Yousef Munayyer writes: I’m a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges.

A series of walls, checkpoints, settlements and soldiers fill the 30-mile gap between our hometowns, making it more likely for us to have met on the other side of the planet than in our own backyard.

Never is this reality more profound than on our trips home from our current residence outside Washington.

Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport is on the outskirts of Lod (Lydda in Arabic), but because my wife has a Palestinian ID, she cannot fly there; she is relegated to flying to Amman, Jordan. If we plan a trip together — an enjoyable task for most couples — we must prepare for a logistical nightmare that reminds us of our profound inequality before the law at every turn.

Even if we fly together to Amman, we are forced to take different bridges, two hours apart, and endure often humiliating waiting and questioning just to cross into Israel and the West Bank. The laws conspire to separate us.

If we lived in the region, I would have to forgo my residency, since Israeli law prevents my wife from living with me in Israel. This is to prevent what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once referred to as “demographic spillover.” Additional Palestinian babies in Israel are considered “demographic threats” by a state constantly battling to keep a Jewish majority. (Of course, Israelis who marry Americans or any non-Palestinian foreigners are not subjected to this treatment.)

Last week marked Israel’s 64th year of independence; it is also when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” during which many of Palestine’s native inhabitants were turned into refugees.

In 1948, the Israeli brigade commander Yitzhak Rabin helped expel Lydda’s Palestinian population. Some 19,000 of the town’s 20,000 native Palestinian inhabitants were forced out. My grandparents were among the 1,000 to remain.

They were fortunate to become only internally displaced and not refugees. Years later my grandfather was able to buy back his own home — a cruel absurdity, but a better fate than that imposed on most of his neighbors, who were never permitted to re-establish their lives in their hometowns.

Three decades later, in October 1979, this newspaper reported that Israel barred Rabin from detailing in his memoir what he conceded was the “expulsion” of the “civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000.” Rabin, who by then had served as prime minister, sought to describe how “it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

Two generations after the Nakba, the effect of discriminatory Israeli policies still reverberates. Israel still seeks to safeguard its image by claiming to be a bastion of democracy that treats its Palestinian citizens well, all the while continuing illiberal policies that target this very population. There is a long history of such discrimination.

It’s worth reading in full the 1979 report by David Shipler that Munayyer cites. The fact that Rabin’s account of Jews driving Palestinians from their homes at gun point was censored could be assumed to indicate that it was an account of unusual candor. But even if was such an account it was also an example of what is called in Hebrew yorim u’vochim — we shoot and we cry.

Rabin writes: “Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach Brigade included youth-movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international brotherhood and humaneness. The eviction went beyond the concepts they were used to.

“There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action. Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these youth-movement groups, and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.”

At a time when Israeli leaders and Israel’s supporters frequently bemoan the fact that Israel is subject to harsh criticism, we are told that Israel is unfairly being singled out in a world where injustice is pervasive. Even so, there truly is something unique about the sentiment that Rabin and others describe.

Their message to the Palestinians is this: when you hurt, we empathize with your suffering so much that it hurts us too. We are not guilty of unfeeling brutality. Our brutality is garnished with sensitivity. Indeed, we are so sensitive that it hurts us deeply when onlookers who don’t carry the same moral burden that we do, judge us harshly. That is perhaps the greatest injustice.

Contrast this with the brutality of those who shoot and don’t cry. Ostensibly that is a worse brutality because it is bereft of empathy. Sometimes so, but, I would argue, this unfeeling brutality is unfeeling for a reason: callousness is a way of protecting those who inflict pain from the power of their own conscience. They know that if they were to allow themselves to empathize with their victims they would cry and stop shooting.

What those who shoot and cry are expressing is a narcissistic form of brutality. Empathy, instead of serving as an antidote to cruelty makes cruelty easier. And this empathy is in truth no such thing; it is a form of vanity — a conviction of those who refuse to doubt their own virtue.

Aside from its incompatibility with genuine democracy, one of the problems with the idea of a Jewish state is that it invests too heavily in the choice of its citizens.

As much as virtually every state is able to drum up a certain amount of nationalistic fervor among its citizenry, the foundation of loyalty behind the facade of flag waving is that for the vast majority of people they have no choice about the country they profess to love: it’s the one they were born in and have no real option to leave. The few paths of migration that do exist are defined by oppression, war, and poverty.

The chosen people are unique in this particular choice. But if becoming an Israeli can for any Jew be a choice, its chosenness — even for those born there — also makes it easier to contemplate the possibility of other choices.

Yuval Ben-Ami writes about the option of leaving Israel.

It was 2:00 AM when we arrived at St. Pancras station. 2:00 AM London time is 4:00 AM Tel Aviv time, and we were certainly still on Tel Aviv time. In a way, we were still in Tel Aviv altogether, or perhaps somewhere in between the two – in the cold sky over Bulgaria or Slovakia. The soul is said to be chasing the body when it is taken away by a jet plane. It only catches up with it several days later.

We stepped into a cab and were surprised by how roomy it was, as well as by the fact that it was driven by a lady, an uncommon sight around our own neighborhood. The air outside the cab was chilly and smelled of large trees and fried food, inside was a unique, inimitable, London cab smell. We were in an environment entirely foreign to us yet felt instantly very much at home. For an Ashkenazi Israeli, Europe will always be a home of sorts. The soul of our nation apparently hasn’t yet caught up with Zionism. It is still on its way from the grassy knolls of our grandparents’ homelands, baffled to behold us flying the other direction in Easy Jet planes.

Our longing for Europe’s mix of the familiar and the exotic grows, the more hopeless Israel’s situation becomes. The rise of fascism, the growing disregard for human rights, the gradual disappearance of our freedom of speech, all of these cause concerned young Israelis, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise, to reconsider their future on the soil of the Holy Land and look west.

Israel is losing its educated, concerned young generation to other countries, ironically: mostly to Germany. The new emigrants (let’s call them “newgoers”) are different from emigrants of decades past, termed “Descenders” in Zionist lingo, which views Israel as elevated above the rest of the world. While the descenders of the ’70s and ’80s were motivated for the most part by economic factors, the newgoers are often driven by a dread of Israeli politics and a sense that they no longer belong in Israel. It is a sense that our government gladly reinforces, mainly via supporting legislation that delegitimizes dissent.

By deliberately alienating this public, Netanyahu’s government is causing what I term a “heart-drain.” Israelis who hold a point of view that isn’t entirely tribal, who empathize with those living under the occupation or others wronged by state-sanctioned prejudice and intolerance, Israelis who take an interest in opening difficult historical questions for discussion, are encouraged to leave. If I had a penny for every time I was told to “just pack up and go,” I could buy my own flat in Pimlico.

The cab brought us the the home of the first exile, a friend who is completing his MA in London. His program is to conclude at the end of the year, but he told us he intends to stay out of Israel for another half a dozen years at least. Currently he is staying in a stately college campus in central London. The campus is made up of a single structure which encloses a serene courtyard. Its grand dining room is vaulted by a high, arched ceiling, beneath which a full English breakfast is served to students for the price of an Israeli popsicle. Its bulletin boards advertise an upcoming production of Macbeth, Its windows overlook a stately park, complete with enormous oaks and well tended paths. All in all the place looks like Epcot Center’s Hogwarts pavilion, and I mean that in a good way.

How, I thought, could I console myself for not living this guy’s life? Not only does he reside in such a graceful, calm environment, but he remains an activist by writing, informing, educating and organizing. It is likely that from from his London location, this man is making more of a difference than I do back home, while building a future for himself, somewhere that has an actual future. [Continue reading…]

A recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland in which 24,090 citizens across 22 countries were interviewed, revealed that around the world Israel is viewed as negatively as North Korea.

Considering the fact that Israel has vastly greater opportunities and resources to promote its image than does North Korea and that the North Korean government has little apparent interest in improving its global image, Israelis should be asking themselves why they have a government that is doing such an appalling job of promoting their interests.

According to those whose job it is to represent Israel, the failure is not their own — it is the result of a powerful global movement hellbent on “delegitimizing” poor little Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, laments:

[W]hy have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious “Israel Lobby” purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel’s record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?

The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.

It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.

Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past.

The fallacy embedded in the idea that Israel is threatened by delegitimization is that Israel does not face legitimate criticism it must answer. “There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Israel…” government officials dutifully repeat yet never acknowledge the specific ways in which Israel has a responsibility to answer its critics.

The real challenge Israel faces is that it is being defended by dissembling whiners like Oren and shrill ranters like Alan Dershowitz. The message of victimhood which they disseminate resonates only with those who already hold the same view. They utterly lack any ability to influence observers who are still in the process of weighing up the issues. Indeed, they do nothing more than present Israel as a crybaby which protests it is being treated unfairly.

Contrast these voices with those that they tar as “delegitimizers” and it becomes apparent that Israel’s image problem stems not only from Israel’s actions and political failings but the fact that among Israel’s defenders there appears to be no one who can speak with integrity.

Take note, Michael Oren, this is what integrity sounds like:

Anyone who is really afraid of the delegitimization of Israel should consider that Israel may face no greater threat than the one posed by its own defenders.