WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our Jewish people’s endless betrayers seek to delegitimize us and our homeland. We American Jews need to strengthen our sense of peoplehood and three-millennia homeland connection. Tobin says so, and by me he’s correct.
Confronting the Biggest Jewish People Betrayals by the World in General, the US, EU, Media, and Even American Jews
Year-end’s the time to look back at what’s been significant. So, not limiting ourselves to just the past year, let’s look back for these moments on how the world in general, America, enlightened Europe, the media and, alas, we American Jews, through what Tobin calls a declining sense of peoplehood, have grievously betrayed our Jewish people in our own time. It is we, and not our defamers, who must define our Jewish people’s place among the world’s peoples, and our sovereign homeland’s place among its nations.
The World in General
In Diaspora Jews’ biggest betrayal, the Holocaust in our own time, Nazis and allied anti-Semites uprooted Jews who’d lived in Europe for centuries and exterminated six million. But why put this under “The World in General,” and not under “Europe”? Because of a conference of all the world’s nations, when it was still possible to save Europe’s Jews, if only there were places for them to go, in which the world’s nations all took the podium and shook their heads sadly, “Sorry, no room in our inn.”
Has the world gotten more friendly to us today? As surely as the Ukrainians helped the Jews in the Holocaust. Just look at the lopsided votes in the annual UN General Assembly resolution pogroms, including in late 2022. But the UN’s crowning contribution to a just, lasting and comprehensive peace between Arabs and Jews is UNSC resolution 2334 of 2016, in which that august assembly representing all the world’s nations declared that it
“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.”
Not “disputed,” mind you, but “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East [i.e., historic] Jerusalem.” And see the recent resolutions that call what’s been known in the West forever as “the Temple Mount” exclusively by its Muslim name, which the US delegate to the drafting committee called a denigration of Israel.
United States
I’m talking here of America’s treatment of non-American Jews. We don’t like to think about it, but America joined Britain in not bombing the death camps or railroads to them even when their bombers flew almost overhead. And that was the tip of the iceberg. Acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk summarized David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews in chapter 20 of his sterling bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, writing that “conferences like the one in Bermuda were convened with the goal of killing time and prolonging inaction.” Citing U.S. State Department documents, Kaniuk wrote (p. 154) that they “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 committed not to save the Jews.’”
Britain armed Egypt in the 1948 war with, inter alia, fifty Spitfires, with which an American pilot who aided Israel, Collie Goldstein, quoted in Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, said he could have conquered much of Europe. The United States, for all that Truman had the US vote for partition and recognized Israel in fifteen minutes, embargoed arms to the warring parties and vigorously enforced it against American Jews “sending farm machinery to Palestine” (one of American Jews’ prouder moments). It was only after the Six Day War that America became Israel’s arms supplier.
Today Biden, Blinken & Nides proclaim America’s ardent support of “two states along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps,” depriving Israel of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all), but they didn’t start it. On pages 577-78 of his just released autobiography Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu talks about UNSC 2334, adopted 14-0-1 by the Security Council on the Obama administration’s post-2016 election way out the door. “It mandated that ‘Israel stop immediately and completely all settlement activity in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem.’” It was the US that abstained, but Bibi wrote that “Egypt was chosen by the US [emphasis added] as the country to submit the anti-Israel resolution at the Security Council.” (And, btw, guess who co-sponsored 2334 – New Zealand and Ukraine. Ibid.) Bibi wrote “I knew definitively that I had lost this round.” But:
“I had received word that in the final months remaining until the inauguration of the new US president, a new and even harsher Security Council resolution was being prepared. This one would be a binding resolution calling on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines and establishing a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
“… I communicated to Moscow my extreme disappointment with Russia’s vote on the previous resolution. ’We hear you’ was the answer I received. I was not disappointed again. The second resolution never materialized.”
Europe
In its notorious product labeling decree, the European Union, with specific reference to Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, declared that “settlement” connotes not just newness of presence in a place, but “foreign” newness.
How’s Europe doing today in recognizing Jewish homeland connection to the land of Israel? Not too well. See, e.g., JNS, 12/21/22, EU Working With PA To Take Over Area C, Document Obtained by JNS Shows. It reports that in violation of the Oslo Accords:
“A confidential document composed by the European Union’s mission in eastern Jerusalem and obtained by JNS shows that Brussels is actively working with and on behalf of the Palestinian Authority to take over Area C of Judea and Samaria ….”
A Times of Israel article carried in Israpundit 12/22/22, Dozens of MKs Accuse EU of Blood Libel, Hatred After West Bank Plan Leaked, reported that 40 MKs wrote to the EU, bitterly accusing it of completely ignoring “our people’s historical affinity to our homeland.”
The Media
If I had to pick one media news story exemplifying the MSM’s delegitimization of Jewish connection, ancient and modern, to our homeland of Israel, I’d pick a Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) headline and photo caption of May 24, 2021. That news article dealt with Israel’s reopening access to the Temple Mount to Jews, to whom it had been temporarily closed by Israel in the face of Arab rioting there. Under a headline “Mosque Visits Resume” [Mount visits had not been suspended for Muslims], the Inq ran a photo of Arabs clashing with police on the Temple Mount plaza the previous day, captioned:
“Palestinians clash with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque complex Friday. On Saturday, a group of 250 Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.”
Note that although the Inq sited the Arabs-police Mount plaza clash as “at the Al-Aqsa mosque complex,” identifying it as a site more extensive than the mosque building itself, which is at the Mount’s southern end, it continued that “Jews visited the mosque,” which they did not. They too were on the Mount plaza, the “complex.”
Misleading enough, but the Inq’s main betrayal of the Jewish people [and the Inq’s own Christian readership] here is the Inq’s wholesale endorsement of the maximal Muslim claim to the entirety of the Temple Mount, by which name it has been known in the West for millennia, as “the mosque.” When a recent UN General Assembly resolution called the Temple Mount exclusively by its Muslim name, Haram al-Sharif, which the US delegate to the drafting committee called a denigration of Israel, the Inq must have cheered.
American Jews
Jonathan Tobin, JNS, 11/4/22, The Panic in the US Surrounding Israel’s Next Government is About Politics, Not Values, commented that American Jews’ howling over Israel’s new “right-wing” government has deeper roots than just concerns about potential perceived threats to Israeli democracy, religious freedom, etc. It’s basically about American Jews’ growing alienation from the raison d’etre of the Jewish state:
“The root cause of American-Jewish alienation from Israel has little to do with politics. It is a function of the decline in a sense of Jewish peoplehood among a rapidly assimilating population, with the largest growing sector labeled by demographers as ‘Jews of no religion.’ [emphasis added]
“And if Jews don’t care about being Jewish, they aren’t going to be inclined to support Israel, no matter who is in its government.”
By me, Tobin is right. In the face of these unending mammoth betrayals of Israel and Jews, we must preserve and proclaim our sense of Jewish peoplehood. It is us, not our defamers, who must define our people’s place in the world and our sovereign homeland’s place among the world’s nations.
Happy New Year!