but gone. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of secular Jews, but they're so by default, not by conscious ideology as in the past. Even the secular have a high proportion of masortiyim (traditionalists) who lead secular lives but keep traditions like in that lovely picture you posted of a woman lighting Shabbat candles. That woman could easily be secular in her usual life, but tradition is cherished.

Politically, over these years, patience with the Arabs has grown thin. Remember that, from October 2000 to this day there's been a series of outrages, as well as external observations, that has sapped the willingness for land concessions. Whether it was the Second Lebanon War of 2006, or an outside event like the Danish Cartoon Riots, there's been a growing feeling that the deals we've signed or would sign are not land-for-peace deals but land-for-nothing deals. And there is very little love for an outside world that chides us as we're attacked, the way it happened in July–August 2006 and is beginning to happen right now.

As I once mentioned, and you promoted it to a post, Israeli Jews tend to be more politically flexible than, say, their American counterparts. They can, for example, demonstrate against Netanyahu for his capitalist economic policies, and at the same time unwaveringly support him for his retaliation against Hamas. This combination of left-wing economic leaning and right-wing foreign policy leaning is baffling to most American onlookers, but it's quite natural here.

In short, Israeli Jewish society and culture has changed in such a way that, if ever the Arabs were once sincerely interested in a land-for-peace deal, their window of opportunity is now well-nigh closed. With the overwhelming belief that giving up Judea and Samaria would only lead to a barrage of Kassam rockets on the Tel-Aviv area, and that a new pretext would be found for it (say, the "Right of Return" being yet unfulfilled), few Israeli Jews have a heart for such deals. The picture from Israel's mainstream media may be different, but the Israeli MSM does not reflect the average Israeli Jew.

I hope this brief rundown clarifies things a bit and isn't too tainted by my personal views.

HaShem bless you all.