Kishon’s “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy” is 1962, after 1956, written. :-)

Meryl Yourish dissects the contention that anti-Israel sentiment is all about … the “occupation”: Like in 1960, when the UN Security Council released this resolution, in protest of violating Argentina’s sovereignty. Why did Israel violate Argentin…

Israel Perspectives ran his list of top (or, more precisely bottom) 10 essays in honor of Yom Ha’atzmaut. Ironically the top (bottom) two have problems geting their stories straight. The first, by Tony Judt, argues that Israel is an adolescent……

So, why not hold a ceremony so that when anti-Semites say: “But, the Jew Judt says Israel is an apartheid state.” We can say, well that is his opinion, but he is not Jewish.

“I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War — and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel’s earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventures of 1956.”

Tony Judt graduated Cambridge in 1969; he must have been 18 or 19 years old in 1967 — and 7 or 8 years old in 1956.

The “condition” of the Palestinians in 1967 was that they had the entire West Bank, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem, but three years earlier had formed the “Palestine Liberation Organization.” The geographical reference in the title of their new organization was not to the West Bank, but to Israel.

For a look at recent History, don’t miss Meryl’s lesson about the “occupation” for Tony Judt…….

It’s worth looking for Ephraim Kishon’s article, “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy,” written not long after the Six Days War. His thesis is that Israel forfeited world sympathy by…well, surviving. I have no doubt if they hadn’t left-wingers all over the world would hold Israel Memorial Days, lamenting that wonderful, kibbutznik country that so tragically went down before the onslaught.

My guess is that if the Israelis had to choose they’d opt for what happened rather than maintaining the sympathy of the world.

And your point is absolutely correct–when Judt says people liked Israel, he means pampered and cossetted western intellectuals like, say, Tony Judt liked Israel. Once defending Israel in the faculty lounge required a little backbone he caved in.

All over him, in fact. Meryl has left no stone unturned or unkicked. May I say that this is among the finer blog posts I’ve……

“Interesting that Haaretz gave this guy a paltform. It says a lot (negatively) about the mindset of its publishers.”

Haaretz and some of the Israeli left I suppose, are still engaged in a set of dual identities. One, Israel. The other, Western leftist discourse influenced by Marxism and Soviet foreign policy objectives posing as ideology. Since 1967 this divide has been problematic for the faith-based left. “Post Zionism” is a comfortable position within Marxism and the Soviet fears of nationalism, a domestic fear projected outward.

“Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left”

Clever revisionism. This is how Judt disposes a critical argument – that the post-1967 anti-Zionist/Semitic propaganda campaign was the or a root cause of left thought, a mirror of Soviet obsessions.

It poses that Soviet bloc anti-zionism is the same before and after the ’67 war. Not true. Only after did the Soviets start their incessant campaign. And he implies that the “non-communist left” regarded Israel well because the Soviets opposed Israel. Laughable, but telling revisionism in order to portray a “left” that was anti-Soviet.

The reality is the Soviet propaganda campaigns coined and originated all the templates for anti-Zionist left thought (racism, apartheid, colonialism, nationalism, etc.) These were imbibed by leftist critics. The campaign was incessant because the ’67 campaign piqued many Soviet fears. Their major exports, arms, were inferior. Nationalism, a great domestic fear of the Soviets borne out by the Soviet dissolution. Global Power politics. Need to suppress Arab oil production, coompetitors of just about the only other export anyone would buy from the Soviets. And good ol’ Russian anti-Semitism.