No wonder 'the World is against us'
If you're trying to figure out why 'the World is against us,' one place you might want to start is Midwest Consul General Orli Gil. We were therefore not surprised with the delivery of the diplomat who addressed us. She was Orli Gil, Israel Consul General for the Midwest based in Chicago. Ms. Gil was well spoken and had a list of diplomatic credentials attained over the years. She also had a history of appearing at gatherings sponsored by such organizations as listed above.I have written many times before about how Israel's Foreign Ministry is teeming with Leftists who support the 'Palestinian' narrative who are left over from the days of Shlomo Ben Ami, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni. I just wanted to let you know that the Lieberman - Ayalon Foreign Ministry has had little success in getting rid of them. Aren't you glad that union rules (yes, really) prohibit firing them?
She assumed her post as Israeli Consul General to the Midwest region in July 2008 and is a career diplomat who has served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 22 years. Ms. Gil holds a BA in English and Hebrew Literature from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – hardly an education, by the way, directed toward political expertise.
Ms. Gil spoke well enough. Unfortunately, the Israeli Government message that she presented was disappointing, to say the least. It was sometimes difficult to determine whose view was being presented – the Israeli or the Arab.
The terminology used by Ms. Gil was shocking. She had somehow learned to use the pro-Arab version. She spoke of Israel having “conquered” much Arab territory in 1967 and was “occupying” it to this day. She spoke of Israel “giving back” land that Israel had “conquered” and was fully prepared to “give back” more for peace.
Never did she seem to understand and certainly did not verbalize the fact that Israel had simply regained territory that should have been the Jewish Homeland in the first place. Never did she remind the audience that the Jewish claim to the land goes back over 3000 years. Never did she state that there is no genuine legitimate Arab claim to the land and that at no time was there an Arab nation on that land. In fact, the term “Palestinian” always referred to the Jews living there.
Arabs were simply designated as Arabs who had migrated into the area when the Jews began to drain the swamps, make the land habitable, utilized Jewish genius to bolster the entire economy and thus create jobs for these Arab immigrants. They streamed in from Iraq, Egypt, Syria and surrounding areas only because in Palestine and then Israel, they finally had a chance to make a decent living and to obtain the huge benefits of a democratic nation that they do not have in their own Arab countries to this very day.
If Consul General Gil and the entire Israeli diplomatic corps had read, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine published in 1984 book by Joan Peters and describing, in great detail, the origins of the Arab population of Palestine, they would learn these basic facts. These facts have been studiously ignored by an Israel government too obtuse to understand their public relations significance.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: hasbara, Israel's Foreign Ministry, Orli Gil
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:51 PM
8 Comments:
I think I've told you guys before that in 2008, the day after Obama's AIPAC speech, an Israeli consul guy came to a Jewish community event we were having and just coo'd over Obama. And when Obama retracted the stuff that guy liked the next day, no one ever revised the coo'ing. I don't know. We keep reading that Israelis have moved right, but the Israelis and Jews I know are holding multiple dissonant beliefs concurrently. I can't think that any rightward movement is going to last. Eg., I read somewhere that the Orthodox Jews in NY9 are mostly (D)?? So they are like Lieberman? or Dershowitz? Hmmm...
Hi Carl, are you claiming that there were no non-Jewish inhabitants in Mandatory Palestine prior to the rise of Zioinism in Europe in the late 19th Century? Are you also claiming that the Bible is an historical atlas, backed up by independent evidence, rather than a collection of scriptural writings? Are you claiming that no 'Arabs' were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel in 1948? You refer to completely separate Isreali and Arab views, seeming to forget that many 'Arabs' are Israeli.
Viewed from outside, your opiinions seem based on 'facts' unrecognisable to anyone but yourself. It's all very worrying.
I will have to get hold of this Joan Peters book as it seems to express some very odd ideas that you are taking very seriously.
Putsch needed.
Where on earth is MattP getting his information from? What is the source since his questions seem not only hostile, but have very little to do with reality.
I find it very amusing that people who know nothing about other peoples history, for some reason believe they are experts, believe they know more about other peoples history than the very people he obviously dislikes.
Can't Lieberman transfer them to Burkina Faso and Kazakhstan?
MattP101 probably is a student or maybe faculty at a University of California campus. He creates the displays for the MSA anti-apartheid wall that they put up every year. He has memorized the "narrative".
Hi all, no hostility on my behalf. I'm just trying to understand where Carl is coming from. My questions are looking for answers, which noone has yet supplied. My reading has included Israel by Martin Gilbert, Ariel Sharon portrait by Uri Dan, several military histories of the 1948 war and those subsequent. I studied the Arab-Israeli conflict at school. Based on all that I am having trouble tying in this Jewish land claim stuff Carl is arguing, also in seeing it's relevance to what looks like a human rights mess, with Israel's non-Jewish population clearly second best to the majority Jewish group. Give me something persuasive.
One book MattP101 could read to get a picture of the "human rights mess" in the region is "River War" by Winston Churchill in 1898. The current state of Israel was not in existence at the time... slaughter, rape, slave trade, Turkey/Ottomans, Egypt, etc. etc. There probably is a book about the Armenians that I haven't come across yet. You can download it, sync and listen on your iPod here:
http://www.archive.org/details/riverwar_1003_librivox
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