Controversial Israeli political analyst Professor Efraim Inbar gave nine reasons he believes antisemitism is rife, in an address to an Anti-Defamation Commission event at Beth Weizmann on Sunday.
In a talk titled “Why They Hate Us”, the president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security – and former founding director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies – said accusations of “deicide” and of rejecting the Prophet Mohammed as a deity respectively underpin the antisemitism of Christians and Muslims.
Secondly, he said, “Israel has a unique story not easy to follow or to accept … Jews returning to their homeland … The juxtaposition of our story to the Palestinian story is not always convincing.”
Thirdly, decades after the Holocaust, “feelings of sympathy towards the Jews … are weakening, sometimes replaced in a sick way with sympathy for the Palestinians that are portrayed as the victims of the ‘Israeli-Nazi’ behaviour”.
Fourthly, said Inbar, Europe’s post-colonial guilt has been transferred to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and, fifthly, while “people here in Australia like multiculturalism, we don’t, we are nationalists, we believe one culture is the prevalent culture”.
The sixth factor, he asserted, is the “radical left” with Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and former US president Barack Obama who “was very close to those types of attitudes … and nowadays within the American Democratic party, we see even worse dispositions towards the Jewish State”.
A seventh factor is “the green-red alliance” of Muslims with the left, eighth is the modern European culture that “it’s not nice to use force, while in the Middle East use of force is part and parcel” of strategic relations, he said.
Finally, there are “self-hating Jews … Jews for Justice in Palestine, Jews for Jesus, J Street,” he declared.
Inbar said Hamas rockets are the “price of having a Jewish State”, and Israel has to “mow the grass” – manage rather than solve the Gaza situation. While Hamas remains, the Palestinians will remain divided and strategically weak.
Donald Trump’s anticipated Israeli–Palestinian peace plan will be “born dead”, Inbar said, but “obviously it will be a better deal” than anything during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. Moreover, Trump “is quite a narcissistic figure and we have to stay in good grace with him”.
Australian Jewish News, 31.05.2019
