Peace Trains’ Jews Against Israel

Peace Trains’ Jews Against Israel

 By Giulio Meotti 

Karl Marx died long before the State of Israel was created. But what made the founder of Communism an anti-Zionist before Zionism was his opposition to the very idea of a Jewish identity. The explanation can be found in his writings. In the second of his two early essays, together known by the title “On the Jewish Question,” Marx made many antisemitic assertions, such as: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist.” “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

If one believes that mankind has to be emancipated (read it: liberated) from Judaism, one then insists that Jews be powerless and assimilated. That’s why the new Jewish Marxists have turned anti-Zionism into one of their very highest priorities.

From the 1970s, Israel’s universities and Western intellectual circles had become home to a new generation of Jewish intellectuals who demonize and boycott Israel, and ultimately undermine the survival of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

More than 90% of the allegations of “Israeli war crimes” cited in the shameful Goldstone Report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million from the New Israel Fund, an organization headed by former Meretz MK and neo-Marxist Professor Naomi Chazan.

The list of “deranged Jew-haters which, if listened to, will do nothing other than pave the way to the next calamity” (as the brave Caroline Glick once called them), is long and very rich. Steve Plaut has drawn up a thorough list of them for the Middle East Quarterly and in his Freedom Center pamphlet, Jewish Enablers of the War Against Israel.

Tel Aviv University students and professors recently commemorated the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe,” as the Arabs call the date of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Ayal Nir, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, in his Facebook page, called to “break the necks of right-wing activists.” Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand achieved celebrity status in Europe by publishing a book denying the existence of the Jewish people, while Professor Oren Yiftachel called Israel “a white… pure settlement colonial society.” Larry Derfner, a former senior staff writer for The Jerusalem Post, publicly stated that the killing of Israeli citizens was a justifiable weapon for Palestinians in order to overcome the “occupation.”

At the Ben-Gurion University, Neve Gordon accused the IDF of being “war criminals” and promoted the boycott of Israel in a Los Angeles Times editorial.

Two days after two Jewish boys were murdered near their homes in Tekoa, Professor Ze’ev Sternhell published an article entitled “Against the lunatic government,” in which he wrote: “If the Palestinians had more sense they would direct their struggle against the settlements. They would also avoid placing explosive charges on the western side of the green line.” In other words, Sternhell, one of the most famous symbols of the defeatism of the lunatic Israeli Left, permits bombs to be exploded against Jews on the eastern side.

The new Hebrew publication “Tachlit Re’uya” by Ruti Eisikowitch sheds light on this “de-humanization of the settlers” committed by Israeli figures. Moshe Zimmerman of Hebrew University said he regards Jewish children in Hebron as Hitlerjugend. After Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two “settler kids” in the Judean desert, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton declared that “the settlers raise little monsters.” Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University openly supported boycotts of her own university, while University of Haifa professor Ilan Pappe accused the Jewish State of “ethnic cleansing.” Ran Hacohen from Tel Aviv University described “Israel as fulfilling Hitler’s dream” and referred to the assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin as “a milestone in the process of the barbarization of mankind.” Lev Grinberg of Ben-Gurion University accused the Israeli government, in a Belgian media, of “state terrorism.”

In recent years, the most unremitting criticism of Israel in the Anglosphere has come from Jewish intellectuals. Every day, celebrated Jewish personalities – writers, artists, academics – are depicting Israel as a “racist,” “vicious” and “inhumane” entity that has to be dismantled. Many of them have assumed pivotal roles in the campaign to divest from the Jewish State. Their relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed puts an end to Israeli life.

George Steiner, who has been proclaimed “the most important literary critic in the world,” questioned whether Israel should have come into being at all. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most famous living historians, supported the Second Intifada, endorsing the “the cause of liberation.” Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote letters to “Palestinian partisans” during the Intifada. The late historian Tony Judt had been outspoken in his rejection of Israel’s right to exist and offered Israelis the fate of other religious minorities in the Middle East. United Nations envoy Richard Falk is one of the most radical demonizers of the Jewish State. Historian Norman Finkelstein is one of the staunchest Western supporters of Hezbollah. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh have been the most famous anti-Israeli figures in the UK. The initiative for an anti-Israel boycott in London was taken by Stephen and Hilary Rose, two renowned Jewish academics. The linguist Noam Chomsky, “the intellectual godfather” of the US anti-Israel campaign, openly proclaims the abolition of the Jewish State. Jewish philosopher Judith Butler is leading the divestment from Israel. Michael Lerner’s magazine, Tikkun, is the most virulently anti-Israel screed ever published under Jewish auspices.

Along with Jewish speculators like George Soros, the worldwide patron of liberal activism believes that American foreign policy is guided by a “Zionist lobby” and its  money goes to anti-Israel organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You also find most of the influential Jewish intellectuals in the US who abandoned and attacked a modern Jewish hero like Jonathan Pollard, by calling him “a fanatic” (Robert Friedman of The Washington Post), “an aberration” (Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg), and “a viper” (Marty Peretz of the New Republic).

Like Karl Marx, these Jewish personalities gained fame by trashing their own people. They are the self-professed “better Jews” who set themselves apart from the Israeli masses and pusture as the possessors of greater cosmopolitan, liberal, humanistic and really Jewish wisdom. The more they attack other Jews, the more they prove that they are not defined by being Jewish. They are more dangerous than the proud anti-Semites. “Good Jews” who are trying to deliver Israel to what Hillel Weiss, evoking the wagons that carried Jews to Nazi concentration camps, superbly called “the peace trains.”

 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/peace-trains-jews-against-israel/