Sarah Honig Has Some Words

Mike L.

In a piece entitled, Who's The Sucker, from early last month, Jerusalem Post opinionator, Sarah Honig, suggests that:

... if the world, for a host of ulterior motives, contends that Israel is the villain and the Arabs are its downtrodden victims, we don’t quarrel with this premise. We throw the howling hostile hounds a few bones to mollify them. 

If the world, for cynical self-serving reasons, equates us with South Africa’s old apartheid regime and the Arabs with the oppressed indigenous masses, we don’t challenge this odious distortion. We try to improve our image.

If the world decides we’re foreign colonists who forcefully usurped the land of peaceful natives, we remove several settler outposts rather than refute the brazen fabrications and stress our right to our only homeland.

If the world falsely depicts us as the many and the mighty and the Arabs as the few and defenseless, we shy from military solutions to violent conflicts. If the world calls us aggressors, we apologize.

We convince ourselves that we thereby stave off immediate disaster, that we outsmart all other poker players. But in fact we only impress ourselves, while at the same time honing our image overseas as tyrannical Goliaths, diehard apartheid adherents, colonialist interlopers and/or militarist ogres. 

It’s staggering stupidity to appear to own up, even if indirectly, to the rampant slander that has today replaced the medieval calumny of deicide. {Editor's emphasis.}

By repeatedly conceding the basic assumptions against us, we aggravate our own distress and inevitably succumb to the inimical international axiom that we’re in the wrong and that those who would annihilate us are desperate insurgents against injustice.

I am convinced that one of the biggest mistakes that Jews who care about Israel have made in recent decades was in accepting the so-called "Palestinian narrative" as something that approximates truth.  The notion that is peddled throughout the west, as well as to your own children, is that the Jews of the Middle East are vicious militarists who stomped on the innocent Arab "indigenous" population after marching out of Europe following World War II.

What we need to do, as I will continue to insist until I get it through at least a few skulls, is place the conflict within the larger scope of Jewish history under Arab rule within the system of dhimmitude for thirteen hundred years.  Palestinian-Arabs have the sympathy of Europe and the western-left because they have positioned themselves as the victims of an aggressive "Zionist" occupation.

The truth of the matter, as even a gander at Jewish history in the region will tell you, is that it is the tiny Jewish minority that are the victims.  It is the vast Arab majority - which outnumbers the Jewish people in the Middle East by a factor of sixty or seventy to one - that is the aggressor who have kept Jewish numbers to a bare minimum throughout the region where the Jews were born as a people.

The Jews are the persecuted indigenous people "between the river and the sea" and no other existent people have ever had a state defined by that region aside from the Jews.

This is not a right-wing view.  Nor is it a left-wing view.

What it is, is the truth.