For decades, the Israeli Left has carefully cultivated its image as the fun side of the political divide, so Caroline Glick pointed out in a recent article.
Some might even suggest that the public has been indoctrinated, to believe that the Left is on the side of tomorrow. It is the hometown of optimism. If you want a cheery future, if you want to party all night long and never worry about tomorrow, the opinion-makers have had us believe the Left is the place to be. From the Left's perspective, the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs was the fulfillment of its promise. It was also its key to a permanent cultural monopoly and control of government.
Yet, Israelis who objected to handing control over the country's heartland and capital city to the Palestinian Arabs were nothing more than preachers of gloom and doom, messianic extremists. The Right was angry. The Left was happy. The Right was the party of war. The Left was the party of peace. The Right was suspicious and tribal. The Left was optimistic and international.
The first blows to the Left's otherwise perfect narrative were cast just seven months after the moment of their greatest triumph on the lawn of the White House. On April 6, 1994, the first suicide bomber murdered eight Israelis on a bus in Afula. By that time, the peace process was a year old, the image of the suicide bomber had begun to eclipse the image of the balloon-festooned peace the Left sought to embody. Yet, the Left maintained absolute allegiance to the phony peace process. Quietly but relentlessly, the Left replaced hope for a better future with fear of a terrible future. Leftist leaders began threatening their fellow citizens with national demographic destruction. Using data supplied by the Palestinian Arabs and United Nation based organizations, which inflated the number of Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip by 50 percent and more began to explain the need to continue with the peace process to avoid an encroaching demographic doom. True, transferring land to the Palestinian Arabs had turned out to be a very bad idea. True life had been better and safer before the phony peace process. But, the Left warned, if we didn't retreat to the 1949 armistice lines anyway, Jews would become a minority in our country within 15 years.
It took much longer for the demographic time bomb to be exposed as a dud than for the peace process fantasy to literally explode in our faces. Today, with even the leftist media admitting that Israeli Jews have the highest birthrates in the Western world, it has become difficult to convince Israelis that surrender is necessary on demographic grounds. Indeed, a poll taken by the post-Zionist Geneva Initiative in 2008 showed that 71% of Israelis were not concerned about losing Israel's Jewish majority. The Left's demographic threats began unraveling just before its land surrender doctrine became totally discredited.
The Left’s New Argument
Yet even as its plan of surrendering land was exposed as more idiocy, and its demographic doomsday scenarios were proven wrong, around 2006, the Left began threatening that if Israel does not remove itself from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the US will abandon us. Israel faces two possible futures according to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert( recently indicted on serious corruption charges). It can withdraw or it can resist US pressure. If Israel withdraws, it will relinquish defensible borders and clear the way for the emergence of a terrorist-controlled area threatening all its major population centers. The fact of the matter is that like the peace fantasy and the demographic fantasy, the international-isolation-and-war-with-the-US fantasy is pure nonsense. None of these leftist scenarios - whether rosy or bleak - have ever withstood the slightest scrutiny.
What the Left’s true agenda?
The answer to this last question is as simple as it is deceitful. What the Left truly seeks is not peace or even security. In pushing their land surrender policy in the face of a mountain of evidence that it imperils Israel, leftist ideologues and political leaders are seeking to destroy their ideological rivals on the Right. That is, they wish to destroy religious Zionism, make us disappear, and politically powerless.
It is religious Zionism, which looks to Jerusalem rather than to Tel Aviv, that drives the Left to seek moral and financial support from Israel’s enemies. It is the hope of destroying religious Zionism by destroying the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem - the Jewish nerve center of the country - that keeps the Left focused on destroying a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. They believe that the dispute is between the religious public and the rest of the Israelis." Today more than ever, the Left is committed to convincing the public to adopt their false narrative and understanding of whats best for Israel, but in all honesty, they the Left are not motivated out of love for the land of Israel but to eradicating the ideological and political power of religious Zionism. They the Left will never relinquish their leadership of the Zionist movement to us, isn’t it ironic how rather than becoming united and standing together to meet the challenges awaiting the State of Israel, the Left has made a strategic decision to cooperate with those very organizations who aim to dismantle Israel as the homeland of the Jewish Nation, “peace by peace”.