[Part one of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4181.]
Increasing numbers of self-hating Israeli academics openly call for Israeli national existence to be ended and for Israel to be replaced with a single state with an Arab majority and PLO hegemony. Israeli left-wing professors turn out mountains of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish political propaganda, often passing it off as "scholarly research".
It is an open secret that on campus, leftist extremists with laughable and ludicrous publication records get hired, tenured and promoted, as acts of solidarity by other leftist faculty already inside the system. Israeli university governance is notoriously corrupt and politicized. Some of these tenured leftists then tour the world urging anti-Semites to boycott all of Israel, including the very same academic institutions in which they are employed and from which they draw salaries.
The campus was not the only headquarters for Jewish self-hatred. In the 1990s, the Israeli public school system was also conscripted into proliferating anti-Israel, pro-Arab ideology. Israeli politicians from the Left and some leftist "academics" seriously proposed that Israel create a National "Nakba Day", in which it atone for the very fact of its creation and the "catastrophe" that this creation caused to Palestinian Arabs. "Nakba Day" events are increasingly common on Israeli campuses and occasionally in Israeli public schools. Israel is the only country on the planet in which schools and colleges regularly hold symposia devoted to expressions of mourning and remorse that the country in which they live exists at all, and in which they barely hide their desire to see their country annihilated.
The Israeli media has long operated under the nearly complete hegemony of the Far Left, a unique form of quasi-totalitarianism operating within the overall framework of a country with democratic institutions. The Israeli media have by and large taken their cues from the academic Left, and campus Newspeak, including "postmodernist" gibberish, is now a regular part of the daily journalistic dose. Israel's daily newspapers have served as regular bludgeons against the country, promoting Arab propaganda as editorial and opinion, and often, even as news, blaming Israeli obstinacy and mistreatment of Arabs for all of the problems of the world.
Haaretz long ago ceased to be a newspaper or an organ of political pluralism, and operates as an instrument of far-leftist political indoctrination. Yediot Ahronot is only slightly less biased. Maariv is the only Hebrew newspaper that maintains any semblance of pluralism, and even it is often much more a platform for the Left than for the non-Left. The three Israeli television stations compete against one another over which is the furthest to the Left and which can employ the largest number of leftist political commentators. The main form of political pluralism in radio broadcasting ended when Ariel Sharon's government shut down Arutz Sheva.
The main manifestations of the Leftist Ascendancy have been the universities and the media, but other institutions, such as the Supreme Court, the intelligence services, and much of the officer class in the military, have also come under its sway. A large part of the secret of the success of the Ascendancy is the enormous funding it openly receives from institutions and people outside the country, those for whom Israel's best interests are decidedly not part of the agenda. Picayune "organizations", some of them communist front groups, are flooded with funding and fill the press and billboards with large political ads.
Jewish anti-Semitism is more and more openly the driving force behind the fundamentalist theology of the Leftist Ascendancy. This obsession with self-flagellation among the Ascendant Leftists has produced a situation whereby each and every atrocity committed by Arabs, without exception, is greeted with calls from the Israeli chattering classes for more concessions and appeasement. Some, including the tenured extremists at the universities, go so far as to justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis to come to their senses and make peace.
For the past 12 years, the Israeli elites have lived in a make-pretend world in which Jews are to blame for everything and Arabs are merely expressing "frustrations" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews. The fact that no Arabs ever launched any intifada in Arab countries, where their treatment by Arab regimes has always been infinitely worse than by Israel (even if all Arab accusations against Israel are accepted at face value), never seems to matter to any of them.
The psychological war by Israel's elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect, indeed against national existence, has long been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing. Every atrocity by the Palestinians is greeted with new offers of concessions and goodwill gestures from Israel, which has been pursuing a policy holding that no act of Arab violence should go unrewarded. Ehud Barak surrendered to Hizbullah terror and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon, and, in so doing, placed all of northern Israel, including the Haifa Bay and its refineries, within range of Hizbullah rockets. Israel rewarded decades of Syria's aggression, Holocaust denial, harboring of German war criminals and terrorism, through its Hizbullah surrogates, by offering to grant Syria not only the Golan Heights, but also parts of pre-1967 Israel, with access to the waters of the Sea of Galilee.
The national policy of self-abasement was accepted with equanimity by much of the Israeli public, hoping against hope that the Osloid politicians promising light at the end of the appeasement tunnel would prove correct. The very same nation that had defeated the Arab hordes in 1948-9, in the Suez Campaign, in the Six Day War and in the Yom Kippur War, now morphed into whining defeatists. The one avenue for making peace that was declared by the elite as unthinkable was "peace through military victory" over the country's tormentors. And all the while, Israel's own government was subsidizing the venomous anti-Zionist extremists at the Israeli universities and elsewhere.
For thirty years or so after Israel's creation, few would have challenged the idea that secular Zionism had achieved an unqualified success in its begetting the new "Israeli". Israeli Jews were at last "normal" citizens of their own country, patriotic to the point of being insufferable, proud to the point of hubris, confident in themselves and in their military, sure of their moral justifiability. And then, just a few years later, these same Israelis were reduced to begging Yasser Arafat to allow his terrorist squad leaders to meet with Israeli army officers in order to maintain the facade of a "peace process". Israeli politicians were abandoning any pretense of conditioning further concessions to the Arabs on the latter abstaining from violence. Israeli leaders and intellectuals were endorsing the principle of Israel paying reparations and tribute to the very same Arabs who had attacked them and lost.
The 1990s were the era in which it became evident that a great many Israelis and most of the Israeli elite had lost their will to survive as a nation. After centuries in which Diaspora Jews maintained the most militant sorts of pride and self-assurance, even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated, here were the Israelis of the Oslo age, possessing one of the great armies of the world, abandoning all pride and explicitly promoting self-humiliation. The same Israeli military that had rescued the Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, was suddenly incapable of rescuing a wounded IDF soldier bleeding to death in Joseph's Tomb in Nablus or protecting children under fire in Jerusalem neighborhoods. McClellenism had replaced audacity as the calling card of the Israeli Defense Forces. Here was an Israel unwilling to use force to prevent Palestinians from firing rifles, mortars and rockets into civilian homes, and instead asking to hold talks with those doing the shooting, to work out differences and reach understandings.
An Israel less than two generations after the Holocaust was suddenly willing to hold "peace talks" with people who deny there ever was a Holocaust and who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzos. The same Jews who fought against enormous odds and won in 1948 were acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral peace gestures from Israel in exchange for the Arabs continuing to make war against the Jews.
[Part 2 of 3]
Increasing numbers of self-hating Israeli academics openly call for Israeli national existence to be ended and for Israel to be replaced with a single state with an Arab majority and PLO hegemony. Israeli left-wing professors turn out mountains of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish political propaganda, often passing it off as "scholarly research".
It is an open secret that on campus, leftist extremists with laughable and ludicrous publication records get hired, tenured and promoted, as acts of solidarity by other leftist faculty already inside the system. Israeli university governance is notoriously corrupt and politicized. Some of these tenured leftists then tour the world urging anti-Semites to boycott all of Israel, including the very same academic institutions in which they are employed and from which they draw salaries.
The campus was not the only headquarters for Jewish self-hatred. In the 1990s, the Israeli public school system was also conscripted into proliferating anti-Israel, pro-Arab ideology. Israeli politicians from the Left and some leftist "academics" seriously proposed that Israel create a National "Nakba Day", in which it atone for the very fact of its creation and the "catastrophe" that this creation caused to Palestinian Arabs. "Nakba Day" events are increasingly common on Israeli campuses and occasionally in Israeli public schools. Israel is the only country on the planet in which schools and colleges regularly hold symposia devoted to expressions of mourning and remorse that the country in which they live exists at all, and in which they barely hide their desire to see their country annihilated.
The Israeli media has long operated under the nearly complete hegemony of the Far Left, a unique form of quasi-totalitarianism operating within the overall framework of a country with democratic institutions. The Israeli media have by and large taken their cues from the academic Left, and campus Newspeak, including "postmodernist" gibberish, is now a regular part of the daily journalistic dose. Israel's daily newspapers have served as regular bludgeons against the country, promoting Arab propaganda as editorial and opinion, and often, even as news, blaming Israeli obstinacy and mistreatment of Arabs for all of the problems of the world.
Haaretz long ago ceased to be a newspaper or an organ of political pluralism, and operates as an instrument of far-leftist political indoctrination. Yediot Ahronot is only slightly less biased. Maariv is the only Hebrew newspaper that maintains any semblance of pluralism, and even it is often much more a platform for the Left than for the non-Left. The three Israeli television stations compete against one another over which is the furthest to the Left and which can employ the largest number of leftist political commentators. The main form of political pluralism in radio broadcasting ended when Ariel Sharon's government shut down Arutz Sheva.
The main manifestations of the Leftist Ascendancy have been the universities and the media, but other institutions, such as the Supreme Court, the intelligence services, and much of the officer class in the military, have also come under its sway. A large part of the secret of the success of the Ascendancy is the enormous funding it openly receives from institutions and people outside the country, those for whom Israel's best interests are decidedly not part of the agenda. Picayune "organizations", some of them communist front groups, are flooded with funding and fill the press and billboards with large political ads.
Jewish anti-Semitism is more and more openly the driving force behind the fundamentalist theology of the Leftist Ascendancy. This obsession with self-flagellation among the Ascendant Leftists has produced a situation whereby each and every atrocity committed by Arabs, without exception, is greeted with calls from the Israeli chattering classes for more concessions and appeasement. Some, including the tenured extremists at the universities, go so far as to justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis to come to their senses and make peace.
For the past 12 years, the Israeli elites have lived in a make-pretend world in which Jews are to blame for everything and Arabs are merely expressing "frustrations" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews. The fact that no Arabs ever launched any intifada in Arab countries, where their treatment by Arab regimes has always been infinitely worse than by Israel (even if all Arab accusations against Israel are accepted at face value), never seems to matter to any of them.
The psychological war by Israel's elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect, indeed against national existence, has long been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing. Every atrocity by the Palestinians is greeted with new offers of concessions and goodwill gestures from Israel, which has been pursuing a policy holding that no act of Arab violence should go unrewarded. Ehud Barak surrendered to Hizbullah terror and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon, and, in so doing, placed all of northern Israel, including the Haifa Bay and its refineries, within range of Hizbullah rockets. Israel rewarded decades of Syria's aggression, Holocaust denial, harboring of German war criminals and terrorism, through its Hizbullah surrogates, by offering to grant Syria not only the Golan Heights, but also parts of pre-1967 Israel, with access to the waters of the Sea of Galilee.
The national policy of self-abasement was accepted with equanimity by much of the Israeli public, hoping against hope that the Osloid politicians promising light at the end of the appeasement tunnel would prove correct. The very same nation that had defeated the Arab hordes in 1948-9, in the Suez Campaign, in the Six Day War and in the Yom Kippur War, now morphed into whining defeatists. The one avenue for making peace that was declared by the elite as unthinkable was "peace through military victory" over the country's tormentors. And all the while, Israel's own government was subsidizing the venomous anti-Zionist extremists at the Israeli universities and elsewhere.
For thirty years or so after Israel's creation, few would have challenged the idea that secular Zionism had achieved an unqualified success in its begetting the new "Israeli". Israeli Jews were at last "normal" citizens of their own country, patriotic to the point of being insufferable, proud to the point of hubris, confident in themselves and in their military, sure of their moral justifiability. And then, just a few years later, these same Israelis were reduced to begging Yasser Arafat to allow his terrorist squad leaders to meet with Israeli army officers in order to maintain the facade of a "peace process". Israeli politicians were abandoning any pretense of conditioning further concessions to the Arabs on the latter abstaining from violence. Israeli leaders and intellectuals were endorsing the principle of Israel paying reparations and tribute to the very same Arabs who had attacked them and lost.
The 1990s were the era in which it became evident that a great many Israelis and most of the Israeli elite had lost their will to survive as a nation. After centuries in which Diaspora Jews maintained the most militant sorts of pride and self-assurance, even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated, here were the Israelis of the Oslo age, possessing one of the great armies of the world, abandoning all pride and explicitly promoting self-humiliation. The same Israeli military that had rescued the Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, was suddenly incapable of rescuing a wounded IDF soldier bleeding to death in Joseph's Tomb in Nablus or protecting children under fire in Jerusalem neighborhoods. McClellenism had replaced audacity as the calling card of the Israeli Defense Forces. Here was an Israel unwilling to use force to prevent Palestinians from firing rifles, mortars and rockets into civilian homes, and instead asking to hold talks with those doing the shooting, to work out differences and reach understandings.
An Israel less than two generations after the Holocaust was suddenly willing to hold "peace talks" with people who deny there ever was a Holocaust and who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzos. The same Jews who fought against enormous odds and won in 1948 were acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral peace gestures from Israel in exchange for the Arabs continuing to make war against the Jews.
[Part 2 of 3]