The continued building of settlements on the West Bank tends to be the focal of Israel bashers. The settlements have been a contentious subject during the tenure of the Obama and Bibi administrations, and international leaders bringing attention to them is frequent. For example, last week John Kerry issued a statement somewhat legitimizing the recent wave of terrorism as a response to their continuation: “And there's been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there's a frustration that is growing.”
Irrespective of how blasphemous it is to suggest that the creation of parks, schools and homes could lead people to stab or run over innocent Jews with credibility, it’s appal-ling and unreasonable how often we hear about the settlers, as if they are the cause of instability in not only Israel, but the entire Middle East.
How can there be a remotely rational comparison between bloodthirsty, violent terror-ists on one hand and people living on disputed territories on the other? No, the settlements are not helpful to the solution in Israel, but it’s faulty to cast them as the propellor that keeps the conflict running. Alan Dershowitz reminds us that the Arabs committed terror attacks in 1949 – 1967 before there ever was a single settlement.
During my college years, Israel bashing weeks were quite common and they still are on many campuses. The central idea at these events is that their attendees are not antisemitic, but anti-zionist or humanitarian. But after a certain point, watching these hostile crowds rally month after month, pontificating about the settlements, it became clear we weren’t just talking about the policies of a small country across Earth. Condemning the settlements became an excuse for acting extreme. Howard Stern observed something similar when discussing Roger Waters’ open letter for the BDS movement: “It looks like you’re a little too consumed with it.” As difficult as it may be to assess bigotry versus free speech, that is perhaps the greatest indicator: the obsession, or the intensity of focus on one specific people or country. Because if the incentive of the BDS movement or other Israeli bashing entities was truly humanitarian, where are the condemnations of the Syrian or Sudanese governments in their human rights violations? Where is the humanitarian outcry over the seven-hundred innocent Arabs who were trampled to death in Mecca just a month ago?
Others are more reasonable and understand Israel is in an existential predicament, and that the settlements are not the cause of the conflict, but they should not be expanded, nevertheless. It’s a valid point—a final decision must be made on these ambiguous lands if there is ever going to be an end to this—but at the same time, if you are going to condemn the Jews for winning wars and making territorial gains, why not also condemn the rest of humanity? The United States, European powers like France and the United Kingdom, the Arab countries, have all had their borders defined by war. Israel is the only country I’ve read about which after seizing land offered to negotiate it right back, but the point remains: by this logic, every single person living on Earth is an ‘occupier’ or a ‘settler,’ or at least a descendant of one. Why do we only globally condemn the Jewish ones and hold rallies to have them vacate?
Let’s be real: the world’s obsession with Israel and the recent wave of repulsive violence has little to do with Israeli settlements in the West Bank or policies regarding the Temple Mount. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach puts it, “Israel is not hated because of its security policies. It’s hated because the world has a 2000-year problem with the Jews.”
