The Biggest Lie in Israel

Here is an article by Prof. Paul Eidelberg, Director of The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy which aptly sums up the central issue which lies at the root of all of the current challenges facing both the Jewish People and the Jewish State today...

The Biggest Lie in Israel

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg


Evelyn Gordon is one of the more candid journalists of The Jerusalem Post. Back in April 16, 2002, she cited some of Israel’s most charming Arab Knesset Members: (1) Taleb a-Sana, who praised a suicide bomber and called for more of the same; (2) Abdul Malik Dahamshe, who calls Israeli Arabs convicted of murdering Jews “prisoners of conscience”; (3) Azmi Bishara, who praises Hizbullah as the model for Israeli Arab resistance against Israel; (4) Mohammad Barakei, who urged Israeli Arabs to participate in Palestinian violence against Israel.

Ms. Gordon then remarked: “if the statements by [these] Arab MKs indeed reflect the opinions of their voters, the inescapable conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs actively or tacitly support violence against Israeli Jews.”

More recently, Sammy Smooha of the University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology, reported, “Israeli Arabs totally reject the notion of a Zionist state.” (Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2005.) Only 13.8 percent agreed to Israel’s right to exist. Had the pollster been an Arab, that 13.8 percent would probably have plummeted close to zero—and why not?! Why should any Arab with a stitch of honor—and Arabs are notorious for their overweening pride—want to live under “infidels,” especially in a country like Israel?

After all, what country exhibits so little national pride as this so-called Jewish state? What country tolerates in its law-making assembly subversives like Taleb a-Sana, Abdul Malik Dahamshe, Azmi Bishara, and Mohammad Barakei?

National pride? In the midst of war, and despite the palpable fact that vast majority of Israel’s Arab citizens identify themselves as “Palestinians,” i.e., with Israel’s enemies, our senses are assaulted by the miasma of Jewish MKs who want to deJudaize their country’s national anthem, Hatikvah! While Jews are still mourning the loss of their loved ones—some murdered by “Israeli” Arabs—the Knesset Constitution and Law Committee is considering a proposal endorsed by its reputed nationalist chairman Michael Eitan (Likud), to replace the words "nefesh Yehudi” (Jewish soul) with “nefesh Yisraeli” (Israeli soul). As if this will endear Arabs to Israel, or to Jews whom they naturally despise.

The baseness and obsequiousness of these Jewish law-makers makes a man of taste want to vomit. But let us not be deceived. These law-makers are first and foremost democrats, not Jews—for it is only as democrats that these nominal Jews derive their respectability and legitimacy.

Note their moral egalitarianism: “Israeli soul” makes all citizens of Israel—Jews and Arabs—equal. This moral egalitarianism is obviously rooted in their lack of Jewish national pride or honor. How indeed can moral egalitarians possess Jewish pride or honor? Nor is this all.

By truckling to Arabs who despise them, these assimilated Jews betray moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. Max Nordau, a psychiatrist, saw this among the emancipated Jews of his time, more than a century ago. He calls them the “new Marranos,” whom he compared unfavorably with the Ghetto Jew:

In the Ghetto, the Jew had his own world; it was to him the sure refuge which had for him the spiritual and moral value of a parental home. Here were associates by whom one wished to be valued, and also could be valued; … Here all specific Jewish qualities were esteemed, and through their special development that admiration was to be obtained which is the sharpest spur to the human mind.

What mattered if that outside the Ghetto was despised which within it was praised? The opinion of the outside world had no influence, because it was the opinion of ignorant enemies. One tries to please one's coreligionists, and their applause was the worthy contentment of his life.

Nordau contrasts the psychology of emancipated Jews—those who aped the Germans or the French or the Americans:

The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow-beings … His best powers are exhausted in the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment, of his own real character. For he fears that this character might be recognized as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is in all his thoughts and sentiments. He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher feeling men, as is everything that is unreal.

The "new Marranos” is more crippled than the “old.” The old Marranos had “a secret desire for truth or a heartbreaking distress of conscience, and they often sought for pardon and purification." In contrast, the new Marranos “carry with them their own humiliation, their own dishonesty …”

I think with horror of the future development of this new race of Marranos, who are normally sustained by no tradition and whose soul is poisoned by hostility toward their own and strange blood, and whose self-respect is destroyed through the ever present consciousness of a fundamental lie.

The biggest lie in Israel today is “democracy,” a word ever on the lips of Israel’s ruling elites. Since they can no longer take pride in being Jews or part of the Chosen People, they must substitute the only thing of which they can boast—today’s touchstone of all that is good and right: Democracy.

Democracy is their life raft in the storm swept sea of the Arab Middle East. It is the one kosher label by which they can possibly (and naively) claim the support of the gentile democratic world, so much given to anti-Semitism, i.e., hatred of Jews and Judaism.

These Jewish play-actors lie in vain. Not only do they arouse the contempt of gentiles, but as the prophet Ezekiel said, “That which comes into your mind shall not be at all; in that you say, “We shall be as the nations ...” No, no: much lower!