Israeli Protests Are a Sign of Tolerance, But the Media and Academics Use Them to Attack Israel

Israel is facing a challenging time. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed a law last week restricting the right of the Supreme Court to annul a government decree on the grounds of “unreasonableness.”

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out, this is a self-inflicted wound with potentially negative economic, political, military, and cultural consequences. Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored the cries coming from his people and, like a typical populist, claimed he had a right to move ahead because he won an electoral majority. Even President Biden’s calls did not help.

I was appalled, however, at how some sectors of the mainstream media, and even some academics and other personalities, treated Israel as a whole — including its courageous civil society.

The New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley wrote that “the protest movement has generally focused on sustaining the status quo of the Jewish state rather than fighting for equal rights for Palestinians.”

Such statements downgrade the value of a protest movement that is trying to prevent the destruction of the Israeli system of checks and balances. The Israeli judiciary has protected minority rights, including for Palestinian citizens of Israel, LGBT Israelis, and others. Such a statement also ignores that in Israeli society, many Jewish citizens deeply care about the Arab minority. Likewise, there are many other channels of Arab-Jewish cooperation.

As the Israel Democracy Institute has asserted, despite existing inequalities, the status of the Arab minorities has gradually improved in terms of standards of living, life expectancy, and education.

Academics Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, Shibley Telhami, and Michael Barnett argue that the opposition of Israeli civil society to Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul “has declined to criticize the occupation.”

That is simply wrong. There is a vital sector in Israeli civil society that opposes the settlements. Likewise, the courts have often protected Palestinian property rights and their rulings rejected the government’s decisions.

Some others, like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, took advantage of the Israeli constitutional crisis to reiterate his advocacy to reduce aid to Israel.

These examples represent a pattern of misrepresentations and misconceptions.

The first misconception is that the Palestinians are not responsible for the failure of the Oslo Accords. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s rejection of multiple peace offers, the increasing domination of Hamas and radical Islamists, and the consequent weakening of the Palestinian Authority (PA) do not seem to factor in for these observers and thinkers.

Secondly, there is a notion that Israel is an oppressive entity that violates Palestinian human rights. Roadblocks, checking points, and raids would not exist if Palestinian terror did not exist. Democratic Spain reacted to the Basque ETA terror attacks with death squads. In reaction to terrorist attacks on its soil, France granted police and intelligence agencies extended powers to search homes, restrict movement, and even close mosques considered radical.

When Israel built a fence to prevent the penetration of terrorists from the West Bank, members of the media and academia chose not to see this as a measure of self-defense, but as an attempt to establish permanent borders or erect a wall comparable to the Berlin Wall.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in the face of the PA’s inability to reach a peace agreement. Subsequently, Israel proceeded to dismantle its towns and settlements in the Strip.

However, two years later, Hamas violently removed the PA from Gaza. Since then, Hamas and other terrorist organizations have launched countless bombardments on Israeli populations, and murdered Israeli civilians, including women and children.

Such a scenario created a new distortion where Gaza is viewed as an “open-air prison,” without pondering that perhaps access to Gaza was restricted by both Israel and Egypt precisely because of Hamas’ terrorist activities.

Likewise, Paul Pillar, a former CIA operative and a non-resident Senior Fellow at Georgetown University, argues that Israel is more hostile to Iran rather than the other way around. The fact that Iran continues to support terror targeting Israel, or that Iran threatens it with nuclear genocide, is clearly not an issue for Pillar. Again, the principle of self-defense and preventive action is dismissed — but only, of course, when it comes to Israel.

The Gaza experience taught Israel that, for the time being, a withdrawal from the West Bank does not guarantee Israel’s security — and may in fact do the opposite. Therefore, Israel’s presence in some of these areas is a no-choice situation, even if we discount those Israeli messianic sectors that wish to expand settlements and annex the West Bank.

The last terrorist attacks organized from Jenin confirm that anti-Israel hostility in the West Bank is very much alive and aided by a systematic anti-Israel propaganda spread by the Palestinian Authority itself, and fueled by the Palestinian government paying salaries to terrorists who murder Israeli civilians.

Furthermore, there are voices in academia that support a one-state solution, meaning Israel should give full citizenship to West Bank Palestinians — and cease to exist as a Jewish state.

The notion that two nations in a hostile relationship can co-exist under one state is as naive as it is absurd. Such a solution is a formula for bloody civil war.

Furthermore, several academic organizations, most recently the American Anthropological Association (AAA), adopted a resolution boycotting Israeli academic institutions. The AAA accepted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s dogmatic narrative of Israel, which holds that the problem is not the Israeli government or a sector of the country — but rather that the entire state and civil society institutions are oppressive, and as such, they should be eradicated. Such a view does not recognize the independent and liberal role of Israeli courts and academia. The AAA’s resolution repudiates Israel altogether.

As I have argued previously, Israeli civil society has become a role model in defense of a globally declining liberal democracy. However, even those expressions of democracy have been twisted, further contributing to a cumulatively false consensus around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus exacerbating already existing antisemitic sentiments.

Luis Fleischman, PhD, is co-founder of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy & Policy Research, professor of Social Sciences at Palm Beach State College, and the author of the book “The Middle East Riddle: A Study of the Middle East Peace Process and Israeli-Arab Relations in Changing Times.” He is a longtime member of the Academic Engagement Network, a national organization that mobilizes university faculty and administrators to counter antisemitism, oppose the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities, promote academic freedom, and advance education about Israel. 

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