T he front page of last Friday’s Jerusalem Post had no fewer than four headlines about Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely’s allegedly “offensive” remarks about American Jewry and a front-page picture of IDF lone soldiers from North America with a sarcastic caption reading “What would Tzipi Hotovely say about these IDF soldiers from North America?” “There is no place for such attacks and her remarks do not reflect the position of the State of Israel” harrumphed Prime Minister Netanyahu who was said to be mulling whether to fire Hotovely.
Hotovely I assumed must really have said something both tactless and stupid. Yet when I read her actual responses to a television interviewer I could not find anything exceptionable about what she’d said. She pointed out that American Jews often fail to understand the “complexity of the region” in which Israel exists. For one thing they do not by and large share the experience of sending their children to the military — whether the Israeli army or the American. And they have not lived under the constant threat of missile fire from both north and south or of terrorist attacks.
Far from being wild Hotovely’s statements were virtually inarguable. Not one of those vociferously protesting her insult to Diaspora Jewry made any sort of substantive refutation. The only halfway sensible criticism was that of Herb Keinon the Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic reporter who wrote that it was a mistake for her to have played into anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews being underrepresented in the American military when it was irrelevant to her major point that contemporary American Jews have little understanding of the exigencies of military combat or of life under siege.
Indeed I would go further than Hotovely. Not only do most American Jews fail to understand the circumstances in which their fellow Jews in Israel live they have also made little effort to do so. Worse still they give no benefit of the doubt to Israeli Jews when the latter are portrayed as militaristic warmongers by left-wing propagandists around the world.
