Of Loneliness and a World Gone Mad

The Tel Aviv stock exchange reached its highest level ever immediately after the Passover holiday. Not typically a symptom of country under a seemingly ever-growing cloud of existential threat. And in spite of news that seems to grow more worrying by the day, Israelis and foreigners alike continue to fork over millions for towering apartments in range of ever more powerful missiles from an ever widening array of hostile powers which threaten daily to unleash them. Multinationals continue to invest and to build and though perhaps not in masses, new immigrants arrive daily from prosperous and relatively quiet countries. Rare are the voices that suggest that perhaps Nero is fiddling while Rome burns. And yet, one wonders if even the citizens of Czechoslovakia in 1938 felt the same deep sense of abandonment that many Israelis feel today. Did they feel as deeply misunderstood by a topsy-turvy world in which right is wrong and political expediency (to say nothing of a unquenchable thirst for oil) replaces any semblance of morality? The Jordanian monarch is probably right when he states publicly that Israel is more isolated than North Korea. Why shouldn't this be so in a world in which Libya can chair the UN Human Rights Commission and in which Israel's medical mission to earthquake stricken Haiti can be accused by supposedly reputable people of harvesting organs?

In spite of constant attacks and censures from even those whom we considered to be level-headed friends, most Israelis somehow continue to remain reasonably secure in their footing on the moral high ground. Most of us are not so blind or arrogant as to be unable to admit that perhaps we might have made some mistakes, done some things differently and that tragic errors do occur. At the very least we might have explained ourselves better. Not that any of it would have made much difference in a world which seems to have decided that Israel is guilty no matter what it has or has not done, but it might have made those whose faith has begun to wane believe more strongly in the justice of our cause

This is not a matter of some kind of double standard. Israelis probably wouldn't mind very much being held to a higher standard than the rest of the world. It should be our raison d'être to be "state of the art" in morality as well as in technology and I think we should stop complaining about that. It is or should not be a double standard that troubles us, but the lack of any moral standards at all that contributes to a profound loneliness. True, at times that standard goes to absurd lengths as where building apartments on disputed land somehow becomes more heinous than all of the wonderful human rights accomplishments of some of our neighbors like raping condemned women, to say nothing of condemning them to death for frequently fabricated crimes, or hanging homosexuals or executing heretics for the practice of any religion but that of Islam (and perhaps only one variant of that). Or when atrocities which never happened are reported on page one and retractions, if there are any, may find themselves buried on page 46. Everyone remembers the reports of the Jenin massacre and of the countless other fabricated massacres. Who remembers the subsequent corrections? Probably very few people, since generally they aren't even published.

We have little choice but to continue to do what we believe is right and to build our lives, our land, and our future and to try as far as is humanly possible to so in a manner that will at the very least contribute our own belief in ourselves and the justice of what we are doing here.

Ben Dansker
Vice President, Atid EDI