Grapevine November 3, 2023: The war of words

Long before the advent of the Swords of Iron war, Israelis and Palestinians and their respective supporters were waging war on social media platforms, in the corridors of academia, and in city squares in the battle for public opinion. Victory, at the present time, appears to be in the Palestinian court. This is partially because of a tendency to side with the underdog, but more because so many Palestinian children have lost their lives in Israeli air raids on Gaza. This despite Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and to distribute warning notices in Arabic before a raid. The world is not interested in that.

The world’s focus is on the end result – which is fatal.

Although there was much sympathy for Israel in the initial days after the Hamas massacre, that sympathy is rapidly fading as Hamas continues to display photographs of dead children with first-person captions that state the name of the child, the date of birth, the date of death and the question: “Do I deserve to be murdered?”

Israel’s public diplomacy is helpless in the face of a campaign of this kind.

This has prompted the Institute for National Security Studies, in cooperation with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Israel), to launch a podcast series under the title of Fakeland.

Featuring veteran commentator Attila Somfalvi and INSS researcher David Siman-Tov in the first episode, the discussion in Hebrew with English subtitles, centers on the public diplomacy war in which the mind, rather than the body, is the target.

Will Israel lose its allies in South America?

■ ISRAEL IS losing out in South America, where Bolivia, for the second time, has severed ties with Israel over the Gazan death toll, having previously done so in 2019. Colombia and Chile have recalled their ambassadors for consultations and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva tweeted “For the first time we witness a war in which the majority of the dead are children….Stop for the love of God. Stop!” Lula is of course referring to Palestinian children while ignoring the fact that Israeli children were murdered by Hamas and hundreds of young Israeli soldiers aged 19-21 have lost their lives or have been seriously wounded in a war that was not initiated by Israel.

Grief is a two-way street. Both Palestinians and Israelis are mourning their loved ones. When stripped of their religious, ethnic, and national identities, they are all human beings who are attached by bloodlines and emotions to other human beings. The loss of loved ones is painful at any time, but more so when they die unnatural deaths.

Even Israel’s best friends and allies, while supportive of Israel’s right to defend herself, are calling for a ceasefire and for greater humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilian population. So are many Israelis and Jews in the diaspora – not all of whom are on the left of the political pendulum.

Natan Sharansky on October 7

■ IN NEW York last week, as one of the guests of honor at the 10th anniversary gala of Algemeiner’s launch of the list of the 100 most impactful people on Jewish life, Natan Sharansky in reference to the attack on Israel on October 7, recalled the days when it was widely believed that all Jews of the Soviet Union knew about being Jewish was antisemitism. But when he was a student in Moscow, and a dissident and human rights activist campaigning for Jews to be permitted to emigrate, he saw that on Simchat Torah, elderly Jews emerged singing and dancing from the synagogue as they carried a Torah scroll. That in essence, was his introduction to Judaism.

Fast forward to October 2023, and the Hamas assault which a much more Jewishly informed and observant Sharansky perceives as a “wake-up call.”

“We forgot that we should not take the existence of the State of Israel for granted,” he said. “We believed that antisemitism is something Jews of the diaspora keep suffering – of course, we have to help them – but it’s not something about Israel. And definitely pogroms, it’s not part of our history. So we had to learn, and now we are learning how to live again. It’s not the end of history… we have to go through our wars and our battles again.”

Sharansky, who since his arrival in Israel, in February 1986, has founded and led a political party, been a member of Knesset, a government minister, and chairman of the Jewish Agency. He is currently chairman of the American-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism.

Among the other luminaries at the event were Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations Gilad Erdan and world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Sharansky, who is himself a champion chess player, kept himself sane during nine years of solitary confinement in a Soviet prison, by playing chess games in his mind. In 1996, he and Kasparov played an exhibition game in Israel – and Sharansky won.

Tom Nides leaves banking for UJA and Middle East orgs

■ JUST A few days prior to the Senate’s confirmation of Jack Lew as the incoming US ambassador to Israel, his immediate predecessor Tom Nides resigned from his position as vice chairman of Wells Fargo bank after having been on the job for only a month. Nides cut short his posting in Israel because he missed his family who had remained in the US. But apparently, his departure from Israel left such a deep hole in his heart that he could not refrain from once again becoming involved, albeit not in a diplomatic or other US government capacity.

Nides, who was profoundly affected by the events of October 7 and its aftermath, will be working closely with the UJA Federation of New York as well as with several Middle East organizations. Though having left office in July of this year, Nides now feels an obligation to once again turn his attention to the region and to do what he can to help.

Meanwhile, since his departure from Israel Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d’Affaires Stephanie Hallett has been holding the fort, and has earned high praise from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Lew, who will serve as an ambassador for an even shorter period than Nides, bearing in mind the upcoming US presidential elections, is the sixth member of the Jewish faith to serve as US ambassador to Israel after Martin Indyk, Dan Kurtzer, Dan Shapiro, David Friedman, and Nides; and the third after Kurtzer and Friedman to be religiously observant, though Shapiro frequently brought Jewish religious themes into his speeches.

Like Shapiro, Lew speaks Hebrew fluently. He also has relatives in Israel, and will instantly feel at home when taking up his post, despite the very tough time that he has ahead of him.

Public service is a family trait. Lew’s daughter Shoshana is Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Herzog meets with European delegation

■ FOLLOWING NEWS reports of the global spike in antisemitism and fears by French Jews to wear pendants with Jewish symbols, it was heartening in an early morning bus in Jerusalem this week, to see a boy who looked younger than 13, but who had apparently reached that age, donning tefillin (phylacteries), while some of the other passengers were reading the morning prayers from their mobile phones. These are common sights in Israel, but in most of the world, Jews would be terrified to openly practice their faith on public transport.

Among the various visiting delegations with which President Herzog met in recent days was one from the European Jewish Congress led by Haifa-born EJC President Ariel Muzicant, who has lived in Vienna since he was four years old. The delegation shared its concerns about the resurgence of antisemitism in the countries that each member represents, and the president issued a warning that when the Palestinians say from the river to the sea, they mean without any Jews.

”When they demonstrate on campuses against Israel – they mean without Jews. When they criticize Israel for fighting to defend its people and fighting against the most brutal attack that humanity has seen in the last generation – they mean no Jews. This is a fight not only against Israel. It is a fight (by Israel) against antisemites all over the world, and we are here to strengthen our brothers and sisters of Jewish communities all over the world to show solidarity with them, because we are all in this together”.

Fake news on Bnei Brak hospital

■ AN ITEM in Wednesday’s Grapevine column reporting a complaint against Maayan Hayeshua Medical Center that was published in a tweet by MK Ahmad Tibi has been denied by the hospital’s management. The tweet referred to an Arab patient who had allegedly been treated in the hospital’s oncology unit for a year, and who had been refused emergency treatment after suffering the effects of chemotherapy. Sivan Nadav, a spokesperson for Maayan HaYeshua confirmed that the woman had undergone surgery at the hospital and had been treated in the hospital’s gynecology department, but insisted that the rest of the story was fake news.

The woman had been asked to wait while Maayan Hayeshua got in touch with Sheba Medical Center to request that an oncologist come as an external physician, but the patient decided not to wait, and left. Maayan Hayeshua does not have an oncology department, said Nadav, adding that the hospital accepts people of all faiths and ethnicities who are in need of medical care.

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