#906 5/3/18 – Nick Haley This Week: “The UN is hopelessly biased against Israel.” It’s Not Just the UN, and American Jews have a Place in Standing Against This

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Nikki Haley This Week:  “The UN is hopelessly biased against Israel.” It’s not just the UN, and American Jews have a place in standing against this.

President Nixon once asked Americans to pick the time during American history which they regarded as most meaningful to have lived.  Let’s expand that time range, for ourselves, to three millennia Jewish history.  With which generation would you choose to belong? Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai, with David taking Jerusalem, Solomon dedicating the Temple, the Maccabees wresting back homeland independence from the heirs of Alexander the Great?

I would apply two criteria:  that time’s historical event must be momentous in shaping the course of our people’s long history, and yet afford all members of that generation a place, however great or grassroots, in that event’s coming to pass.

For the next page or two, let’s consider the Jewish history place of diaspora, specifically American diaspora, Jews of today.

Many American Jews don’t regard Israel’s sovereign rebirth in our generation as right up there with establishment of the kingdom of David and Solomon, and the Maccabees’ kingdom Judaea, but every Jew over the past two millennia who was murdered, just for being a Jew, in an inquisition, holocaust or pogrom in Europe or an Islamic-ruled land would beg to differ.  But deeper even than that, the centrality of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem to Jewish peoplehood imposes upon our diaspora generation whose homeland Israeli cousins, against all odds, pulled off that dream of generations for Israel’s redemption a duty to stand by them, as Ben-Gurion, in the very act of proclaiming Israel’s sovereign rebirth, called upon us to do.

But is there really a role there for us?  Alas, there is.  “It is now completely clear that that the UN is hopelessly biased against Israel,” US representative to the UN Nikki Haley stated this week, in vetoing a Security Council resolution that was “willing to blame Israel, but unwilling to blame Hamas, for violence in Gaza.”  (Algemeiner, 6/1/18).

And, how’s this for the mainstream media on Friday this week – long after it has been unequivocally established, including by Hamas itself, that most of those killed in crashing the Israel-Gaza border fence were its members (“Hamas admits most of protesters killed by Israeli fire were its members,” AP in The Japan Times, 5/17/18); that it had whipped up Gazans into frenzied storming of the fence in a “March of Return” aiming to enter Israel “to kill Jews” (Washington Post, 5/14/18), armed by Hamas “with maps of how to get to Jewish towns and villages” (Dore Gold, JCPA, 5/24/18)?

AP squib Friday (6/1/18, The Intelligencer [Doylestown PA]) on an agreement between Israel and Myanmar:

     “Tuesday’s agreement comes as both countries face international criticism: Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya and Israel for using live fire against Palestinian protesters across Gaza’s border.”  [emphasis added]

In the Q&A following the “media bias” Powerpoint talk that my co-author Lee Bender and I give to area groups, we’re sometimes asked how what we endeavor to do differs from the wonderful work of the international anti-Israel-media-bias-fighting groups CAMERA and HonestReporting.  I put it this way: We ourselves don’t seek correction, as important as that is, of individual media misstatements on Israel.  We plead with our own, individual diaspora Jews we can reach, to cease using the loaded language designed to delegitimize the Jewish people’s homeland connection to the land of Israel, and to point out the pejorative punch in such terms to reachable American Christians and Jews.

In the end, it’s western publics’ perception of respective Jewish and Arab Palestine equities that both we, the Jewish homeland’s Jews and its diaspora supporters, and those “hopelessly biased against Israel,” including not just the UN, which Amb. Haley so characterized this week, but much of the media, western countries and publics in general, and even some diaspora Jews, are both so strenuously trying to shape.

A place in this struggle exists for today’s American diaspora Jews.  At a grassroots people-to-people level, we can make the case that the Jewish people is indigenous to the land of Israel and not a post-Holocaust-founded alien implant, that Palestine’s Arabs are not “THE Palestinians,” that “the West Bank” was still called “Samaria and Judea” even by the UN in 1947, that Jews are not outside “occupiers” there and are not “settlers” in historic Jerusalem. There IS a “two-state solution” – Jordan and Israel, both originally part of the post-Turkish Palestine Mandate.

Pick Now as a most meaningful Jewish history time, and belong it.