A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
Burg Article

Last month, Labor Party Knesset member Avraham Burg wrote a column in Yediot Aharonot that was sharply critical of Israel. The piece, which was then translated into English and published in the Forward, under the headline 'A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent,' claims, in part, as follows:

"The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly...

"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated...

"Israel's current prime minister personally embodies ... suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law — combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead."

Yesterday, the viciously anti-Israel Guardian reprinted the article, this time with the headline 'The end of Zionism: Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy.'

Today, the article appeared in Arab News, a Saudi paper and in the Jordan Times.

Burg has a right to express his views (though they have moved to the extreme left from his previously more mainstream leftist positions and though they have a tone of self-hatred). But I have a big problem with a member of Israel's opposition marketing his column to newspapers opposed to Israel's existence. It's one thing to be sharply critical of Israel in an Israeli paper and a Jewish weekly in the U.S. I think doing so in Saudi Arabia and Jordan is incitement against Israel, while placing the column in the Guardian will be seen as a moral defense of that paper's venom toward Israel.
posted on 9/16/2003