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Slandering Menachem Begin

July 20 2016

When, as Israel’s then-opposition leader, Menachem Begin first visited the U.S. in 1948, a group of Jewish intellectuals—among them Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt—wrote a fervid letter to the New York Times condemning him and comparing him with the Nazis. Milton Viorst has revived these charges and added fresh and still more preposterous ones in his recent book Zionism: The Birth and Transformation of an Ideal, arguing that Begin’s prime-ministership initiated Israel’s transformation from a bastion of peace and tolerance into a militaristic and belligerent state. To the contrary, writes Moshe Fuksman Shal:

[Begin’s] Ḥerut party, [the precursor to the Likud], became a principal voice for democracy and liberty in Israeli politics. It was Ḥerut that was one of the leading opponents of the martial law that had been imposed on Israel’s Arab population until 1966. This opposition was consistent with Begin’s principled belief in equal rights for all of the country’s citizens.

The party also played a major role in defending freedom of the press, [including for] media outlets on the opposite side of the political map. . . .

Contrary to Viorst’s assertion that Begin was somehow the instigator of a new anti-peace Israel, when Begin agreed to hand over the Sinai peninsula to Anwar Sadat he demonstrated his commitment to peace as an ideal, even at the cost of giving up a key territorial asset. This can be contrasted with the famous statement from the previous Labor government that it would be “better to have Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh.”

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Albert Einstein, Anwar Sadat, Hannah Arendt, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Arabs, Israeli history, Menachem Begin

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic