Like C Glick, he has an interesting perspective, helpful in forming a 3-D image of how Israeli Jews think, or are taught to think. If you look at the unexpurgated original, you will notice that he implies that the mere assertion that a Jewish politician is ‘crafty’ is already anti-Semitic – RB
The Anti-Israel Campaign in Haaretz
P David Hornik, INN, Feb 26 2012
Haaretz used to be Israel’s newspaper of record, comparable to the NYT, read also by those who disagreed with it. Today Haaretz is read by less than 6% of Israelis, far behind freebie Israel ha-Yom at 38% and Yediot Aharonot at 36%. Haaretz’s English website, however, gets a very high Alexa ranking, around the 3900th most popular website in the world and currently neck-and-neck with the JPost and INN. Netanyahu allegedly called Haaretz and the NYT Israel’s “two main enemies,” saying:
They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories on what they read in the NYT and Haaretz.
He could have added that foreign diplomats as well base their views of Israel, and their perceptions of Israeli opinion, on what they read in Haaretz. Israeli justice minister Yaakov Neeman has allegedly gone even further and likened Haaretz to Der Stürmer. Are such charges justified? To get an idea on whether they are, I followed Haaretz’s English website’s op-eds and editorials through the Israeli workweek of Jan 29 to Feb 3. Having done the same experiment eight years ago, I can say right away that Haaretz has, if anything, gotten worse since then. While its reporting is also biased, the bias is easier to demonstrate in opinion articles. This despite the fact that last August, Aluf Benn became Haaretz’s new editor in chief. For years Benn was a thoughtful left-of-center columnist for the paper who made valid, if arguable, points. Under his tenure, though, Haaretz has kept publishing the same bevy of radical leftists. It appears inevitable considering that the Schocken family, which has owned the paper since 1937, still holds a dominant 60% stake of Haaretz. In an op-ed last November, current Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken portrayed Israel as a country verging on apartheid.
During the week in question, Haaretz published 30 op-eds. Fifteen of these could be called neutral on political, left-right issues. Exactly one, by Israel Harel, was a discussion from a right-wing perspective. Of the other 14, 11 were virulently left-wing and 3 more moderately so. As for the editorials, all six were harsh attacks on Israeli policy, leadership, and institutions. The following is only a sampling from the week. On Sunday, Gideon Levy published a piece on a recent poll finding high levels of religious belief in the Israeli Jewish population. For instance, 84% believe in God, 70% believe Jews are the chosen people, 76% eat kosher at home, figures far beyond the approximately 25% of the Jewish population that is formally observant. This poll, to put it mildly, did not sit well with Levy and other Haaretz pundits. Levy wrote:
Expressions of racism toward Arabs and foreigners, Israel’s arrogant attitude toward international opinion, these too can be explained by the benighted, primeval belief of the majority of Israelis (70%) that we enjoy complete license because You chose us. We are in the West Bank above all because the majority of Israelis believe that it is not only the land of the patriarchs, but that this fact gives us a patrimonial right to sovereignty, to cruelty, to abuse and to occupation, and to hell with the position of the international community and the principles of international law, because, after all, we were chosen from among all other peoples.
Also on Sunday, Amir Oren complained that the Israeli army “was another kind of army, before the chief rabbi of the air force took office, before the religious takeover of aircraft hangars, and their takeover of the rest of the IDF.” Oren approvingly quotes an anonymous letter to the chief of staff by a secular air force pilot:
Maybe I should let you know that the members of the air force, at least from [x] base, will not be meeting with authors, or guides who would teach them about nature and about various places around the country, or scientists or philosophers, or journalists or historians, or people looking at future trends. Only with religious people, whom my son describes as crazy. I find no reason to assume that this disease only exists on this one particular base. Don’t be surprised if normal soldiers don’t find their place in your army of God.
Sunday’s editorial weighed in on the failed Israeli-Palestinian talks in Jordan, saying these were intentionally scuttled by Israel and adding:
Netanyahu, with Barak’s help, has turned the Iranian nuclear threat into an impressive ploy to distract attention from settlement policy and the perpetuation of the occupation. The death certificate of negotiations based on the two-state solution is a badge of shame for Israeli society. It’s hard to understand how a society that has so impressively brought social injustice to the top of the agenda has fallen victim to our nationalist-religious leaders’ criminal ploy.
On Monday, Druze writer and contributor Salman Masalha drew direct parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Then there was Akiva Eldar, who also featured the crafty, peace-destroying Netanyahu:
If Netanyahu had not existed, the settlers would have been forced to invent him. It has cost him peanuts to remove some of the roadblocks in the West Bank, to lift part of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, and to pay a bit of lip service to “the peace process.” And, he has managed to preserve all the settlers’ interests. Fact: It is possible to gobble up additional territories and also be depicted as a moderate leader while managing to keep relations with the US and EU intact. The settlers can relax. The general positions outlined last week in Jordan to the Palestinians were nothing more than another exercise aimed at presenting Netanyahu as a partner to peace and the Palestinians as the ones who turn it down.
Monday’s column by Merav Michaeli also focused on the poll that so upset Gideon Levy but found a different significance in it:
The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews that the guiding principle for the country and for Judaism itself is to remember the Holocaust. 98% of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people. That’s the way it is with traumas. Trauma leads to belligerence and a strong tendency to wreak havoc on one’s surroundings.
On Tuesday, Avirama Golan gave her take on Israeli secondary education:
From year to year, Israeli children will participate in experiential tours in Israel and abroad. First they will lift their heads in national pride in the City of David and shed a Jewish tear at the Western Wall. Two years later they will march with a huge Israeli flag in the suburbs of Warsaw, will hate Poles and will swear to take revenge on the Palestinians. Never mind. In any case these children will be drafted, will be welcomed to the army by the rabbi of the base, who will blow the shofar in their honor. It’s better if they’re prepared.
On Wednesday, Bradley Burston heaped some more demonization on the Israeli leadership:
If we’re lucky, the threat (no more than the threat) of an Iran attack (Bibi and Barak’s Glory Days Redux fantasy) will be just one more dodge to keep settlers and their opponents at bay: long enough to make it to elections, long enough to get another fix of power. Alternatively, they could do the bidding of the hard right. Shun the left, exploit the center, build like mad in the settlements and bomb Iran for good measure.
Wednesday’s column by Zvi Bar’el directed still more abuse at the settlers, depicting them as taking over the country while perhaps being “willing to give Israel equal rights under conditions dictated by the invaders of the hills.” Thursday was somewhat quieter, with the aforementioned column by Harel and a few neutrals. But Ari Shavit came through with:
Over the past three years, Netanyahu has succeeded in decimating the left’s belief in peace with the Palestinians, and he is en route to destroying the world’s hopes as well. He has managed to convince both the US and the EU that the main topic on the world’s agenda must be Iran.
And Haaretz was back in full force on Friday, with Yoel Marcus:
The most worrying survey showed that 80% of Israelis believe in God. This number is another element in the weakening of the left, the strengthening of the right, the reinforcement of the rabbis’ rule, the sanctity of the territories and the continuation of the Bibi regime.
Yossi Sarid offered an imaginary letter to his parents by an Israeli schoolchild taken on a school tour of Hebron:
They should stop telling us stories. We’re not children anymore. With our own eyes we saw the settlers acting like the bosses, telling the soldiers and the policemen what to do. Once I saw a movie called “To Hell and Back,” and that’s a pretty good description of the day we had. We discovered a grave new world, in which an abomination becomes a righteous deed, as long as it’s performed by authority of the Torah, of course. I’m going to have to rethink everything, after I found out that God has more support than Netanyahu here: at least 80%, and a majority is a majority. Just as murder is murder. I trust our education minister will examine our memories to discover what Hebron did to us as a city that really stinks.
And Doron Rosenblum:
It has become difficult in this country to distinguish, at least on the visual level, between a ceremony to dedicate a new Torah scroll and a walk to the cabinet meeting by the prime minister (who is “good for the Jews”) and his entourage of skullcap and kerchief wearers.
To sum up, then, the gleanings from one week of Haaretz’s opinion articles: the Jewish religion is primitive and benighted, and Israeli Jews exploit it to abuse others. Religious Jews are taking over Israel and the Israeli army and constitute a “disease” in that army. Israeli is solely and deliberately responsible for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian talks, and craftily uses the Iranian threat to deceive the US and EU and advance its goals. Israel is an apartheid state. Israelis are driven by the Holocaust to wreak havoc on others. Israeli schoolchildren are inculcated with a ludicrous religion, Judaism, and learn to hate Poles and Palestinians. Israel may bomb Iran just so its prime minister and defense minister can please the hard right. The settlers are demons, entirely evil. Etc.
We disagree, because this dishonest and presumptuous Kommissar act of invalidating whole libraries for the use of a permanently tarred phrase is pretty solidly American. In fact it’s not just US-Jewish, probably brought to Israel from New York, it’s also all throughout American political culture, spread doubtlessly by Jews but existing healthily outside of them. It is the replacement of literacy by ideology, thus Jews being so much more ideological are susceptible to it to a more visible degree, but when we were on mainstream leftist blogs and used a phrase that was not coined and approved of by the DNC we spent the next hour patiently explaining to screaming progressives that we hadn’t been sent over from the NRA. It is irresistably easier for the ideological person to use these verbal blocs, and that makes false accusations inevitable, and, in the case of Jewish false accusations, magically credible.
It probably came from Protestantism, ditto the American obsession with utopianism-through-war and purging social campaigns.
In fact this is a line of thought we think might bear some useful results: the conflict between ideologically zombified, fresh-off-the boat USsians, and Israeli Israelis who, while thoroughly Zionist are used to thinking in more sophisticated terms, not in the army or the settlements but in the press. The analyst here reads like he works for the Weekly Standard or the Washington Times.
You mean, you disagree with my description of it as an interesting perspective? Or you disagree that it reflects the majority Israeli Jewish view, not just the view of US Jewish propagandists? Well, it does reflect the majority Israeli Jewish view, unfortunately, and if I hadn’t “toned it down” it would be unreadably offensive, because it assumes that everybody who disapproves of the current phase of zionist maximalism is a crypto-nazi, including you, me, Obama, and the man in the moon, if there is one.
If I was doing PR for Israel, I would start by reversing almost all the gratuitously insulting PR programs of the last forty years. But this would take quite a while and would arouse considerable antagonism. Perhaps they need to lose another war before they can be induced to see sense. They do tend to lose their wars, in real terms, even though on the surface of things they seem to win them. Their last assault on Lebanon was a grotesque error, and they still don’t admit that, or even see it. Similarly, Gaza.
What they do is, they goad the rest-of-the-world, and specifically their neighbours, into lashing out at them, and then crush them with superior firepower, over and over again. They want to be hated, because this confirms their cartoon image of the rest-of-the-world as haters. This is pathological. They’ve been doing it ever since the 1940s, but since 1973 they have been doing it quite blatantly, whereas before then they did it secretly, as far as western publics were concerned.
No no no, all we meant was that in trying to trace the origin of it, it’s not Israeli. there are certain rhetorical flourishes and patterns which we feel confident in naming as Jewish or Israeli and this is one that is extremely common over here among non-Jews.
I tried my best to knock all the rhetorical flourishes and patterns out of it and just present it as a piece of content analysis with a droll conclusion (“a ludicrous religion, Judaism”). Style apart, I think the considerable majority of Jewish Israelis regard the absorption of the entire West Bank as a long-term inevitability, which given the Jewish jujitsu hold on global politics, it probably is. What they do not know, in my opinion, is what on earth will happen to the Gaza Strip.