IMAGINE THERE’S NO COUNTRIES. ISRAEL: YOU GO FIRST
PEACENIKS PROMOTE GENOCIDE IN TYPICALLY NAÏVE DUPLICITY.
When the madness of crowds manifests in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Jewish people and anyone with brains recognize this as a call for the eradication of Israel and probably Jews.
No, no, how dare you! we are scolded. This is a merely a peaceful call for pluralistic multiculturalism! We don’t want to kill the Jews. We just want to make them a minority in a democratic binational state.
And that would be lovely.
In a different, more perfect world.
In this world, we know the consequences of Jewish statelessness. And we’re not going back.
Rima Berns-McGown, a particularly smarmy Canadian politician, childishly declared: “[It is not] antisemitic to suggest that the answer lies perhaps in a one-state solution in which Jews and Palestinians live peacefully but which is neither a particularly Jewish nor particularly Palestinian state, per se. (Isn’t that the kind of state we are building in this country, after all?)”
Sure, that analogy would be fair — if Anglo Canadians had been inculcated for generations with genocidal hatred against Quebecois and were suddenly unleashed into an erstwhile fortified Quebec as full citizens. The adorable Belgium or Switzerland Berns-McGown imagines would, of course, look a lot more like Rwanda or Yugoslavia. But then, based on the nonchalance so many similar activists take toward issues of Jewish life and death (eg., not giving a single shit), we would likely see these same folks look at their failed experiment in racial harmony and shrug. Well, that happened. Whoops.
For whatever else the Jewish state is, it is a collective defence against the antisemitism that permeates the world. To use Berns-McGown’s problematic formulation: It is not racist to acknowledge that, whether you are a product of Western civilization or Muslim civilization (so, that’s about half the world’s population), antisemitism is in your civilizational DNA.
As we saw on October 7 and, sadly, a million times between 1948 and that infamous day, Jewish self-determination does not eliminate either hatred or the ability of haters to kill. But as we have seen since October 8, it does eliminate the millennia-long scenario in which the mass murder of Jews can be perpetrated without consequences.
Although the formulation FAFO didn’t exist in 1948, it has been a good piece of advice (too often ignored) by those would harm Jews and Israelis since then.
Berns-McGown represents a phenom I cogitated on recently about two other smarmy Canadians. There is an M.O. in the anti-Israel movement for war and hatred to dress itself up as peace and love, for grotesque immorality to masquerade as compassion. In this case, it is probable genocide doing drag as multicultural harmony.
“Imagine there’s no countries,” wrote John Lennon, “It isn’t hard to do.”
No, it’s easy. Simple. And the post-nationalist activists chanting on the streets worldwide are unctuous in their certainty that nationalism is so 19th century. We need to eliminate borders. So they declare: “Israel: You go first.”
You could make a case for the elimination of borders. But then, let’s start with the easiest ones. Europe did it. Awesome! I love the EU and my heart broke over Brexit.
How about making a real impact and eliminating the longest undefended border in the world, the one a few blocks from my house, dividing Canada and the United States? Most people can’t tell us apart anyway. We’re practically the same. But just wait until Canadians hear about this. There goes our free medical care, gun-safe schools and everything else we cherish as uniquely Canadian.
And — again — Americans have not been bred for generations to hate and aspire to kill Canadians. (They’ve been bred to not even know we’re here, but that’s a story for another time.)
Maybe before we start demanding Israel eliminate the border between themselves and the people who, according to opinion polls, think October 7 was awesome, start by erasing the borders nearest you and see how you like it. Or how about the border between Ukraine and Russia? Good with that? Mexico and the United States? India and Pakistan? China and Tibet? (OK, a bad example that proves the point.)
After we’ve eliminated the easy ones like this, maybe we can think about erasing the border between Israel and Palestine.
But wait a minute.
There are those zealots who call for a one-state solution. I’ve dispatched them in the last few words, I think. What about the “moderates” who do not want (or, at least, in polite company claim they do not want) to eliminate Israel? They want an independent Palestine. How is Palestinian nationalism the world’s biggest craze right now while Jewish nationalism — which is called Zionism — is recast as the world’s greatest crime?
Supporting Palestinian nationalism while opposing Jewish nationalism is a tad contradictory innit? Of course, as long as you preface it with pat phrases like “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” or “It’s not antisemitic to suggest …” I’m sure it’s fine.
If you do not understand the significance of Jewish self-determination, why the existence of Israel is sacrosanct to almost every Jew, you should maybe crack open the history book you slept on at your high school desk.
Jews and others with a sentient, empathetic understanding of history, on the one hand, and those who credulously call for a “one-state solution,” on the other, took two wildly different lessons from the 20th century.
The Second World War, for a lot of people, was a lesson in the dangers of nationalism. For Jews and we who have a more nuanced understanding of reality, that same era was the final lesson in the intolerable consequences of Jewish statelessness.
So we are generally coming from two massively disparate approaches on the idea of nationalism and borders: The integrity of nation-states was the reason for the war. Jewish statelessness was the reason for the Holocaust.
To square that circle, plenty of people are willing to sacrifice the Jews (again). And yet, irrationally, while singing the praises of erased borders — it isn’t hard to do — they have made a Palestinian state (either alongside, or on the graves of, the Jewish state) their top priority. (There’s a term for treating Jews differently than you treat every other group and no amount of chanting “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” can befog that fact.)
If the chant “From the river to the sea” is not a call for genocide, it is a call for a “one-state solution.” If you do not understand why Israelis, pretty much every other Jew, and any reasonable human have a problem with that, you really don’t get it.
To the Jewish people, you are saying …
Relax. What’s the worst that could happen?
The holocaust essentially proved Zionism right. And the 'special' treatment Jews receive, along with calls to dissolve or dismantle the state of Israel, are all the proof we need that it should and must exist.
There are so many cogent points here, and so many flashes of brilliance, one would have to quote the entire piece to say which were the standouts. Jewish nationalism = bad; Palestinian nationalism = good is an utterly brilliant exposure of the hypocrisy of the Free Palestine rent-a-crowd.