Sometimes a frog is just a frog

Israel is finding it more difficult than ever to explain the righteousness of its actions to the world. No matter how hard it tries, the world refuses to believe our reasons for keeping Gaza under a blockade for so long. We explain that the Gazans are not suffering from a humanitarian crisis, and that if they are, it is their own doing. But those goyim, feeble-minded as they are, refuse to believe us. We prepare ‏(particularly for our guests from across the sea‏) full companies of soldiers dressed in white, reflecting our desire for peace and our inherent hospitality in the very color of their uniforms. Yet they, through a complete lack of understanding of our noble goals, find reason for condemnation even in that.

	A Palestinian woman hangs laundry outside her house in front of a section of the separation barrier in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank on May 4, 2010.
	Photo by: Reuters

And it is not only with regard to Gaza and the flotilla: The folly of Israel-haters extends into every corner. We explain, simply and clearly, that most of the land in the West Bank is inhabited by our settlers, that they are the pillar of fire advancing before the camp, that the lands were not taken from their owners but are “state lands” − that is, areas that were ours from the beginning, promised to Abraham by God Himself. And if they were not ours from the beginning and were not promised to us by the Almighty, they were purchased from their owners with full payment, with deeds and receipts.

But the goyim, they of little faith, persist in believing what they wish.
We pave roads for the benefit of those who enjoy a higher standard of living under our rule, but they, blockheads that they are, refuse to understand why we must then make those roads unavailable for their use. We build separation fences along the safest, shortest routes available, and they, idolaters that they are, become locked in an idée fixe about segregation and apartheid, as if those terms had ever cropped up in our darkest dreams.

They are not even intelligent enough to understand our most private, intimate lives. Out of a love of cleanliness and order, we separate our white, kosher girls from our less kosher Mizrahi cousins. For generations we have maintained racial purity in matters of marriage, protecting ourselves from every evil, and they, small thinkers, swallow all this chatter fed to them by those who are not even circumcised, while expecting us to hurt the feelings of Israel’s keepers of the faith.

We have always known how to look in the mirror with directness and courage. We must therefore admit that we sometimes appear − to a superficial, naive glance − a bit less attractive than we would like, certainly than we are entitled to look. Still, we wisely explain, with reference to the Brothers Grimm story, that something that looks, on first, distorted glance, like a frog, is to the penetrating eyes of the enchanted princess a prince. But they, with their bottomless hatred of our nation, reinterpret the story to mean that frogs live in this swamp who have never seen a royal palace, but were born in the swamp and will remain there forever.

The writer is a law professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.