Perhaps hypocrisy is embodied by Meron Benvenisti, the leftist former deputy mayor of Jerusalem who lives in a plush villa in Herzlia and who said that he “always prefers an Arab village to an Israeli one.”
Or is it embodied by the writer Amos Keinan, who confessed in an interview that he loves Arabs more than Jews? Or by former president Ezer Weizman, who accused the right-wing ‘pirate’ radio station Arutz-7 of endangering air traffic and that if it were up to him he would have knocked off the station with an air raid?
Fifteen years passed without a single aviation accident caused by Arutz-7’s transmissions, and yet Tommy Lapid tells his fellow ministers that their hands would be ‘covered with blood” if Arutz-7 were not taken off the air. But Lapid is an expert in the field of hypocrisy – someone who preaches freedom of speech and expression in all walks of life but has forbidden two of his party’s MKs who participated in the Geneva fiasco to publicly advance their views.
Hypocrisy and distortion of truth have been the main ingredients in the war on Arutz-7 declared by the Israeli Left, which may be down and out among the electorate but still has strongholds in the legal system and the media. But then, misinformation and disinformation are precisely what the Left thrives on, in Israel as elsewhere.
After all, Ehud Barak ran his election campaign with a platform that included the slogan “Jerusalem will always be united under Jewish rule.” After Barak’s Camp David summit with Arafat, Yossi Beilin was asked by an interviewer and why Labor hadn’t told the Israeli voters that the party was willing to cede East Jerusalem to the Arabs, to which he replied, ‘We knew we couldn’t tell the truth.’
The fig leaf that the Left has chosen to cover its undemocratic dark side is “the law.” But, one should ask, exactly what law? Is it the law to legalize Arutz-7 that was passed by the Knesset and revoked by Israel’s top court, which decided that the law was against the law? The Supreme Court came up with the lame excuse that legalizing Arutz-7 would be unfair to -prospective competitors.’ What competitors? Abie Nathan is long dead and gone, though it?s instructive to recall the support his ‘Voice of Peace’ station received from the same Israeli leftists who now have a problem with pirate radio stations.
What “law” is the Left talking about, since it’s is obvious that in Israel there is no Rule of Law, but rather the Rule of Low Politics? The Arutz-7 affair is only the latest example of what happens in a legal system as politicized as Israel?s ? though what makes this especially significant is that it directly involves control of the media, something the Left will attempt to maintain at any cost.
In its relentless struggle to control the flow of information and suppress independent views, the Israeli Left reveals itself in all its hypocrisy and duplicity. Those traits, along with the Left’s delusional and suicidal policy prescriptions, were instrumental in the demise of left-wing parties in the most recent Israeli elections.
The Israeli public deserves to know the facts that the Left tries so hard to conceal. This is why Arutz-7 should never fall. Its existence is good for Israel, for Israeli democracy, and for any truly honest and accountable opposition. Too bad there is none in Israel yet.