Tim Butcher wields the knife again

Tim Butcher piously suggests to us today that Israel has few options in dealing with suicide bombers.

He goes to great lengths to inform us that whatever Israel does to fight terror, doesn't succeed.

In doing so, he deftly manages to slip in statements that leave you in little doubt that he thoroughly disapproves of whatever it is that Israel does, from:

forcing the government to try everything in its arsenal, no matter if it brings international criticism.

Israel has tried military crackdowns, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers across the occupied territories with carte blanche to arrest and detain indefinitely any suspected suicide bomber sympathiser. It has paid millions to informers and collaborators.

It built a fence to separate Israel from Palestinian areas, setting up checkpoints and one of the most intrusive regimes of interrogation and searching in the world.

It has tried political pressure, withholding tens of millions of pounds that it owes the Palestinian government to try to coerce it into tackling the bombers.

And it has used diplomacy, persuading the world's major powers to condemn as a terrorist anyone who even condones suicide bombing.

But Tim goes further. He suggests that the success of the suicide attacks are undermining Israel's very raison d'etre.

While the rate of attacks has dropped dramatically since the worst days of the second intifada, this offers little consolation in a country set up to offer safe sanctuary to the world's Jews.

The loss of a single, avoidable Jewish life strikes at the raison d'etre of the Zionist project

What a load of baloney.

Apart from anything else, the raison d'etre of Israel is not to be just a safe haven for Jews. That happens to be one of the side benefits. And there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and their descendants living in Israel today who might just disagree with Tim Butcher's reckoning. Because had they not been able to enter Israel, those people wouldn't be around today.

But more importantly, the raison d'etre for Israel is to restore to Jews the Jewish homeland, in the very country where Jewish laws and traditions were founded, and where today a fully Jewish life can be lived in either a secular or religious way. The vast majority of Jews who live in Israel, and who emigrate there today, are not there because they seek sanctuary, but because they want to live in a country whose rhythms and celebrations are determined by the Jewish bible, the Jewish calendar, Jewish history and the Hebrew language.

This is a concept which Tim Butcher doesn't seem to be able to take on board.

That's not surprising, because, as I've documented before,  Tim Butcher has quite a track record of contempt and animus towards Jewish traditions and Israeli life today.

And something else Tim Butcher doesn't point out is that Israel is like any other democracy in being unable to eliminate the risk of suicide terrorism.

But I doubt we'll see him writing articles in the Daily Telegraph telling us that Islamist suicide terrorists strike at the very raison d'etre of Christian countries like Britain, Spain and the USA.

Comments

[Lisa]

Your punchline is perfect. As they say in America, "You go, Girl! Tell it like it is!"

[Judy]

Thanks, and happy birthday, Lisa. Should you be spending it reading blogs?

[Fisking Central]

"And something else Tim Butcher doesn't point out is that Israel is like any other democracy in being unable to eliminate the risk of suicide terrorism."

The key point for me. Indeed, nowadays it isn't just democracies, but any kind of state at all...

[Lynne]

the use of "zionist project" says it all, doesn't it?

Doubtless, Mr. Butcher is quite unaware that up until the Soviet Union allowed Jews to leave en masse in the early 1990s, more than half of Israel's Jewish population came from Muslim countries, not the European Diaspora.

[Robert]

and where today a fully Jewish life can be lived in either a secular or religious way.

I find this concept very interesting - the notion that one can still give a religious name to a secular life seems an oxymorn at first glance, but clearly has a meaning. I meet many self procalimed "non-practicing muslims" who nevertheless ignore all Five Pillars, for example.

To what extent have our moral compasses been forged int he white heat of religion? It would be interesting to develop this idea further. Or is that not what you mean?

[Fabián]

Judy: very good post. And thanks for the hat tip in Harry's Place.

[Yehudit]

"It built a fence to separate Israel from Palestinian areas, setting up checkpoints and one of the most intrusive regimes of interrogation and searching in the world."

Which has worked very well; it's stopped the vast majority of attacks. Even though there have been a few horrible ones lately, it's still much fewer than before the fance was built.

[judy]

Robert-- The moral and cultural underpinning of every modern society I know of is religious. Very few British or American atheists and agnostics would regard themselves as secular Christians, but they do live by a Christian calendar and a huge part of their core moral values derives directly from Christianity. Eg the secular celebrations of Christmas, assumption of Sunday as a different day from the rest of the week, values of forgiveness and redemption of wrongdoing etc. It's Christianity that holds that the defining element of being religious is whether you "believe in" Jesus, God etc. The Jewish tradition regards practice as the defining element. Secular Jews don't observe the Sabbath as religious Jews do, but they do regard it and live it as a special day, different from the rest of the week. They regard festivals like Passover as theirs to have as a secular holiday. And their moral values derive from the Jewish prophets as well as those of the Enlightenment.

Yehudit-- according to the Israeli press, the recent terrorist attack in Tel Aviv succeeded because the terrorists were able to get through an uncompleted part of the fence.