Opinion: To Criticize Israel Is to Love It, Not Hate It

(June 1) -- It is a shame that one can't have a calm, decent conversation about Israel without incrimination against anyone who criticizes Israel's actions.

I have been called a self-hating Jew, and worse, because of various positions I've taken, most recently simply for posting video of the Israeli raid on a Palestinian aid flotilla. Similarly, my Twitter stream has been filled with some choice comments.

Examples:

doug_kaplan @AlanColmes we should send you to Gaza and see how Hamas treats you. Since they are so hospitable to us Jews.
NJCJR79 @AlanColmes Anyone Jew that does not support Isreal is not a Jew...period, paragraph end of story.

But Israel's actions on Monday have prompted international opprobrium, and rightfully so. They were provocative and incendiary. And, in spite of its claim that a blockade of Gaza is necessary to stop Hamas from building up its arsenal, the blockade has not had that effect, and has led to great human suffering, preventing Gaza from rebuilding after last year's raids. As Juan Cole notes, there are two plausible reasons for Israel's brutal behavior.

One is that the Israeli troops boarding the vessels met some sort of resistance and over-reacted. Aid volunteers are unlikely, however, to have posed much real challenge to trained special forces operatives.

The other possible reason is that the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman gave a green light to the commandos to respond with excessive force. That is, the deaths and woundings may have been a brutally frank warning to any future Gaza aid activists that they are taking their lives in their hands if they plan any more flotillas to help the Palestinians.

What Israel has done is give a propaganda coup to its foes and severely, possibly irrevocably, strained its relationship with Turkey. Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books has it exactly right as he calls out the more conservative members of the Jewish establishment for their "naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians." This hard-line stance is at odds with a younger generation of Jews who love and support Israel but not its intransigent policies that have done nothing to enable peace. As Beinart put it:

... fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster -- indeed, have actively opposed -- a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Telling Jews like me that we hate Israel because we don't support its current government's actions is like saying we hate America when the right wing is in charge and instituting its destructive policies.

If the old adage is true that if you put 10 Jews in a room you get 11 opinions, it is certainly fair to be of the opinion that the Netanyahu government, with its radical deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs Avigdor Lieberman, harbors dangerous views.

Lieberman believes the peace process is a mistake and has said that Arab members of the Knesset who had contact with Hamas should be executed. This is the kind of thinking that can lead to the tragedy of the Palestinian aid flotilla.

To speak out against this despicable act isn't to hate Israel, but rather to love it, and peace.

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