Break the Parents Circle of Anti-Israel Hate (Part II)
Israel’s often radically anti-Zionist peace movement is today an “anachronism that no longer has realistic answers to Israel’s problems,” Commentary magazine has noted, something exemplified by the Parents Circle—Family Forum (PCFF). As previously discussed, PCFF’s spokeswoman Robi Damelin recently visited Washington, DC, on a speaking and lobbying tour, yet non-Israelis should critically examine PCFF before offering uninformed support.
PCFF’s claim of promoting reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians, including PCFF members who have all lost relatives to various Arab-Israeli conflicts, masks more nefarious agendas. PCFF’s false ideology consistently proclaims that violence against Israel has resulted not from over a century of Arab/Muslim hatred of Zionism, but rather from Israeli injustices against Palestinians. Accordingly, PCFF always equates Israel’s terror victims and defenders in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with those like terrorists who have sought to harm Israel.
A prime example of this is PCFF’s participation since 2006 in an annual Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony that follows Israel’s national Memorial Day. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has called the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day a “desecration” and “display of bad taste and insensitivity.” Speakers at the ceremony have included Palestinians who have denounced Israel’s “racist regime,” along with Israel’s internationally-renowned author David Grossman, who supports and advises the radical Israeli organization Btselem.
At the ceremony, the leading Israeli leftist Grossman has offered a distorted condemnation of Israel’s “apartheid reality in the occupied territories.” While he has decried a supposed Israeli “cruel indifference to the suffering of others,” nevertheless he still retains a certain sense of realism concerning Israel’s security predicament that is light years away from groups such as PCFF. This initial supporter of Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, in which his son fell fighting in the IDF, has noted that Israelis “need to be strong militarily,” for “Israel is not wanted in the Middle East.”
By contrast, PCFF activities never favor Israeli self-defense. These include the 2014 Peace Square protest in Tel Aviv opposing Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Gaza’s ruling terrorist organization Hamas. PCFF high school events in Tel Aviv and elsewhere have exhorted students to declare that Israelis and Palestinians have the “same level of immorality,” while a 2015 PCFF presentation in Belgium was even more openly anti-Israel. One Palestinian youth there quoted Martin Luther King on intercommunal harmony, while his Israeli companion stated that peace is impossible “as long as one side is occupied, oppressed by the other.”
PCFF only accepts justifications for violence from Palestinians, who are supposedly mere victims of Israeli “occupation.” Thus the Palestinian PCFF spokesman Bassam Aramin said of IDF security forces in the West Bank at a 2015 Denver event that “their goal is to kill our humanity.” PCFF founder Roni Hirshenson, whose IDF paratrooper son a 1995 Islamic Jihad suicide bombing attack killed, has stated that “Palestinian society suffers more on a daily basis” than Israel.
PCFF visits to the ruins of Lifta, a former Arab village on Jerusalem’s western outskirts, similarly promote Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”) propaganda concerning Israel’s 1948 independence war. According to this falsified history, Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians, from whom descend millions of Palestinian “refugees,” who today demand a “right of return” that would demographically destroy Israel. While PCFF claims that Lifta’s “Palestinian inhabitants were expelled,” the village’s actual history reflects the fact that in 1948, Arabs often voluntarily or under their leaders’ directives fled combat zones.
Hirshenson therefore makes no mention of jihadist aggression against Israel, but rather in a false equivalence has stated that Palestinian “parents of a shahid [martyr] over there are like bereaved parents in Israeli society.” While reflecting upon his Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) family background and Israeli imprisonment, Palestinian PCFF spokesman Ali Abu Awwad has declared that Palestinians “have a right to resist Israeli aggression.” While he now advocates nonviolent Palestinian strategies, a PCFF film showing a Palestinian political poster with an assault rifle proves that his beliefs are not universal among Palestinians.
PCFF’s online collection of personal stories from individuals who have lost relatives to Arab-Israeli fighting offers more questionable statements about Israel’s historic struggles for survival. One Palestinian claimed that the “occupation is the reason for the suffering of both nations,” as if Arabs never attacked Israel before it won disputed territories in the 1967 Six Day War. By contrast, one Palestinian anachronistically wrote that the “occupation is what killed my father,” a Jordanian soldier who fell in 1967 when the IDF expelled Jordanian forces from former Palestine Mandateterritories that they had seized in 1948.
One Palestinian woman, meanwhile, indicated how threats to Israel have always extended beyond the Palestinians to the wider Middle East. An IDF airstrike killed her brother in Lebanon in 1982 after he had joined the “Palestinian resistance.” Another Palestinian woman mourned her son, who died when IDF soldiers opened fire upon Palestinian stone-throwers, without mentioning the soldiers’ self-defense rights against possibly deadly attacks.
In contrast, PCFF’s Israeli personal narratives reflect self-criticism, such as the father who lost a son serving in the IDF during Israel’s “sinful” 1982 Lebanon war. Another grieving Israeli father criticized both Israeli and Palestinian leaders for an inability “to end this insane conflict.” Likewise, an Israeli man condemned the Israeli-Palestinian “mutual hatred produced by the crimes we have committed against each other.” He met with the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 2000, even though PLO rocket strikes from Lebanon in 1982 had killed his mother in northern Israel.
Unsurprisingly, the international company PCFF keeps is hardly friendly to Israel. PCFF’s British affiliate counts as patrons the delusional Islamophile Karen Armstrong and imam Usama Hasan, a member of the self-proclaimed Islamic reformers at the Quilliam Foundation, an organization that has repeatedly slandered Israel. PCFF’s German affiliate similarly includes former German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel, a “frequent anti-Israel inciter.” His hostility towards Israel has included apartheid libels and official function invitations to Iranian officials who advocate Israel’s destruction.
Leaders of PCFF’s American affiliate, such as Shiri Ourian, have considerable affiliations with the not-so-pro-Israel leftist organization J Street. Rabbi Shira Milgrom, a member of J Street’s rabbinical cabinet, participated in the first Women’s March on Washington, DC, despite the event’s numerous anti-Semitic ties. Howard Sumka, who moderated Damelin’s Middle East Institute (MEI) panel appearance in Washington, DC, is a member of J Street’s Advisory Council.
Emblematic of J Street, Sumka has tweeted in support of the Iran nuclear deal and denigratedIsrael’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, as a “Florida Republican sheathed in the Israeli flag.” He has opposed on spurious free speech grounds legislation against Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel. Correspondingly, he has tweeted support of Airbnb’s discrimination against Jewish property owners in the disputed territories, stating that “Airbnb is boycotting the settlements, not Israel.”
Sumka’s colleague Oz Benamram is an International Council Member of the New Israel Fund (NIF) that has its own connections to BDS. Founded by Peace Now members, NIF funds numerous leftwing activities in Israel. A speaker at the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony, NIF’s former president for Israel, Eliezer Yaari, once stated that Israeli leftist organizations such as NIF are “representatives of foreign barons.”
Yaari highlights a considerable controversy in Israel noted by Arnold Roth, an Australian-Israeli whose daughter died in the infamous 2001 Hamas bombing of a downtown Jerusalem pizzeria, namely that most PCFF funding is non-Israeli. Indeed, lobbying significantly motivated Damelin’s recent Washington, DC, tour following the cutting of a USAID grant that, PCFF has noted, equaled “approximately one-third of the Parents Circle’s operating budget.” She further observed at MEI that there are “so many organizations looking for the pot of money from the same place,” such as PCFF.
As a 2015 PCFF presentation in Denver demonstrated, Damelin’s emotional appeals for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation excite strong donor enthusiasm. For example, advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi provides PCFF with pro bono marketing. Yet in contrast to such aid from afar, groups such as PCFF affiliated with the BDS movement are completely unrepresentative of Israeli society.
PCFF’s many failings validate the insight of the Middle East Forum’s Israel Victory Project, for which this author has written. Most Palestinians have not abandoned their longstanding jihad against Zionism and Israel’s Jewish state, and therefore PCFF’s one-sided mediation efforts will only indulge self-righteous Palestinian fantasies of continued defiance. True peace with Israel will only come when enough pressure makes Israel’s neighbors admit defeat in their unjust cause to destroy Israel, which is why foreign funding of appeasement groups like PCFF must end.
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