Henning van den Akker

Heel teleurgesteld over @pauwendewit.

Ruim in godsnaam @DilanYesilgoz en @rubenbrekelmans op. Zij zijn verantwoordelijk voor de politieke impasse. Nederland verdient nieuwe gezichten die positief en constructief werken aan oplossingen. Sinds Yesilgöz de deur voor Wilders opende, gijzelt de VVD de politiek.

Er zijn nog steeds mensen die bij kritiek op het terrorisme van de staat Israël met modder gaan gooien.

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I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on. I believed it. I repeated it. For years. Then I moved to France. And I met Jews. Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth. What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration. Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not. I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door. I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people. Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it. That difference is not incidental. It is the point. The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination. Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open. The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them. When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value. I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation. It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own. I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition… Read the rest of the essay on my Facebook page.