SHLACH L’CHA 5770
This has been a hard week for Jews throughout the world. Last Monday, the Israel Defense Force boarded 5 of 6 ships—to prevent the shipment of weapons to Hamas—trying to penetrate the Israeli blockade on Gaza with no incident. The ships were diverted to the Israeli port, Ashdod, where their so-called humanitarian cargo would be inspected to make sure there were no weapons, and then taken by land to Gaza. When the 6th ship, The Mavi Marmara, was boarded, all hell broke out. As the videos—available on Utube—shows, the Israeli soldiers—who were carrying paint guns to prevent any harm—were being mercilessly attacked with metal pipes, knives, chains and stun grenades. As one of the Israeli soldiers put it, “They were lynched as soon as they got there.”
This was disturbing enough, but what really got to me was the almost instantaneous and visceral hatred that spewed towards Israel from around the world: Paris, London, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Stockholm, Caracas, Mexico City, Bagdad, Dublin, Oslo, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Tokyo, all over the US and Canada—more than 100 cities worldwide had hateful protests! It reminded me—l’havdeyl—of Kritallnacht in 1938, when anti-Jewish violence “spontaneously” erupted throughout Germany after the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan. It was obviously carefully planned and coordinated—just waiting for any excuse to begin.
The UN immediately convened to condemn Israel and for the 1st time the United States agreed—some friend we have in the White House! North Korea torpedoes a South Korean ship and kills 46 sailors and for more than 2 months the UN refuses to issue a condemnation. Israel kills 9 Islamic extremists in self-defense and the next day it is condemned!
Our Torah portion today contains the story of the spies Moses sent out to report on the Promised Land to the people as they were marching towards it. All of the spies agreed that it was a wonderful land with luscious fruits and great beauty. 10 of the 12 spies, however, made it clear that the Israelites could not conquer it because the inhabitants were too fierce and the cities too well fortified. The Torah calls their report, dibat haaretz, a lot of negative talk about the Land of Israel. This week we have heard a lot of dibat haaretz, negative talk about Israel.
According to the Talmud (Sotah 35a), these 10 spies had always intended to deliver a negative report on the Land of Israel: “Just as their return was with the intention of bringing a negative report, so too was their departure with the same negative intention.” Yet, if the spies’ objective was to tarnish the image of the Land, why did they begin their report by praising its richness? “Said Rabbi Yochanan in the name of Rabbi Meir: ‘any lashon hara which does not open with an item of truth will not be sustained in the end.’” As the commentator Etz Yosef explains, without the bit of truth, “everyone who hears would assume that the spies were liars. For this reason, they included an item of truth at the outset so that the people would believe them.”
As the story of the spies demonstrates, a modest amount of truthful information can make even the largest lie seem credible. The so-called “peace activists” in the flotilla this week proved the efficacy of such tactics as they attempted to break Israel’s just blockade of Gaza.
In August 2005, Israel took a bold step toward peace by withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. While Israel hoped that the Palestinians would use this opportunity to develop their economy, build government institutions and move toward peace, Hamas instead consolidated its control of Gaza and stepped up its attacks on Israel—raining rocket after rocket towards Sderot and Ashkelon. Israel had no choice—if it wanted to protect its citizens—but to launch a major offensive against Hamas to stop the terror. Israel was then forced to restrict the flow of goods to Gaza to humanitarian assistance because Hamas has regularly used dual-use items that can be used for construction, such as pipes and concrete, to build rockets and bunker fortifications.
While the organizers of the flotilla claimed that the participants were peace activists, seeking to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, in reality they were extremists seeking to provoke an international incident. As Greta Berlin, of the Free Gaza movement, stated a week before: “This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege on 1.5 million Palestinians.”
Of course it wasn’t at all about humanitarian relief. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to Ashdod, inspected for military materiel and trucked into Gaza—as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel into Gaza. Israel has already twice intercepted ships laden with Iranian arms destined for Gaza. What country would not try to stop that?
Tragically, this cynical political ploy resulted in the deaths of 9 people. While everyone recognizes the basic truth that Gaza is blockaded, the media fails to report the risks that Hamas poses to the Jewish state and portrays Israel as an ogre persecuting the poor people of Gaza. But the kernel of truth, that a blockade exists and that there are poor people in Gaza, makes the lie—that the people aboard the ship were interested in delivering aid to Gaza, as opposed to provoking Israel—seem plausible.
Question: Why were peace activists—who were warned that they will be boarded if they head towards Israeli territorial waters—armed with knives, iron bars and stun grenades? Why were there 700 passengers on board an aid ship? With fewer people there would be much more room for need goods.
Answer: It was all a setup to embarrass Israel.
The organizers of the flotilla, a fanatic Turkish organization known under the initials IHH and its European partners, had repeatedly and explicitly declared before setting out that their purpose was to break the Gaza siege and embarrass Israel. Israel previously asked the “peace activists” to transmit a letter to captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, who has been in Hamas custody for almost 4 years. But these “peace activists” were not interested in any humanitarian operation. They just wanted to carry out their joint Arab-European propaganda offensive against Israel in order to delegitimize the Jewish state, deepen its isolation and provoke an international outcry…
The Turkish IHH—the so-called “humanitarian organization” actually belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good—labelled by the US as a terrorist organization. A number of the passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara have connections with Global Jihad-affiliated terrorist organizations and were carrying envelopes containing tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Al Jazeera reported that onboard the ships IHH members were chanting an Islamic battle cry calling for the killing of Jews and for martyrdom.
What was this really all about? Why now? To tell the truth, it’s really all about Iran. Iran found the perfect means to sucker the anti-Israel media by creating a diversion—a humanitarian crisis with Israel as the villain. The resulting propaganda-driven riots worldwide would certainly take attention away from the really big story last week…and that was that International Atomic Energy Agency announcement that Iran now possesses more than enough enriched uranium for 2 nuclear warheads.
If you were Iran, sitting in the same seat of power of ancient Persia, what would you do when confronted with new sanctions against your nuclear program? You would sponsor a David-versus-Goliath flotilla—a media extravaganza—carrying a Nobel Peace Prize winner, an American activist, and a Holocaust survivor. Central casting could not have done it better. Iran’s nuclear achievement was buried by the media in the face of the flotilla.
It’s becoming more and more apparent that Iran, Turkey and the Palestinians having been planning an operation to make Israel appear as an aggressor for more than a year…and now was the time to use it. This week, the country Turkey is acting much like its namesake—like a turkey—and not up to its potential. For much of the past 50 years, Turkey was a secular democracy, an ally of Israel. Now Turkey appears to be moving into the bosom of radical Islam.
The majority of the spies that Moses sent to scout the land came back to report that Israel was, “a beautiful land; but that giants lived there and, hence, that the land could not be conquered.” Yet 2 of the 12 spies—Caleb and Joshua—had enough foresight, enough faith, enough trust to plead that Gd would help the people conquer the land in spite of these giants.
My friends, in the face of relentless lies and distortions, let us be like Caleb and Joshua—seeing and pleading the truth where ever we go. May Hashem protect his people and His holy land. Amen!
Rabbi Mark Hillel Kunis
6/5/10
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