‘Where is the conscience of World Jewry; why are its voices silent?’
is a question increasingly being posed by many Jews worldwide referring to the daily killings of Palestinian children and other civilians by the indiscriminate air strikes of the IDF. The answer seems to lie in our extraordinary naivety and ignorance as we listen to the weekly exhortations of our (right-wing) rabbis to support every action of the Israeli government. That the Israeli political system has been proved to be endemically corrupt and that those Palestinian children are just as valuable as our own children, has been blocked from our minds as we mentally regurgitate the propaganda that we have been fed over the last decades. As Jews, we supinely listen to a motley assortment of ex government ministers and retired military men sent over by the Israeli government to appeal for money and who reiterate the urgent plight of Israel as she waits to be ‘wiped of the map’. We unthinkingly accept this emotional and political nonsense, as gospel, and discuss it endlessly over the bridge table and at bar-mitzvah parties, not bothering to realise that these killings by the IDF are of real people who bleed as we bleed and who are human, just as we are human. Sharon, Barak and Olmert are, (or were), power-hungry politicians who care not one iota either for the truth or for the value of human life – and we ingenuously still believe that Israel is a beacon of integrity and a ‘light unto the nations’, where human life is sacrosanct. The truth is more mundane yet more sinister: Israeli politicians believe their own misinformation and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the U S ensures that they are allowed to do so.