printThat’s the title of the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens article describing last week’s TIME magazine cover story, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”:
“If you’re a reader of a certain age, you might understand the headline.
In May 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel’s prime minister, Time magazine set out to describe the man, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his last name: ‘Rhymes with Fagin,’ the editors explained, invoking the character from Oliver Twist. Modern Israeli leader; archetypal Jewish lowlife: Get it?
The magazine’s other characterization of Begin was that he was ‘dangerous.’ A year later, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.
Maybe there’s something in the magazine’s DNA. This week, readers were treated to a cover story by Karl Vick titled, suggestively, ‘Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.’ That’s one way for Time to address the current state of negotiations between the Jewish state and its neighbors, which otherwise barely rate a mention in the article.
Mr. Vick’s essay draws on the testimony of a pair of real estate agents, a columnist for a left-leaning newspaper, and a few others to explain that Israelis are too blissed-out by the fruits of their economic prosperity to pay much attention to the subject of peace, much less whatever sad things may transpire among their neighbors in Ramallah and Gaza. ‘We’re not really that into the peace process,’ says Gadi Baltiansky, a peace activist quoted in the story. ‘We are really, really into the water sports.'”
It’s hard to say what to make of this, since the article concludes by contradicting its central thesis: ‘For all the surf breaks, the palms and the coffee, the conflict is never truly done, never far away,’ Mr. Vick writes.
Indeed it isn’t: Nearly every Israeli has a child, sibling, boyfriend or parent in the army. Nearly every Israeli has been to the funeral of a fallen soldier, or a friend killed in a terrorist attack. Most Israeli homes and businesses come equipped with safe rooms or bomb shelters; every Israeli owns a gas mask. The whole country exists under the encroaching shadows of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the prospect of a nuclear Iran. How many Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, can say the same about their own lives?” READ ON.
[SNIP]
What TIME cretin Karl Vick is describing, and depicting with the aid photos of good looking Israelis on the beach, is a plucky people engaged in LIFE; working, playing, making money (horrors!), and having fun, in the face of daily existential threats. This is to be admired not condemned.
My daughter, who was decidedly not pro-Israel when she visited there, came back enthralled with the country and its people (she wrote about it HERE). Never before had she met such tough, positive, feisty sorts (and certainly not in the Jewish school she once attended in South Africa. Israelis and diaspora Jews: never the twain shall meet).
As admirable as is the Israeli absorption with the good life, I’m afraid that regular Israelis need to learn to be more guarded with creeps likes Vick of TIME. And maybe to revive some of that founding patriotism, once again.
Michaels lost me with this paragraph:
“Journalism aside, there’s also a moral dimension here, especially for a magazine that recently devoted its cover to the question of whether Americans are “Islamophobic.” That dimension is known as the delegitimization of Israel — the idea that the country ought not to
exist. Insisting that Israel be wiped off the map, as Iran’s leaders do
with such numbing frequency, is one method of delegitimization.
Suggesting that Israelis don’t care about peace — not all of them, of
course; there’s always a remnant of politically anguished Israelis to be
found, quoted and celebrated for the purposes of native standing and
moral cover — is another.”
No comparison whatsoever between calling for the liquidation of a country and disliking the attitudes of its citizens. We are talking of a difference of substance, not degree. Michaels would probably think that someone who didn’t fancy Israeli food was engaging in “delegitimization”.
I defy Mr. Vick to find any other country on the planet that has accomplished as much as Israel has since its modern inception in 1948. Technically their neighbors have been at war with them since 1948 as well. When your neighbors won’t even reconize your existance, threaten to drive you into the sea, what the H311 are you supposed to do? The left refuses to recognize the difference between defending yourself against an existental threat and an interest in a “phony peace”. Is Israel interest in peace? The resounding answer is YES. However, Israel is not interested in a peace that results in being eiher driven into the Mediterranian or destroyed in a nuclear holocaust by Iran.
Didn’t King David speak about his enemies talking about peace when they were actually for war? Does this theme sound familiar to anyone?
I haven’t read Vick’s article in it’s entirety, so I can’t comment on it’s accuracy yet. But I repeat my main point: whether he is right or wrong it is ludicrous to compare a TIME magazine article to the politicidal pronouncements of the Iranian mullahs.
If you can learn to laugh while the world is crumbling around you, if you can treasure the respites and focus for awhile on those things that most of the world does as a part of their normal everyday lives, where is the cause for ridicule and criticism?