By Charles Jacobs
August 26, 2006
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Advocate.
As Israelis dissect their mistakes in Lebanon, Jewish performance on Israel's behalf in America needs a post-mortem as well: on our own front we failed to counter the anti-Israel campaign -- and look what happened.
Decades of biased reporting created a simple theme: "indigenous, impoverished Palestinians are needlessly oppressed by Israeli Jews, who ought to know better." Mainstream institutions digested this line and now liberal church denominations condemn Israel; high school texts and teachers rehearse anti-Israel lessons; and much of the American professoriate preaches Palestinianism.
We have a big problem that's only getting worse: This fall on campus, for example, expect a vigorous, hateful, well-funded national campaign against Israel ... and her supporters. Jewish students are unprepared.
All this didn't happen overnight. Anyone who thought about it should have discerned the pattern: an ideological assault masquerades as legitimate criticism of Israel, singles out the Jewish State, applies to her utopian standards applied nowhere else, and then blames and defames Israel when she fails to measure up. Result: "Israel is bad."
Simple, and right before our eyes. The question Jewish leaders, indeed all of us need to face: how did we -- champions of justice-for-everyone-else, PR mavens, Hollywood honchos, word-wizards, marketing magnates, legal geniuses -- lose so much ground to those who defame us?
Reader, you'll have your own hypotheses. Here's my short list:
1. In-fighting. We spent decades debating left vs. right what Israel should do, rather than making Israel?s case to the public -- from the left and from the right.
2. Jihad-denial. We treated the Palestinian conflict as a local fight over land and borders, but it is a regional, religious conflict that has now morphed into the central front of the global Jihad.
3. We played defense, only. We waited for attacks, and then, to every charge that Israel was "bad," our retort was "we're not as bad as you say," or "that's not right." Never did we initiate campaigns against our detractors. Never did we say THEY, or YOU are bad. We never turned the tables: Just who are they to talk to us about human rights? We played the Jew in the dock, a losing proposition. (See Ken Levin's "The Olso Syndrome.")
As in chess, a great benefit of a lost game is that you can study your errors and win the next round. And, as with Israel's failures in Lebanon, blame for our own public relations failure spreads so far and deep that almost no part of American Jewish institutional life can escape it. There's benefit in this too: such widespread failure can help create a new consensus -- that our course must be changed, that we need a quick transformation, a revolution, a complete renovation of thought and action.
We need to explore the ideological assault on Israel and her supporters, as well as the reasons -- psychological, structural, ideological -- for our failure to defeat it. There's no more time to lose.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
