-By Aaron Velasquez, Right Side News
The American right loves Israel. We love Israel because Israel is us. Israel has McDonalds, night clubs, a middle class, semiconductor plants, and nuclear weapons. The left hates Israel for exactly these same things. Some liberals go one better and equate Israel with Nazi Germany, with Palestinians acting the part of the Jews. As bizarre as this seems to me, it plays well in the emotionally-driven finger-pointing crowd.
Israel is rich, stable and secure, and Palestine is poor and in turmoil. The fallacy is the idea that Israel’s success caused the poverty of the Palestinians. People looking for “root causes” of violence often stop at poverty, and assume that the nearest rich people are to blame. Mexico is poor and backward compared to the United States, but nobody is saying that the United States made Mexico that way. The United States even took some of Mexico into herself and made more states. I live in one of them. However, there is no international outcry for reparations. There are no Mexican suicide bombers blowing themselves up in Dallas or Albuquerque.
Israel is a strong industrial society with a functioning military, a good educational system, infrastructure, and an intellectually high-functioning citizenry. The Palestinians are weak in all of these areas. In the liberal media and academia, this discrepancy is made into a causal relationship. That is, the Palestinians are poor and backward because the Israelis made them that way. It would be as if the Israelis marched into a developed, first-world Palestine in 1948 and displaced its high-functioning populace from the controls of its well-oiled European-style machine.
Continue reading “The Left’s Mischaracterization of Israel”