After she was fired from her post as envoy for combating antisemitism, Noa Tishby tried to impress upon the Israeli public the intensity of the damage the government’s actions are doing to Israel’s image in America.
She lingered on U.S. President Joe Biden’s response – “no” – when asked if he would invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the White House soon. She tried to translate the American “no” into Hebrew. The Americans, she explained, do not say “no.” They have a million ways to get around the word. It would appear, then, that the correct translation of Biden’s “no” is “go to hell.”
About a quarter-century ago, Amos Oz coined the analogy of Benjamin Netanyahu as an air compressor. Perhaps it’s only because Netanyahu’s image has already merged with that of Israel, but in any case it’s hard to get rid of the feeling that what is perceived today as a compressor that doesn’t cease its deafening noise under the window of the world is Israel itself.
According to a recent Gallup poll, U.S. Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, for the first time. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who chairs the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, said last month that Washington should make aid to Israel conditional.
U.S. Jews want to bury themselves when Bezalel Smotrich represents Israel and the values of the Jewish people, and let’s not forget the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It’s not only in Israel that there is a growing group of people who can’t stand the direction in which Israel is heading and see no future for the state.
The truth is that we have exhausted the entire world with our problems. We are failing to preserve even a modicum of normality here, to genuinely succeed in being a nation among nations and to lose this damn sense of being chosen. Because not only was our Holocaust a singular crime, everything that happens here is perceived, and experienced, and discussed, and analyzed, and explained, and marketed to the world as a singular, unique, one-time event that has no equal, likeness or precedent. A unicorn.
Our wars are always existential, our enemies are not like those of others, they always seek to destroy us, and when it comes to bereavement – well, no one loves their children as a Jewish mother does.
Our dilemmas are always logical paradoxes without a solution, no matter how many legions of geniuses our people produces – and in Israel, everyone’s a genius. Our army is not like the other sadistic armies, it is the most moral in the world, and our occupation is the only one in the world from which the occupier cannot free itself.
We are dying to free our slaves, but what can we do, they insist on remaining chained. There is no partner for liberating the conquered from their conquest. And we will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to establish the settlement enterprise. And borders, that basic thing that defines a territory politically, that’s for basic nations, the kind that are everywhere. For us, it is not a physical task but a metaphysical one.
You know those maps that show the Muslim continuum on the map of the Middle East and Israel as a tiny red dot? What do they want from us, Israelis ask, look how much of the world they have, and for our tiny morsel on the globe they put us through hell.
But if the processes of alienation toward Israel continue, there are those in the West who may look at this map and think that perhaps “the only democracy” is not an asset but rather a liability, and that it is easier to deal with a world with an undemocratic Western-Muslim continuum than to preserve a Western democratic outpost in the heart of the Middle East. Even more so when that place is becoming less democratic and less Western by the day.
If we’re not careful, the Americans may still be tempted to press the “off” button to stop the incessant rattling of the compressor.