The World is Sick of Israel and its Insanities: Not Showing Much Interest in Israel's Three Missing Teens

A fifteen-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed was killed by Israeli soldiers during their search of the West Bank
for missing Israeli teenagers. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

Israel is discovering that it’s no longer the center of attention as it always was before.

By Gideon Levy
What a cruel world: Three yeshiva students were kidnapped, and the world isn’t interested; three mothers are crying out, and the world doesn’t answer. It’s all because the entire world is against us; it’s anti-Semitic and hates Israel. The Anti-Defamation League is already preparing a report. But the truth is, that’s just the way things are: When you openly thumb your nose at the world for years on end, eventually, it thumbs its nose back.

The three mothers went all the way to Geneva. One of them went abroad for the first time in her life to go to the United Nations Human Rights Council. But the world, and the council, went on their merry ways. It’s the irony of fate: About two years ago, Israel officially suspended cooperation with that council; together with the Marshall Islands, Palau and the U.S., it opposed the council’s very establishment. But now, in its distress and the mothers’ distress, it has turned to the council, which is indeed hostile to Israel and spends more time on it than on any other country. Suddenly, Israel needs the world. It even needs the UN, which all of a sudden isn’t the worthless body Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once termed it.

Missing Israeli teenagers found dead. They were kidnapped in the West Bank.

It takes considerable effrontery to demand that the world interests itself in the fate of three abducted Israelis, and considerable chutzpah to be disappointed by the fact that it has kept silent. Granted, Israel tried to move heaven and earth, and its ambassador/propagandist at the UN gave a moving speech in an effort to scrape up a few more public diplomacy points against Hamas. But once it was paying attention already, that bizarre world was more interested in the campaign of collective punishment imposed on thousands of West Bank residents after the kidnapping.

That’s the way things are with the world-that’s-entirely-against-us: It’s more interested in the half-century-old occupation; it’s more upset over the fate of three million Palestinians than the fate of three Israelis. The world has no lack of kidnapping victims, but none of them ever got the attention received by kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. With the three current kidnap victims, however, Israel no longer had a chance. Over the last two weeks, which I spent in Sweden, I didn’t run across a single mention of the abduction in the media. Not one.

That’s what rotten fruit looks like. The world has no reason be more interested in the fate of Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrah and Gilad Shaar than it is in the fate of their age mate Mohammed Dudin, a boy of 15 who was killed by live fire from Israeli soldiers in Dura last Friday.

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