WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn testified to Congress Tuesday that calls for genocide of Jews may be Ok “depending on context.” Add that to the nice things being said about us in other academia, in the UN, the US, the media, Europe and the Mideast. But Israel and Diaspora are beginning to answer. We have to join in.
Who’s Against Us and What Do We Do About It?
So Who’s Against Us These Days?
I graduated the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School, 3400 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, in 1964, a consummation devoutly revered by my father as The Miracle on 34th Street. Something rather less than a miracle is going on at the University of Pennsylvania today. Tuesday, Penn’s President, along with those of Harvard and MIT, “told a Congressional committee that calling for the genocide of Jews is not always against their rules.” Jewish Chronicle, Thursday, 12/6/23, US Uni Presidents Say Calls for Jewish Genocide Might Be Allowed ‘Depending on Context.’
Rabbi Gabriel Greenberg, Executive Director of Hillel at Penn, along with that chapter’s undergraduate co-Presidents, emailed: “We are appalled by the need to state the obvious. Calls for genocide against Jews do not depend on the context.” [emphasis added]
Yad Vashem’s Chairman articulated that calls for the genocide of Jews, to borrow a phrase from the UN’s Secretary General, do not occur in a vacuum. INN, Thursday, 12/6/23, Yad Vashem Chairman: ‘Any University that Can Excuse Calls for Genocide is Doomed,’ stated:
“’Yad Vashem is extremely alarmed by University Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn refusal to claim that genocidal calls against Jews do not violate university policy and code of conduct. In fact, when the three presidents were asked point blank whether calls for the genocide of the Jews violated university rules or code of conduct, their response was it was a ‘context-dependent decision.’ Yad Vashem is appalled that leaders of elite academic institutions would use misleading contextualization to minimize and excuse call for the genocide of the Jews. The positions taken by the three university presidents in their testimonies highlight a basic ignorance of history, including the fact that the Holocaust did not start with ghettos or gas chambers but with hateful antisemitic rhetoric, decrees, and actions by senior academics, among other leaders of society,’ it added. [emphasis added]
Foremost among those “other leaders of society” is the United Nations, about which an article appeared on INN Thursday, 12/6/23: UN Condemns Israel More Than Rest of the World Combined. Yes, Poison Ivy League and other American academic institutions have become hotbeds of Jew-hate, but it’s the center of the World Stage that spews out the hatred – including, e.g., not condemning for two months Hamas’ beyond horrific sexual abuse of females of all ages in its October 7 Holocaust-level pogrom. Our Jewish people’s homeland of Israel will never be accepted as a legitimate equal among the world’s nations unless and until Israel’s utterly unfair unjustified discrimination, indeed demonization, by the UN is brought to an end.
Nor is the UN unique among world “leaders of society” in obsession with doing ill to Israel. Israpundit, carrying Axios Tuesday, 12/5/23, Israel Now Willing to Discuss Post-War Gaza, U.S. Officials Say:
“’I’ve been working with a number of people in and out of government to figure, what after Gaza,’ President Biden said Tuesday. ‘I think the only available solution is a two-state solution’ for Israelis and Palestinians.” [emphasis added]
If you’re growing tired of me protesting that ripping from Israel historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland would relegate it to a defenseless Jewishly meaningless ghetto, recollect that I reiterate this, talk about obsession, in response to America’s President repeatedly proclaiming that his “two-state solution” is “the only available solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”
And on top of all this we have the mainstream Western media led by the ubiquitous AP, e.g., mislabeling Judea-Samaria as “the occupied West Bank” (e.g., 10/26/23, Palestinian Activist is Expelled by Israeli Forces From His Home in a Volatile West Bank City.
What Do We Do About It?
Ok, America’s universities, the UN, President Biden, the MSM, Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis, crowds in US and European streets – what’s a grassroots US Jew to do? We have to work with Israel in making the case that our Jewish people’s homeland, the land of Israel – historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and Judea-Samaria (its name for three thousand years, not, MSM, just “the biblical name for the West Bank”) included – is Ours.
There are some encouraging steps. Victor Davis Hanson pointed out the point we must make in his observation last week, Jewish Voice, 11/30/23, The Unhinged Among Us, commenting on “pro-Palestinian” protests: “Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia.”
A Ynet article Monday, 12/4/23, Israel Puts Spotlight on Expulsion of Jews From Arab Countries and Iran, reports a welcome step by Israel, a new website, in response to claims of “ethnic cleansing” by Israel by highlighting the expulsion and deportation of Jews from Arab lands and Iran.
“The site also presents the staggering numbers of Jewish refugees who fled for their lives – over 900,000, the majority of whom found refuge in Israel. Additionally, the site showcases disturbing images of persecution against Jews in Arab countries. Efforts are underway to release and English version of the site, and an Arabic version is expected to arrive at a later date.” [emphasis added]
Great, but would that Israel would drive home that together with our homeland’s never-completely-left homeland Yishuv, which historian Parkes credited with writing today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds,” today’s Sabra descendants of these indigenously Middle-eastern never-left-the-Mideast Jews make up the biggest segment of Israel’s population today, giving the lie to the canard Israel’s a post-WW II European “settler-colonial” implant.
And chalk this up to the ZOA. Its news release this week, Absurd Lie! – There’s No Israeli Genocide of Arabs: Israel Saw Huge Increases of Arabs in Israel & Gaza – Arab Countries Cleansed Themselves of Jews, contains a chart showing that while Jews in Arab lands and Iran went from c. a million in 1948 to a mostly Israel-absorbed almost none, Arabs in Israel have increased from 156,000 to 2,100,000, and in Gaza from 80,000 to 2,000,000.
In making our case that the land of Israel is our people’s homeland, we can’t ignore that Palestinian Arabs have a Palestine homeland claim. The chief answer to this still seems to me for us to make the case that they’re the population majority of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate and that the excision of all-Arab Jordan therefrom constituted a more-than-equitable-to-Arabs division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. And in addition thereto, Palestinian Arabs are the exclusive population of Gaza, Palestine, which could become a Mediterranean coast vacation and, e.g., agricultural, using the word advisedly, mecca, and under the Bibi-and-Gantz-accepted Trump plan were offered autonomy, albeit security-wise “less than a State,” in a larger portion of Judea-Samaria than they mainly occupy now.
There are die-hard anti-Semites in America beyond all reach. But, as the astute Mr. Hanson last week observed, many of the protestors in the streets don’t know that Jews have lived in the land of Israel and wider Mideast for three thousand years. By being given the historical facts and inherent justice of our Jewish people’s land of Israel homeland case, some of them can be reached. All of us have to join in that effort.