The Left, Hamas are boosting Netanyahu - opinion

Two weeks ago, Israel seemed to be on the cusp of a coalition of change, a bold experiment in Left to Right, Jewish and Arab big-tent governance.

Let’s not be naive. If it happens, this push-me-pull-you, bribe-me-blackmail-you coalition will be as unstable as a radioactive isotope. But it also could generate hope by unseating Netanyahu – even temporarily – and addressing some of the issues vexing our Israeli-Arab brothers and sisters, while delivering exotic gifts called a national budget and planning.

Reporters and demagogues can blather on about Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa. Hamas had a different agenda in starting this war. These nihilists could not bear the idea of Ra’am, an Arab party, joining an Israeli coalition democratically – and wanted to advance their power struggle against the Palestinian Authority. So these fundamentalist terrorists did what they do best. They unleashed 4,300 rockets, hundreds of which fell in their own territory, killing their own people. The rest sent Israelis into bomb shelters – and the Israel Air Force into action, because today’s Jewish state is not yesterday’s Jewish pushover. When attacked, we protect our civilians by counterattacking. And if that makes us unpopular, so be it.

Predictably, left-wing radicals excoriating Israel and implicitly excusing Hamas’s evil tried drowning out the sounds of Hamas rockets exploding and rocket-warning sirens wailing. Everyone ran to their usual battle stations; yet another BIFF (blame-Israel-first fest) had begun.

For years, progressive propagandists kept (mis)casting Palestinians as African-Americans. In today’s Black Lives Matter era, many people, including thousands of young Jews, swallowed this sloppy, inaccurate, insulting, misleading analogy.

Talk about cultural appropriation! It demeans the African-American experience of centuries of helplessness with false comparisons to the Palestinians, with their cult of irresponsibility. And it’s curious: when university presidents declared “All Lives Matter” they were pilloried – why are Palestinians allowed to hijack this African-American slogan?

Tragically, most Palestinian lives don’t matter – to fellow Arabs or the rest of the world. Why is it, one friend observes, that 2,300 innocent children were killed between 2018 and 2020 in Yemen with little outcry, while 22,000 children and 13,000 women, including many Palestinians, are among the half a million Syrians killed in the Syrian civil war? Apparently, Arab-on-Arab killings are OK.

This vicious ideological assault on the Jewish state green-lighted assaults on Jews worldwide. Just as, last year, gangs of angry BLM protesters intimidated innocent civilians, gangs of pro-Palestinian thugs are Jew-bashing, from Montreal to London to Manhattan to LA.

In a perverse way, the whole scenario boosts Netanyahu and his the-whole-world-hates-us enablers – from Hamas’s bombing to the Left’s bashing to the antisemites’ bullying. And once the rioting began in Lod, Ramle and other “mixed” Jewish-Arab cities, the chances of nurturing this broad-based coalition plummeted.

HISTORIANS ARE supposed to avoid the word “if” – but imagine, if you will, a less lunatic Left and a less thuggish pro-Palestinian community.

Imagine if more Black Lives Matter voices condemned Hamas for essentially saying “No Lives Matter” with their contempt for life: for those living under their regime and those next door. Imagine if leading Democrats, professors, and columnists mocked this Ferguson-to-Gaza idiocy, because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is national, not racial.

Imagine if we all paid more attention to Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt’s rabbinic letter of 250 rabbis defending Israel rather than the 100 rabbinic students’ letter trashing Israel. And imagine if American Jewish leaders vowed that they would never hire a rabbi who showed such little understanding of Jewish history, and such little empathy for fellow Jews in distress.

Imagine if most feminists objected to the Palestinian calls to “rape” Jewish “daughters,” remembering that their “zero tolerance” for threats of sexual violence should include Jews, too.

Imagine if more progressives said “don’t you dare threaten the Jews” and more bystanders intervened when sociopaths attacked their fellow citizens for being Jewish – as one brave Armenian-Lebanese Christian did during the now infamous attack on some LA Sushi-eating Jews. And imagine if the atmosphere was such that Mher-the-hero felt comfortable sharing his last name, too, because the forces of good were on the march, not in retreat.

Imagine if in Lod, Bat Yam, Ramle, Jaffa and elsewhere, moderate, mature Arabs and Jews had restrained the young hotheads who tried to destroy decades of coexistence – and to negate this past corona-scarred year, when so many Israeli Jews discovered just how central Israeli Arabs are to Israel’s health miracles.

Of course, beyond dreaming of left-wing opinion leaders who speak truth to progressive power, I dream of right-wingers who would exile Ben-Gvir and other anti-Arab bigots, as well as Israeli-Arab leaders who would shun their Israel-apartheid-spouting colleagues.

Still, at this moment, confidence-building, truth-affirming, complexity-respecting measures from the Left could have been game changers. They could have inhibited that great exploiter of Jewish fears, Bibi Netanyahu, from practicing his dark arts. Instead, they failed.

With antisemitic clouds forming in America, Canada, England and elsewhere, with the dust still settling in Israel, as we drown in hypocrisy, idiocy, false analogies and growing enmity, despair grows, thanks to yet another mass betrayal by the world – and too many (although still a minority of) Jews.

Our pride in the IDF’s extraordinary, disciplined, effective acts of self-defense risks being blunted. If all this keeps Bibi in power, curse the Left, not just the Right; and Hamas, not just Bibi’s devotees.