Returning from Britain’s annual Limmud conference—where some 2,500 Jews attended a series of classes and panels on Jewish issues—Ruthie Blum comments on the political attitudes she encountered:
[T]he attitude toward Israel among British Jews is that because they consider themselves to be held accountable in their society for “bad” Israeli behavior, they want Israel to stop engaging in practices that reflect negatively on them. And it is this ill ease above all that shapes their political views. It is thus that they are both affected by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and end up abetting it, albeit unwittingly in most cases.
So deeply rooted is this malaise on their part that a young man attending one of my lectures had the gall to suggest that perhaps Israeli border police should not shoot to kill Palestinians in the act of committing stabbing attacks, but rather aim for their limbs. You know, because dead Arab teenagers don’t look good on the BBC.
The most striking thing about such a shocking suggestion is that it came from someone who was not taking issue with the Israeli soldiers—whose predicament he said he understood—but with how they are portrayed in the anti-Israel press. As though somehow the Jewish state would be given a pass if it adhered to the script of its enemies.
My ultra-emphatic reply to this person, which I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to keep at a reasonable decibel level, was drowned out by the applause in an adjacent room, where a member of Breaking the Silence was accusing his comrades in the IDF of war crimes.
Read more on Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=14837