Dermer: Anti-Israel media feeds oldest hate
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer is the personification of Jewish sovereignty. American-born, he made aliyah and served his country, Israel, at the highest levels.
During an interview on the heels of “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” the 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel in May, I asked Dermer what his take was on the international media’s coverage and what he believes the Jewish state got wrong.
“It was pretty bad, and they just played right into the hands of Hamas,” whose strategy “is to essentially not only target our civilians, but embed their own civilians and essentially turn them into human shields,” he said. “They are actually putting their civilians in harm’s way, and what they rely on is either a gullible or malicious international media to then blame Israel for the civilian casualties,”
“And the media went for it,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think it’s not gullibility. I think it’s more malicious. I think it’s an attempt to cast Israel as the evil actor in this equation as a force for evil.”
Dermer said this intentional misinformation is “dangerous for democracies because it can light a tinderbox of anti-Semitism all around the world with this demonization of Israel that has been going on for many years,” he said. “And I think it reached a new crescendo in the latest round in Gaza.”
I asked Dermer what he believes Israel can do to try to do better on the public relations front.
He replied that “the demonization of Jews is a very old problem. And many people believe that if we just educate people about the facts that the Jew-hatred will end. I don’t believe that.”
He added that to a certain extent, “the Holocaust has distorted our view of anti-Semitism.”
He said that since the Shoah is such a “blinding event, [it] blocks out 25 centuries of anti-Semitism that happened before.”
He suggested to anyone yearning to understand the history of anti-Semitism to Google any century “and look at the attacks against Jews in that century, and it’ll shock people.”
Dermer lamented that many people do not know who Bohdan Khmelnytsky is. Khmelnytsky was a ruthless Ukrainian Cossack leader who is thought to have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in the 17th century.
“He’s lost from history,” according to Dermer, because Hitler’s infamy “blinds him out.”
“But we’ve had a lot of Khmelnytskys in our history,” he continued. “We’ve been expelled from countries throughout Europe and in other places around the world, we’ve had pogroms, we’ve had massacres, we’ve had all of this. This is a very old problem.”
“People thought that those decades after the Holocaust were a new normal, but it wasn’t,” he said. “It was just the exception to the rule. And what we have is the demonization of Israel, a return to the norm of anti-Semitism.”
Dermer argued that when people, especially public figures who command large audiences such as late-night TV comedians Trevor Noah or John Oliver, spread lies about Israel and call it an apartheid state or say it is guilty of war crimes, “they are taking a match and throwing it into a powder keg that is 2,500 years old.”
“The difference now is that the Jewish people have a state, the Jewish people have sovereign power,” said Dermer. “We have a shield, we have a refuge, we have a voice and we’re going to use it. As ambassador, I had meetings with scores of ambassadors. I never saw the ambassadors of Babylon, Imperial Rome or the thousand-year Reich. But there is an ambassador of Israel, and fortunately, we have sovereign power, and we have to use that power.”
“Jews have to begin to fight back against their own demonization. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, we learn from history. No one’s going to stand up for us, but I think that the tide is turning, and I hope that we’re going to stand very strong and push back against these forces, and hopefully, win the day,” he said.
Dermer said his proudest achievement was the moment Israel demonstrated its sovereignty to the world when former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to the United States in March 2015 to speak out against the Iran nuclear deal before Congress.
He said Netanyahu’s speech before Congress “gave meaning to Jewish sovereignty” by promoting the fact that “we have the military power to defend ourselves” and “that we have a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution around the world.”
Ellie Cohanim is a broadcast journalist who has served as deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism at the Department of State.
