Tsvi Bisk: Israel – Time to Alter Course
Machiavelli famously wrote (I paraphrase) that “it’s nice to be loved but it’s better to be feared”. It’s time that Jewry in general and Diaspora Jewry in particular absorbed the wisdom of that remark. Some would retort that it’s best to be respected. But when you are disrespected to the extent that Jewish women have been disrespected by the demonstrative disregard of every women’s organization and humanitarian organization in the world then the only thing left is fear. When there are no consequences for the contempt and disrespect Jews are shown all the Hasbara and “education” against antisemitism doesn’t mean a thing.
We should have learned this from our Muslim cousins. People are afraid to offend them. They are afraid of being beheaded or attacked harassed or having their businesses ransacked. Bookstores remove books that might offend Muslims lest their windows be smashed or they are firebombed. I am not saying we Jews should adopt the violent behavior of our cousins but only that we should make people fearful of offending us.
For example, “feminist” and “humanitarian” organizations (from this time forward two words always to be written in inverted commas) should have their tax-exempt status challenged on grounds that their silence represents political advocacy as well as discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion and national identity. We may lose in the courts but the very cost in time and money these organizations will have to invest in fighting our claim, as well as the bad PR they receive will turn off many of their donors. This will put them on notice that disrespecting the Jews carries a price.
Secondly, we should expand and systemize a phenomenon that has already taken place. The young idiots that have had their lives and careers short-circuited by being photographed tearing down pictures of hostages. Their names and photos should go onto a website that can be accessed by various companion social media outlets. The identities of students who have signed petitions calling for the dismissal of Jewish professors for supporting Israel or BDSing Israel should go onto the same website. This digital record should follow them for the rest of their lives (being very careful not to misidentify innocent people with the same name). The Jewish community should proactively petition major companies and institutions to agree never to hire such people. Again, we may not succeed in a significant way but it will certainly give pause in the future to those people who might engage in anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activity, not out of conviction or knowledge but simply out of the desire to appear cool and “in”. People who don’t even know what river and what sea – 10% of whom think that Arafat was the first PM of Israel. People should know that their capricious ignorant behavior might follow them for the rest of their lives – that there are consequences for their recreational dissent. One of the conversations that must take place before a family sends their child off to college should be “Don’t piss off the Jews just to be popular with the ‘in’ crowd, it could affect your future in a serious way”.
There will be some who argue that such a tack will only encourage antisemitism. Perhaps! But since the new course I am suggesting is to demoralize, inhibit and demolish the antisemites rather than to educate that antisemitism is not nice I am a little dissuaded by this type of argument. I no longer want to be the obsequious Jew who constantly has to justify his own existence, who desires to be accepted and approved of, who is constantly on the backfoot having to explain himself to the professional self-righteous whose own morality is in serious question; who support, justify or explain away some of the most morally abhorrent regimes on the face of the earth because the resist “the imperialist west”. Indeed, some of the same critics of Israel are now singing the praises of that “New Axis of Resistance” – Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. No! I want to put our enemies on the backfoot.
A very current example would be the performative breast-beating of the current South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa. The response of Israel’s spokespersons has been quite satisfactory but I would go a few steps further. Actually attacking him in the opposition South African press as using the Middle East to cover up the colossal failures of the ANC governments since the death of Mandela. Failures that derive from the corruption and incompetence of successive governments (including his). Over 600,000 people have been murdered in South Africa since 1994; 28,000 in 2023 alone. Yet Ramaphosa chooses to cry over dead Palestinians (not dead Jews, God forbid). The water infrastructure is crumbling, tensions between the various Black ethnic groups are growing, and social solidarity is in the toilet. The Human Development Index (HDI) of South Africa is lower than Palestine. The HDI of Gaza before October 7th was higher than half the black townships in South Africa. This after 30 years of the ANC government. We should be hitting him in his own local approval rating. “Why are you wasting time and energy on the Middle East when you should be improving the lives of your own citizens.? Is it to distract the voters from your own incompetence?” We must make people very wary of messing with us, as wary as they are of making even the slightest criticism of Muslims.
Neither should we be afraid of sacred cows like the Vatican or the International Red Cross. When chastised by the Pope we should respond that “regretfully, we fear that the Pope might be getting his information about the Jewish State from the intellectual descendants of Clerical Fascism who in World War II supported the Fascists and the Nazis and after the war used the Catholic clergy and Vatican resources to help smuggle Nazi war criminals like Mengele and Eichmann to South America – we would be most happy to assist the Holy Father in understanding the true facts of the case”. Such a brief statement would cause a journalistic uproar forcing church officials to clarify, on television and in the press, the Church’s role before, during, and after the war. This might become as uncomfortable for the Church as the current slew of sex abuse scandals and thus inhibit their preachments in the future; the undeclared Vatican policy becomes “don’t mess with the Jews, it becomes a real PR headache when we do”.
We should also be a little more forthright when dealing with the obvious contempt the International Red Cross shows us (not the American Red Cross – we should be careful to differentiate). Following their trite pablum criticism of Hamas (I wouldn’t even call it condemnation) they came down full force on Israel. We should have responded, “Given the historical indifference of the Red Cross to Jewish suffering during WWII, their helping Nazis escape to South America and appointing Nazis to high Red Cross posts after the war, it is no surprise that today they show the same kind of contemptuous indifference to Jewish lives while giving the hereditary offspring of the Nazis a relative pass”. Let these hypocrites deal with the media uproar that would follow. We could do similar things with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, putting them all on their back foot having to explain themselves instead of us having to explain. Let’s supply information (good and bad) rather than explanation (the more accurate translation of Hasbara). I am tired of having to explain my existence. When challenged with “I don’t think Israel has the right to exist” we should respond with “I don’t think you have a right to exist”. “What right does Israel have to exist” – “What right do you have to exist”.
And are we doing anything to highlight Palestinian savagery in Thailand, Nepal, and the Philippines given their nationals were murdered and taken hostage on October 7th? How about comparing the Jihadist slaughter and kidnapping of Christian children in Nigeria to what happened on October 7th? Certainly, Christian Africa would show some understanding of Israel’s struggle. The 600,000 killed by Assad and the over 300,000 (and counting) have been and are being killed in Yemen. We should be on the attack, comparing BBC (and other outlets) airtime dedicated to these atrocities in comparison to Israel – let’s embarrass our enemies constantly without mercy.
Globally we should be adopting the phrase “felony murder” when “defending” ourselves regarding Gaza casualties. This refers to the fact that anyone killed in the process of a crime, or in the search for the criminals, is to be considered murdered by the criminals themselves. Every death in Gaza is on Hamas, not on us. Given their behavior on England’s streets and the contempt they show for the British flag, symbols, and war memorials, we should be pushing the line that what they did to us on October 7th they would surely do to you if only they had the chance. We should aim to stir up the emotions of the average Brit and not only always be the calm voice of reason. They are not and cannot be good citizens of a democracy because tolerance and understanding of the other is totally foreign to them. I do not believe we are taking proper advantage of the incipient rage felt by the average Englishman over recent events. And why aren’t British Jews making criminal complaints against every Iman inciting to murder the Jews? Sit-down demonstrations at Scotland Yard and the various police stations calling for their arrest and expulsion from the UK should be ongoing.
And how about creating a BDS 2.0 against Pakistan citing their brutal treatment of women, Hindus, Ahmadis, and Shiites as well as their present ongoing expulsion of almost two million Afghani refugees without any concern for their well-being? It is a very interesting thing that the world is concentrated on the mistreatment of Muslims in India (around 200 million) while ignoring the fact that Hindus have been almost completely ethnically cleansed from Pakistan (as well as Bangladesh for that matter when it was Eastern Pakistan). The analogy to the Israel-Arab situation is striking. The Hindu Diaspora is ours for the taking if we handle it right. Since the vast majority of Muslims in the UK are Pakistanis and they are the most vicious antisemites and violent demonstrators such a move would be both morally and tactically justified. Interestingly, a BDS against Pakistan could be much more effective than a BDS against Israel. Israel’s exports are overwhelmingly business-to-business. If you use a cell phone, drive a car, get an MRI, take a generic medicine, use a flash drive, own and use a computer, play a computer game, gamble online, watch a sporting event with close-up camera work, and so on and so on, you are most probably using an Israeli product or system without even knowing it. It could only be a part of the system or a part of the part to the degree that the final assembler of the product doesn’t even know that the part of the part he has purchased is ZIONIST (Allah Akbar). Pakistan’s exports, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly consumer-driven – over 60% related to clothing, textiles, carpets, and accessories.
Going into any department store in the West and putting Pakistan-produced goods into a shopping cart and then walking out leaving the goods without purchasing them would be the easiest thing in the world and the inconvenience and added expense caused to the merchants (to constant reshelve them) would make them hesitant to purchase Pakistani goods in the future. This would entail much larger damage to Pakistan’s economy than the damage done to Israel by taking Israeli Humus off the shelves. When challenged by the media and the anti-Zionists that we are simply muddying the waters of Israel’s “oppressions” we would have the opportunity to simply state the facts of the case to show that Pakistan is a much more extreme violator of human rights than Israel – thus putting them on the backfoot for ignoring Pakistan while being obsessive about Israel.
If we wanted to be even more creative we could initiate the creation of a European movement demanding reparations for the enslavement of Europeans (especially Slavs) by the Muslim world. Actually, the very word slave derives from Slav. I refer to the Black Sea Slave Trade, the Balkan Slave Trade, the trans-Saharan Slave Trade, and of course the predations of the Barbary Pirates. The major targets would be Turkey and Algeria (the geopolitical descendants of this trade) as well as the major oil powers. I would also enlist European Blacks whose roots are East African and whose ancestors were decimated for over 1,000 years by the Arab Slave trade, which was crueler in many ways than the Atlantic Slave Trade (castrating the majority of men).
Sometimes being performative can also be useful. For example, Israel should declare every women’s organization and their officers persona non grata. This of course would have no practical utility but would be an excellent opportunity to highlight the unbelievable hypocrisy of these organizations in league with the UN. Israel has just been accused in the UN for being responsible for Palestinian men beating their wives – if it wasn’t for the occupation everything would be just fine and dandy, despite the fact that on Palestinian radio Imans give instructions to men how to beat their wives. (No, I am not making this up.) Yet to this day, not one UN Agency has uttered a peep about the rape, mutilation, and murder of Israeli women on October 7th.
What might have some utility would be for Jewish communities to press for laws preventing foreign contributions to Universities dedicated to particular departments or studies programs? Generic contributions, with no strings attached, would be permitted. Also, conduct a public campaign against contributions to universities tolerating woke departments that substitute advocacy for scholarship.
The invidious nature of much academic literature must also be taken seriously. For example, consider the following extract from an essay uploaded onto a self-described academic platform:
“… beginning 3000 years ago with Cyrus the Great’s construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in which Palestinians were expelled from their homes by force, the pattern of expulsion continues today. As seen in the 20th century alone, when Hitler “returned” the Jews to former Canaan (Palestine) with the transference agreement signed by him with the Zionists, Hitler precipitated the revolutionary wheel of time that allowed for the Jews to repeat the cycle of expulsion of Palestinians during the creation of the Jewish State.”
In other words, this “scholar” claims that Cyrus the Great expelled the Palestinians to make room for the Jews and this 3,000-year-old indignity preceded Hitler’s deal with the Zionists to expel the Palestinians again. Most outrageous: Hitler “returned” the Jews. Imagine the outrage if some wrote that the Black slaves “immigrated” to America. So-called academic publications are an entire subset of the more general academic rubric that must be addressed. I would love to see Dr. Miriam Adleman, owner of Israel HaYom, divert the tens of millions of dollars she wastes every year on Israel HaYom to buying up as many of these outlets as possible in order to cleanse them of their soft antisemitism. She would be doing the Jewish People a much greater service.
Finally, I would advocate for a Jewish community watch (defense) organization which I would call the Shomrim (certainly not the Jewish Defense League with all the baggage that name carries). In Europe and America, they would be equipped with various accouterments suitable for breaking bones and removing teeth without Novocain. In America, some could be armed. I would want to see Shomrim on every college campus so that when Jewish students are physically accosted and harassed for wearing a yarmulke or a Star of David by antisemites and Jewish self-haters, the harassers have to visit the campus first aid station. I never again want to see Jewish students shaking in fear, having to take refuge in the school library, or being told by administrators that if attacked they can hide in an attic (“just like Anne Frank; think of it as studying your heritage”). “We shall not hide” should be the new motto, and be forewarned, that if attacked we will defend ourselves (and by the way we are going to call for your resignation for even suggesting such a thing rather than to take steps to expel the hooligans). University administrators should become more afraid of the self-identified Jewish community on campus than of the “progressive” hit squads. Lastly, I wouldn’t tolerate ANY classroom advocacy for any anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist bullying. Every Jewish student should be prepped by the community before going to university to know how to react to charges of Apartheid and Ethnic cleansing and so on.
In short, NEVER AGAIN will we tolerate the disrespect shown to the Jewish People following October 7th.
