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The Right Coast
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View from HaifaMaimon Schwarzschild

By Thomas A. Smith

Menachem Kellner, our Haifa correspondent and (in his spare time) a professor of mediaeval Jewish thought at Haifa University, posts this View From Haifa on the mideast war:

Israelis today are probably more united than any time since 1967. With the exception of a minute and dwindling minority, for whom Israel can do no right in any circumstance, the entire Jewish population (and much of the Arab population as well, it would appear) agree that the war in Lebanon was forced upon us and that it is a war for the very existence of Israel as a nation and for the lives of Israelis as individuals.

Like much else in the middle east, it is all a matter of perspective, of foreground and background.  Israelis see the present events in the context of an Arab and Muslim world where:

  • for close to two generations it has used the existence of Israel as an excuse to maintain corrupt and brutal regimes
  • Sunni Muslims and Shi’a Muslims, who ordinarily hate and vilify each other, cheerfully collaborate in order to murder Jews
  • each Israeli attempt to achieve peace through the sacrifice of territory (south Lebanon in 2000, Camp David/Taba in 2000, Gaza in 2005) is greeted as a sign of weakness inviting fufurther warfare
  • a secular, Ba’athist regime in Syria can connive with a fundamentalist, Islamist regime in Iran to support Hizbollah
  • Hizbollah can openly call for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide
  • the allegedly reformist president of Iran can deny the holocaust and casually call for wiping Israel off the map
  • much of the European press, with the enthusiastic leadership of BBC and the Guardian, serves as an organ for Arab propaganda, manipulating the news so as to foreground every Israeli crime, real and imagined, while backgrounding the all-too-real crimes of the Arab world.

In such a world, all but the looniest of Israelis see the existence of their country and the lives of their loved ones as truly endangered.

Read the whole thing.  Kellner goes on to give a revealing sketch of Haifa, an unusually cosmopolitan place, even by Israeli standards.  Kellner’s post appears, by the way,  on the British “openDemocracy” website, which is usually far from friendly to Israel – which doesn’t differentiate it at all from the rest of the UK media.