Jews devoted to hurting Jews

We Jews produce many wonderful people. We also produce a uniquely large number of people who devote their lives to hurting their own people. 

The Jewish communists in the Soviet Union who helped the state oppress Jews and suppress Judaism are a well-known example. But in our time, these Jews are legion.

On Thanksgiving Day, I encountered this at the University of Oxford, where I debated, along with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, two virulently anti-Israel spokesmen. One of them was Avi Shlaim, an expatriate Israeli, who has devoted his life to using his professorship at Oxford to promote anti-Israel activism.

The proposition debated at Oxford was: “Hamas is a greater obstacle to peace than Israel.”

Rabbi Boteach and I argued in support of the proposition. Shlaim and his debating partner argued against the proposition. That this proposition was even debated at Oxford is a moral and intellectual scandal. As I asked in my opening remarks: In the 1930s, did the Oxford Union debate the proposition, “Great Britain is a greater obstacle to peace than Nazi Germany”?

Here are some examples of what Shlaim said to hundreds of Oxford students:

“The motion before this house is preposterous because it blames the victim [Hamas] and exonerates the oppressor [Israel].”

 “[Israel] is no longer a democracy. … There is another word to describe the situation — apartheid.”

“These military operations [of Israel] are cruel acts of state terrorism.”

“The Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation, and Hamas is the vanguard of this resistance.”

So, here we have a Jew who grew up in Israel (he was born in Iraq) who uses his high academic position in the U.K. to announce that Hamas is the victim, and the Jewish state — which he regularly labels an apartheid and terrorist state — is the oppressor. He had previously written, “The main threat to regional stability is not Iran,” but Israel; and that “I do believe that Hezbollah has the right to target Israeli civilians.”

Benny Morris, professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the most prominent of Israel’s “New Historians,” who have written highly critical histories of Israel, has rejected Shlaim as a colleague and even as a competent historian. In Morris’ long article on Shlaim in The New Republic (Nov. 28, 2009), he labeled Shlaim’s work “Derisionist History.” 

Another example of a Jew hurting other Jews is Ilan Pappé, a professor at the University of Exeter in the U.K., where he is director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies. He and Shlaim tour Europe vilifying Israel.

Pappé was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa from 1984 until 2007. In 1996, Pappé joined Hadash, the mostly Arab anti-Zionist Communist Party. According to Pappé, “Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam.”

One of his books is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” and he is a leader in the European movement to boycott Israeli universities and academics. In July 2014, he wrote in a piece titled “Israel’s Incremental Genocide in the Gaza Ghetto,” published by the violent Islamist website The Electronic Intifada:

“I feel the urge today to make a pledge to you, which none of the Germans my father knew during the time of the Nazi regime was willing to make to him when the thugs committed genocide against his family. This is what I can pledge — to work to prevent the next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Norman Finkelstein, another child of Holocaust survivors, is a supporter of Hezbollah and was described by a leading liberal writer, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic for 30 years until last week, as “poison: a disgusting self-hating Jew.” In a documentary film made about him, Finkelstein is shown at a 1982 rally in front of the Israeli consulate in New York carrying a poster urging “Israeli Nazis” to “stop the Holocaust in Lebanon.” 

In his book, “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” (2000), Finkelstein wrote, “A handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe [and] divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians.”

Finkelstein explains in the aforementioned documentary film, “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” that he inherited his temperament from his mother, Maryla Husyt Finkelstein. Both Maryla and Finkelstein’s father, Zacharias, were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of concentration camps. His father was interned in Auschwitz, his mother in Majdanek. 

According to the documentary, even Finkelstein’s mother, whose “emotional investment in left-wing humanitarian causes [bordered on] hysteria … came to feel he had taken her too literally and become a ‘Frankenstein’s monster.’ ” 

Then there is Hedy Epstein.

It’s not often that one singles out a 90-year-old woman as a villain, but Epstein has used her status as a Holocaust survivor to do whatever she can to harm Israel. This past summer she was in Gaza accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians. She also has organized petition drives to obtain the signatures of other Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren on petitions denouncing Israel for committing genocide, a libel on the level of the infamous blood libel of medieval history.

These are only four of the many Jews who devote their lives to helping those who wish to destroy Israel. What makes these useful idiots of the Jew-haters tick?

Well, these four all have something in common — they or their parents have suffered at the hands of Jew-haters — in three instances the Nazis, in the fourth Muslim Jew-haters (in Iraq, which Shlaim’s family fled when he was 5 years old).

I am convinced that many Jews who hate Israel subconsciously believe that if they side with the Jew-haters, they will be spared if the Jew-haters win. Or, if you will, it is a form of the Stockholm syndrome. 

Finally, they believe they will show the world that whereas almost no Germans spoke up against the Nazis during the Holocaust, they will speak up against the Jews in the Palestinians’ “genocide.”

They are, in a word, sick. 

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host (AM 870 in Los Angeles) and founder of PragerUniversity.com. His latest book is the New York Times best-seller “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph” (HarperCollins, 2012).