WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: JNS editor Jonathan Tobin stressed importance this week of Israeli diplomats’ command of idiomatic English. Until now that was true, but I think today most key is their showing Israel’s real Mizrahi face to the West. I suggest how. See if you agree.
Fighting Israel’s “Colonialist” Image: Show a More Mizrahi Face in the US and UN
JNS editor Jonathan Tobin had a Jewish Press article last week, 4/19/23, ‘Occupation’ Myth Drives Antisemitic Terror, the gist of which is that those who believe that Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and even Jerusalem beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines (“green line”) constitutes “occupation,” let alone those who deny the legitimacy of our Jewish homeland altogether, afford a moral basis to excuse murderous terror against Israelis as “resistance” to “occupation.”
Indeed, Tobin rightly says our homeland-legitimacy image problem runs even deeper:
“More to the point, the intersectional left, which conceives of the Palestinian war on Israel as morally equivalent to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, sees Zionism on both sides of the green line in the same way. If you divide the world, as believers in intersectionality and critical race theory do, into two groups – oppressors and victims – and assign victim status to the Palestinians and treat Israelis as colonizers, then it doesn’t matter how badly the former behave, the latter is always in the wrong.” [emphasis added]
I further agree with some of what Jonathan wrote this week in his second article, JNS, 4/26/23, What Type of Representative Does Israel Need?. He defends Netanyahu considering outspoken journalist Carolyn Glick for Consul General in New York City, and I agree she’d be an excellent choice, “an unapologetic advocate not just for the country but for the government he or she is representing.”
Where I differ from Jonathan, and I base my case on the paragraph from his first article that I’ve quoted just above about Israelis being seen today as “colonizers,” is with what he also wrote in this second article, under the heading “Israel’s Best Advocates” among Israel’s ambassadors in the UN and US. He cites as three of the best at having “ably argued the justice of the Jewish state’s cause” as having been Abba Eban, Chaim Herzog and Bibi himself. He’s of course right about that. Here’s what he says next:
“It is not a coincidence that in addition to their command of the issues – and unlike many of those who have represented Israel in the United States – all three spoke fluent and idiomatic English with, respectively, South African/English, Irish and American accents. That was a major asset that enabled them to avoid the pitfalls of addressing the American public with awkward or non-idiomatic English, a must in a country where relatively few people speak a foreign language.”
I agree that that was true until now. But I believe that today “Israel’s Best Advocates,” in a world today obsessed with seeing especially Israel as a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans, are advocates who combine effective-in-English advocacy with personal embodiment of Israeli genuine Middle-eastern ethnicity.
I commend to you an op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2019: Op-Ed: No, Israel Isn’t a Country of Privileged and Powerful White Europeans. Let that title sink in for a minute. Then go find this article by a Mizrahi Israeli, Hen Mazzig, on the internet [Google “Hen Mazzig Los Angeles Times” – it’s ok, you liberals, it seems he’s against Judicial Reform]. Read this op-ed and then ask yourself, is this not the answer to what Tobin wrote in that first quote above about the root cause of the world’s incessant bashing of Israel – its being seen as “colonialist”? Here’s a sampling of Mazzig in the LA Times:
“Along with resurgent identity politics in the United States and Europe, there is a growing inclination to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of race. According to this narrative, Israel was established as a refuge for oppressed white European Jews who in turn became oppressors of people of color, the Palestinians.
“… I am Mizrahi [son of an Iraqi Jewish mother and North African Jewish father], as are the majority of Jews in Israel today. We are of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Only about 30% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi, or the descendants of European Jews.”
This Mizrahi Israeli goes on criticize Israel-bashers in America who “falsify reality in their discussions of Palestinians’ ‘intersectional’ struggle, their use of the term ‘apartheid’ to characterize Israeli policy, and their tendency to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews alone.”
“I believe their misrepresentations are part of a strategic campaign to taint Israel as an extension of privileged and powerful white Europe, thereby justifying any and all attacks on it. This way of thinking signals a dangerous trend that positions Israel as a colonialist aggressor ….”
With due appreciation of Israel’s best past diplomats’ excellence in “fluent and idiomatic English,” what’s most needed today to fight today’s incessant canards of Israeli “colonialism, apartheid and outsider occupation” are effective-in-English official representatives of Israel in the UN and the West who represent Israel inter alia by embodying the indigenous Middle-eastern ethnicity of the bulk of Israel’s population. Israelis in Israel are as indigenously Middle-eastern as the Palestinian Arab majority in 78%-of-Palestine Jordan and Arabian Arabs in Arabia. There’s an effective way for Israel to make the world see it.