WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: First, below, I list a few forces in the world with which we grassroots US Jews must contend in the coming year. And then I suggest a few ways.
The World Confronting Us Jews in 2024, and How (By Me) We Must Confront It
Let’s begin by identifying some forces in the world with which we must come to grips in 2024.
The 4H Club
Let’s start with those actively aiming missiles at us: the Four H Club – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Harvard. I agree with Obama for once: Harvard should not dismiss President Gay; after all, she’s just plagiarizing most of the planet. If calls for “genocide of the Jews” is your shtick (depending on “context”), don’t be a hypocrite by hiding it. Flaunt it.
The UN
One headline this month says it all: INN, 12/6/23, UN Condemns Israel More Than Rest of the World Combined. We have to confront this. Last week I quoted a “US official” telling Times of Israel (Israpundit, 12/15/23, Israel Is Urging US Not To Talk Publicly About Two-State Solution) that the US has to push “two-states” because we must “take into account” not just “our own domestic politics” but as well “our global diplomatic standing.” So with the Free World’s leader more concerned with the world approving its global diplomatic standing than with leading the Free World in setting that standing, then as Harry Potter would put it, “It’s got to be us.”
The Media
It’s past time we grassroots American Jews wake up and recognize that the mainstream Western media really really really doesn’t like us, and that endless emails “to the editor” are not going to fix it. E.g.:
*** From the AP pushing “occupied West Bank” (e.g., 10/26/23, Palestinian Activist is Expelled by Israeli Forces From His Home in a Volatile West Bank City),
*** to America’s Newspaper of Rectum headlining “Israel has killed more women and children than have been killed in Ukraine” (see Washington Free Beacon, c 12/18/23, The New York Times Retracted a Headline Comparing Israel to Putin’s Forces, Citing Data Discrepancies; CAMERA’s Gilead Ini, Jewish Voice, 12/14/23, Errors & Distortions Slant NY Times Gaza Casualty Piece),
*** to my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer having headlined Jews returning to the Temple Mount plaza after its brief closure by Israel only to Jews due to Muslim violence as Mosque Visits Resume (Inq, 5/24/21),
the mainstream Western media contemptuously demeans Israel and ergo us with disdain and derision.
US Jewish Leadership
What troubled me the most about our American Jewish institutions’ pushing “two-states” was not just that they advocated divesting from Israel both historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, as incomprehensible, officious and shameful as that seems to me, but, by me, the underhanded way in which they pushed it.
To refresh your recollection, leading American Jewish organizations – ADL, Ameinu, ARZA, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, Israel Policy Forum, MERCAZ USA, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism – wrote an open letter to then President Trump that “strongly urged” him to support a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for agreed “territorial adjustments” thereto, and to oppose “annexation” by Israel in “the West Bank.”
Those “1967 borders” were 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines expressly declared in their defining document NOT to be political borders, which have an international law gravitas that military ceasefire lines lack, and these organizations referencing “territorial adjustments” thereto just rubbed that mischaracterization in further. Then these Jewish organizations miscalled Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” and exacerbated their mischaracterizations even further, surrendering Jewish homeland equity in Judea-Samaria, by referencing possible Israeli “annexation” thereof, “annexation” being defined by Encarta Dictionary as “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity – e.g., a country or state.” (emphasis added)
So What Do We Do?
American Muslims aren’t bashful about warning President Biden that they’ll cease their support if he continues supporting Israel in its war with Hamas. But they’re even less likely to vote for the party of Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Nikky Haley, David Friedman et al than are most liberal American Jews. But we can warn that if he continues to press for “two-states,” many of us will.
Beyond that, we need to support colleges and universities that aren’t hooked on wokeism, newspapers that are, e.g., AP-free, and the like.
But there’s more. Jerusalem Post, 12/7/23, ‘From the River to the Sea’ – Students Chant But Don’t Know Which River or Sea (emphasis added):
“In a recent survey of 250 college [emphasis added] students across the US, some 86% supported the Palestinian chant “From the River to the Sea” – but only slightly more than half of them were able to name the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as the boundaries that the slogan is talking about.”
But:
“After learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, two-thirds of the surveyed students went from supporting ‘from the river to the sea’ to rejecting it.”
This, of course, suggests that getting “a handful of basic facts about the Middle East” across to American college students might help our Cause, but there’s something I think that’s deeper still. We’re not occupiers. Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 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.”
That, I think, is the key. We have to get across to Western publics not just that there’s not room in the narrow space between the Jordan River and Sea for a second sovereign state, but that that land, the Land of Israel, is by both international treaty (the Palestine Mandate), and historical physical presence, ours (see, e.g., J. R. Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine); that Israel’s largest population segment is indigenously Middle-Eastern, descended from mid-twentieth century Jewish refugees from Arab and other Muslim lands, and that Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of 78% of Palestine – i.e., Jordan – and are the exclusive population of another part of Palestine, Gaza, and have been offered under the Trump plan internal autonomy in a larger segment of Judea-Samaria than they mainly occupy now.
Merry Christmas!
To our Christian subscribers, Merry Christmas from our Jewish subscribers and me.