Daniel Greenfield article: The Israeli Man's Burden

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The Israeli Man's Burden Posted: 27 May 2013 10:08 PM PDT New York Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem are expected to set new standards for malicious bias and during his time there, Ethan Bronner was no exception. A bureau chief anywhere else in the world may be expected to explore the life and color of the city. But in Jerusalem, a New York Times scribe fills the same spot as the bitter goth kid working on the high school paper who is forced to review musicals put on by cheerleaders. What comes out the other end may have a distant resemblance to journalism, but is mostly just gallons of congealed bile. Ethan Bronner, who has moved up the New York Times totem pole from attacking Israel to attacking America, still visits the old country on occasion and still pens spiteful little pieces about how dumb and shallow the cheerleaders are. The latest Bronner missive sees him attending a wedding and grumbling at how happy everyone seems to be. At a "raucous wedding", Bronner finds that few people are interested in discussing "the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders". Instead, "everyone was celebrating". And why wouldn't they be celebrating? It is a wedding. And people at weddings generally don't talk about the people trying to kill them. Average weddings in the United States don't involve detailed discussions of terrorism, even when New York Times reporters are in attendance. But Bronner's thesis is the same as the one put forward by John Kerry. "People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity,” Kerry complained. Israelis are having too many weddings and not suffering enough. The limited autonomy achieved in daily life what the peace process was supposed to. It's not just about the physical suffering of terrorism. What bothers Bronner is that Israelis aren't conscious of the grievances of their enemies. They don't carry the burden of guilt that comes from knowing that their border controls prevent Hamas from getting the weapons with which they could inflict more death and suffering on Israelis. The peace process is a myth because its end result was never meant to be peace. Instead it was meant to achieve exactly what it did achieve in the 90s. A state of terror. A way of life that would make every Israeli conscious of the terrorists and their demands all the time. That's not just their plan for Israel. It's their dream for the entire free world. A world liberated from its freedoms. The left does not set out to solve social problems, but to induce a state of permanent crisis in order to impose a permanent state of insecurity and guilt on the populace. Its solutions always make problems worse because the left views violence as not the problem, but a symptom of the true problem, which is the oppression of the violent by their victims.  The negotiations and concessions were not supposed to bring peace. They were supposed to make Israelis suffer. And through this ritualistic suffering, the descendants of Holocaust survivors would finally understand their burden of guilt to the descendants of the conquerors who had repressed them and ruled over their land for centuries. Terrorism is meant to destroy morale. To break down the sense of stability and order on which every system depends and replace it with uncertainty. And that uncertainty makes people doubt their own rights and more easily accept the arguments of their enemies. Like violent interrogations, the process of terror breaks down the morale of the prisoner and makes him more willing to concede the premises of his captor until he finally learns to love Big Brother. Until the victim of terrorism becomes a supporter of terrorism recognizing that he is the one who is guilty, not the terrorists. The peace process was working when Israelis were dying. And the bar was being moved further down. It stopped working when Israelis stopped dying. Supporters of the terrorist cause, whether at the New York Times or the State Department, don't want to see happy Israelis. They want to see frightened Israelis, sobbing Israelis, confused Israelis and hysterical Israelis. They will even settle for angry Israelis. But the last thing they want to see is Israelis who seem indifferent to the torture being inflicted on them. Israelis are by no means as safe and secure as Kerry pretends or as aimlessly cheerful as Bronner describes them, but neither are they the broken shells that they were supposed to be after decades of terror and appeasement. Israelis have taken a beating, but they haven't been beaten. What infuriates New York Times reporters and State Department trolls alike is that Israelis can go for hours and even days without contemplating the tortures prepared for them. Not only are they not struggling with the question of whether to love or hate Big Terror, they can sing and dance as if Big Terror isn't even in the room. They commit the worst crime that the left can imagine. They disregard it. They escape it. And the only people who fear political escapes are the political jailers of the left. The left's Oceanian utopias, its inhuman animal farms, depend on indoctrinating total consciousness. If you aren't outraged, then you aren't paying attention. If you aren't part of the problem, then you're part of the solution. If you aren't doing either one, you're exercising white privilege. And it is telling that to the left, the unawareness of its agenda is privilege. If you're one of those people dancing at that wedding under the "glistening chandeliers" and "sky-high ceilings", then your lack of awareness of the plight of everyone who isn't at that wedding is privilege and makes you part of the problem. The Israeli man is not supposed to be dancing to music until dawn as if he were in a middle-eastern flavored production of Fiddler on the Roof. He is supposed to be weighed down by the burden of all the people he is oppressing. He has no native right to be happy. Having his own country should crush him to the floor with guilt. He should be wearing a red t-shirt and marching around denouncing the government for not doing something, anything, to convince the terrorists to come to the negotiating table. Instead he's dancing all night. Fear is the gateway to guilt as Stockholm Syndrome devotees know. To induce the guilt that the left craves, there must be fear. A sense of insecurity. A gnawing worry. Without fear, there is no punishment. Without punishment, there is no purpose to progressivism which exists to take property, land and life from one and give it to the other and put things in order the way "they ought to be". Men and women dancing lightly on their feet have light consciences. They aren't weighed down by all the guilt they ought to be feeling. Instead they are happy and free. Terrorism was supposed to be the punishment that Israelis needed to experience in order to destroy their sense of rightness. Just as it is meant to fulfill that same role for Americans and Brits and many of the other nations of the First World. In the calculus of the left, terrorism isn't just violence, it's righteous violence. The more horrific it is, the more it upends your understanding of how the world is supposed to work. The moral order, the code that you grew up that says you don't plant bombs next to 8-year-olds gets blown away and you are left to either conclude that your enemies are monsters or that they are paying you back for something even worse that you did to them. They are not the ones murdering 8-year-olds. You are. Faced with someone else's inhumanity, you are told to assert your own. To reach for the moral high ground. To try and understand why this is happening so that you can try to be better than those who did it, only to learn that you are actually much worse. And it's not that some Israelis haven't caught the disease. It's not that parents of terror victims haven't met with the parents of suicide bombers to understand their pain. It's not that Israeli leaders haven't said that they might have been terrorists if they had been born on the other side. All the sycophantic appeasement and moral degradation is there, but it also goes in one ear and out the other. Israelis are an impatient people. They have less appetite for endless degradation with no way out. And that is what the Peace Process was. It would be nice to say that Israelis have seen through it. Mostly they've seen through it about as well as Europeans have seen through immigration or Americans have seen through the politics of racial division. The common sense awareness is there, but it hasn't percolated into widespread political awareness of what's wrong. Instead there is an impatience with the dead letter office of peace where treaties go and never come back. The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden because they know it's a lie. They were there in '67 when they had to fight, not because of the so-called occupation, but because they were under siege. They were there in '48 when the Jews were ethnically cleansed from East Jerusalem by the invading armies that have kept on claiming that their act of ethnic cleansing made that part of the city theirs. The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden of guilt for the actions of their enemies. Instead they have chosen to dance. Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.