© Gali Tibbon / AFP
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a Taglit-Birthright annual event.
The former congressman Brian Baird once said that when you criticize Israel even privately to Israeli officials, they flip out on you, even if you're a congressman; and this is the most important takeaway of the wonderful Birthright walkout that happened yesterday and that is now all over the Jewish press.
A group of five young American Jewish women on their free propaganda trip to Israel kept demanding information about the occupation, and at last left the trip to join a tour of occupied Hebron by the Israeli dissident group Breaking the Silence. And the Israelis went crazy.
The irrational belligerence of the Israeli response to this mild form of dissent by American Jewish women is staggering, and it's
on film.
When Bethany, a dissenter,
announces the walkout on the bus, the Birthright tourguide berates her and the other walkers-out in a disgraceful manner, shouting at them that they are
trying to "bash" Israel and did not come with open minds or clean hearts, they are
tyrants who tried to impose an agenda, and his grandfather fought the Nazis, and
no Palestinian is going to force him out of here. Later he warns the women to be mindful of their security,
their lives could be at stake. When all these young women did, they say calmly, was to ask questions.
And an American member of the Birthright group, who describes himself as a "teacher," taunts the women:
"Just go. Go to Palestine. Because guess what's going to happen. You will get killed. You will get raped."
The Israeli newssite YNet
is offering characterizations of the young Jews as the pawns of "radical" anti-Israel forces, and stating that the non-Zionist group IfNotNow, which encouraged the protest, is an "extreme left" organization. IfNotNow is surely leftleaning, but it does not oppose Zionism outright, and it works earnestly inside a framework of "Jewish values," and Jewish religious practice.
Comment: Russia is reasonable in its suspicions regarding the OPCW.