Time Magazine is Already Blaming Israel if Peace Fails
Perhaps the most offensive part of the Time Magazine cover article, Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace, by Carl Vick (September 13, 2010 print edition) is the title itself. The article focuses on Israel's current economic successes and indicates that the author's examples of young Israelis enjoying the good life somehow indicates that they do not care about either the plight of the Palestinians or peace itself.
The title itself presumes that Israel does not care about peace. He does not ask "If" they care; he goes directly to "why" they don't. The article pictures all Israelis enjoying the good life. After all, all Jews are rich, aren't they?
But the piece may be more misleading in what it omits. He omits the fact that 20% of Israelis are Arab and identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality but Israeli by citizenship. He omits that Arabs has been elected to the Israeli Knesset ever since the country's independence in 1948. And while he notes multiple times in the article that the feud is with "Arabs who used to live on this land" he omits the fact that many Arabs still do, and he omits any mention of the 700,000 Jews who used to live in neighboring Arab states who were ejected in the greatest Jewish ethnic cleansing since the holocaust.
He omits that Israel stands alone in the middle east in sexual equality, tolerance of homosexuality, religious tolerance, a free press, and a modern educational system. He omits that Israel is surrounded by fanatics who have been poisoned by a strand of anti-Semitism that would have made the Hitler youth blush.
Phyllis Chesler's comment on the Time article described Italian journalist Giulio Meotti's upcoming book about Israel's terror victims:
Yet while Americans agonize over a single proposed mosque in Manhattan, Israel has several mosques including the Al Aqsa Mosque at the Temple Mount, a stone's throw (pun absolutely intended) from the Wailing Wall, the Jews' and the Israeli's most holy site. You can hear the Muslim prayers blaring out through the loudspeakers from the Mosque throughout Jerusalem.
The fact that Israel manages to enjoy the success that every modern tolerant society also enjoys while its neighbors labor under oppressive theocratic fascist rule does not mean that they do not want peace. They have come to realize that succumbing to the wishes of peace at any cost is simply the peace of surrender and self destruction. The disappointment of the Oslo and the Clinton initiative gave way to the murderous Intifada, rocket attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Hamas in Gaza, and the existential threat of a nuclear Iran.Yet there is no front page article about why Gaza, the PLO, and Israel's many other enemies do not want peace. If such an article was written it would be very short; it would be because for Israel's enemies, the total destruction of Israel is far more important that any peace agreement.
Henry Oliner
www.rebelyid.com