Reaching a different and wider audience means hearing from different voices.  I have been told that the opposition to the policies of the current Government in Israel is simply the product of years of indoctination by educators in the United States and has no actual relationship to those in charge today.  That may be so, but it is dangerous for Israelis and diaspora Jews to attribute all we are seeing today to “leftist” opinionmakers.  When the relentless critiques of Israel come as much from Tucker Carlson or the Vice President of the United Sttaes as they do from the Mayor the City of New York, it is a grave mistake to discount them as simply the product of rogue influencers.

Ths following was published elsewhere last June when a series of democratic socialists opposed to Israel won primary elections causing a level of panic and abandonment among many American Jews and was an attempt to explain what is happening both in the Unuted States and elsewhere that does not further the cause of Jews in the diaspora or in Israel:

It is not, as is sometimes said, the fault of the Prime Minister. His Government was formed after a series of national elections and reflects, as best elections can do in one governed that way, the will and mood of the people who live in Israel. That has been the case for most of the time since what is now Likud, then led by Menachem Begin, took over the Government after the shocking, and nearly fatal to Israel, Yom Kippur War, and then the intifada (the attacks on the civilian infrastructure and persons in Israel) after the Oslo accords were reached.

If neither of those events ring a bell, or tell you anything important, you really have no basis upon which to view the situation that exists in that part of the world. Yes, a tiny sliver of what was then called Palestine, was set aside as a homeland for Jews after the attempt to annihilate people based on their ancestry in what many of us call the shoa and more call the holocaust. The Arab countries surrounding that sliver of land decided they did not want any such sliver to exist and attacked it, while expelling the Jews who had lived in their lands for centuries. they have never stopped doing so.

Under those circumstances, and particularly after the near final destruction of the State of Israel in 1973, it is perhaps understandable that Israelis would decide that the generally socialist (and ashkenazit) Government that had largely governed Israel since its inception should be replaced by one which Israelis believed would do better at protecting them. Without going through chapter and verse of what happened after that, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a person opposed to any steps toward some resolution of the otherwise never-ending threats to Israel’s existence, we can skip to the era we are now in where for most of time since first becoming Prime Minister in 1996, Benyamin Netanyahu has been the head of the operational Government of the State of Israel.

The Labor Party, which first lost control of the Government to the party led by Menachem Begin in 1977, is barely a shell of what it once was. It has even changed its name before this year’s elections where it will run as “The Democrats.” In the most recent period when Netanyahu was dislodged from being Prime Minister, from early in 2021 until the end of 2022, the coalition which controlled the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) was made up of parties that disagreed with each other on virtually everything other than the idea to keep Netanyahu away from controlling the Government, collapsed leading to elections which gave a Netanyahu led coalition a barely sufficient majority to again take control of the Government.

This coalition, though, was quite different from any other which had led Israel even after Labor virtually disappeared. It had, and still has, very extreme elements which have no interest in any agreements with elements in the region favoring the creation of an independent state for what are now called “Palestinians” (generally meaning non-Jewish, mainly Arab, people related to those displaced, by force or by choice by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948) and who actively support the annexation of parts (if not all) of the areas on the west bank of the Jordan River which were not part of Israel in 1948 but which has essentially been occupied under Israeli military control since Israel defeated Arab forces which attacked it in 1967.

The most notorious of those members of the current........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)