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Sanchez is a third-year economics student.

By Armando Sanchez

The most fortunate thing about the submission, “Enough is enough: truth about Israeli conflict must be told,” (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, May 29) by Ben Shapiro is that he immediately alerted his readers not to expect a balanced analysis by initially declaring his intention to present only one side of the story. Indeed, he introduced his piece with the particularly bold rejection of objectivity by declaring that there literally is no truth outside of his own position, a rather remarkable approach if one expects to be taken seriously.

From that point on, the reader expects, and is duly subjected to, the standard 53-year-old rant against the indigenous people of Palestine and any who object to their dispossession.

There is little worth responding to in this regurgitation of Zionist propaganda. The most interesting aspect about it, is how even young generations of Israeli loyalists in America like Ben Shapiro continue to suspend the intellectual integrity and independence normally associated with youth in order to parrot such outdated and repudiated notions about the Zionist state which are even largely obsolete inside Israel itself.

Zionists of the sort represented by Shapiro, including their oblivious and fanatically programmed grist for the settlements are, in fact, rather disliked in Israel as extremists. They are not really suitable for internal Israeli society which would prefer to disassociate their peculiar country from the ultra-orthodox religious rhetoric of the likes of Meir Kahane and his reality-challenged ilk, and would rather adopt the western European nation-state model favored by Israel’s European Jewish founders, mostly secularists.

As mentioned, there is little need to respond to the specific claims in Shapiro’s submission; the lack of substantiation, as well as the initial declaration of bias sufficiently discredits his piece.

Odd and academically ludicrous references to “the betrayal of the Jews” reveal Shapiro’s unselfconscious ideological underpinnings. He refers to broadcasts by “Arab radio stations” without naming them or a single source. He quotes an obscure Lebanese newspaper in New York, citing only the year in which the provided quote is supposed to have appeared, perhaps because it was an unresearched reference discovered in all likelihood while hurriedly surfing the Internet to become an expert on the history of the Middle East.

The most striking features of Shapiro’s submission are both its intellectual frailty, and in contrast, how thoroughly he himself appears to be convinced by it; indicative always of deep indoctrination.

Of course the necessary sense of entitlement is present throughout, being the fundamental characteristic of Zionism itself. For example he states that “the nations of the world saw that the Jews needed the homeland that God had promised them millennia before.” Shapiro also writes with the ingrained feeling of Israeli infallibility as well, especially when he refers to USAC’s discussion of a resolution condemning Zionism and Israel.

Shapiro writes, “That resolution shouldn’t have had to be voted down; it should have been immediately struck from the agenda.” I guess Israel must be beyond scrutiny.

It is worth noting that Shapiro does not in fact refute that the Palestinian population is indigenous, and was dispossessed of their land.

It apparently does not occur to him that this dispossession should actually be regarded as offensive since the Palestinians are in his view interchangeable with any other Arab peoples, without a unique cultural identity or connection to their historical homeland. According to Shapiro, “they were identical to the Arabs of neighboring states.”

I guess because they are identical, they therefore could be transferred at will to accommodate the immigrant Jewish population, who incidentally shared no common characteristics with any other people in the region – not culture, nor language nor religion.

This is the most telling aspect of most Zionist propaganda; it very often confesses the brutal truth of the theft of Palestine, quite simply because the level of indoctrination is such that it does not appear, to the Zionist, to be a confession.