Mira Bar Hillel is the Property and Planning Correspondent for London’s Evening Standard. But that’s not why she has written four consecutive opinion pieces attacking Israel in The Independent during this month alone.
You see, Mira is an expatriate Israeli who hates the country of her birth so much that she writes about how she is on the brink of burning her Israeli passport. She has even admitted that she is prejudiced against Jews.
But being able to speak “as a Jew” or “as an Israeli” makes Mira that much more compelling for The Independent, a newspaper that makes little effort to hide its disdain for Israel.
In her latest harangue, Bar Hillel writes about how “As a child growing up in Israel, I saw how Palestinians became increasingly dehumanised.” She begins by imagining how Israeli leaflets dropped on Gaza would look like if they were from the British to the Irish during the height of the troubles between the two:
This really is all about Bar Hillel’s warped imagination and desire to demonize Israel. Israel’s aim is not to bomb Gaza “back to the stone age” and the only time the electricity supply to Gaza has been cut is when Hamas rockets have destroyed power lines that Israeli workers have bravely repaired at great risk to their own lives.
There is only one address that Israel is placing blame and unlike Bar Hillel’s assertion, it is not the civilian population of Gaza. It is quite definitively Hamas.
Despite the fact that Hamas rockets have the ability to kill and injure thousands of Israelis, Bar Hillel states:
They are still little more than toys compared with Israel’s smart bombs and heavy artillery and – yes! – nukes, not to mention the sophisticated anti-rocket devices, sirens and shelters which help protect the Israeli population. But they allow Israel to remain – in its own eyes and those of its blinkered backers – always the victim.
Bar Hillel then reminisces about her childhood growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s in Israel erasing all historical context or the reality of Israel’s precarious situation during its early years of statehood. In those days, the surrounding Arab states made no secret of their desires to destroy Israel and throw the Jews into the sea.
Instead, Bar Hillel claims that Israelis spent their time dehumanizing Arabs. She goes on to minimize and ridicule the very real threats that Israelis faced in those days:
Importantly, back then there were virtually no rockets, no bus explosions, no suicide bombers. But also no respect. The Arabs were not like us, refined Western Jews who went to philharmonic concerts and competed in the Eurovision.
They were dirty, smelly, incomprehensible, mildly dangerous, not to be associated with whatsoever. The ones living in Israel were to shunned. Others would sneak over the border and try to do mischief (the word “terrorism” in its current meaning was only defined by the UN as recently as 2004) and were summarily dealt with by the army.
So cross-border attacks by armed terrorists with guns, knives and grenades are merely “mischief” in Bar Hillel’s eyes and certainly not terrorism because the word had not yet been defined by the UN.
Mira Bar Hillel must have had a very sheltered childhood. She clearly could not see reality back then and she sure can’t see it now.
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