Let’s talk about justice

Israel’s long humanitarian arm, as revealed through our mission to Haiti, turned out to be the best thing that could happen to Israel’s image. We have not been lauded so enthusiastically on the international stage since the earthquake in Turkey, or was it the quake in Armenia. Finally they are saying good things about us on Sky News and praising us in the Washington Post. With two or three more earthquakes we’ll be resolving all our Goldstone problems.

Yet the earth, thank God, does not tend to shake in line with Israel’s diplomatic needs. By the time Purim rolls around, nobody (with the possible exception of the tax official rescued from under the rubble by our forces) will remember the hospital we set up in Port-au-Prince. We did very well by arriving from so far away to rescue him, but we cannot premise our entire public relations effort on his tangled body.

Israel is not a rescue team or a field hospital; it is a state. Our PR salvation needs to come from other places, and especially from our righteousness. The Israeli way to the world’s heart does not go through overseas disaster zones or touching memorials at Auschwitz, but rather, only in the debate theater vis-à-vis the Arabs.

If they defeat us there, no mission to Haiti will save us from a despicable colonialist image. If we defeat them, we shall be able to do without Bill Clinton’s compliments regarding our mobile operation rooms.

The trouble is that at some point we gave up. We stopped debating and started to bargain. As result of our fatigue we abandoned our claim of ownership for Judea and Samaria and shifted to focusing on security considerations. In the face of Palestinian occupation claims, we presented our Qassam rocket concerns.

Rights vs. defensible borders

Mahmoud Abbas talks about rights while Netanyahu speaks of defensible borders. The Palestinian Authority chairman claims, with great chutzpah, that Beit El is his ancestral land, while our prime minister is willing to make do with Palestinian recognition of Tel Aviv’s Jewishness. All the legal and historic arguments justifying our control of Beit El and Jerusalem – and these are some well-based arguments – have been put into deep freeze.

The world is following the rhetoric of both sides with great interest and concluding that the Jews admit that the Arabs are right. This is the reason for most of the diplomatic troubles that befell us in recent years. Britain, Belgium, and Spain have started to issue arrest warrants for IDF officers only after Israel was tempted into talking about security instead of justice.

Everyone notices that Israel sent a rescue mission to Haiti while the Palestinians did not, yet everyone also believes, and rightfully so, that there is no connection between those issues. Over time, the gentiles are unimpressed with our humanitarian enterprises or with our high-tech achievements. They are also unimpressed with our security concerns and Holocaust trauma. They prefer to hear a convincing moral explanation from us, but they are not getting it.

All the Zionistic explanations of yore have been buried for many years now under the rubble of our confidence in our righteousness. The time has come to organize a mission that will rescue them too.