Time's latest blood libel

Just Out: TIME Magazine's Latest Blood Libel About Israel
by Phyllis Chesler
September 4, 2010
http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/848/time-magazine-blood-libel


The September 13, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine arrived yesterday. The cover
story is titled "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace" and is illustrated by
a large Jewish star composed of daisies. Yes, daises=97as in "counting
daisies, don't have a care in the world."
This is precisely the point of Karl Vick's article. He writes:
Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter [of peace with the
Palestinians]. They're otherwise engaged: They're making money; they're
enjoying the rays of the late summer =85 they have moved on.
Vick quotes an Israeli real estate agent in Ashdod, one Eli, who tells him:
People are indifferent. They don't care if there's going to be war. They
don't care if there's going to be peace. They don't care. They live in the
day.
According to Vick, Israelis don't care about peace, peace negotiations, or
about the Palestinians because they are simply having too good a time:
sunbathing, swimming, caf=E9-hopping, profiting from start-up companies, an=
d,
according to polls cited by Vick, utterly disconnected from "politics;"
indeed Vick suggests that Israelis resemble Californians more than they
resemble Egyptians. These are all points which scream: Israel does not fit
in; if Israelis were only more impoverished, more indolent, and
paradoxically, even more "laid back," they might be recognizable as
indigenous to the region, a true part of the Middle East.
These are Vick's thoughts, not mine.
Of course, Jews are the original Palestinians and the most indigenous of th=
e
region's inhabitants; yes, there are many impoverished Israelis, both Jews
and non-Jews; and, let's not forget that there are even some Israelis who
remain permanently on high alert for the next terrorist attack, permanently
scarred by the last ones. For a moment, let's forget about all that. Allow
me to ask: Why doesn't Vick also point out that Palestinians are leading th=
e
high life on the West Bank and in sumptuous villas on both the West Bank an=
d
in Gaza; that they, too, are sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dining out, an=
d
relaxing at the beach=97at least as much as the Islamist thugs who run the
lives of Palestinians will allow it?
Vick and his editors at TIME seem to think that showing six photos of
Israelis at leisure: blowing smoke on a beach chair, lounging on a beach
chair, resting in an army uniform on the beach without a chair, playing wit=
h
one's baby in a stroller, sitting at a caf=E9=97are proof that Israelis are
engaging in activities which are not admirable, are, in fact, "proof" that
they are not suffering but rather, proof that Israelis simply don't care
about peace with the Palestinians. And Vick brings in polls as well as
expert and person-in-the-street opinions to back up this claim.
Vick writes that real estate is booming, as is business in general, Israeli
"brainiacs" have helped their nation avoid the economic disasters that have
plunged Europe and America into a recession. He literally writes this.
"Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the U.S. and Europe into
recession. It is known as a start-up nation=97second only to the U.S.
companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange."
Is Vick aware that, consciously or not, intentionally or not, he is countin=
g
on the world's long-held resentment about Jewish creativity, genius, and
scientific and economic success=97counting on the world's willingness to
scapegoat Israel once again for crimes that it has not committed? Or becaus=
e
Jews seem to "know something," maybe they are channeling God directly and
thus, the deck is stacked against non-Jews. Vick presents Israel's "success=
"
as somehow unseemly, because it makes other nations look bad. Does he harbo=
r
the suspicion that Jewish prosperity has been "stolen" from non-Jews or is
he merely advertising that Jewish gold is there, ripe for the taking?
Buried=97but really buried-- in Vick's four page cover piece are snippets o=
f
true facts: That the Israelis are weary of peace negotiations which never
succeed because the Palestinians do not want peace; that Arabs and
Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state and as many Jews as possible.
But Vick fails to convey that negotiations cannot work as long as the
ultra-Nazified Arab Islamic propaganda against Jews and Israel continues to
turn out children who hate Jews and who become human homicide bombs,
snipers, kidnappers, kassam rocket throwers, etc.
Here is what Vick utterly fails to comprehend, namely, that the Israelis ar=
e
not merely tired, disenchanted, living in la-la land a la southern
Californians (hence, the Jewish star made of daisies on the cover). The
Israelis are actually showing the entire world how to embrace life, even as
they live, trembling, in the shadow of death. They are teaching the world
how to "love life more than they fear death." A new and wonderful book A Ne=
w
Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism by Italian
journalist Giulio Meotti, which is not yet out, makes precisely this point.
The Jewish insistence on life may be the key to our survival as a people
despite ceaseless persecution. It might be the lesson, the model, for all
humanity in an era of genocides, civil wars, torture chambers, tyrannies,
and totalitarian regimes. Why is TIME turning things on their head and
refusing to recognize the courage and the heroism of Jewish Israelis who
choose to live in the moment when the moment is all they have? Against all
odds, the Jews simply refuse to give up. As Meotti writes of the numerous
victims of terrorism during the ongoing Intifada of 2000, "Israel teaches
the world love of life, not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a
solemn celebration."
Meotti begins where I began in early 2004, when I wrote about a new
Holocaust in the pages of The Jewish Press, a Holocaust which is now based
in Israel. At the time, I was not heard beyond a small circle. I did what
Meotti now does in his opening pages. Meotti fully understands that Israel
is the "first country ever to experience suicide terrorism on a mass scale:
that more than 150 suicide attacks have been carried out plus 500 have been
prevented." According to Meotti, there have been "1,723 people (murdered)
and 10,000 injured" in Israel. Meotti does what I did: He converts these
numbers into the demographic equivalent of attacks on Americans. When I did
so there were somewhat fewer people in both categories. Thus, Meotti writes
that in American population terms, this means that "74,000 Americans" would
have been killed and "400,000 injured."
Vick does not factor this grave reality into his article. Nor does he seem
to know how high the Jewish population growth was in the DP camps right
after the Holocaust. Can he comprehend that permanently endangered Jews=97a
people that has survived as a people for nearly six thousand years=97the
Chosen People=97have always chosen life in the moment, have chosen to seize
life with both hands, even as they memorialize their dead and make sense of
their persecution in a way that illuminates this particular Hell for all
humanity?
What Meotti is doing is remembering the lives and the deaths of the Israeli
victims of Palestinian terrorism during the last decade. I have only read
the first few chapters but cannot put it down. These are unknown stories,
unnamed victims, whose mortal remains have often evaporated, disintegrated
as surely as those Jews who literally went up in smoke during the Nazi
Holocaust. His stories are mainly of victims who were unarmed and helpless
and who, it turns out, were actually exceptionally kind to others, often to
the very Arab Palestinians who shot them down, bludgeoned them to death, or
blew them up into unrecognizable bone fragments, drops of blood, perhaps a
few teeth.
I look forward to completing Meotti's book. I hope that people more fully
understand that TIME Magazine as well as countless other media in the
Western world, can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.