Stunning Betrayal Featuring Israel’s Top Novelists: Jack Engelhard
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16127#.VImXx3vIhyJ
Aren’t Jews loyal to whatever state they live in? How about if they live in Israel?
Say it ain’t so, but apparently it’s true that Israel’s three leading novelists are demanding that Israel surrender itself to the tender mercies of Europe – and we all know what happened the last time we trusted those nations with our lives.
But if I’m reading it right, Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua are taking part in a campaign to give up their own country. They are welcoming a Trojan Horse named “Palestine.”
Israel’s three literary elites are proud signatories to a public letter petitioning European parliaments to formally recognize a Palestinian state.
A word of advice to any Israeli leader who is ready to give up “land for peace.” Start by giving up your own home and neighborhood. Illustrate your sincerity.
This does not happen very often, where citizens seek out a foreign enemy for aid, comfort and a separate peace. There is a name for this.
During the 1930s and 1940s, American poet Ezra Pound fell in love with fascism and Nazism. From Italy, he delivered hundreds of radio addresses favoring Mussolini and Hitler while denouncing FDR and the United States. In 1945, he was arrested for treason.
Since when was Europe a friend and since when was “Palestine” ever a country and since when has any “Palestinian” leader even proven himself ready for peace? Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no choice but to tell it like it is – that the incitements coming from the other side are enough to “make your hair stand on end.”
He meant the Abbas/Hamas crowd, but he could have been speaking of the Israeli Radical Left, which is on the prowl and feeling mighty good about its chances to take over the government come March. Even before taking office, some – like the Big Three Novelists – have already announced their preparedness to give up more Jewish territory.
A word of advice to any Israeli leader who is ready to give up “land for peace.” Start by giving up your own home and neighborhood. Illustrate your sincerity.
There ought to be a law about this, and there ought to be a law against outsourcing your patriotism.
Over the centuries part of our liturgy summons us to “pray for the welfare of the State” – meaning any State in which we find ourselves to be citizens. In other words, loyalty is demanded of us no matter where we live, and I would expect that the same to be true in Israel. Apparently not.
Apparently not since that petition to those European parliaments, calling for Israel to be deluged into Islamic submission, was signed, sealed and delivered by 700 other Leftists, in addition to Oz, Grossman, Yehoshua — and in Israel it’s business as usual.
My beef indeed is with those three novelists. We share a literary fraternity and, as novelists, it harms us all when we go off on the deep end like this. It makes us all look bad when even the few of us show ourselves to be far beyond eccentric, but actually nuts!
I took up another case against Oz some time ago. My friend, fellow novelist John W. Cassell, accused me of having been too respectful, too polite – too “gentlemanly,” he said. Well, I was. I felt uncomfortable ripping anyone in Israel, especially a fellow writer of books.
I still feel uncomfortable about this, but I must say that, given the latest, my respect for Oz, Grossman and Yehoshua has plunged to a new low. Their books can’t be trusted if their political views are so wobbly; though it is true that a book is always smarter than the writer of the book (topic for another day).
Can they really be that clueless? What were they thinking when they sent their best regards to Europe?
But here is someone who gets it. In a column for The Wall Street Journal, Brendan O’Neill writes:
“In Nazi Germany, it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei. Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call “Zionistfrei”—free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves “Israel-free zones,” insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.”
If writers get it from Wall Street, where are the writers from Jerusalem?
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. New from the American Novelist, the original inside-the-newsroom thriller exposing media bias, The Bathsheba Deadline. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
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