Why pick on Israel? This may be the best answer I have gotten yet; for it speaks to my own experience as someone who shambled along in Marty Peretz's train as he swung his pot of incense from side to side and we repeated after him. By Arie Brand at Richard Silverstein's site (thanks to Drubetskoy for the spot):
Zionist apologists often come up with an argument on selective indignation. Why pick on Israel, they argue, whereas there are worse things happening elsewhere. In Darfur, in Congo, in Sri Lanka…
I believe that something else is coming in here. And perhaps I can illustrate that with the French writer Julien Benda’s
account of his main reason for becoming an active “Dreyfusard”. It was
not, he says, because Dreyfus’ personal fate touched him very much. It
was rather because he couldn’t stomach the fact that General Mercier
tried to impose the “truth” “with his big sabre”.
Something similar explains a lot of anti-Israel activism, I believe.
What happens in Darfur is terrible and so is the mess in Congo. The
Singhalese army is poised to eradicate the last of the Tamil Tigers.
But neither the Sudanese nor the Sri Lankan government, or one of the
warlords of Congo, has set up a string of PR offices around the world
and has thousands of pens at their command to ‘explain’ to the world
that what they are doing is entirely justified and that, in fact, black
is white.
People get angry about human rights violations but they get even
more angry about being systematically lied to. Human rights violations
generally happen to other people and unless one personally witnesses
one of these one’s concern remains a bit academic. But being lied to
happens to (pre)activists personally and that arouses their rage and
keeps it going. Mendacious propaganda, and being submitted to it,
constitutes an assault on one’s personal dignity.
That is why I believe Israeli propaganda to be in the long run quite
self defeating. Those who have been lied to for years wake up one day
and are enraged about having been fooled for so long. It happened to me
and I don’t believe that my experience was unique.
So let those hasbara warriors come. I have only one request: let
them have a minimum of sophistication pullease because there is no
satisfaction in rebutting the ‘arguments’ of the inept clods who seem
to prevail in that camp.
