The deep dissonance between the competing narratives about Israel – Israel-is-flying-high vs. Israel-is-heading-towards-disaster – was clearly evident this week.
Several news items played into this: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' retrogressive and hostile speech, U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to partially defund UNRWA, dissent over Israel's plan to deport African migrants, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's celebratory visit to India.
The lead item about Israel in the local and global media should have been, in my view, Netanyahu's triumphant visit to India. The splendid embrace of Israel by India significantly boosts Israel's regional and global standing. It is an alliance of enormous strategic importance and a gargantuan counterweight to the pathetic predictions of Israeli diplomatic isolation.
Yet much of the media gave miserly attention to Netanyahu's India coup. Good news stories about Israel's fortunes, or those that highlight Netanyahu at his best, apparently are not in vogue.
Instead, journalists and politicians around the world were seized by the 50 percent cut in American funding for the corrupt organization that purposefully perpetuates the Palestinian war against Israel: UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. They played this as some sort of grand humanitarian crisis and a great dislocation that would threaten global peace and security.
They were oblivious to how ridiculous this claim is. The Palestinians receive over $3 billion a year in global aid. What's more, nobody in the world has done much to alleviate the plight of 2 million Syrian refugees, a crisis that is indeed a great dislocation that is rocking multiple counties in Europe and the Middle East and which truly threatens global peace and security.
Western journalists and politicians purposefully played ignorant of the valuable political message signaled by the U.S. aid cut: that Palestinians have to get real about compromise with Israel, and that the U.S. will no longer support an everlasting struggle against Israel anchored in a prism of permanent victimhood.
Belgium certainly didn't get the message. It rushed to raise its contributions to UNRWA to fill some of the shortfall. So much for helping to drive the Palestinians towards political realism.
Then there was Abbas' speech against Washington and against Zionism, a horrid two-hour harangue filled with lies, curses, and racist references, a rant that rolled back three decades of efforts towards Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.
Abbas explicitly denied the Jewish people's indigenous roots in the Land of Israel; asserted thatthe establishment of the State of Israel was a criminal venture and that anybody who helped it rise was guilty of war crimes; and revived classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jews/Zionists poisoning Palestinian wells and drugging Palestinian children. And, of course, he evinced no willingness to compromise with Israel to secure a better future for his people and for ours.
Abbas' tirade was news in Israel but not so much elsewhere. This enormously frustrated Israeli diplomacy professionals, who want the world to recognize that it is Abbas and his fellow old-time PLO rejectionists who are the obstacles to peace, not Netanyahu or Israel.
They correctly pointed out that had Netanyahu given a speech even a fraction of a percent as critical of the Palestinians, as dismissive of Palestinian rights, or as hostile to world leaders, he and Israel would have been excoriated internationally at the highest levels for weeks. Netanyahu would have been tarred-and-feathered in an immediate emergency session of the U.N. Security Council. European foreign ministers would have been tripping over themselves to compete for the coveted title of most-aggressive Netanyahu-basher. Israel would have been convicted of killing the peace process, and sanctions against the country would have followed.
But when Abbas unmasked the depths of Palestinian decrepitude and blew all hopes for a stable peace out of the water, the world was silent.
However, my view is that this is just fine. Israel does not need to draw attention to Abbas' sad dying words. I sense a new maturity on the part of global observers on the relative unimportance of the Palestinian plaint.
In the grander scheme of things, given the changes sweeping across the region and the grave threats to world security (such as the Iranian drive for Middle East hegemony and totalitarian Islamist terror attacks), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is but a sad and manageable problem.
It is terrible that Abbas is blocking any movement towards peace – indeed it is tragic for Israel – but we are all rightfully seized by more urgent challenges, and indeed greater opportunities elsewhere.
Which brings me back to Israel and its relations with India, China, Africa, Central America, North America, and moderate Sunni Arab states. Wise and important actors around the world are beating a path to Netanyahu's doorstep in Jerusalem (yes, in Jerusalem!) seeking opportunities to cooperate with Israel, not to isolate it.
They have come to accept Netanyahu's strategic assertion that Israel is an anchor of sanity and ingenuity in an unruly world. They recognize that Israel should be judged on its central role in promoting regional stability and in advancing globally useful partnerships in the fields of education, democracy, and technology, rather than on failures in peacemaking with intransigent and radicalized Palestinian adversaries.
There is an Israeli grand strategy of sorts, and it has been largely successful. It involves caution, vigilance, patience, and looking over the horizon for new partnerships. It has led to what Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies calls a "year of wonders," with a string of Israeli strategic and diplomatic achievements.
Unfortunately, some progressive activists and politicians prefer to ignore Israel's impressive achievements, and instead promote a narrative of Israeli blemishes and blunders. They are fixated on the rights of Palestinians, despite the objective problems, as well as on the rights of African infiltrators in Israel, of Bedouin in the Negev, of non-Orthodox Jewish religious denominations in Jerusalem, and so on.
All these are serious issues that require attention and responsible policymaking.
But they have become intersectional causes around which some people rally to confront the Israeli government, explicitly threatening that unless the government bends their way, Israel will lose global support and become an "immoral" or "apartheid" state. That approach generally involves gross simplification and misrepresentation of delicate issues, and is an unacceptable way to relate to Israel.
Sober and caring leaders should reject this approach. They should also cheer up, because Israel is worthy and is winning.
