REALLY Answering Hill, Airbnb and 2334: Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria AREN’T “Occupied Palestinian Territories”
A great deal of Israel supporters’ energies right now are rightfully being expended in protesting Temple University’s not firing Prof. Hill for his anti-Israel-violence-justifying UN Palestine Day speech and in protesting Airbnb’s delisting of Jewish-owned rental sites in Judea-Samaria, just as at the Obama administration’s end we protested U.S. abstention on UNSC 2334, calling every inch of the land of Israel over the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, including “East” [i.e., historic] Jerusalem, “occupied Palestinian territory.” Good and necessary, but reflect for a moment on whether post-anti-Israel action protests effectively address the devastating disease of which, e.g., Hill’s, Airbnb’s and U.N. condemnations, including this week’s, are relentlessly recurring symptoms.
An NGO Monitor November 20 piece, “The NGOs and Funders Behind Airbnb’s BDS Policy,” unequivocally stated:
“This change in [Airbnb] policy was a clear result of a coordinated and well-financed campaign [emphasis original] targeting the company by NGOs involved in BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) against Israel, led by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), in concert with the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), at least three Israeli groups, and the Palestinian Authority. The funders responsible for this campaign include a number of European governments as well as the U.S.-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund.”
If NGO Monitor is correct that such powerful forces are behind Airbnb’s delisting of just Jewish-owned rental sites in Judea-Samaria, ask yourself whether such forces’ target was Airbnb or Jews in Judea-Samaria, and, if the latter, whether this vicious campaign is now likely to cease.
The grave significance of Prof. Hill’s speech to the U.N.’s “International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People” was not that he gave it, but that it was so warmly received. The grave significance of UNSC 2334 was not exclusively the U.S. abstaining (and thereby driving the final nail into the coffin of our “but-it-doesn’t-say-‘THE’-territories” interpretation of UNSC 242), but that the elected representatives of every-other-nation-on-earth Unanimously voted for 2334.
The question before us is whether [a] most of the world is anti-Semitic, or [b] it believes that Israel was “created and founded” in 1948, that the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines are “Israel’s 1967 borders,” that Judea-Samaria is “the West Bank,” that historic Jerusalem is “East” Jerusalem, that the Jewish connection to “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” dates from “their capture by Israel in 1967,” that Jewish presence in these “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is that of “Jewish settlements” alongside “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages,” and that Palestine’s indigenous natives are “THE Palestinians,” multitudes of whom were unilaterally displaced in “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” and still live today in “refugee camps” exemplifying the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict’s one-sided “Palestinian refugee issue.”
Tonight, when we light the first Hannukah candle, what we’ll be celebrating is not “Jewish Christmas,” but, a tad more than two thousand years later, the Jewish people having wrested back homeland Jewish sovereignty from the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great. In doing this, joyfully, we need to recall, though, that this second period of Jewish homeland independence lasted just eighty years (thank you, Rome), and that the third period, in our own time, has so far lasted seventy.
Ok, there are more ways to interpret the meaning of Hannukah than to spell it in English, but one unshakable core significance of the commemoration is that of Jews standing up for ourselves. For us armchair Homeland Defenders of the Diaspora, lighting the Hannukah menorah should include [1] acknowledging both that the mainstream Western media employs that litany of Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives two paragraphs up religiously, and that we ourselves use, e.g., “West Bank” as though it were a synonym, and not an antonym, of “Judea-Samaria,” and [2] committing to stopping averting our eyes from this loaded lexicon that poisons Western public perception of Jewish homeland equity. So Happy Hannukah, Hanukah, Hannukkah, Hanukkah, Chanukah ….”