The intemperate tirades of right wing Israelis and their American friends on news sites and social media make the Gaza war look like an expression of Jewish hatred of Islam, implemented by an invincible Jewish army killing despairing Muslims bunched in crowded neighborhoods. [icopyright one button toolbar]
This is bad for Israel because most young people in far-flung countries get their worldview from mobile phone and tablets. Few do anything beyond that or think deeply to understand the issues at stake.
However unfairly, more than five billion people in some 140 countries are disengaged from the existential threats to Israel. They are indifferent to ancient historical legitimacy claimed by many Israelis, since faith in Jewish and biblical works is not part of their cultures.
They see images of horrifying deaths and destruction during brief TV news broadcasts from a tiny part of the world very distant from theirs. Yet in a globalized world, Israel also needs their sympathy for its self-defense arguments.
Some empathize with the long historical suffering of Jews but most do not emotionally internalize its meaning for the human race. For them, the tyrants who systematically and regularly tortured Jews, including perpetrators of the horrific Shoah, were from far-off peoples and tribes.
The governments of some major developing countries also feel shortchanged when a State whose entire Jewish population is less than size of one of their cities, receives so many more resources from the US and Europe than their much more deprived people.
Israelis and their friends may find it obtuse but for people in most non-Western countries, Islam has greater resonance than admiration of the Jewish heritage and political commitment to a Jewish State. They hate Jihadi terrorists but do not reject Muslims, as do the outbursts of right wing Israelis and their right wing Christian supporters.
In swathes of south, southeast and central Asia, ordinary people may have never met a Jew, whereas they might have generations of Muslim families living down the road from them. Therefore, seeing Muslim families similar to their neighbors dying in Gaza is not easy to stomach especially when accompanied by the asymmetry of destruction between Israel and Gaza .
Many more people around the world have lived for centuries with Muslim neighbors and know much more about Islam on a daily basis than about Jews. Many more have benefited over long periods from trade and shared life styles, knowledge and spirituality with Muslims than Jews.
People of diverse cultures witness Israel’s military actions in real time but are mostly ignorant about the contributions of the Jewish religion to human progress and thought. They may see the Gaza wars as acts of a militarized State against people without a state or nationality.
Even if Washington and the US Congress stand steadfastly behind Israel’s wars, other world leaders may find it harder to withstand pressure from their people upset emotionally by the sight of suffering families in Gaza. Some of those people may themselves kill tens of persons with clubs and knives in local inter-religious riots but the sight of bombs reducing homes to rubble and scattering the body parts of Muslims day after day can be very unsettling.
To some Israelis, such reactions may seem very hypocritical since Islamic Jihadists often kill hundreds of innocent Muslims with brutal savagery. But that is seen as terrorism and may not register in the spectator’s consciousness as war against Muslims as such. Israel’s wars are not against Muslims either but the invective on social media makes it seem so.
Since the prospects are of further wars with the Palestinian resistance, Israeli leaders can no longer avoid contending with the impacts on distant people even as they perform their sworn duty to defend their own.
Perhaps, even Netanyahu needs to go beyond war to rethink how he ensures Israeli security in a global village connected in real-time by social media on smartphones.
Right wing Israeli’s using rough language for comments on news and social media sites should think more carefully about the damage being done to Israel’s soft power by creating misperceptions about Jews in general among the hundreds of million young people around the world who know almost nothing about Jews.
They are not anti-Semites like many hypocritical Europeans but reading those comments on their mobile phones may give them wrong ideas about the fairness and humane kindness of Israeli citizens, and Jews in a broader sense.
This is not irrelevant since the Benyamin Netanyahu regime has turned recognition of Israel as the world’s specifically Jewish State into a central pillar of peace with its enemies.