Intellectuals generally inhabit ivory towers isolating them from tough realities. These used to protect them from the sound and fury of the madding crowd, insulating them from the dangerous partisanships of dogmatic faith, religious or secular. But ever since intellectuals assumed the mantle of their nation’s conscience, their isolation from life—and their love for abstractions and utopias (which they confuse with reality)—has become dangerous. More so since they have convinced themselves that as the select few who traffic in ideas, their views and judgments, including about politics, are informed by a higher wisdom, when in fact they often only defy common sense and are marred by a terrible naiveté.

A recent debate in London on a motion asserting that “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews” saw radical Israeli leftists and their fellow intellectuals leading the attack, illustrating the infection of many intellectuals with nihilistic post-modernism and neo-Marxist fantasies. Many intellectuals perversely criticize nowadays their own countries for failing to observe some abstract utopian notions of ideal justice, while supporting the most horrendous tyrannies, simply because these “represent” an aggrieved third world.

So it is not surprising that many intellectuals have chosen to ignore the genocidal ethnic wars in Africa or in the Balkans and focus exclusively on the least bloody ethnic conflict, the Arab-Israeli one, because Israel has come to represent the West, or America, in their eyes. They have become so obsessed with anti-Israel sentiment, that trying to help the Palestinian people they have actually come to support a Palestinian terrorist regime that in actuality oppresses the Palestinians and harms them in a worse manner than Israel ever would.

To sustain such perversity, intellectuals from Noam Chomsky down resorted to misrepresentations, to denial of fact, even to lying.

Thus Avi Shlaim, a former Israeli and an Oxford “historian”, condemns Zionism by building his case against it beginning with Israel’s 1967 “illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories”. The historian Shlaim omits to mention that murderous Arab attacks on Zionism preceded 1967 by a century, when no settlements existed, and when Zionism, even he admits, was a legitimate liberation movement.

Sneakily ignoring what transpired prior to 1967 helps Shlaim invent a false narrative that in 1967 an expansionist Israel suddenly and capriciously decided to wage a ”savage war against the Palestinian people”. Shlaim does not disclose that it was serious Arab threats to destroy Israel when no Arab lands were to be liberated that caused war to erupt; nor that “occupation” was really a figment of Arab propaganda, because since Oslo most Palestinian Arabs live under the sovereignty of the “Palestinian Authority”. Israel periodically exercises its natural right to defend itself from terrorism by temporarily entering Palestinian territory. But to call this an occupation, and to claim that the “occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 is the underlying problem” is a lie.

Shlaim calls Israeli nationalism “a liability and a moral burden for the liberal segment of the Jewish community”. He even claims that it “explains” anti-Semitism. But he and his “liberal segment” apparently have no qualms supporting a most aggressively jingoistic Arab nationalism or its xenophobia, its oppression of women, children and anyone with less power. He is not bothered that by attacking Israel he helps military dictatorships that have not only fomented massacres, suicide bombings and other atrocities against their own minorities, but have exploited nationalism in order to oppress their own people in the most horrendous ways. In this he follows, of course, the tradition of his intellectual mentors who supported every murderous dictator, from Stalin and Mao to Castro and Arafat.

Shlaim, who as an historian ought to know better, helps peddles the big lie of Arab propaganda about Israel stealing “Palestinian Lands”. This lie took root by being reiterated so often by Arab propaganda and by Israel foolishly failing to challenge it. But the disputed West Bank Territories were never “Palestinian” either by habitation or by private or national ownership. Less than 4% of them were ever occupied by Arabs, or privately owned by them, nor was there ever, historically or legally, a Palestinian entity of any sort with claim to this land. The lands of Palestine as well as all the lands which Arab states, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq occupy, belonged for centuries, until the end of World War I, to the Turkish Empire. They were taken from Turkey in the post-First World War peace agreement. 99% of them were allotted to the Arabs, while the 1% that made up Palestine (including what is now Jordan) was entrusted by international agreement to Britain because it undertook to build there a Jewish national home. It was agreed then that the Jews had an overwhelming claim to this territory. So if anyone has a residual legal claim to the essentially empty government owned West Bank lands, it is the Jews, not the Arabs. The Arabs received their part of the bargain, and some, and now they demand the rest.

We cannot, of course, expect leftists like Shlaim and his “liberal segment”, true believers in an autistic liberation theology, to respect for legal rights. All that counts for them are the “rights” that derive from being an oppressed third world member. They believe these rights justify all the horrors third world rulers have committed, and their own lying on behalf of these rulers.

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