I have been repeatedly pointed to articles on TruthOut - a site devoted to a torrent of great, Progressive viewpoints except when it comes to Israel, where they reverse course and excoriate the victim Israelis and plead deceptively for support of the violent, depraved, aggressor Muslim terrorists. One of many of their pundits is - naturally - a Jew (I use this word in its most pejorative sense, as befits one who should be scorned and vilified, just like the Church has taught for many centuries) named Ira Chernus.
Chernus claims to have been a "Jewish peace activist for over 30 years..." Yet in all that time he's apparently learned nothing. Most of us favor peace. But when push comes to shove (to reference the vernacular of his formative years) pacifism becomes suicide. And for Chernus to advocate Jewish suicide is either disingenuous or stupid.
When I was a kid, there were a couple of bullies in town whom the rest of us tried to avoid. Occasionally I would get trapped by one or two of them (they often traveled in pairs), and my only choices were to outrun them, or if that was not possible, to outsmart and/or outfight them. I returned home bloodied a few times when my pacifism and negotiating skills were of no avail. This is a regrettable microcosm of human experience. On a larger scale, humans have been attacking other humans for as long as human life has existed. Wishing away human aggression has not worked, as the Jews of Europe learned to their loss.
It's not just in football that the best defense is a strong offense. Chernus's notion is that we can avoid aggression by submitting to it, capitulating to every hostile demand, submitting to every aggressive imposition. That is repugnant and obviously an invalid application of the goal of pacifism, which is to create peace through the goodwill and voluntary agreement of all parties to create a set of circumstances which fairly addresses the needs and desires of all. In the absence of universal agreement that peace is the goal, we have a situation where one party can continue aggression and force the other to either capitulate or to defend. There is no little bit pregnant. You are either a victim, or you protect yourself. Chernus turns this reality on its head, apparently basing his virulent criticism of Israel on his own irrational premise: "I want peace & peace is good. Therefore if Israel just capitulates to the violent Muslim aggressors, All of Persia & Arabia will suddenly convert to pacifism & subordinate their violence to my wishes." Get real!!!
One of Chernus' biggest problems is that he is apparently incapable of discriminating between cause and effect. In a recent article, he talks about Land Day and Passover as though the difference between them was the 'ongoing tragedy' of the Palestinians versus the emancipation of the Jews. That scenario is only a mere consequence of the real source issue. And that first cause was that the Israelites were enslaved by the autocratic actions of an external Egyptian tyranny which was forced upon the Israelites through no fault of their own, while the Palestinians have imposed their own isolation upon themselves by refusing to halt the violent, aggressive attacks they have been engaged in against the Jews of Palestine since the 1880's. That antisemitic ethnic targeting precedes the founding of Israel by almost 70 years. It's a typical practice among antisemitic pundits to employ deceptive anachronism to make their irrational case sound very reasonable, since many readers are unaware of the real timelines and history.
Chernus is deeply invested with a claque of Arab apologists who twist reality to suit their own dishonorable ends. That they get away with it so often is a sad commentary on the level of debate and deception in the public arena, and the tragic inadequacy of our education and our public information systems. In his piece, Chernus talks about the "43 years of Israeli occupaton", completely ignoring the fact that the Palestinians had been occupied since the proposed establishment of that new state in 1948 until they were liberated by Israel in 1967. The vital piece of information, which Chernus would have the gullible ignore, is that Palestine was occupied by Egyptian (again!) and Jordanian invaders upon its establishment by the UN. The neighboring Arab occupation was much harsher than the Israeli. But since it was a mere extension of the ongoing orgy of Islamic antisemitism that had been the original cause for the establishment of Israel and termination of the faltering British Mandate, it is a non-issue for Israel's critics. Worse, acknowledgment of such reality would contradict Chernus's goal of fabricating a narrative which transfers blames to Israel for all the evils foisted upon the world and upon themselves by a violent and intolerant Persian/Arab-Islamic chauvinism.
In the combined first-wave Arab invasion of Palestine and Israel by seven Arab armies in 1948, one percent of the Jewish population were killed. KILLED! That is a huge proportion! Think of the US for a scaled comparison: 3.6 million human beings!! That the Israelis carried on was due only to the fact that they had no alternative, having been driven out of Europe, where they'd resided off and on for a thousand years, and from Arab countries, where they'd lived for 2600 years. We refused the Jews safe haven during the Nazi slaughters, ensuring their entry to the charnel houses of the Nazis and their antisemitic European allies (The Japanese were considerably more civilized!). The few remaining wretched refugees fled wherever they could go. Palestine was an option that appealed for historico-religious reasons and offered hope of finally re-establishing Jewish self-determination and allowing freedom from the past 2000 years of antisemitic tyranny imposed by the tolerant, pacifist, Jesus-loving Christians whose principal messages were "love, peace, and kill the Jews." (and of course for a brief period, 'kill the Muslim infidels and recapture the Holy Land', the land of milk and blood. That hostility was brief - but antisemitism is forever.)
Chernus continues his depredations with a deceptive reference to blood-letting and with a deliberate misrepresentation of Israel's reaction to aggressive attacks by terrorists as a continuation of the bloody Biblical narrative of Passover slaughter. Confounding truth with fiction, cause with effect, victim with aggressor is Chernus's stock in trade. That doesn't make his viewpoint correct. But it helps misinform a lot of people.
Perhaps Chernus's worst deception is the Jerusalem illusion, the notion that there is a rationale to justify forcing Israel to cede their holy city to those very Arab aggressors who have repeatedly attacked them and in previous years prevented Jews from even visiting, much less living in their ancestral homeland capital. There is no possible equitable justification for such cession! His boast of his pacifist bona fides is totally irrelevant to such a faux revanchist notion, and that is itself based upon aggressive and violent intentions of conquest and ethnic cleansing of Jews.
Upon establishing Israel & Palestine, the UN envisioned Jerusalem as an open city. With the combined Arab attack and the resulting Jordanian conquest of Jerusalem in 1948, all synagogues within their grasp were destroyed. Jewish headstones were ripped up and used for building materials. Almost all traces of 3,000 years of Jewish presence were obliterated in a deliberate Arab attempt to alter history. It is only after the Arab's third formal attempt to wipe out the Jews that Israel successfully entered Jerusalem, and for the first time since the original Arab attacks, Jerusalem was finally reopened to all. Chernus employs his deceptive preachments in support of Islamic aggressions. This is pacifism? The reality is the opposite of what he claims, and peace will not be encouraged by defending those whose violent history and recourse to aggression has been well documented for a much longer period than there has been an Israel.
The overall truth about this conflict is much simpler than Chernus comprehends: the irredentist Muslim hordes are continuing a religious tradition birthed in the 7'th Century and pursued rigorously ever since. Underlying all else is a bloodthirsty religious intolerance. One sect of Islam blows up another when they're not busy enslaving or slaughtering infidels or beating or killing their women. While Islam has not yet conquered the world, that is their clear and publicly avowed goal, and they've made substantial progress at cowing public figures and institutions throughout the West as a first step in achieving this conquest. Only in Israel is the Muslim agenda and the violent action Islam subscribes to so fully observable. Yet people like Chernus have managed to completely invert truth and fabrication on behalf of the aggressor Muslims. The Muslims attack Israel - it's got to be Israeli aggression. The Arabs kill Jews for 130 years - it's because Israelis assert control over parts of Palestine for 40 years, after repeated Arab attacks upon Israel. The Arabs demand Jerusalem - it's because they are entitled, since they conquered it in their first attack, then initiated four more wars of aggression, engaged in several informal wars, and thus in some bizarre, perverse, pacifist perspective they deserve it. Chernus and his ilk should be medicated or muzzled. His distorted perceptions do not derive from any factual history of the Middle-East conflict, and certainly are not pacifist in nature. They merely feign a false justification for the repeated, inexcusable efforts of Muslims to obliterate Israel and kill the Jews. Where have we heard that theme before? Shades of history, that was Hitler's line, and he was no pacifist!