By Bradley Burston
I'd like to talk about this problem I have. You can't talk about it to just anyone. Friends of mine have it too. But you'll never see this one on Dr. Phil.
I don't care how big the self-help section is in your Borders or Waterstones, you're not going to find it there either.
It kicks in when you least expect it. And kicks is the word. Let's try to give it a name. Leftists who love Israel. And who feel – or are made to feel - like leftists who love Israel too much.
By leftists, I am including people who may describe themselves, or, without coming out to others, may know themselves to be, doves, peace activists, social democrats, Democrats, disenchanted former Meretz voters, disenchanted former Labor voters, disenchanted longtime non-voters, human rights activists, vegans, activist moderates, the ostracized Orthodox Jew, the ostracized Protestant, the broad-view Catholic, the proactive pro-social justice moderate, the anti-neocon, the girl or guy you just passed on the street in Israel. Me. You.
There was a time when this grouping represented little more than an intensely interested but effectively disenfranchised buffer between the pro-occupation right whipping Israel along the road that leads straight off a cliff, and the detest-Israel's-guts-as-a-philosophy-of-life extreme left, which sought to see the Jewish state, pretty much any Jewish state, go out of existence in any event.
No more. The success of the former, aided and abetted by the excess of the latter, has made the abyss all too tangible up ahead. These days, whether they believe it or not, leftists who love Israel are one of the nation's only hopes for survival.
If there's a rescue squad out there, these people are it.
Not coincidentally, this is the group most likely to become the target of the contempt and thus the very public venom of extremists on the far-right and the far-left, working in unacknowledged but full concert, keen to neutralize people they see as spineless, bloodless sell-outs.
They're warming up even as we speak – you're about to meet them at the bottom of this page, and every other. You'll know them by the foam at the mouth, and by their characteristic incontinence of reason.
