Noah Pollak on the Shonda of B'Tselem

The B'Tselem Witch Trials

Israel's Left, having won the argument on forfeiting visions of Greater Israel in service to an authentic and durable two-state solution, saw the land for peace bargain crumble in the dust and human carnage of the Second Intifada, the Lebanon withdrawal of 2000 and the subsequent wars against Hezbollah and Hamas in 2006 and 2008-9, not to mention the barrage of over 10,000 rocket attacks from Judenrein Gaza into Israel proper. Israel's mainstream left was decimated in subsequent electoral results, verdicts rendered by a sobered Israeli society that saw its genuine efforts for peace met with terror, ideological and psychological warfare.
Noah Pollak demonstrates convincingly how organizations like B'Tselem have co-opted the politically untenable stances of the mainstream left by recreating themselves as "apolitical" NGO's with human rights and international law norms as their weapons of choice.
It is a tactic as transparent as it is disingenous. Sadly, western media and intellecutals fail to see through the ploy.
Below, a short excerpt. The essay deserves a full reading.
db in seattle


The story of those Israeli Jews who have made careers out of attacking Israel’s right to exist, such as Biletzky and Yiftachel, illustrates the degradation of the once mighty Israeli peace movement. Originally, the movement sought legitimacy and prominence in Israeli politics, and received it for a time—and because it was part of the political process, it was constrained by the need for electoral support and popular legitimacy. Yet the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 2000 and the Palestinian terror war that followed presented the peace movement with an existential crisis: With whom, exactly, were Israelis supposed to make peace? The withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza five years later, and the entrenchment in the vacated territory of Iranian-backed terrorist groups, further disillusioned Israelis and called into question the central proposition of the peace movement: if Israel makes the right concessions, peace will follow. And so, over the past 15 years, the peace movement has fallen from a position of influence in Israeli politics to one, today, of irrelevance, an anachronism that no longer has realistic answers to Israel’s problems.

What remains of the peace movement is a white-hot core of activists who refuse to acknowledge their failure and yet cannot gracefully recede from the political stage. They have discovered an innovative formula for rebuilding their political relevance completely outside the democratic political arena: reconstitute themselves as NGOs and conceal their political agenda in the apolitical rhetoric of human rights and international law. In this guise, the peace movement no longer has any need to win elections or offer a serious platform for governance. The NGOs instead position themselves as a blunt opposition force working against mainstream Israeli society, which is viewed as unsophisticated, provincial, racist, and stricken with “security hysteria.” This “human-rights community” has thus not only opposed every consensus Israeli security measure—Operation Defensive Shield during the
intifada, the security fence to stop suicide bombers, the targeted killings of terror-group leaders, the Lebanon War, and the Gaza War—but has branded them war crimes and human-rights violations for which Israel should be punished.In these circumstances, where there is no point in trying to succeed at the ballot box, leftist Israeli activism now directs itself internationally in the hopes that fomenting a narrative of Israeli criminality will invite enough sanction and condemnation from Europe, the United Nations, and America to force Israel to accede to the demands of these otherwise powerless radicals.

The policies they support would constitute nothing less than Zionism’s destruction. And they apparently have no compunction about seeking its destruction from without, since they have learned to their disappointment and rage that Israel is too strong a nation to allow itself to be destroyed from within.