WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: When Hillel taught us that if we don’t stand up for ourselves, then others won’t do so, it was a long time ago. But what he said Then was never truer than Now.
This Week: “If I Am Not For Myself, Who Will Be For Me?”
Anyone seeking proof that Hillel was right need only have had an internet-connected computer this week.
United Nations: This Wednesday, ConservativeNewsWeekly.com disseminated a Republican Jewish Coalition release stating: “The UN focuses tremendous time and resources on vilifying the only Jewish state in the world, Israel. The list of UN attacks on Israel is endless ….” RJC highlighted these: The 1975 “Zionism Is Racism” resolution, which stood for years; “the UN Human Rights Council’s (HRC) permanent agenda lists just one country Israel ….”; UNESCO passed a resolution referring to the Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name and putting “Western Wall Plaza” in quote marks; and the HRC published a “blacklist” of companies operating in Judea-Samaria, Israeli Golan and “East” Jerusalem.
On Thursday of this week, ZOA issued a press release commending Congressmen from both parties for sending a letter last week to Sec. Blinken calling on the US to prioritize reversing the UNHRC’s “discriminatory and unwarranted treatment of Israel.” Congressmen’s letter:
“In May 2021, just days after the conflict between the Gaza-based terrorist organization Hamas and Israel, the UNHRC approved an unprecedented open-ended investigation of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, purported war crimes and human rights violations. This Commission will not only focus on the actions Israel took in Gaza as it sought to defend its citizens, it will also have a carte blanche mandate – in perpetuity – to examine any period in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about violations not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The mandate made no mention of the 4,300 lethal rockets fired by Hamas toward Israeli civilians in a matter of days and no mention of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
European Union: Monday of this week the Jewish Voice ran an article, European Union Funding Illegal Palestinian Projects in West Bank, leading “A report by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry criticizes the European Union for funding the Palestinian Authority’s illegal ‘takeover’ of areas that are recognized as being under Israeli sovereignty.” The article goes on that the report “describes how the Palestinians use E.U. funds to build thousands of illegal structures and grab swathes of agricultural land.”
United States: Caroline Glick had a JNS article last Sunday, The Negev Two-State Summit, in which she lamented the negative impact U.S. Secretary of State Blinken’s involvement had on the Sde Boker conference last week of Israel and four Arab foreign ministers. Shared fear of a nuclear Iran, and not sudden love of Zionism, may be what drove these Arab state ministers to Ben-Gurion’s old desert kibbutz, but whatever, growing cooperation between Israel and Arab states can only be seen as a positive for security and ultimate regional peace. Glick writes that Blinken, for U.S.-Iranian looming deal and relationship aims, was able to change the conference’s subject away from Arab state-Israel “Abraham Accords” cooperation to “the two-state solution.” In their final statements, that’s what the Arab foreign ministers touted.
But that, alas, is just the latest U.S.-Israel relationship Israel-slight. Israelis living across the old defunct 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines “infuriate” U.S. Ambassador Nides, who, btw, wouldn’t want some Israeli leaders coming to dinner. And “settler violence,” infinitesimal compared to the terror Palestinian Arabs are right now wreaking in Israel, seems more upsetting to U.S. officials. And, as Glick noted, “the two-state solution” is back.
NGO’s: Move over, “Human Rights Watch.” “Amnesty International” has taken over center stage, not just with its recent report castigating Israel as “apartheid” against Palestinian Arabs, but in one of its leaders’ recent statements (never mind all the states that call themselves Muslim or Christian) that “Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state” and that American Jews agree with him. Thursday, Coalition For Jewish Values, which had officially challenged both parts of that statement, commented on its website on that Amnesty International official’s “something of an apology” in a letter to American lawmakers, in which he said “I regret representing the views of the Jewish people.” But CJV added that in that “apology” letter the AI official criticized Israel’s Nation-State law declaring Israel the Nation-State of the Jewish people, and that letter “doubled down” on AI’s report that had “characterized Israel as a racist state engaged in ‘apartheid’ against Palestinian Arabs.”
The Media: A glance at CAMERA’s website this week reveals the following: On March 30, following contact by CAMERA, The Hill corrected calling Tel Aviv “Israel’s capital.” Same day: “Within hours of an AP report giving favorable coverage to the proponents of the false Palestine-Ukraine analogy, the slaughter of two peaceful Ukrainians [how ironic!] by a Palestinian terrorist in the heart of central Israel unmasks the comparison’s absurdity.” An April 4 CAMERA posting referenced a Guardian headline, “Israeli forces raid a refugee camp in the West Bank, killing two Palestinians.” They weren’t innocent civilians. They died in a gun battle.
This Guardian headline, I believe, is reminiscent of a pair years ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer, plainly revealing, I believe, the contempt this U.S. newspaper, among others, has for us Jews. A 4/29/08 Inq AP squib reported that “The Israeli army shot four Palestinian militants who were trying to plant explosives near the Gaza Strip border fence,” and quoted Hamas calling them its members “on a jihad mission.” The Inquirer headlined: “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians.” Three days before that, the Inq ran an AP squib reporting that two Israeli factory guards had been shot dead by a Palestinian Arab whom “a spokesman for Islamic Jihad” said had snuck into Israel and reached the plant in a border industrial zone in which “Israeli factories employ Palestinians.” The Inquirer headlined “Two Israeli Factory Guards Die.” (A few days later, the Inq accurately headlined a wire service squib that a rocket from Gaza had killed an Israeli civilian mowing his lawn. I’d expected: “Israeli Gardening Enthusiast Dies.”)
BDS: An Algemeiner article Friday, “Ben & Jerry’s Tries To Force a ‘Food Apartheid’,” leads: “For the first time in human-rights history, an international mega-corporation has attempted to coerce a licensee into ‘food apartheid.’ This unprecedented contractual demand has provoked a turning-point lawsuit that asks whether it is legal to attempt to force a food licensee to discriminate against entire communities, especially ethnic ones.” The reference is to whether Unilever can force its Israeli licensee to stop selling in eastern Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria.
American Jews: MideastMonitor.com, along with other sources, reported Monday that a claimed-synagogue, Tzedek Chicago, “in a statement decrying the creation of Israel ‘as an injustice against the Palestinian people,’” declared itself to be “anti-Zionist.” ZOA for one questioned whether it’s an actual synagogue: “Since we had never previously heard of this ‘congregation,’ we decided to investigate. It turns out that Tzedek Chicago is essentially an anti-Israel political group, an offshoot of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) that distorts and omits the essence of Judaism—the Jewish people’s 2,000 years of prayers for “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
But the issue is bigger than whether this perhaps shul, whose address, per the ZOA, “is a P.O. box,” is “anti-Zionist.” J Street is a real organization, and this is what it says in its Haggadah among the Ten Plagues: “As a Jew, as someone connected to Israel, how do I reckon with the terrible price paid by the Palestinian people for the creation of the Jewish state?” [emphasis added] If that’s not big enough for you, consider the big Jewish organizations and institutions, including the Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, who wrote to then-President Trump, demanding he support “the two-state solution,” with borders that, save for mutually agreed “territorial adjustments,” would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders [i.e., 1949 mere ceasefire lines], – i.e., excluding defensible Judea-Samaria and Old City and rest of historic Jerusalem, Temple Mount, Western Wall and all. This is American Jews demanding this.
Is this Reform & Conservative movements’ “1967 borders” demand a standing-up of religiously organized American Jews for ourselves? On Tuesday this week, Yoram Ettinger, “US Pressuring Israel – Reality Testing,” quoted what PM Begin had said:
“1982 – Prime Minister Begin rejected the ‘Reagan Plan,’ which stipulated Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines. He sent the following message to President Reagan: ‘….What some call the “West Bank” is Judea and Samaria; and this simple historic truth will never change. There are cynics who deride history. They may continue their derision as they wish, but I will stand by the truth…. The matter of security is of paramount importance. Geography and history have ordained that Judea and Samaria be a mountainous country and that two-thirds of our population dwell in the coastal plain dominated by those mountains. From them you can hit every city, every town, each township and village and, last but not least, our principal airport in the plain below…. Under no circumstances shall we accept such a possibility (returning to the pre-1967 lines) ever arising, which would endanger our very existence…. A friend does not weaken his friend, an ally does not put his ally in jeopardy. This would be the inevitable consequence were the ‘positions’ transmitted to me on August 31, 1982, to become reality. I believe they won’t. ‘For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest’ (Isaiah, 62).”
That, by me, and not the Reform & Conservatives’ two-states’ borders that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders,” even if you’d sacrifice some of Judea-Samaria in a compromise settlement, is being for ourselves in this time in which international regard for our Jewish homeland of Israel can be characterized only as an unprecedented international Pogrom. To those of my fellow American Jews who’re hesitant about standing up for ourselves at this moment, reflect upon Hillel: And If Not Now, When?