With all of the world’s attention focused on fighting, attacks on school buses, Israeli attempts to stop them, rockets launched against Israeli targets and Israeli attempts to stop them, little attention is given to Israel’s contributions in the world. All too rarely are the good things about Israeli society and the incredibly tolerant Israeli people promoted.
Israelis never seem to be given credit for what they do and what kind of people they are. Stories about Israel’s help far beyond her borders are often ignored such as this one about Israel’s help in Japan following the quake. Instead Israel’s days seem to be described as follows:
There was evening, there was shelling, there was morning, there was reacting, there was shelling and there was more reacting. The media thought Israel was bad. One day.
Of course, Israelis must also be racists. Zionism is racism after all, right? I recently wrote about the fact that Israelis are not only tolerant of others, they actively oppose discrimination against minorities!
If you really look at Israelis, you will find that they care more deeply about people whose skin color is not like their own, and people whose beliefs are not like their own, people whose dress is not like there own than probably any other people on the planet. Eilu v’eilu. For Israelis, “these and those” are not only the words of the living God, but these and those people are the creations of the living God.
Of course those things are ignored — they are beyond the point of the anti-semites. They are also irrelevant to Israel’s attempts to change its image.
Every time Israel makes a concession and the Palestinian Arabs don’t, it sends a very clear message: that the land is rightfully Palestinian, that Israel stole it, and is trying to get away with giving some of what it stole, “back.” Israel needs to change the discussion, making it clear that the land in question is historically Jewish, that Israel has no intention of given up sacred Jewish soil, and that Palestinian Arabs are only welcome to stay on the land if they behave.
Israel quickly sent a medical team to Haiti after their disaster and Jenny Tonge, a member of the House of Lords, wanted an investigation into the charge that the reason Israel did this was so it could harvest the organs of victims. She lost her Liberal Democrat leadership role but other than that seems to have suffered no repurcussions, much less shunning by all decent people.
You need only walk down any street is Israel and see that whatever Zionism is, it’s not racism. But “racism” no longer means anything except that the speaker doesn’t like something, although the charge is still telling.