In Globe & Mail Column, Anti-Israel Activist Raja Khouri Complains Jews Are “Largely” Silent About Non-Existent Genocide
Raja Khouri, an anti-Israel activist who has been given a regular platform to spew his accusations against Jerusalem by Canadian news media outlets, authored an opinion column in The Globe & Mail on October 10 where he lectures Canadian Jews about the Middle East, all while displaying a remarkable ignorance on the very matter he is pontificating about.
Khouri’s commentary, “As a Palestinian, this is what I wish the Jewish community could hear,” complains that “it pains me that many Jewish organizations have been largely silent about the genocidal acts being done in Gaza in the name of Jews.”
Khouri appears to be entirely unwilling to even entertain the concept that his entire premise – that Israel is carrying out “genocidal acts…in the name of Jews” is complete nonsense. Israel did not target terrorists in Gaza “in the name of Jews;” it did so to protect itself from a murderous and bloodthirsty menace.
Moreover, contra Khouri’s accusations, Jerusalem has taken extensive precautions to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, going far beyond its legal obligations to do so. Predictably, this is entirely ignored in his column, instead preferring to lecture Jews on their apparent inability to see the truth as Khouri believes it to be.
He acknowledges that “it can be hard for a non-Jew to understand the Jewish attachment to Israel; for a Palestinian, it is near-impossible,” before sharing what he has been told, that Israel exists as a safeguard for Jewish life, though lamenting that “redemption for Jews has meant dispossession for us. My people have been paying for the historical antisemitic sins of Europe ever since the Second World War.”
While it is undeniably true that the immediate historical context of Israel’s independence in 1948 was the Holocaust – and the world’s indifference to it – Khouri glosses over a rather important detail, namely that Israel is not simply a haven for Jews, but the reconstituted homeland of the Jewish People, representing some three thousand years of uninterrupted habitation in their historic and ancestral lands.
It is not, as Khouri portrays it, some kind of a consolation prize on the backs of Arabs, who were forced to pay for the sins of the Nazis.
In fact, the Arabs in the region were offered a state of their own in 1947, which they rejected entirely, instead preferring to launch war against Israel in an attempt to annihilate it, seeking to continue Hitler’s genocide against the Jews in the Middle East.
Khouri’s opinion column is ostensibly a request that the Jewish community hear his pain, and listen to his point of view. But in his sanctimonious commentary, Khouri displayed a striking misunderstanding – or misrepresentation – of the Jewish ties to Israel, spread the demonstrably false claims of genocide, and demonstrated none of the open-mindedness that he demands of Jews.
Khouri’s column is not simply a problem in its own right; it is a shameful and continued black mark on The Globe and Mail for displaying little attempt at informing readers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than simply acting as a megaphone, largely for anti-Israel voices.
