#1096 1/23/22 – Unique Acceptance of Jews in America No Substitute for American Jews’ Resolute Support of Jewish State

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  America is unique in its acceptance of American Jews as part of the American people.  But we must recognize that this attitude did not extend, e.g., to European Jews during the Holocaust and does not today to an Israel including the defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland or most Jewishly meaningful historic Jerusalem.  We comfortable American Jews must stand by Israel in its unwillingness to surrender this heart of our people’s homeland.

Unique Acceptance of Jews in America No Substitute for American Jews’ Resolute Support of Jewish State

Lee and I were asked, in the Q&A following our “Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talk to a Christian group, “Do American Jews regard America as exceptional?”  We replied that our people has an institutional memory extending back three millennia, and that we regard America as unique in its reception of us as embraced within the American people.

That is not to say, of course, that anti-Semitism hasn’t and doesn’t exist in America, but nowhere else have we been as securely safe and included.  But we must recognize that this acceptance has not extended as broadly to our people beyond America’s borders.

Over the course of centuries past, majorities of our people lived as perpetually-persecuted homeland-less outsiders in Christian Europe – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom, all designed expressly for us – and as persecuted dhimmis in Muslim lands.

This changed in our own time when Jews in Palestine rebuilt a viable state, homeland army and all; rescued and brought home against the will of the British the Holocaust’s survivors; achieved against the will of the Arabs our homeland’s sovereign rebirth and then liberated historic Jerusalem and the land of Israel’s defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland; brought home the dhimmi Jews of Muslim lands, and are today merging these Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish streams into a non-white, non-European homeland Jewish people.

It is incumbent upon us relatively safe, secure, comfortable American Jews not to join with most of the world in telling Israelis to walk out of and hand over Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem to “the Palestinians” who’ve never ruled any of it, but are the majority population of 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan.

There are two reasons why it’s incumbent upon us American Jews to “stand by” Israel, as Ben-Gurion put it, in fulfillment of the dream of generations for its sovereign redemption.  One is that we Jews, not Arabs, are the land of Israel’s indigenous people (see, e.g., Tobin in JNS Friday, What Those Who Accept the ‘Stolen Land’ Myth Don’t Understand – “Jews Are indigenous in Israel”) which we never physically abandoned, and in which today’s Israel is its next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.  The second reason is that America, unique as it has been in accepting us American Jews, during the Holocaust aligned with Britain in conscious inaction on rescue of European Jews barred by Britain’s 1939 White Paper from reaching homeland haven in Israel, and even today supports dismembering from Israel Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.

America During WWII and the Holocaust

Toward the end of his moving biography of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk devoted a few pages (153-159) to America’s knowing inaction in saving Europe’s Jews, blocked by Britain’s 1939 White Paper from entering Palestine, during the Holocaust.

*  As late as 1938 the Germans were trying to expel Jews, but “with the strong support of the Americans, the British put pressure on the European countries, even threatening them, not to allow the Jews sent by Eichmann to enter their borders.”

*  “A State Department document openly states that if numerous Jews were rescued, it would not be possible to solve the problem of placing them after the war…. Such statements were open to only one possible interpretation: the two great democracies, the United States and Great Britain, were, in the words of an official of the American Treasury Department, ‘deeply commited not to save the Jews.’”

*  “Conferences like the one in Bermuda were convened with the goal of killing time and prolonging inaction…. The Anglo-American commitment not to save the Jews turned into an active campaign and was conducted with the clear knowledge that it had sympathizers.”

*  While the Allies parachuted food to non-Jewish Poles, they would not do that for Jews starving to death in ghettos, because “the American government claimed that such an act would violate the order prohibiting any aid whatsoever to enemy citizens.”

*  In the summer of 1944, “when the British, American, and Russian governments already knew full well what was going on,” the Americans and British still refused to bomb the death camp gas installations, or the railroad tracks and rail bridges leading to the camps, claiming the sites were too far from the Allied bombers’ bases in England.  After the war it became clear that Europe-based Allied bombers “flew over Auschwitz and attacked the refineries and manufacturing factories near and inside the area of Auschwitz.”

*  In 1943-44, “the Allies put pressure on neutral governments not to accept Jews into their borders, claiming that they were enemy subjects and this would alter their status of neutrality.”

During the Jews’ Post-War Struggle Against the British and Arabs

After the War, the British blockade against Jewish immigration and weapons for the Jewish army continued, accompanied by British seizure of Jewish arms British soldiers could find.  America refused to sell arms to the homeland’s Jews and actively worked against American Jews sending “farm machinery” to Palestine.  One of every hundred homeland Jews died in its inadequately armed War of Independence.

Today

Here’s what it says in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted 14-0-1 with U.S. abstention if not more, in 2016 in the Obama administration’s way out the door.  The Security Council

“[1]  Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;

“[2]  Reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard;

“[3]  Underlines that it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations; ….”  [emphasis added, a trifle]

This flies in the face of the Palestine Mandate and of continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for three thousand years.

I received an email this week ostensibly from President Biden.  It began, “Dear Mr. Verlin, Thank you for writing to me about the conflict in the Middle East.”  I don’t remember having so written, but what concerned me most was how the President’s letter ended:  “I am committed to working toward a two-state solution.”   I’m of course not.  And, given America’s abstention if not more on UNSC 2334, you should not be either.