How is it possible, I asked myself, that so many presumably otherwise decent people who were raised with western values could take the side of an extremist, Middle East-Islamist organization officially recognized as a terrorist group by Canada, the European Union, Japan, and the United States as well as the Organization of American States?
My answer to this question came some nights later while watching the film The Highwaymen. It is a 2019 Netflix production, part fiction, part fact, based on events leading up to capture of the notorious 1930s American criminal couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The only detail I remembered about this couple is that they were ambushed by the authorities and died in a hailstorm of bullets while sitting in their car. I wasn’t aware that by the end of their crime spree they were responsible for the deaths of thirteen people, mostly police officers.
What I learned from this film is that during the couple’s interstate cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement, with their murderous escapades being reported nationwide in newspapers, magazines and on radio, they had developed a significant fan following. Young women began to style their hair and wear dresses similar to Bonnie. Young men took to copying Clyde’s attire. They became virtual rock stars. So much so, that some 10,000 people attended the Barrow funeral, while the estimated number of attendees at Parker’s was twice that. Thousands of flowers were sent to each service from around the country.
Similar public adulation has been bestowed upon other figures who, in the course of their confronting the establishment – whether army or police – knowingly took the lives of innocents. Examples include the revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Che Guevara and mobsters John Dillinger and Al Capone.
STORIED CRIMINALS who did not commit murder but whose criminality was trivialized by their admirers and were even lauded as heroes include felonious bank robber and heiress Patti Hearst and more recently George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter icon who between 1997 and 2005, was convicted of eight crimes and served four years in prison.
But it was not their criminality that attracted admirers; it was, rather, the combination “Robin Hood” and “David and Goliath” image that came to surround them via news reporting and rumors. Applying today’s terminology these individuals were not viewed by their fans as criminals but as authentic social justice warriors. Irrespective of their actual deeds or motivations, the sole image many saw – or chose to see – was the little guy pitted against the much more powerful bully, the have-nots against those who have, the innocent against a corrupt establishment, and most poignantly, the oppressed against the oppressor. Any criminality involved is rationalized to be nothing but a means to a desired political end; it is unfortunate, but necessary and thus justifiable.
This brings us back to Israel, the Palestinians and Gaza.
Soon after Israel emerged victorious in the June 1967 Six Day War the country found itself facing an image problem, an “inverted David and Goliath.” The way in which the surrounding Arab countries had been formerly seen in relation to the tiny Jewish state, a now militarily powerful Israel was seen vis-a-vis a stateless and disenfranchised Palestinian people.
Leaders within the former Soviet Union, wishing to cement the loyalty of the Muslim world during the height of the Cold War, assisted the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, in promoting the image of victims and changing the world’s perception of the Palestinian cause from one bent primarily on destroying Israel to a cri de coeur for social justice. In relatively short order, Israelis had become the oppressor and Palestinian Arabs the oppressed.
RECOGNIZING THIS ironic turnabout, Israeli journalist, author and social commentator, Ephraim Kishon, published So Sorry We Won (1967). Thirteen months after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, renowned American Jewish author Cynthia Ozick wrote in an Esquire magazine essay: The Palestinians, we are told, are the Jews’ Jews. They are also the newest Zionists. They too long for restoration to Jerusalem. They too have their Diaspora. They too educate their children to the hope of Return.
The pile-on of the left against the Jewish state has with little doubt been fueled by the end of the apartheid era in South Africa in 1994. For self-styled progressives of the Left, always in want of a cause, Israel-Palestine was a no-brainer; in fact, it was there waiting. The verbal artifacts of this period, specifically “racism,” “apartheid” and “colonialism” were ready-made and easily adapted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by leftist ideologues. These have been joined with additional charges of “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” “murder of children” and “genocide” in creating the image of a society that is the epitome of evil.
The impunity with which these baseless and fallacious allegations have been leveled is facilitated by the fading significance of the Holocaust. Ironically, though, Holocaust inversion rhetoric, i.e. what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Jews are now doing to the Palestinians, is also employed in the malicious campaign to defame Israel. Israelis are today’s Nazis.
The ability of otherwise well-meaning people to buy into this narrative and to look the other way at, if not actually applaud, the incessant bombardment of civilian Israeli communities, requires on their part a powerful selective filtering of reality. The throngs of pro-Palestinian Western marchers and protesters see past the terrorist organization’s war crimes and focus only on the unfortunate non-combatant residents of Gaza, who themselves are victims of Hamas.
It is like those who only saw Bonnie and Clyde as a daring young couple standing up to a corrupt justice system. This is only possible for people who view the perceived underdog and social justice as synonymous; no more need be known nor asked. The underdog is blameless. That is the bite of the underdog.
What can Israel do? In the short term there is nothing Israel can do to alter the equation in its favor. Israel is now Goliath, the Palestinians are David. That image is accepted by most of the world. But if Israel continues to advance diplomatic relations with her Muslim neighbors, it is reasonable that they would concede the need for the Palestinians to also recognize Israel’s legitimacy and negotiate a mutually acceptable settlement. Diplomatic and even economic pressure from Arab countries at peace with Israel could serve as catalyst for positive change among the Palestinian leadership and within Palestinian society. If we are fortunate enough to arrive at that stage, the hateful rhetoric and deceitful imagery that is today the Palestinian narrative will simply lose relevance. The underdog will have wandered off.
The writer is the director of www.iTalkIsrael.com in Efrat.