Home

Public discourse regarding the latest Israeli election, coupled with events in Europe, has made one thing clear: patriotism and racial tolerance are now officially mutually exclusive.

And so it is with Israel's new Knesset power broker, MK Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman's party, Israel Beiteinu, increased its Knesset seats in this year's parliamentary elections to 15, making it the third largest party in the upcoming Knesset. Coupled with Labor's slide to 13 seats, Lieberman held the most influence in Binyamin Netanyahu's and Tzipi Livni's scramble to form a governing coalition (Bibi's Likud won 27 seats; Livni's Kadima won 28).

Lieberman, a Moldovan immigrant, is a difficult figure to pin down politically. He's ferociously secular, and wants the state to allow couples to marry in a civil ceremony, thus circumventing the rabbinic state authority. This idea was inevitably going to attract support after last year's conversion crisis was mishandled by everyone who touched it.

But he's also a hawk on national security, and has no patience for Israeli Arabs who dine with Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists -- and worse, as in the case of former Arab MK Azmi Bishara, who was caught selling state secrets and giving Hezbollah targets at which to fire rockets and other strategic advice. When, in 1949, Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Salah al-Din said "the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the homeland and not as slaves. With a greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the state of Israel," he was talking about a nation of Azmi Bisharas.

Lieberman's campaign platform included a desire to make all Israelis take an oath of loyalty to the state. This, of course, was directed at two groups: Israeli Arabs and Haredi Jews. Because the global media doesn't regard Haredi Jews as human beings, they only concentrated on how the oath would apply to Arabs. In unison, they called this "racist".

Haaretz predictably called Lieberman "racist" and "fascist". One Washington Post editor said Lieberman "advocates harsh discrimination" against Israeli Arabs, and the editorial board called the election a "step backward" for Israel, warning President Barack Obama to stand firm against an Israeli obstructionist government. Also in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria ("Fact-Free Fareed" to those who regularly read his columns) called even Livni's party "right-wing," and questioned instead the loyalty Israeli Jews show toward Israeli Arabs. To back up his point, he quoted... Azmi Bishara.

The N.Y. Times reported that members of all major parties were "furious and afraid" at the prospect of Lieberman being part of the governing coalition or the opposition (in other words, for existing), and quoted a Bar-Ilan University dean saying that anyone who supports Lieberman's party is "simple-minded".

Tri-state area Jewish papers joined the chorus, one editorializing that their issue with Lieberman's platform "is that it is racist". This refrain will sound familiar to any Jews in the tri-state area who expressed support for Sen. John McCain's candidacy in November.

Livni's Kadima party picked up on this, and directly accused Lieberman of racism. Kadima MK Shlomo Molla, an Ethiopian immigrant, explained to the Jerusalem Post just why Lieberman is a racist: "Israel Beiteinu has no Ethiopian candidate on their Knesset list, not even far down the list."

So Lieberman is a racist, and the Israeli voters -- who made him this election's big winner -- are stupid racists, because he wants a loyalty oath and had no Ethiopian running mates?

But Zionism is the Jewish right to self-rule in the Jewish homeland, and loyalty to that concept and its practice should be a no-brainer. In fact, that's what Arabs are protesting: that Lieberman is advocating Zionism. Don't take my word for it; just ask Sheikh Abdullah Nameer Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel. On Lieberman's loyalty oath, Sheikh Abdullah said: "He wants us to say that we're Zionists? We never will be."

New Jersey's Jewish communities are proud pro-Israel activists. They are not stupid, and they are not racist. And they will not be bullied into falling in line like weak-willed sheep. That's the good news.

The bad news is that New York-area Jewish papers will continue to call our Zionists racists, and Israeli newspapers like Haaretz will do the same to Israelis. More than 30 years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood firm in America's opposition to the U.N.'s "Zionism is a form of racism" resolution, and nearly 20 years after President George H.W. Bush had that resolution revoked, Jewish and non-Jewish society have imposed it upon us.

In a rousing speech as the U.N. voted to approve its Zionism equals racism resolution, Moynihan, then the U.S. ambassador, declared: "As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number -- not this time -- and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost."

I don't know if we'll lose this time as well, but let's make sure historians knew we fought.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.