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Why Israel Receives Such Disproportionate World Attention and Criticism

(Times of Israel) David E. Bernstein - Many in the Christian and Muslim world are repulsed by the idea of Jews having sovereignty and wielding military power, for reasons that are ultimately anti-Semitic. Traditional Catholic theology posited that Jews were doomed to wander the earth, stateless and homeless, as punishment for rejecting Jesus. To see the Jews exercising dominion over Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land is a hard theological pill to swallow. While the Church has largely come around, many traditionalist Christians have not. More liberal Christian theologies remain wedded to the notion that martyrdom is the highest form of virtue. Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals. In the Muslim world, the dominant narrative is that Mohammed, after showing his military prowess by massacring local Arabian Jewish tribes, beneficently allowed Jews to live peacefully under Muslim sovereignty. Muslims, as the Divinely-favored religious group, would always rule over Jews and not vice versa. To see a Jewish army consistently defeating Muslim opponents destabilizes many Muslims' worldview. Moreover, just as Mohammed expanded his empire throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Muslims assume that Judaism is expansionist like Islam, which of course misunderstands Zionism and Judaism. Finally, it bears noting that anti-Israel ideas did not arise spontaneously, but are products in part of state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaigns run over decades by the Vatican, Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and various Arab and Muslim states. Young anti-Zionists today repeat slogans from Soviet propaganda of fifty years ago without even being aware of it. Thus, criticism of Israel's use of military force cannot easily be reduced by Israel "behaving" differently. It's not how Israel uses force that is the primary source of criticism, but ideologically-based repulsion at Jews exercising military power via their sovereign state, at all. The writer is a professor and executive director of the Liberty & Law Center at George Mason University Law School.
2021-07-08 00:00:00
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