Daniel Levy addresses the UN Security Council. Noa Argamani, the Israeli hostage who was rescued from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last June, addressed the UN Security Council this week. She spoke about being abducted into a “world of torture and humiliation,” where she tried to comfort two small girls who had been dragged with her into the darkness of the Hamas tunnels and where she saw her fellow hostage, Itai Svirsky, brutally murdered.
Her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was dragged into the Gaza Strip with her, remains in captivity. Of the 63 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.
Argamani’s raw testimony was a necessary corrective to the unconscionable indifference in the halls of the United Nations to Israeli suffering, and its shocking embrace of Israel’s genocidal attackers.
Shortly afterward, however, someone else addressed the Security Council. This was Daniel Levy, the British former Israeli peace negotiator and now president of the US/Middle East Project think tank.
Referring to Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the murdered Israeli infant hostages who were buried in Israel in heartbreaking scenes the following day, he said:
A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.
What a breathtakingly vile comment. Hamas terrorists murdered nine month-old Kfir and four year-old Ariel with their bare hands and mutilated their bodies to conceal the crime. How could anyone equate this monstrous depravity with the fate of children in Gaza killed unintentionally in a war to defend Israel against genocide — killed, moreover, because Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields and cannon fodder?
Moreover, the 18,000 figure is merely a claim by Hamas that notoriously makes no distinction between dead civilians and combatants, has reclassified numerous adult fatalities as children and includes as “children” teenagers who serve as Hamas gunmen.
Worse, Levy said all this in front of Argamani herself. As she stared at him, Levy claimed sanctimoniously that it was “important to hear your testimony of an awful experience to which no human should ever be subjected” — and then went on to diminish that experience by equating it with a stream of distortions and unverified Hamas propaganda claims.
He hailed as an equivalent victim Dr. Hassan abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who he said was still being held in detention by the Israelis and mistreated.
The IDF, however, raided that hospital because it was a Hamas hub under the terrorist group’s control. One terrorist arrested there admitted to the IDF that abu Safiyeh had been “orchestrating the terror and Hamas activities within the compound”.
Levy then cited as equivalent to the murdered Bibas children six-year-old Hind Rajab. A year ago, she became a martyred poster child for the anti-Israel crowd — indeed, the “Palestine” UN representative brandished her picture at the Security Council meeting — after it was claimed that the IDF had targeted her family car in Gaza, killing her along with five family members and two medics.
But the IDF said its troops weren’t present near the vehicle or within firing range — while both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad acknowledged that they had been bombing and shooting in the area during the period the car was hit.
Levy, whose father Michael is a prominent British Jewish philanthropist and fundraiser for the Labour Party under both Sir Tony Blair and Sir Keir Starmer, has a long history of defaming and demonising Israel.
He helped found the virulent anti-Zionist group J-street. His think-tank’s website says he’s involved in “work to combat antisemitism and to prevent its misappropriation in ways that silence legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies”.
This seems close to the claim by antisemites that Jews use antisemitism to launder the crimes of Israel.
J-Street and other groups such as IfNotNow, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewish Voices for Peace and B’Tselem are at the forefront of demonising Israel and sanitising the Palestinian Arabs.
But as hostages have returned to Israel, the demonisers’ claims have been shown to be false. Levy said thousands of Palestinians had been starved. But the Gazans ecstatically celebrating the murder of Jews in the grotesque hostage handovers were extremely well-fed. The people who were actually starved were the Israeli hostages they had harboured, several of whom looked like Nazi concentration camp victims.
Far from being wretched and deprived, Hamas terrorists flaunted their sadism with pristine uniforms, bristling weaponry and brand new pick-up trucks in slick and gloating PR spectacles with mobs cheering the murder of Jewish babies.
These are the monsters that Levy and his ilk have been supporting.
Although October 7 and the brutalised reaction to the war that followed have shocked some people out of their previous illusions about poor, oppressed Palestinians, not even the hostage spectacle will make the slightest difference to most supporters of the Palestine cause. That’s because they have signed up to a death cult. And like all cult members, their minds are hermetically sealed against rationality and evidence.
In progressive circles, there is a strong correlation between those who despise Israel and those who want to replace the western nation and its historic culture with universalist institutions and laws. So they cannot tolerate the utterly particular story the Jews tell about themselves based on their unique attachment to the land of Israel.
To square this circle, liberal universalist Jews seek to transform Judaism into their own vision of utopia by claiming anti-Jewish, anti-western ideological fads as Jewish values.
They think they’re doing the right thing — as have so many others who support totalitarian movements.
From the medieval Catholic Inquisition through the French Revolution, Soviet communism and fascist Nazism, as well as under Islam today and historically, brainwashed adherents to bloodthirsty cults have all believed they are perfecting the world.
And tragically, there have always been Jews who turn on fellow Jews. In an essay in Tablet, the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse cited sources estimating that nearly half the members of the American Communist Party of the 1930s and 1940s were Jews, unable to see that Joseph Stalin and his supporters were among the most brutal Jew-destroying “Cossacks” ever known.
As she noted, the regime perfected a use of language today called “Orwellian” that not only camouflaged its evil through innocuous terminology but also justified spying, tyranny and mass murder in the name of“egalitarianism” and “international peace”. The resonance with today is unmistakable.
Of course, other people revolt against their own religions, cultures or countries. Yet with the Jewish haters of Israel and Judaism, this takes on a pathological form. They obsessively seek to expunge Jewish particularism from themselves and the world. The damage they have done is incalculable.
The question, as ever, is how to deal with them. It’s unwise to accuse them of antisemitism or being “self-hating Jews,” which they can brush aside as meaningless insults. It’s more productive to accuse them forensically of propagating lies, being inhuman, promoting injustice and oppression, inciting murderous hatred, supporting oppressors against their victims and endorsing colonialist conquest, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In other words, stop playing defence, go from the back foot onto the front foot and target their Achilles heel — their terror of being found guilty of the very things they claim to oppose as proof of their moral worth.
It’s often said that history shows internal division is lethal to the Jewish people. Certainly, this weakens defense against outside enemies. But far worse is the influence of Jews who have embraced ideas that pose a mortal threat to the Jewish people. This is the greatest danger of all.
They must be robustly and remorselessly called out, fought and defeated.
Israel is fighting for the Jewish nation. It’s high time for diaspora Jews to root out the lethal aberration in their midst that they have so unwisely allowed to grow.
Jewish News Syndicate
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk .
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