What do you think?

* JUNE 8, 2010

Israel and Its Liberal ‘Friends’
Why don’t they apply the same tough love to the Palestinians?

Questions for liberals: What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What does it mean to be a friend of the Palestinians? And should the same standards of friendship apply to Israelis and Palestinians alike, or is there a double standard here as well?

It has become the predictable refrain among Israel’s liberal critics that their criticism is, in fact, the deepest form of friendship. Who but a real friend, after all, is willing to tell Israel the hard truths it will not tell itself? Who will remind Israel that it is now the strong party, and that it cannot continue to play the victim and evade the duties of moral judgment and prudential restraint? Above all, who will remind Israel that it cannot go on denying Palestinians their rights, their dignity, and a country they can call their own?

The answer, say people like Peter Beinart, formerly of the New Republic, is people like . . . Peter Beinart. And now that Israel has found itself in another public relations hole thanks to last week’s raid on the Gaza flotilla, Israelis will surely be hearing a lot more from him.

Now consider what it means for liberals to be friends of the Palestinians.

Here, the criticism becomes oddly muted. So Egypt, a country that also once occupied Gaza, enforces precisely the same blockade on the Strip as Israel: Do liberal friends of Palestine urge the Obama administration to get tough on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as they urge him to do with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? So a bunch of “peace” activists teams up with a Turkish group of virulently anti-Semitic bent and with links both to Hamas and al Qaeda: Does this prompt liberal soul-searching about the moral drift of the pro-Palestinian movement? So Hamas trashes a U.N.-run school, as it did the other week, because it educates girls: Do liberals wag stern fingers at Palestinians for giving up on the dream of a secular, progressive state?

Well, no. And no. And no. Instead, liberal support for Palestinians is now mainly of the no-hard-questions-asked variety. But that is precisely the kind of support that liberals decry as toxic when it comes to Western support for Israel.

I leave it to others to decide whether this is simple hypocrisy or otherwise evidence of how disingenuous claims by certain liberals to friendship with Israel have become. Still, these liberals insist that their remonstrances are necessary because, without them, Israelis won’t get the tough love they need.

Really? Consider a sample of recent clippings from the Israeli press. An editorial in Haaretz: “Like a robot lacking judgment . . . that’s how the [Israeli] government is behaving in its handling of the aid flotillas to the Gaza Strip.” A columnist in the Jerusalem Post: “As evil as these jihadists [aboard the flotilla] are, they were acting in a cause the whole decent, democratic world knows is right: Freedom for Gaza. Freedom for the Palestinians. And end to the occupation. An end to the blockade.” A member of Israel’s cabinet: “We need to ease the population’s conditions and find security-sensitive, worthy alternatives to the embargo.”

None of this indicates a society lacking in a capacity for self-criticism. Yet that capacity hardly has any parallel in the closed circle of Palestinian media or politics, a point that ought to bother Western liberals.

It doesn’t. One wonders why.

Part of the reason surely has to be intellectual confusion, an inability to grasp the difference between national “liberation” and genuine freedom. Ho Chi Minh was not a “freedom fighter,” and neither was Yasser Arafat. How many times does the world have to go through this drill for liberals to get the point?

There’s also a psychology at work. Harvard’s Ruth Wisse calls it “moral solipsism”—obsessive regard for your own moral performance; complete indifference to the performance of those who wish you ill.

Finally there’s the fact that liberalism has become a politics of easy targets. Liberals have no trouble taking stands against abstinence educators, Prop 8 supporters or members of the tea party. But when it comes to genuine bigots and religious fanatics—and Hamas has few equals in those categories—liberals have a way of discovering their capacity for cultural nuance and political pragmatism.

Today, by contrast, the task of defending Israel is hard. It’s hard because defenders must eschew cliches about “the powerful” and “the powerless.” It is hard because it goes against prevailing ideological fashions. And it’s hard because it requires an appreciation that the choice of evils that endlessly confronts Israeli policy makers is not something they can simply wash their hands of by “ending the occupation.” They tried that before—in Gaza.

Is there a liberalism that is capable of recognizing this? Or are we again at the stage where it has been consumed by its instinct for fellow-traveling? In 1968, Eric Hoffer wrote: “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.” By “us,” he meant liberals, too, and maybe most of all.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Distinguished guests,

Several months ago, I headed the Israeli delegation to the ceremony marking 65 years since the liberation of the death camps Auschwitz and Birkenau. The candle-lighting ceremony took place outside in front of the monument. It was 15 degrees celsius below zero, but it was still warmer than the terrible winter of 1944-1945 when temperatures ranged from 30 to 35 degrees below zero. We stood for about 30 minutes during the ceremony, well-dressed for the weather, but nevertheless we were freezing. Suddenly I understood a simple, chilling truth about millions of my brothers and sisters who ended up in that cursed place: those who didn’t burn, froze; and those who didn’t freeze were burned.

Several months prior, I had visited the Wannsee Villa in Berlin. When I was there, I saw the original invitation for the meeting of high-level Nazi officials, during which they decided on the destruction of the Jewish people. On the invitation that was sent by the Deputy Head of the SS was written: “The chief of the Reich main security office, Reinhard Heydrich, cordially invites you to a discussion about the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Breakfast will be served at 09:00”.
This is how, in an elegant villa on the shore of a pastoral lake, over breakfast and glasses of cognac, 15 men sat and decided how to destroy our people. No one batted an eyelid; no one expressed any doubt regarding the mission, either its necessity or its justness. Immediately after the meal, they began their work to erase the seed of Abraham from the Earth.

As I was walking through the villa, moving from document to document, I felt myself becoming filled with helpless rage, and the feeling continued to grow until it became a flood. At the end of the tour, my German host asked me to write something in the guest book. I sat in the chair and the sadness and the anger rose up and started to overflow. And because of the storm of emotions I wrote three words: Am Israel Chai [the People of Israel live].

Tonight at Mount Herzl, I say it again: Am Israel Chai. The people of Israel will continue to live. It re-established its country, gathered its exiles, built its army, settled its homeland and reunited its capital, Jerusalem. “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” That is how David Ben-Gurion opened the Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel was born out of the ruins and the ashes, and today it impresses the entire world with the force of its creativity and innovation, with its advanced research and knowledge, with the momentum of its economy and with its free and democratic society.

Within several decades, the State of Israel has become one of the most advanced countries in the world: Israeli products help cure illnesses and feed millions of people; Israeli developments help irrigate fields and orchards on every continent; and Israeli ideas help save energy in every corner of the globe. Israel is a rich source of innovation for the world and is looking to the future.

Nevertheless, today we must ask the question: have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned? I believe that there are three lessons: fortify your strength, teach good deeds and fight evil.
The first lesson – fortify your strength – relates first and foremost to us, the people of Israel who were abandoned and defenseless when faced with waves of murderous hatred that rose against us time after time.

“In every generation there are those who stand against us.” And in this generation we must fortify our strength and independence so that we will be able to prevent the current enemy from carrying out its plan.

Fortifying our strength is the first condition for our existence.
At the end of the day, it is also a necessary condition to expanding the circle of peace with those neighbors who accept our existence.
The second lesson – teach good deeds – means accepting or rather teaching to accept the other and differing opinions. This is the recognition that is the foundation for the Jewish perspective that every man is created in G-d’s image and that every man has full rights to freedom, to life and to choosing his own path.

This is the essence of a free society. This is the basis that would prevent the growth of a Nazi ideology or any other fanatic ideology that preaches genocide and carries it out.

This is what we teach the children of Israel, which is a magnificent country, a beacon of tolerance in a dark and fanatical region.
But, ladies and gentlemen, this teaching of good deeds has a complementary side, and that is the third lesson of the Holocaust: fight evil. It is not enough to simply do good and be tolerant. A free society must ask itself what it will do when faced with the destructive forces of evil that seek to destroy and trample man and his rights.

There is no tolerance without boundaries and the boundary of tolerance must be outlined. And that is the answer that all free countries must define for themselves.

The historic failure of the free societies when faced with the Nazi animal was that they did not stand up against it in time, while there was still a chance to stop it.

And here we are today again witnesses to the fire of the new-old hatred, the hatred of the Jews, that is expressed by organizations and regimes associated with radical Islam, headed by Iran and its proxies.

Iran’s leaders race to develop nuclear weapons and they openly state their desire to destroy Israel. But in the face of these repeated statements to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the Earth, in the best case we hear a weak protest which is also fading away.
The required firm protest is not heard – not a sharp condemnation, not a cry of warning.

The world continues on as usual and there are even those who direct their criticism at us, against Israel.

Today, 65 years after the Holocaust, we must say in all honesty that what is so upsetting is the lack of any kind of opposition. The world gradually accepts Iran’s statements of destruction against Israel and we still do not see the necessary international determination to stop Iran from arming itself.

But if we learned anything from the lessons of the Holocaust it is that we must not remain silent and be deterred in the face of evil.
I call on all enlightened countries to rise up and forcefully and firmly condemn Iran’s destructive intentions and to act with genuine determination to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

These are the three lessons of the Holocaust: fight evil, teach good deeds and fortify your strength.

My friends, where does our strength come from? From our unity, from our heritage, from our common past and future. We treasure our past and forge the path to our future.

We are not here by chance. We returned to this land because it is our land; we returned to Zion because it is our city. We are paving roads north and south, and transforming a barren land into a flourishing garden. This is our answer to those who seek our destruction.

As the prophet Isaiah said:
“Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”