#927 10/28/18 – In Memoriam: Eleven Murdered American Jews

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  I’d planned to write this week about the American Jewish Federation of American Jewish Federations (establishment relations of mine to which I stand in the degree of twice-removed, but, hey, that’s still closer than 1/1024) descending on Israel last week waving the banner ‘We Have To Talk’ about some serious Israel-Diaspora differences, but somber events have overtaken this.  What we must learn from them is that our core beliefs and values overwhelm our differences, and that two important ways we can and should act in unity are [1] fighting anti-Israel media bias, which harms all of us, and [2] making the homeland Jewish case to the entirety of the Land of Israel, even if some of us would see the State of Israel sovereign in less than all of it.    

IN MEMORIAM:  ELEVEN MURDERED AMERICAN JEWS

Some years ago, my hometown newspaper ran a most misleading headline:  “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians.”  They weren’t shot just because they were “Palestinians.”  They were shot because, as my hometown paper’s own so-headlined brief news article reported, the group that sent them from Gaza to infiltrate into Israel acknowledged that they were its members on a “jihad mission.”

Unlike those “Palestinians” who were shot not just because they were “Palestinians” but because they were terrorists bent on murdering Jews, the eleven American Jews who were murdered yesterday in a Pittsburgh synagogue were murdered just because they were Jews.  Their murderer said so:  “ALL JEWS [emphasis original] must die!”  And the Huffington Post this morning is saying that the previous days’ headliner, who mailed bombs to all the top Democrats, and is as “pro-Trump” and yesterday’s synagogue murderer is “anti-Trump,” wants to “go back to the Hitler days,” according to his former boss.  The two agree, at least, on us.

We have to begin, but just begin, with agreeing that we are one people – all of us, all Jews in the U.S., all the world’s other Diaspora Jews, and the Jews in our homeland of Israel – and that our core beliefs and values overwhelm the real and serious issues, among Diaspora Jews and between the Diaspora and Israeli Jews, that divide us.  And I can think of two major ways in which we can inject real-world meaning into this otherwise platitude.

[1]  Contesting Media Bias:  The much commented upon recent survey said that over 90% of American Jews consider themselves, hopefully by some honorable if subjective standard, “pro-Israel.”   No one who is pro-Israel benefits through acquiescing in a mainstream Western media Israel-reporting lexicon replete with Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives.  E.g.:

*** “Israel was created and founded in 1948” (as though artificially, suddenly and out-of-the-blue, suppressing twice previously sovereign three-millennia continuous Jewish presence);

***  “Palestinians were displaced by Israel’s founding” [which is how President Obama put it at Cairo], or “by the war that followed Israel’s creation” (ignoring that it was a multi-nation Arab invasion, which Arabs in Palestine joined in and aided, that was beaten back by a homeland army of homeland Jews);

***  Israeli-connection to “East Jerusalem” (i.e., historic Jerusalem) and to “the West Bank” (i.e., Judea-Samaria) dates from “their capture by Israel in 1967” (leaving out about 3,000 years);

***  “Jews living across “Israel’s 1967 borders” (i.e., the old 1949 expressly exclusively military Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines) are “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem “settlers” (in same-sentence contrast to “Palestinians” living in “villages” and “neighborhoods”);

***  “The West Bank and East Jerusalem are Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories” (endorsed by UNSC 2334); and

***  “Jews who believe that Jewish Palestine equity doesn’t stop at the green line, but embraces all of Palestine west of the Jordan are ultra-nationalist rightwing fanciful believers in a ‘Greater Israel,’” (when in fact all-Arab Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab-majority population, comprises 78% of the original Palestine Mandate; it is those who’d partition Palestine a second time, this time west of the Jordan, who are believers in a Lesser Israel).

That’s is a sampling.  If you look at the website of that wonderful media bias-fighting organization CAMERA, you’ll see current instances of mainstream media “corrections” CAMERA has through tireless persistence obtained.  Wonderful, but the river of anti-Israel media bias rolls on unrelentingly.  We must all involve ourselves in contesting, not only inaccurately or incompletely reported facts in particular news stories, but the misleading terms in which Israel news is reported, starting by recognizing and ceasing to use these terms ourselves.

[2]  Handling the “Two-State Solution”:  Let’s not kid ourselves.  Jews are deeply divided on “the two-state solution.”  (My own view, for the record, is that while I believe that Palestine’s Two States are Jordan east and Israel west [all of it] of the Jordan, negotiating peace is Israel’s prerogative, not Diaspora’s, and Israel can do whatever it decides it needs to do re Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.”)

However, as Israel’s Nation-State law declares at its outset, the State of Israel exists in the Land of Israel, and even Jews who believe in an Arab Palestinian state west of the Jordan can and should claim that such a state would exist within the historic Land of Israel and that its presence there is the “hard choice” the Jews should make in peace negotiations.  Indeed, “land for peace” advocates should see that, from their perspective,  making the Jewish people’s very real claim to Judea-Samaria as part of our historic homeland puts a negotiations’ value on that intrinsic part of the remaining 22%, making “land for peace” negotiations in Palestine possible.