What Jewish and Palestinian Terrorists Have in Common with Israel’s Extreme Left

Last week, the attorneys representing the Israeli Jews arrested for the firebombing of a Palestinian home in the village of Duma accused the Shin Bet of torturing their clients. Caroline Glick notes a common thread connecting those echoing such charges and left-wing organizations that promote unverified allegations of purported Israeli wrongdoing:

Those who blithely accuse counter-terror investigators of torturing terror suspects while ignoring evidence and the nature of the crime itself are terror apologists. In behaving as they do, they serve as the moral equivalent of anti-Zionist leftists from Breaking the Silence and its sister groups who libel Israel internationally.

Both groups of terror apologists use anti-Jewish rhetoric to harm the Jewish state. Both groups libel Israel with false allegations of torture that neither would dare to raise against any other country.

The ultimate goal of such groups [as Breaking the Silence] is the destruction of Israel. They seek Israel’s destruction because they believe that Israel is illegitimate and should be replaced by a non-Jewish state of one sort or another.

Unlike their leftist counterparts, terror apologists on the right do not receive foreign funding. They do not direct their actions to international audiences. . . . Their target audience is the Israeli public. They wish to convince the public to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish terrorists by painting them as victims.

But these terrorists are not victims. In their manifesto, the terrorists make clear that they [also] wish to bring about the destruction of Israel. They view terrorism as a means to achieve that aim. One of the consequences of terrorism is that it weakens Israel’s international standing. And in their manifesto, the terrorists say that they seek to use Israel’s “weak points,” including its diplomatic weakness, in order to destroy it.

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right-wing terror apologists are advancing the cause of the terrorists just as surely as Breaking the Silence members advance the cause of Palestinian terrorists when they disseminate their libels about IDF “war crimes” to European and U.S. audiences.