Israel's Chris Hitchens
Amnon Lord, banned from the pages of respectable Leftist papers, has an article up on JPost about the fate of a Peace Now activist who thought that responding to the 1996 Hamas bombings with slavish peace overtures was somewhat dangerous:
Word got around that I was going to vote for Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud. This shocked the people who knew me as a foot soldier at Peace Now rallies or as an editor and reporter at the Hadashot newspaper during the 1980s and early 1990s... leaving the Left was not so much a matter of choice: I felt suffocated as if I were inside an intellectual gas chamber, I told him, and I just ran for my life. I couldn't survive inside…
After I started studying the nature of the Israeli "Left," its roots, its history, its patterns of action and its ideology, I concluded that a leftist's loyalty is almost completely to a political organization, to a movement. It has been said about European social-democratic parties that they do not recognize the sovereignty of the state, only the sovereignty of the party. That is true of the Israeli Left, too.
Now on the outside looking in, the situation is a little clearer to him:
The word "treason" is unsuitable in the context of various figures on the Left and their actions. It is an issue of an entire elite class turning its back on its nation and country. Yossi Beilin and his people's Geneva agreement expresses that moral collapse in the most poignant way. It includes a willingness to collaborate with PLO propaganda against Israel, a surrender of matters of principle such as Jerusalem and refugees, and especially a waiving of Jewish sovereignty in Israel along with a waiver of our ability to defend ourselves.
Word got around that I was going to vote for Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud. This shocked the people who knew me as a foot soldier at Peace Now rallies or as an editor and reporter at the Hadashot newspaper during the 1980s and early 1990s... leaving the Left was not so much a matter of choice: I felt suffocated as if I were inside an intellectual gas chamber, I told him, and I just ran for my life. I couldn't survive inside…
After I started studying the nature of the Israeli "Left," its roots, its history, its patterns of action and its ideology, I concluded that a leftist's loyalty is almost completely to a political organization, to a movement. It has been said about European social-democratic parties that they do not recognize the sovereignty of the state, only the sovereignty of the party. That is true of the Israeli Left, too.
Now on the outside looking in, the situation is a little clearer to him:
The word "treason" is unsuitable in the context of various figures on the Left and their actions. It is an issue of an entire elite class turning its back on its nation and country. Yossi Beilin and his people's Geneva agreement expresses that moral collapse in the most poignant way. It includes a willingness to collaborate with PLO propaganda against Israel, a surrender of matters of principle such as Jerusalem and refugees, and especially a waiving of Jewish sovereignty in Israel along with a waiver of our ability to defend ourselves.
