WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The international campaign to delegitimize our Jewish homeland of Israel has never been so widespread and intense. American Jews, even those advocating territorial compromise, must be united in claiming the land of Israel in its entirety as our international treaty-affirmed Jewish national home.
Answering Amnesty International et Ilk: Israel Is, Should and Must Be, and Will Continue To Be Our Homeland Jewish State
So Amnesty International (May it consume mega-gallons of Ben & Jerry ice cream, it’s the healthiest) now openly says Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.” See, e.g., Arutz Sheva, 3/16/22, Amnesty Has Officially Joined the War Against Jewish Sovereignty. So, as this Arutz Sheva article by Alex Nachumson, CEO of an organization of former senior IDF officers, observes, it’s not about “the so-called ‘occupation’” or alleged Israeli human rights abuses. “It is solely about ending the one and only Jewish State in the world.”
Amnesty’s hypocrisy is overwhelming. As this article further points out, “Amnesty only has a problem with Jews and Jewish collectivity,” that it doesn’t “say a word about the dozens of states which proudly identify as Muslim, Christian, Arab, or as the nation state representing any other religion, ethnicity or people” (emphasis added). Well, Amnesty International et ilk, we Jews are no more apologetic about having our Jewish nation state than are any of them.
And, make no mistake, our Jewish people has a three millennia connection – continuously physical as well as spiritual – to the land of Israel, our national home. Ancient homeland Jewish history, recorded in the Hebrew Bible, whether you believe the Divine intervention passages or not, historically happened, evidenced by enemy as well as Israelite stone writings, including a ninth century BCE enemy king’s “House of David” inscription. (Just this week appeared several internet articles on not-yet-peer-reviewed archeologist announcement of writing mentioning YHWH found among c. 1200 BCE, Joshua time, Zertal Mt. Ebal diggings.)
President Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (p, 3) to the contrary notwithstanding, the Romans on finally defeating the 132-35 CE Bar Kochba Revolt did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews, who remained in the land still for quite some time the majority. Every ruler between the Romans-Byzantines through the Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Turks and finally British was a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that. Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled western Palestine. And the Jews, tenaciously present as a homeland-claiming, repeatedly mass-slaughtered persecuted minority, never fully left, writing, as historian Parkes put it, today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
Over the centuries, Diaspora Jewry led permanently persecuted lives in both Christian and Muslim-dominated lands, but fast-forward, so to speak, to our time. A few weeks ago, I quoted from Yoram Kaniuk’s Yossi Harel bio, Commander of the Exodus, summary of how the World War II Allies, including America, did virtually nothing – not even bomb the death camps they actually flew over – for the Jews trapped in the Holocaust, including by the before-during-and-after-the Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine British blockade.
Read about the Briha, the self-driven movement of Hitler’s Holocaust’s survivors who staggered out of death camps across European borders in winter, against the will of the British, to ports where they boarded Aliyah Bet ships, mostly intercepted by Britain which interned them in camps in Cyprus, except those they sent back in prison ships to camps in Germany. Read about the “on eagles’ wings” Magic Carpet return to the Jewish homeland, beginning while it was still fighting its 1948-49 War of Independence, of Yemenite Jews who walked from Yemen to Aden because they’d heard of Israel’s sovereign rebirth. Read about the danger-filled treks of Black Ethiopian Jews across hostile areas of Africa to the planes of Operations Moses and Solomon. Read about Israel’s 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars for survival, especially the 1967 liberation (not “capture” or “seizure” from the 1948 invader Jordan) of historic Jerusalem, especially accounts by the participants. See if they regard it as “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Read CAMERA’s February report, Amnesty’s Slander: Why Now?, explaining that Amnesty’s “apartheid” accusation of Israel did not appear in a vacuum, but “has been dropped in the midst of an ongoing wave of attempts to delegitimize the Jewish state as a somehow inherently racist endeavor.” There is the International Criminal Court’s ongoing investigation of Israel, and the United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s Special Rappenteur’s report, both referenced in CAMERA’s article. Here’s one paragraph of Jonathan Tobin’s assessment of that report in his JNS article Friday (3/25/22), Why Is The United States Still Paying for the UN’s Anti-Semitic Farce?:
“The report’s entire purpose is to justify the canard about apartheid. But to make its argument, it uses the kind of loaded language that is redolent of traditional anti-Semitic tropes. In it, it speaks of Israel as a ‘covetous alien power,’ of Jewish ‘greed,’ of Israel as an ‘acquisitive occupier,’ ‘rapacious Jewish Israelis’ intent on ‘permanent domination’ and of ‘fever dreams of settler colonialism.’ In Lynk’s screed, Israelis are ‘pitiess’ oppressors building security fences and bombarding the Gaza Strip for no apparent reason with ‘dark’ and ’ominous’ intent, while also playing the role of ‘torturer’ and ‘child killer’ in order to advance an agenda of ‘racial supremacy.’” (emphasis added)
This isn’t the Nazis, friends. This is the U.N.
All the while, the United States Ambassador to the State of Israel says the Palestinian Arabs who pay people who murder Israeli civilians “aren’t perfect,” but it’s “settlements” that “infuriate” him, Jewish Voice, 3/18/22, US Ambassador to Israel Calls Settlement Growth ‘Infuriating,’ Backs a Divided Jerusalem. And the American government is offering a million dollars in grants “to charge Israel with human rights abuses in Judea, Samaria and Gaza” (ZOA Appalled: Demands Cancelling State Dept. Grants of Million To Demonize Israel.) I guess you couldn’t tell from this that today American Jews are the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters.
So this email this week is an appeal from me to my fellow American Jews who read this. I appreciate that I’m to the right of many of you. I’m a Republican, a strong Trump supporter, and I don’t believe in “the two-state solution.” I don’t ask you to agree with me on any of this. I ask you to assert unequivocally that the land of Israel, western Palestine, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, is by history affirmed in our time by international treaty (San Remo and the Palestine Mandate) the Jewish national home and, if you must, that any territorial concession in peace talks is giving up something in compromise that’s ours, not simply our relinquishing something to which we have no historical right or legal title.