At Haaretz–no, this wouldn’t be in the American press–former speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg:
Israel sweeps all the criticism against it, both justified and unjustified, under the same anti-Semitic rug. It is actually we who are repeatedly mixing up proper criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The reason is to avoid at any price having to confront the situation and make tough existential decisions: the occupation, the injustices, the discrimination, the persecution of the non-Jewish minority in our midst. As long as “they” are anti-Semites, we feel pure and justified in our own eyes.
So far this has been enough to go on posturing against the world, based on a paradigm as addictive as it is erroneous, that “the whole world is against us.” This mutation has proved itself across multiple generations, and there is no genuine incentive to terminate it now. It’s a historical, moral and emotional checking account that is suffering from being over-extended and is on the brink of being closed. There is no other country in the Western world from which the international community has been willing to put up with acts of state violence for five decades, other than Israel. There is no other country that is permitted by the international community to maintain a vast, unsupervised nuclear arsenal, other than Israel. And there is no other colonialist left in the world, other than “the only democracy in the Middle East.” The world is still putting up with all this, but not for much longer – it will soon be over.
