Just Out: TIME Magazine's Latest Blood Libel About Israel
by Phyllis Chesler
http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/848/time-magazine-blood-libel
The September 13, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine arrived yesterday. The
cover story is titled "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace" and is
illustrated by a large Jewish star composed of daisies. Yes, daisesas
in "counting daisies, don't have a care in the world."
This is precisely the point of Karl Vick's article. He writes:
Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter [of peace with
the Palestinians]. They're otherwise engaged: They're making money;
they're enjoying the rays of the late summer
they have moved on.
Vick quotes an Israeli real estate agent in Ashdod, one Eli, who tells him:
People are indifferent. They don't care if there's going to be
war. They don't care if there's going to be peace. They don't care.
They live in the day.
According to Vick, Israelis don't care about peace, peace
negotiations, or about the Palestinians because they are simply having
too good a time: sunbathing, swimming, café-hopping, profiting from
start-up companies, and, according to polls cited by Vick, utterly
disconnected from "politics;" indeed Vick suggests that Israelis
resemble Californians more than they resemble Egyptians. These are all
points which scream: Israel does not fit in; if Israelis were only
more impoverished, more indolent, and paradoxically, even more "laid
back," they might be recognizable as indigenous to the region, a true
part of the Middle East.
These are Vick's thoughts, not mine.
Of course, Jews are the original Palestinians and the most indigenous
of the region's inhabitants; yes, there are many impoverished
Israelis, both Jews and non-Jews; and, let's not forget that there are
even some Israelis who remain permanently on high alert for the next
terrorist attack, permanently scarred by the last ones. For a moment,
let's forget about all that. Allow me to ask: Why doesn't Vick also
point out that Palestinians are leading the high life on the West Bank
and in sumptuous villas on both the West Bank and in Gaza; that they,
too, are sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dining out, and relaxing at
the beachat least as much as the Islamist thugs who run the lives of
Palestinians will allow it?
Vick and his editors at TIME seem to think that showing six photos of
Israelis at leisure: blowing smoke on a beach chair, lounging on a
beach chair, resting in an army uniform on the beach without a chair,
playing with one's baby in a stroller, sitting at a caféare proof
that Israelis are engaging in activities which are not admirable, are,
in fact, "proof" that they are not suffering but rather, proof that
Israelis simply don't care about peace with the Palestinians. And Vick
brings in polls as well as expert and person-in-the-street opinions to
back up this claim.
Vick writes that real estate is booming, as is business in general,
Israeli "brainiacs" have helped their nation avoid the economic
disasters that have plunged Europe and America into a recession. He
literally writes this. "Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the
U.S. and Europe into recession. It is known as a start-up
nationsecond only to the U.S. companies listed on the Nasdaq
exchange."
Is Vick aware that, consciously or not, intentionally or not, he is
counting on the world's long-held resentment about Jewish creativity,
genius, and scientific and economic successcounting on the world's
willingness to scapegoat Israel once again for crimes that it has not
committed? Or because Jews seem to "know something," maybe they are
channeling God directly and thus, the deck is stacked against
non-Jews. Vick presents Israel's "success" as somehow unseemly,
because it makes other nations look bad. Does he harbor the suspicion
that Jewish prosperity has been "stolen" from non-Jews or is he merely
advertising that Jewish gold is there, ripe for the taking?
Buriedbut really buried-- in Vick's four page cover piece are
snippets of true facts: That the Israelis are weary of peace
negotiations which never succeed because the Palestinians do not want
peace; that Arabs and Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state
and as many Jews as possible.
But Vick fails to convey that negotiations cannot work as long as the
ultra-Nazified Arab Islamic propaganda against Jews and Israel
continues to turn out children who hate Jews and who become human
homicide bombs, snipers, kidnappers, kassam rocket launchers, etc.
Here is what Vick utterly fails to comprehend, namely, that the
Israelis are not merely tired, disenchanted, living in la-la land a la
southern Californians (hence, the Jewish star made of daisies on the
cover). The Israelis are actually showing the entire world how to
embrace life, even as they live, trembling, in the shadow of death.
They are teaching the world how to "love life more than they fear
death." A new and wonderful book A New Shoah. The Untold Story of
Israel's Victims of Terrorism by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti,
which is not yet out, makes precisely this point.
The Jewish insistence on life may be the key to our survival as a
people despite ceaseless persecution. It might be the lesson, the
model, for all humanity in an era of genocides, civil wars, torture
chambers, tyrannies, and totalitarian regimes. Why is TIME turning
things on their head and refusing to recognize the courage and the
heroism of Jewish Israelis who choose to live in the moment when the
moment is all they have? Against all odds, the Jews simply refuse to
give up. As Meotti writes of the numerous victims of terrorism during
the ongoing Intifada of 2000, "Israel teaches the world love of life,
not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a solemn
celebration."
Meotti begins where I began in early 2004, when I wrote about a new
Holocaust in the pages of The Jewish Press, a Holocaust which is now
based in Israel. At the time, I was not heard beyond a small circle. I
did what Meotti now does in his opening pages. Meotti fully
understands that Israel is the "first country ever to experience
suicide terrorism on a mass scale: that more than 150 suicide attacks
have been carried out plus 500 have been prevented." According to
Meotti, there have been "1,723 people (murdered) and 10,000 injured"
in Israel. Meotti does what I did: He converts these numbers into the
demographic equivalent of attacks on Americans. When I did so there
were somewhat fewer people in both categories. Thus, Meotti writes
that in American population terms, this means that "74,000 Americans"
would have been killed and "400,000 injured."
Vick does not factor this grave reality into his article. Nor does he
seem to know how high the Jewish population growth was in the DP camps
right after the Holocaust. Can he comprehend that permanently
endangered Jewsa people that has survived as a people for nearly six
thousand yearsthe Chosen Peoplehave always chosen life in the
moment, have chosen to seize life with both hands, even as they
memorialize their dead and make sense of their persecution in a way
that illuminates this particular Hell for all humanity?
What Meotti is doing is remembering the lives and the deaths of the
Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism during the last decade. I
have only read the first few chapters but cannot put it down. These
are unknown stories, unnamed victims, whose mortal remains have often
evaporated, disintegrated as surely as those Jews who literally went
up in smoke during the Nazi Holocaust. His stories are mainly of
victims who were unarmed and helpless and who, it turns out, were
actually exceptionally kind to others, often to the very Arab
Palestinians who shot them down, bludgeoned them to death, or blew
them up into unrecognizable bone fragments, drops of blood, perhaps a
few teeth.
I look forward to completing Meotti's book. I hope that people more
fully understand that TIME Magazine as well as countless other media
in the Western world, can no longer be trusted to tell
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