#1100 2/20/22 – CAMERA:  Amnesty Int’l Et Ilk Canards are a Threat to Diaspora Jews; How Are We Responding?

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  CAMERA this week warned that Amnesty Int’l and others’ “apartheid” and other canards, along with unprecedented UN and ICC “investigations” of Israel’s defense against Palestinian Arab attacks, fuel anti-Semitism spreading through the western world. American Jews must contest this, along with UN branding of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, which are neither Israeli-occupied, nor Palestinian, nor distinct territories as comprising “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”   

CAMERA:  Amnesty Int’l Et Ilk Canards are a Threat to Diaspora Jews; How Are We Responding?

CAMERA’s Warning and Our Need To Respond

The fairness-to-Israel media watchdog CAMERA this week warned that the delegitimization-of-Israel efforts of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch pose a greater danger to the Jewish Diaspora than to our people’s homeland of Israel itself.  It concluded its February 16 report Amnesty’s Slander: Why Now?, which placed Amnesty International’s and HRW’s attacks on Israel’s legitimacy in the context of attacks on Israel in the International Court and UN, with this assessment of their effect:

“Israel has faced much more dire attacks on its existence.  It will continue to exist and even thrive, much to the chagrin of the likes of Amnesty’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard and HRW’s Ken Roth.  But at least they can throw fuel on the fire of anti-Semitism spreading through the western world, putting at risk those Jews who do not have an army between them and the anti-Semites.”

While I’m not as sanguine as CAMERA in its dismissal of the danger to Israel itself of Amnesty et ilk’s unjust accusations of Israeli “apartheid” and war crimes against “Palestinians,” such attacking does indeed “throw fuel on the fire of anti-Semitism spreading through the western world.”  And that’s because the western world’s publics link a people’s homeland with its people living both at home and abroad.

American Jews and our institutions address this threat by publicly taking positions on Israel versus “the Palestinians.”  Too many, by me shamefully, express their dissent from Israeli positions and actions by themselves invoking Jewish homeland besmirching pejoratives.  But even the term employed by the United Nations Security Council without dissent – “Occupied Palestinian Territory” – is a triple-decker Ben & Jerry ice cream cone.  Three things that “Occupied Palestinian Territory” is Not are occupied, Palestinian or a territory.

 American Jews’ Joinder in Besmirching Israel

A shocking instance of a super-disturbing segment of American Jews joining in utterly unjustly blasting Israel as engaging in “apartheid” and “suppressing human rights” was chronicled last year in a May 15, 2021, Jerusalem Post article, Rabbinical Students Sign Letter Calling US Jews To Hold Israel Accountable.  It led:

“Dozens of American rabbinical [!] students have issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the ‘violent suppression of human rights’….

“…. The letter is unusual for its stark criticism of Israel and the Jewish community — a community that the signatories will represent upon ordination. It is also a landmark collaboration across American seminaries: Nearly 90 rabbinical students had signed by Friday morning, representing a significant portion of students who are enrolled now in the country’s nonOrthodox rabbinical schools. No students in Orthodox seminaries have signed.”

Don’t kid yourself that these kids were out there all alone in youthfully rebelling against the beliefs of their elders.  In 2019 a shockingly mainstream segment of their elders – ADL, Ameinu, ARZA, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, Israel Policy Forum, MERCAZ USA, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism – addressed an open letter to then President Trump that “strongly urged” him to  support a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for agreed “territorial adjustments” thereto, and to oppose “annexation” by Israel in “the West Bank.”

The leaders of these leading lay and religious American Jewish institutions knew full well that the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire agreement that drew those “1967 borders” had expressly defined them as military ceasefire lines exclusively without prejudice to either side’s border claims.  They knew full well that the term “West Bank” had been invented by Jordan in 1950 to replace the Hebrew-origin names “Judea” and “Samaria” that had been in use for 3,000 years, including by the UN itself in 1947, for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as “Palestine” – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.  They knew full well that applying Israeli law to legitimately Israeli-claimed Judea and Samaria was not “annexation” – defined by Encarta Dictionary [alt T-L-T in Word] as “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity – e.g., a country or state.”  (emphasis added)

What these mainstream American Jews are doing is endorsing world-wide dismissal of any Jewish claim whatever to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.  UNSC 2334, adopted 14-0-1 in 2016, in which the UN 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]

This flies in the face of the Palestine Mandate and of continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for three thousand years.  If American Jews, of all people on Earth, don’t stand by Israel on this, who will?

Three Things “Occupied Palestinian Territory” is Not:  Occupied, Palestinian or a Territory

But even American Jews who support “two-states” without consciously bad-mouthing Israel have to recognize that casting Israeli territorial concessions as not mere relinquishment of territories to which Israel had no legitimate claim, but as meaningful concessions worth reciprocation requires our contesting the UNSC’s branding of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem as “Occupied Palestinian Territory” as creating the Holy Roman Empire of our time.

Not “Occupied” and Not “Palestinian”

“Occupied” territory is territory that belongs to someone else.  During the past three thousand years, three native homeland Jewish states have existed in Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem – Judah, Judaea and today’s Israel.  “The Palestinians” have never ruled any part of any of these places ever.  Foreign Arab dynasties – Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid – ruled most of the time between 636 and 1099, period.  Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.

Not a “Territory”

The land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, is a geographically coherent defensible territory, bounded by the River backed by the Judea-Samaria highland ridge.  By contrast, the 1949 ceasefire line, the “green line” drawn with a green pen, snakes through between where the invading Jordanian and defending Israeli armies by happenstance stood at externally imposed ceasefire time.  It’s existentially perilous on the Israeli side, just nine miles wide in the heavily populated lowland middle dominated by Arab-held hills also dominating the narrow Jerusalem access corridor, and Old City on the Arab side, all literally inviting end-all invasion.  Yet this line would be restored three-quarters of a century later by “two-states along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps.”

What To Do?

I do not think that American Jews who’d blithely have Israel succumb to such a dismemberment adequately appreciate the long courageous Jewish homeland-redeeming struggle that restored its sovereignty in our time after so many centuries of Jewish Diaspora’s mistreatment, to say no more, in Christian and Muslim lands, or the significance to all Jews of historic Jerusalem.

Maybe reading truly gripping first-person accounts of Israel’s sovereign rebirth (there are quite a few in my thousand-volume personal collection of Israel books from decades of my used book store and Jewish neighborhood library book sale hauntings) would get through to more of our people what we’ve achieved, what it means and what’s at stake..  I’m pondering appending a “book report” to these weekly emails.  Worth doing?