Ron
Jager, The writer, a 25-year veteran of the I.D.F., served as a field
mental health officer. Prior to retiring in 2005, served as the
Commander of the Central Psychiatric Military Clinic for Reserve
Soldiers at Tel-Hashomer. Since retiring from active duty, he provides
consultancy services to NGOs implementing Psycho trauma and Psycho
education programs to communities in the North and South of Israel. He
is currently a strategic advisor at the Office of the Chief Foreign
Envoy of Judea and Samaria. To contact: medconf@netvision.net.il More from this writer
The "World Happiness Report", released recently, ranked Israel the 11th-happiest country in the world, ahead of the United States,
and far ahead of its neighbors in the region. It was based on data
collected from 156 countries between the years 2010 and 2012.
The
report ranked the happiness of the world’s nations based on a life
evaluation score, measuring several factors, including health, family
and job security, and social factors like political freedom, social
networks and lack of government corruption.
The
index was a collaborative effort between the Vancouver School of
Economics, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the London
School of Economics, and Columbia University. Israel jumped three spots
in the rankings from last year, coming in just behind Australia (10th).
The United States dropped six spots, coming in at 17th.
Israelis,
including Israel’s Arab citizens are much happier when compared to
their neighbors in the Middle East. Jordan ranked 74th in the survey,
Lebanon 97th, and Egypt 130th.
Despite this vote of confidence in Israel’s sustainability, we are witnessing -in Israel- a concerted media campaign that attempts to present Israel in the most undesirable and critical light, seemingly calculated to portray Israel as no less than Hell on earth.
Blatant lies and fabrications
are used to claim that Israelis are emigrating from Israel at an
unprecedented rate, to complain about the deteriorating education
system, about the dearth of health care, about the lack of hope for
young people, about the academic brain-drain, about the spiraling cost
of living and about the soaring prices of real estate.
These prophets of doom are easily dismissed with a brief presentation of hard facts.
The
Israeli economy has been generating new jobs at the rate of 100,000 to
120,000 a year, with the unemployment rate falling to an unprecedented
low last month of 6.1%.
As
far as Israel’s collapsing health system is concerned, it was ranked
4th in the world in efficiency in a Bloomberg ranking, and the OECD has
reported the Israeli health system as one of the best among the
organizations member states.
Life expectancy is among the highest in the world, the number of suicides is among the lowest in the world.
As
for the emigration rate and the imaginary brain-drain, Israel enjoyed
the lowest figure in the past 30 years in 2013 as the emigration rate
fell to an unprecedented level.
So
why has this overall positive situation been transformed into
descriptions of Israel as a horrible and inhabitable place to live?
What are the motivating factors behind this home-produced campaign to
question the success of Israel as a modern state and as the home of the
Jewish nation?
This
calculated and orchestrated campaign of lies can be easily traced to
political parties, ideological NGOs, and media opinion personalities who
all support much of the leftist agenda that has been rejected by the
electoral public in recent years.
They have decided that when the ballots repeatedly refuse to elect the
politicians supporting their leftist agenda, allowing Prime Minister
Netanyahu to be a third term national leader, then blatant lies area
legitimate persuasion tool.
Yet
to better understand their negation of Israel as a modern day success
story, we must look beyond ideology and try to understand this
phenomenon from an introspective analysis.
For
these Jewish brethren, whether homegrown or living abroad, primarily in
the United States, the issue at hand is not that they are not
especially connected to Israel, butthat they are not especially
connected to their own Jewishness. Being Jewish simply does not turn
them on. Being uncomfortable with one's Jewishness and disconnecting the
Jewish nation from her Biblical roots as the Chosen people were
proposed by Jewish intellectuals before Zionism existed as a movement.
The
roots to this century old Jewish in-house conflict can be traced to the
period of the Jewish Enlightenment, a movement among European Jews that
began in the 18th, 19th centuries and has essentially
continued unabated until today, finding expression in the
new-anti-Semitism which doesn’t differentiate between anti-Jewish and
anti-Israel.
Why
is it that these Jews find it so difficult to express support for
Israel? Is it because they confuse supporting Israel with supporting
its official policy That is, if they disagree with Israel's policies,
they find it difficult - even impossible - to express support for Israel
Supporting Israel has become for them a messy and complicated
discourse. For them praising Israel raises too many questions concerning
their own personal Jewish identity and Jewish affiliation.
These
Jewish critics of Israel are not interested in a debate, their aim is
not to engage or interact, but to undermine and demonize.
Their opposition is not open to reason or good will. Their rejection of
a positive narrative about Israel’s sustainable future only intensifies
the geo-strategic reality challenging Israel domestically as well as
internationally, and they couldn’t be happier. The worse the better, and
the better the worse it gets.
Two
seemingly unrelated events that have major implications for the State
of Israel, transpired almost simultaneously recently. They were the
yearly Memorial Day for Yitzchak Rabin and the funeral of HaRav HaGaon
Ovadia Yosef. The sheer number of people that attended Israel’s largest
funeral ever to pay final respect to Israel’s greatest halakhic
authority in modern times put Rabin’s memorial event in proper
perspective as far as the public is concerned.
The
Peace Narrative, having been rejected by the Israeli public, has been
superseded by the Israeli is a lousy place to live narrative. Despite
these efforts of opinion makers to demoralize and weaken the resiliency
of the people of Israel, the Israeli is a lousy place to live narrative
will be rejected in the same manner that the Rabin legacy has lost most
of its publics support.
In
500 years when Israel will be the most emulated nation on the globe, no
one will even remember who Rabin was, but I am sure that HaRav HaGaon
Ovadia Yosef will be quoted and read on a wide scale every day of the
year.
Questioning
Israel’s future sustainability in 2013 will be delegated to historians
who will be baffled to explain this phenomena.
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