The College Fix

I was in Jerusalem last Wednesday when a bomb exploded at a nearby bus station. One woman was killed and nearly 40 others injured.

The following day, Qassam rockets and mortar shells were launched from the Gaza Strip, raining down upon the city of Ashdod. They were just several among the more than 70 missiles fired at Israeli cities in previous days.

This came on the heels of a sickening tragedy in the Israeli settlement of Itamar, where terrorists massacred five members of the Fogel family in their home one Saturday night. Three of the family’s six children – ranging in age from three months to 11 years – were butchered to death with a kitchen knife.

So it goes in the Jewish state. “What’s new?” was the response from my friend Josh, a 21-year-old commander in the Israeli army who last week was scouring Arab villages in search of the brutes who murdered the Fogels.

It never ceases to amaze me how commonplace these acts of terrorism have become to the average Israeli. It’s simply business as usual – a territorial hazard, if you will.

It begs the question, what might it be like to live under such endless duress in the United States, or at Northwestern for that matter? What would happen if Katyusha rockets wreaked havoc on Evanston? Or if students waiting for the intercampus shuttle to Chicago were killed in the fiery blast of a suicide bomb?

Surely it wouldn’t be tolerated here, just as the Israelis never tolerate it there. But whenever Israel retaliates against those who have unjustly attacked its citizens, it is swiftly chastised in the court of international opinion, where Israel is most often labeled the villain and never the victim. Quick to point the finger at the tiny Jewish state, critics around the world paint the portrait of Israel as a nation bent on an aggressive perpetuation of the Palestinian plight.

Just one day after the Jerusalem bombing, the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva passed the first of six resolutions condemning Israel for alleged violations against the Palestinians. At the session, a UN-accredited NGO distributed to council members a publication depicting a demonic Jewish octopus – wearing an Israeli flag on its head with a swastika substituted for the star of David, no less – wrapping its tentacles around a boat labeled “Freedom,” which was decorated with the Palestinian and Turkish flags. The image was permitted, and so too was the group’s statement that called Israel a threat “even more dangerous than that of a nuclear attack.”

Nevermind that as those across the Arab world fight for democracy to the chorus of cheers from the global booster club, the Human Rights Council remains committed to admonishing the Middle East’s only true democratic country – the one where citizens are constantly dying for their freedom by way of suicide bombs, mortar shells, and kitchen knifes.

All the while, Israel’s critics continue to turn a blind eye to spectacles like the one in Gaza immediately following the Fogel massacre, where Palestinians there celebrated the deaths with candy and pastries.

Such willful ignorance should be shocking – but it isn’t. It pervades organizations like the UN, major media outlets, and even the friendly confines of academic forums like Northwestern.

In just the last two years, the university has played host to Norman Finkelstein (who called the Holocaust a “schmatte” and told students here that it was no justification for the “Israeli massacre” in Gaza), Helen Thomas (who last year proclaimed that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back to Poland and Germany”), and of course Northwestern’s resident Holocaust denier and staunch Israel adversary, Arthur Butz.

A tenured professor here, Butz contends that “the presumed extermination of European Jewry” was deliberately contrived to support the creation of the modern state of Israel. His abhorrent opinions bear no semblance to the truth, which is that efforts to establish a sovereign Jewish state predated the founding of Israel by more than 50 years. The horror and carnage of the Holocaust merely confirmed that Jewish survival necessitated the creation of a Jewish state.

People like my great-grandfather understood this. He fled Poland for what were then the marshy swamplands of Palestine, leaving behind a family that was ultimately gunned down in front of their house by Nazi soldiers. He dreamed of a land where Jews could exercise self-sufficiency absent the fear of annihilation. It finally came one day in May 1948, and though the Arab League objected and pledged to wage “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,” it was to no avail. The next generation, my grandparents, continued the fight for freedom in 1967 and again in 1973, once more battling the surrounding Arab nations who sought Israel’s utter destruction.

And the battle rages on today as terrorists launch missiles at cities, detonate bombs at bus stops, and massacre Jewish families in their homes. Such acts are appalling, to say the very least. But perhaps the most critical attacks continue to come in the form of UN condemnations and denunciations from authoritative figures in academia and elsewhere. The unwitting observer takes them as seemingly innocuous morsels of truth, which in turn helps shift public opinion even further against the small Jewish state that’s just trying to defend itself from the tyrants and terrorists that besiege it, from organizations like Hamas that proclaim: “We love death as much as the Jews love life.”

I can only wonder how we got to this point – where the defense of a people and their democracy is not only shrugged off, but is altogether rebuked by the world’s powers that be.

Alex Katz is an editor for the Northwestern Chronicle. He is a member of the Student Free Press Association.

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