WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: What I’ve railed against lo these past 1167 weeks is not anti-Israel media bias, anti-Israel pejoratives, Jewish homeland-endangering “solutions” and historic Jewish homeland connection denial per se, but our American Jewish community’s inadequately adamant answer back. Two new developments suggest this may be beginning to change. Come see.
At Last Being Heard? Alarm Bells for Grassroots American Jews
Ok, I read it this week – the new book Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, a collection of 22 highly footnoted essays compiled and edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, “perhaps the first devoted to this topic,” that per its cover and by me contents “documents the devastating failure of the Jewish establishment, including its leaders and major donors, to defend and protect American Jews as anti-Semitism surges across the country.”
I agree with Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes’ cover squib: “Betrayal loudly rings the alarm for a somnolent American Jewry. Read it and wake others.” But, fixated as I’ve long been (1167 weeks) not on American Jewry’s leadership but on our grassroots, I found even more encouraging this week a “first-of-its-kind forum” addressing “the central challenges facing the North American [Jewish] Reform movement” that’s attempting “to reestablish central Reform values of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism that have weakened in recent years ….” [emphasis added] This project reaching down to our community’s largest grassroots, mostly liberal at that, is led by Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of New York, as reported in Thursday’s Jerusalem Post, 6/1/23, Reform Rabbis Gather for NYC Conference To Cement Reform Jewish Values.
In these weekly emails, I’ve waded through citing four phases of insults to us that incomprehensibly to me have failed to awaken what Dr. Pipes correctly calls our “somnolent American Jewry.”
Media Bias: The very first misleading front-page news report I cited in Alert #1, January 7, 2001, blamed “the creation of Israel” for “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants” having “fled” or been “forced to leave in 1948,” Knight-Ridder News Service in Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/4/2001. That slight exaggeration (less than half-a-million Arabs left, versus close to a million Israel-absorbed Middle-eastern Jews displaced from Muslim lands in that Arab-invasion war’s wake) ought to have waken up us grassroots American Jews to respond. Nope. The media carried on about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the war that followed Israel’s creation” for years. I finally got a local acknowledgement from the Inq that “Mr. Verlin is right that there weren’t millions of refugees from the 1948 war ….” But other media misportrayals of our Jewish homeland roll on undiminished. View periodically the websites of CAMERA and Honest Reporting. A long time ago, I wrote a letter to an Inq editor in which I complained of a number of imbalances. Her reply referred to them as “inaccuracies.” By me, that’s not what they were.
Dirty Words: There are two levels of anti-Israel media bias – misreporting of the facts of individual stories, and media misusage of a loaded lexicon of poisonous anti-Israel pejoratives in which it purveys Israel-Arab news to the public. These latter fall into two types – those delegitimizing Israel’s 1967 liberation of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, and those delegitimizing our Jewish homeland altogether.
The 1967 group includes, e.g., miscalling historic Jerusalem (Old City, Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) “East” Jerusalem as though it had been a separate entity, not for nineteen Jordan-seized years but forever and ever; miscalling the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to constitute political borders “Israel’s 1967 borders”; miscalling Judea & Samaria, Hebrew origin names in use for three thousand years “the West Bank,” coined by Jordan in 1950 to disassociate part of the Jewish homeland from Jews; miscalling Israel’s liberation of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “Israel’s ‘capture’ [sometimes ‘seizure’] of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967,” to suppress three thousand years’ previous Jewish connection; miscalling Jewish presence in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, to which Jews have stronger rights than Arabs by Mandate and historical presence, “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory”; pointedly contrasting “Jewish settlements” in these areas from “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages”; etc.
The 1948 group includes, e.g., miscalling Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 “Israel’s 1948 creation and founding,” as though artificial and out-of-the-blue; miscalling Arab refugees from the 1948 war started by the Arab invasion, in which Arabs in Palestine joined, “Palestinian refugees of the war following Israel’s creation”; calling the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue “the Palestinian refugee issue” to suppress that that conflict’s refugees included more Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel; etc.
Surely, this Orwellian loaded lexicon of anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives would awaken American Jews into responding to insults being hurled at our homeland. Nope.
“Two-State Solution”: Palestinian Arabs (upon whom we ourselves in our struggle with them over Palestine gratuitously bestow the mantle of “THE Palestinians”) are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate. So a partition of Palestine between its Arabs and its Jews in fact exists.
A cursory look at a western Palestine, land of Israel, map would convince any supporter of our Jewish people’s right to our historic homeland that former Israeli PM Bennett is completely correct that “there is no room for another state between the sea and the Jordan.” (Israpundit, 9/22/22, Bennett Slams Lapid.) Most meaningfully and militarily is this so when the two areas that this “two-state solution” would rip from our people’s homeland are historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria with its Jordan Valley and hill country ridge. Former PM Rabin, no “ultra-nationalist” right-wing fanatic, called for a western Palestine Arab entity that would be “less than a state.”
Surely, such dangers of the universally sought “two-state solution” would wake up our somnolent American Jews to contest it. Nope. Exactly to the contrary, in 2019, nine big American Jewish household-name Jewish institutions, including our Reform and Conservative religious movements, lay leaders, rabbis and all, wrote an open letter to then-President Trump, calling upon him to pursue a “two-state solution” with borders that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” save for “any territorial adjustments” thereto agreed in writing between the two sides, and to oppose Israeli “annexation” [defined, says Microsoft Word quoting Wikipedia, as “the forcible acquisition of one state’s territory by another state, usually following military occupation of the territory”] in “the West Bank.”
Temple Mount: Is ANY site on the Sun’s third-innermost planet sacred to American Jews? Even “non-Zionists,” even pooh-poohers of David as king or even as “dusty hill-village tribal chieftain” have to believe that two Jewish Temples successively stood for a millennium on the Temple Mount, physical evidence of which, far more than just “the Western Wall,” stands there today, and that this site is Sacred to Jews.
So you’d think that others denying Jewish connection thereto would wake us up, arouse us to adamant public clamor in defense of our connection. Nope. Here’s two connection denials.
*** Here’s our “moderate” peace partner Abbas this past month on the world stage of the podium of the United Nations, quoted in the May 15 Jerusalem Post article, Abbas at UN Disavows Jewish Ties to Al-Aqsa, Compares Israel to Nazis:
“the ownership of al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] and al-Haram-al-Sharif [Temple Mount] belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic Wakf alone” [bracketed insertions Jerusalem Post’s]
*** Here’s the Philadelphia Inquirer, my hometown paper with a contemptuous article, cum contemptuous 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, the Inq continued that “250 Jews visited the mosque” – i.e., intruded into a different religion’s building that’s its “third holiest site” – which they did not. They too were on the Mount plaza, the “complex,” which a self-respecting Christian West newspaper would have called the Temple Mount, not “al-Aqsa mosque complex.”
So Why Am I Optimistic?
Because of two statements I quoted in the first two paragraphs above. Jacobs and Goldwasser called their new Betrayal book “perhaps the first devoted to this topic” of the failure of American Jewish leadership to protect American Jews – i.e., that too many of our institutions’ executives are wearing no clothes. And Rabbi Hirsch characterized his conference this week that’s aiming “to reestablish central Reform values of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism that have weakened in recent years” as the “first of its kind.”
So are years of anti-Israel media bias, a loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives, “two-state solutions” that would rip from Israel historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria heartland, and denial of Jewish connection to, of all places, the still-there Jewish Temple Mount, all without adequate adamant answer from us, now beginning to be confronted and contested at last? I hope and think so.