- JEWISH NEWS SYNDICATE - CAROLINE GLICK - MAR 9, 2023 -
The attempted criminalization of Israel and Jews will continue even if the judiciary’s power is limited.
On Sunday, a group of Israeli Air Force reserve F-15I pilots announced that due to their opposition to the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform bills, they would not participate in their squadron’s training mission this week.
It’s hard to know what the pilots thought would happen in response to their declaration, but if they believed the IDF would compel the government to shelve its judicial reform efforts, they received a rude awakening. The very notion that their stunt could succeed is a testament to the Israeli elite’s isolation from the rest of the country. Things look quite different outside their exclusive echo chamber.
The government stood firm. The public was enraged. The pilots’ colleagues were incensed. Thousands of reserve officers, including Air Force pilots, signed petitions demanding that the IDF be left out of the public dispute over judicial reform and pledging to serve under all governments and in all circumstances.
IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi initially angered the public by refusing to publicly condemn the pilots. But on Tuesday, Halevi broke his silence. Halevi read the pilots refusing to serve the riot act behind closed doors, making it clear that if they failed to show up to reserve duty on Wednesday, they would be thrown out of the IAF. On Wednesday, they all showed up. On Thursday, Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar threw the group’s leader, Col. Gilad Peled, out of the squadron.
One of the justifications that leftist retired generals and leftist defenders of Israel’s legal oligarchy more generally give for their refusal to countenance the government’s efforts to place minimal limits on the power of the Supreme Court is that the Court, and the unchecked legal system as a whole, is their shield against international tribunals. With the Palestinians and their international supporters threatening to put IDF warriors—including IAF pilots—in the dock at The Hague, talk of placing checks and balances on the Supreme Court, they insist, is dangerous.
There are two problems with this claim. First, it is wrong. Neither the Supreme Court nor the attorney general protects them from the Palestinians and their supporters. The Goldstone Report from 2010, which falsely accused the IDF of committing war crimes during the 2008-2009 war with Hamas, came out after the Court, the attorney general and the IDF Military Advocate General Corps’ lawyers placed massive, extralegal limits on IDF operations in real time.
The same goes for the legal fraternity’s actions in subsequent operations against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. The International Criminal Court’s “investigation” of “the situation in Palestine” began well after the Supreme Court, the IDF Military Advocate General Corps, the attorney general and the Justice Ministry were arrogated the power to dictate military policies. The ICC and its anti-Israel prosecutors couldn’t care less what Supreme Court President Esther Hayut and her colleagues and underlings think of IDF tactics or their proportionality.
The second reason judicial reform, and a broader program of legal reform, will have no impact whatsoever on the lawfare campaign against IDF soldiers is that the lawfare campaign isn’t in response to anything Israel does. The purpose of lawfare is to criminalize Israel and present its very existence as a crime against humanity.
The campaign to delegitimize Israel grows more audacious and politically and culturally powerful with each passing day. Last month, I experienced it in Toronto when several anti-Israel activists braved a snowstorm to protest my invitation to speak at a synagogue in town. The placards told the tale. They weren’t opposing “settlements” or “the occupation” of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. They opposed “Israeli Apartheid.” Israel, their signs said, is “a terrorist state” and I am a “Nakba denier.”
Separately and together, all their messages made clear that they object not to Israel’s size, but its existence. Israel is “racist and Apartheid” because it is Jewish and Jews have no right to self-determination. Israel is a “terrorist state” because it defends itself against Palestinian terrorists committed to its physical annihilation. I am a “Nakba denier” because I am an Israeli patriot. I am proud and relieved that Israel defeated the coalition of Arab states and irregular forces that came together between 1947-1949 in a genocidal bid to destroy the nascent State of Israel.
The “Nakba denial” charge was arguably the claim that should most anger and trouble Jews in Israel, Toronto and worldwide, because as one of the protesters explained in a write-up of the demonstration, its purpose is to silence and demonize not just Israel but its supporters, particularly its Jewish supporters.
“Nakba denialism ought to be taken as seriously as Holocaust denialism,” Paul Salvatori wrote. He then explained how it should be used against local Jewish communities.
“It’s in the Canadian public interest to know that Nakba denialism pervades certain areas of Canadian society, including but not limited to the northern part of Toronto [i.e., the Jewish part of Toronto]. … Such denialism unnecessarily harms any decent society and so Canadians are entitled to know where it exists so they can rightfully challenge it and prevent it from doing further damage,” he claimed.
“Nakba denial” was a new concept for me, but the effort to use demonization of Israel as a means to exclude Jews from the public square is anything but novel. As Tablet magazine laid out in a spate of articles published late last week, the intersectional, racialist pecking order of progressive victimology places Jews in the two worst oppressor categories. Jews are both “Zionists” and “white.” Either one would be enough to push them out of polite society. But the two together make for a toxic mix that has seen Jews increasingly pushed out of all the areas of American life where they have thrived and excelled for decades.