Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: indigenous

Showing posts with label indigenous. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

01/18 Links Pt2: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder; Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation; Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre; No room for anti-Israel bias at Kennedy School

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan self-evidently thought otherwise. Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world, and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

Netanyahu, Horovitz continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?” As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:
Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”

But of course the Temple Mount is more, for Jews, than a commemorative locale of the past: It is the holiest site in Judaism, the one toward which Jews pray all over the world, because they believe that God dwells there in a special way. Dayan’s decision did indeed facilitate Palestinian claims, rampant today, that no Temple ever stood in Jerusalem and that the entire Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a fabrication. This is why more and more religious Jews are realizing that visiting the site is essential. It is not only far-right figures who are visiting the Mount. Entering certain sections of the Mount in a manner sanctioned by Jewish law is becoming more and more mainstream among Orthodox Jews. And that is why opposition to Jewish access to the Mount is growing more and more frantic by the day.

All this points to a profound irony. The return of Netanyahu has been met with the journalistic gnashing of teeth and the rhetorical rending of garments by writers and public figures about the danger that the (democratically elected) government of Israel poses to democracy. And yet it is these very critics who are often so dismissive of the most elemental of democratic injustices: denying Jews in Israel the right to visit, and to pray at, Judaism’s holiest place. Perhaps, when it comes to the history of the democratic liberties of mankind in the eyes of those who piously intone on the subject, it is only the rights of religious Jews that do not matter.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation

On Feb. 1, 1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a directive “On further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” The social sciences section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences soon established a permanent commission for the coordination of scientific criticism of Zionism, to be housed at the academy’s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies. Over the next 15 years, the IOS would serve as an important partner in the state’s fight against the imaginary global Zionist conspiracy that Soviet security services believed was sabotaging the USSR in the international arena and at home. In 1982, the IOS would grant the doctoral status to one Mahmoud Abbas, upon the defense of his thesis The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.

Abbas’ dissertation has been a subject of considerable interest over the years. The thesis isn’t publicly available: By all accounts, it is kept in an IOS special storage facility requiring special authorization to access. But if one visits the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, one can easily get the Palestinian leader’s so-called avtoreferat—an extended dissertation abstract. Written to the standards of the Soviet State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and authored by the candidate, the 19-page document outlines the dissertation’s relevance, methodology, main arguments and unique contribution to the field. It also provides a literature review and lists the individuals and institutions that were involved in shepherding the work through to completion. It therefore offers a peek not only into Mahmoud Abbas’ academic accomplishment, but also into the system that produced it.

Using the social sciences to support political and ideological agendas set by the Communist Party was a matter of course in the USSR. Entire academic disciplines had been established to grant scholarly legitimacy to the state’s guiding ideology. “Scientific atheism,” for an example, was tasked with proving scientifically that God did not exist and that religion was the opiate of the masses. “Scientific communism” was supposed to supply scientific proof that communism was the superior stage of social and economic development and would supersede both Soviet socialism and global capitalism. When, instead, capitalism superseded Soviet socialism and the cushy budgets that sustained these disciplines vanished, they, too, quietly dissolved.

As a field, “scientific anti-Zionism” never took root in the Soviet academy as broadly as the other two subjects. Like them, it died as soon as its primary client—the Soviet state—disappeared. Soon a million Soviet Jews resettled in Israel and the newly independent former Soviet states restored diplomatic relations with the country.

I grew up in Akademgorodok—a suburb of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that was home to the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences. Adults around me lived and breathed science—real science, like physics and biology. It was well-known that portions of the academy were corrupted by ideological agendas. The antisemitism in its math division and elsewhere was a fact of life. Humanities and social sciences in particular were ruled by ideological priorities. But seeing the intellectual corruption that is evident in the story of Abbas’ dissertation is disturbing nonetheless.

Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre

The Palestinian Authority and its supporters have a new enemy: the Louvre.

The world’s most-visited museum, the famous French institution that holds some of the greatest works of art and antiquities, is likely to find itself on anti-Israel boycott lists around the world.

This is because among the Louvre’s storied collections is a slab of stone with an inscription that affirms the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

The stone, known as the Mesha Stele, was first discovered in 1868 near the Dead Sea, but its inscription, written in the language of the ancient Moabites, was only partially understandable due to centuries of wear and damage. The inscription recounts a war between King Mesha of Moab and the Jews—the same conflict described in the third chapter of the Book of Kings. In addition, the words “House of David” appeared to be included in the inscription, but damage to the artifact meant this could not be proved conclusively.

Linguists and historians associated with a University of Southern California research project recently analyzed the artifact with a new technology called Reflectance Transformation Imaging that “takes digital images of an artifact from different angles and then combined to create a precise, three-dimensional digital rendering of the piece,” according to an article by two of the researchers, André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, in the latest issue of Biblical Archeology Review.

This allowed the damaged section of the stele to be read. As was long suspected, it indeed referred to the “House of David.” So, once again, archaeological discoveries have affirmed what was already written long ago in the Hebrew Bible.

Do you know what is not mentioned in the inscription? “Palestine” or “Palestinians.”

01/17 Links Pt2: Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel; The NYTs and the PLO are made for each other; The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

From Ian:

A New Study Shows That the U.S. Has More Anti-Semites Than Jews

According to a recent survey conducted by the Antidefamation League (ADL), disturbingly large numbers of Americans answered “yes” when asked if they believe Jews “go out of their way to hire other Jews” or “are more loyal to Israel than to America,” and to other similar questions. Kevin Williamson reflects on these results, and what they say about the persistence of this “strange prejudice.”
About 3 percent of Americans agreed that all of the anti-Semitic tropes in the ADL survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more anti-Semites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population.

Anti-black racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history, but anti-Semitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but anti-Semitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the world. The fact that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings from the shadows, but “Zionists.”

Williamson also notes the confusion, and the bad faith arguments, that have emerged from the term “anti-Semitism.”
The Semitic languages famously include both Hebrew and Arabic, but also Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Aramaic, and Maltese. But when T. S. Eliot wrote, “But this or such was Bleistein’s way:/ A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out,/ Chicago Semite Viennese,” he wasn’t talking about the Catholics down in sunny Malta.

The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

The claim that Jewish influence and money can force non-Jews to serve the selfish interests of the Jews is, of course, a classic antisemitic trope. In the modern context, this trope usually claims that these Jewish conspirators are doing their dirty work to benefit Israel.

Roth also claimed that Elmendorf’s decision was “a shocking violation of academic freedom.” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed, saying, “If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint.”

It appears that Roth and Romero do not understand the nature of academic freedom. An applicant for a fellowship or faculty position does not enjoy academic freedom at the institution—in this case, Harvard—where they wish to work. They have freedom of speech to express their ideology and beliefs like all other citizens, but Roth would not have enjoyed the protection of academic freedom, which would allow him to express his views, no matter how corrosive or biased, until he became part of the Harvard community. Obviously, this never took place.

Moreover, hiring committees normally vet applicants during the application process. It appears that in the initial stages of Roth’s application, the committee inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, ignored Roth’s hostility to Israel. So, it is very likely that when the choice of Roth was made public, Harvard stakeholders had the opportunity to inform the dean about the darker aspects of Roth’s career. Dean Elmendorf then did what the hiring committee at the Carr Center should have done in the first place: Examine HRW’s and Roth’s defective scholarship and singular focus on Israel, objectively.

One particularly grotesque example of Roth’s shoddy scholarship and tendency toward outright falsehoods was a 2021 HRW report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the title of which makes its content clear.

No apartheid exists in Israel, but that did not prevent HRW from presenting the 217-page report as fact, effectively redefining apartheid to make their case. The Israel-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor, however, produced a report of its own that eviscerated HRW’s libels. NGO Monitor concluded that “the HRW publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions and blatant double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative demonizing Israel.”

“A careful examination of the text shows that HRW conducted almost no primary research,” NGO Monitor noted. “Rather, the text is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases, and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources—notably, other political NGOs participating in the same ‘apartheid’ campaign against Israel.”

“The omissions are even more egregious than the errors and misrepresentations, rendering HRW’s report as nothing more than propaganda,” the watchdog group asserted.

Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel - opinion

To deal with the inconvenient historical fact that Jews are the indigenous population of Israel, the drafters of the PLO charter created an arbitrary dividing line to determine who would be considered a Palestinian. First, the PLO charter deems any Arab who had lived in the entirety of what is now modern Israel prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland to automatically be Palestinian, without regard to whether they were residents in the land. Further, the PLO charter deemed any Arab (but not Jews) born after 1947 to a Palestinian father to be a Palestinian.

Jews, on the other hand, were excised from their own national identity under the PLO charter. Only Jews who had resided in what is now modern Israel prior to “the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian. And what did the PLO even mean when they called it “the Zionist invasion,” 1948 or the 1800s? The latter, of course.

Jews were forcibly removed from Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersed across the globe, making Palestine, as conceived by the PLO charter, a nearly Jew-free land before the Zionist movement was ever founded.

Imagine if, at the time of the founding of modern Israel, Jews had made a similar declaration with regard to Arabs. To wit, Israel would only recognize those “Arab Palestinians” who resided in the land and identified as “Palestinian” prior to the time of Abraham. This would obviously be an impossibility since the term “Palestinian” was created by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba revolt in around 130 C.E., while Abraham arrived in the Land of Israel approximately 2,000 years before the first use of the term Palestine.

Recently, antisemitic activists have escalated their attacks on Jews, claiming we are “settler-colonists” of a land they call Palestine. In my latest new law review article, I examine the question of colonialism and Israel. Part of my research involved tracing the history of the Jewish presence in Israel and comparing it to the waves of actual settler-colonists, ending with Palestinian Arabs, who displaced the indigenous Jewish population.

The only way that anti-Israel activists can strip Jews of our status as the indigenous people of the land and eliminate Jewish self-determination is to do as the PLO charter did: ignore history and designate a time when Jews had been ethnically cleansed from our own homeland as the point in time when Jewish history in Israel starts.

There are settler-colonists in Israel, and they are Palestinian Arabs. Nonetheless, Israel welcomes these settler-colonists and provides them with rights that no other country would provide to invaders and occupiers. It’s time for Palestinian Arab activists and their supporters to accept history and thank Israel for the gracious hospitality extended to newcomers.

Based on a true story. Israel has never occupied another people’s land in all her 4,000-Year recorded history; Israel is the world’s most accused country of illegally occupying another peoples’ land.
Ten Deceptions: https://t.co/4qiCALoxOJ #israel #palestine
— Joseph Shellim (@PhotoshopTruth) January 17, 2023

75 years ago: Arab official says they'll defeat the Jews because Arab life is cheap

From famed journalist and historian Jon Kimche, writing for the Palestine Post, January 14, 1948:

A leading Arab personality, close to leaders of the [Arab] Higher Executive, who has just returned from a tour of most of the Arab capitals, yesterday gave me a picture of the Palestine situation as top Arab leaders see it.

... Conflict in Palestine was unavoidable, he thought , and it would be accompanied by the close economic blockade of thc Jewish State , which would go on until one side or the other was prepared to surrender unconditionally.

The Arabs would call off the fight, he said, if the Jews abandoned the Jewish State and immigration. No other terms would be acceptable.

The Husseinis, he said , were confident that in the long run - perhaps three or four years—they could break the Jewish State and force the submission of Palestine Jewry though this might cost the Palestine Arabs an enormous number of casualties. The Arabs had a great advantage, as they held life cheaply and had little to lose in Palestine in contrast to the Jews.

Discussing the military line-up inside Palestine, he estimated that in the opening phases, the Jews would have an actual striking force of about 10,000 men, and that the striking force available for the Arabs would be about 5,000 active guerrillas . He calculated that the incidence of fighting and terrorist actions against nonparticipating Arabs will gradually draw into the conflict Arabs who at present are opposed and unwilling to join in the battle, and this wonkl become a constant source for the reinforcement of Arab strength.

He also banked on changes in the international situation which would create great difficulties in the long run for the Jewish State, which would have to draw its resources and food supplies largely from overseas.

"This is how we see it," concluded this Arab personality. "We do not underrate the strength of the Jews, and we think that the issue will be decided not so much by pure weapon power, but ultimately on the decision of who will crack first politically, psychologically and morally. On that we place all our cards. It will be a long struggle and it will require taut nerves."

The highlighted text is more telling than it seems. He is saying that Palestinian Arabs did not have as emotional a tie to the land as the Jews do, so they had "little to lose" - they could go elsewhere in the Arab world if necessary. The Jews don't have that luxury.

The Arab thinking is that the Jewish regard for human life would demoralize them and force them to flee, but they had nowhere else to go. That is why this analyst had it exactly backward - the Arab fighters had little incentive to risk their lives, while the Jews had no choice but to stand and defend their land.

An analogy could be made to Ukraine today - one side is fighting for their homeland, and while the other side also claims the same land, its fighters don't care much about it, even though they seem to have far more military assets available. And just like the Arab world at the time, the Russian side is happy to play the long game, thinking that they will force the other side to surrender by running out of resources and food.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

12/30 Links Pt2: Facts most Arabs and a hostile world would rather not admit; Wiesenthal Center publishes Top Ten antisemitism list for 2022

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The religious culture war comes to Israel

Far from creating a liberal, tolerant society, progressive ideologies are profoundly illiberal and coercive. Far from producing the brotherhood of mankind, left-wing universalism sets group against group in a battle for power over each other.

A constitutional monarchy, such as exists in Britain, promotes unity because it exists above politics and therefore above division. This was the great insight of King David, who unified the tribes of ancient Israel to form a coherent nation and whose limited monarchy was the inspiration and template for the British Crown.

King Charles’s patent desire to bring the British people together has transformed him from a figure widely disparaged and distrusted as cold and remote into a person viewed affectionately as the benign and genial grandfather of the nation.

The State of Israel, of course, doesn’t have a monarchy. Nor does America, which is being pulled apart over these cultural issues.

For all the unifying strength of the monarchy he represents, however, King Charles is actually in a lonely and perilous position. For the prevailing culture in Britain is actively undermining the religious continuity he realizes is essential.

No political party in Britain is prepared to face down and defeat the culture warriors writing women and conservatives out of the public sphere. No party is prepared to stop children being taught the lie that Britain and the West were born in the original sins of colonialism and oppression. No party is prepared to conserve and defend the classical liberal settlement underpinning freedom, tolerance and democracy. And no party is prepared to challenge radical, pagan environmentalism—to which the King, with his belief in the spiritual unity of all creation, is unfortunately also deeply attached.

In America, the parallel collapse of conservatives’ understanding of what was at risk and needed to be defended led to the implosion of the Republican Party and the rise to power in 2016 of Donald Trump as the only way to defeat the cultural predations of the left.

In Israel, the collapse of the moderate, religious Yamina Party meant that those who believe the combination of Jewish religious integrity with a modern economy, scientific advancement and the duties of citizenship is crucial to Israel’s identity and survival were left with no political representation.

They have been presented instead with a stark choice between religious zealots in one camp and left-wingers in the other screaming about the end of democracy while urging insurrection against an elected democratic government—and with Netanyahu holding the line against the extremism on either side.

Considering the way Netanyahu has been characterized as beyond the pale, this is indeed an irony. He and King Charles, it turns out, have something rather crucial in common.

David Collier: How the Twittersphere spreads antisemitism

We all know that Jew-hate spreads in the Twittersphere, but nobody touches on how much of it is there. Nor do people draw comparisons between the level of ‘anti’ activity, and the level of ‘pro’ that seeks to answer it.

As a quintessential minority group, Jews are drowned out on social media, and because these platforms operate on algorithms that reward ‘popularity’, Jewish people are on a loser from the start. Networks of hate even gang up to have Jews removed from the platform.

‘Zioporn’ addicts. Thousands of accounts in the Twittersphere that indulge their ‘kink’ by watching, liking, or sharing, either fake or butchered images that demonise Israel or Israelis. The more gruesome the image, the better the high. Authenticity is irrelevant. The ‘happy ending’ normally involves a tweeted utterance of disgust or outrage directed towards the state of Israel, or those that support it.

In a world which contains brutal regimes that slaughter millions, this tweet (posted 28/12 at 2:28am) suggests Israel is the ‘most despicable’ nation on earth:

A Twittersphere snapshot
I wanted a snapshot. Analysing a period on Twitter and then quantifying the output that was found. Such an exercise would also allow me to draw a comparison with the way other nations are treated on social media – showing just how exceptional (and therefore antisemitic) the anti-Israel rhetoric is.

I took a 36-hour period, from midnight on the 28 Dec, to noon on the 29th. Only two search terms were used. As nobody has any interest in a troll spamming his way to 100 dormant anti-Israel tweets a day, I set a bar for a minimum number of retweets. This ensured that only the hate that travelled was tallied.

Facts most Arabs and a hostile world would rather not admit

I was complimented some time ago by a reader of one of my earlier published articles, titled, Lies, Myths and Obama, which dealt – as many of them do – with the history of Israel and its enemies: Biblical and post-Biblical.

I had included in the article the following sentence: “Only one people has ever made Jerusalem its capital and only one people ever established their ancestral and Biblical homeland between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea: the Jews.”

I had also added that: “the Jews were the indigenous inhabitants of the Land for millennia long before the Muslim religion was created.”

The reader, nevertheless, had correctly pointed out that most people, because they have been exposed for so long to anti-Israel Arab propaganda, believe that there has not been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land during the last 2,000 years. They are thus unaware that the territory was never Judenrein (that is empty of a Jewish presence). And most Arabs and a hate filled world would rather you forget also that Jews lived for millennia in Mesopotamia or what became later known as British created Iraq.

Indeed, Jews had resided for nearly 3,000 years in that territory from the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BCE onwards. It was when Israel was reborn in 1948 that the Iraqi Arabs drove the Jews from their ancient homes, turning them into penniless refugees who found sanctuary in Israel; an impoverished country barely able to support them at the time.

More Jewish refugees were created than Arab refugees as one Arab state after another in the Middle East and North Africa drove out their Jewish populations. A monumental crime, which hardly is ever recognized.

Arabs and their anti-Israel supporters try to convince the world that the Jews just appeared in the early 20th century after being dispersed for two thousand years from their Biblical homeland. That is a flat out lie and flies in the face of recorded history. Indeed the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians do not even acknowledge ancient Biblical Jewish history ever existed. But facts never seem to matter to Arabs and pro-Arabs. So this brief history lesson will be for them an inconvenient truth.

Let me start by quoting from an article written in The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998 by Charles Krauthammer:

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,500 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one today advertising ice cream at an Israeli corner candy store."

Eldertoons - Dueling icons

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Cartoon of the Day: Jews Welcome!

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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A short Palestinian lexicon of words that mean something completely different than their normal meaning

Often, when Israel-haters accuse Israel of some crime, they use terminology that they have given a completely different definition than it has in any other context.

This is quite deliberate. They first choose the crime they want to accuse Israel of, and then change the definition of the crime to fit (or pretend to fit) Israel.

Some examples include "apartheid," "racism," "colonialism" and "settler colonialism," "ethnic cleansing," "international law," and "occupation," which the haters have redefined at least twice.

Related is how the word "refugee" means something different for Palestinians than it does for everyone else.

These are all words with precise, legal meanings, whose very definitions are different when Israel is involved.

There are other, less precise words, that are also misused by the haters in ways that are not obvious unless one knows what to listen for. They include "justice" - no one is against justice, but only one side is allowed to seek it. Also "peace activists," "human rights activists" and "pro-Palestinian activists" that really mean "anti-Israel activists" (cf. the Mavi Marmara.)

These are the terms that have made it to the mainstream, despite their clear inaccuracies.

Palestinians themselves have plenty more absurd words they use and are trying to spread to be as mainstream as the others. They are just waiting for these terms to be used by first the far Left and eventually "human rights" organizations and mainstream media. These include "cultural genocide," "legitimate resistance," "holocausts," "peace activists," "storming," "Talmudic rituals," "settlers" (referring to any Jew in Israel,) "civilian," "child," "open air prison," "concentration camp," "Judaization," "indigenous," "struggle," "defense," "surrounded," "martyrs..." the list is really endless, and Orwell himself couldn't have come up with some of these.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Joseph Massad, lying again, claims that Zionism never claimed to be about Jewish rights

Columbia professor Joseph Massad is very upset that Jews are claiming the right to self-determination. If Jews indeed have the right to self-determination, then opposing that really is a form of antisemitism, and antisemites like Massad cannot admit to that.

His normal method is to claim that Jews aren't a people, and that most Jews do not originate in the Middle East. If they aren't a people, then they have no right to self-determination.

But Massad knows that everyone knows that is a lie besides dyed in the wool antisemites who call Jews "Khazars."

So he has come up with a new argument: that the self-determination argument was never a Zionist tenet, rather it was a Palestinian Arab one.

Since the inception of their war against the Palestinian people, Zionist ideologues did not argue for Jewish self-determination but rather sought to delegitimise the indigenous Palestinians’ right to it. In the tradition of all colonial powers which denied that the colonised were a nation, the Zionists began by denying the nationness of the Palestinians.

Actually, the Zionists didn't even address the "nationness" of the Palestinian Arabs, who themselves didn't assert such a status (except for a tiny number of intellectuals) until decades after Zionism was established.

At the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, the Zionist Organisation (ZO) did not invoke any "Jewish" right to self-determination, even though self-determination was all the rage at the conference, with colonised peoples from around the world affirming this right to liberate themselves from the colonial yoke.
The ZO instead argued that Palestine "is the historic home of the Jews…and through the ages they have never ceased to cherish the longing and the hope of a return".

Massad takes this statement out of context. The ZO's proposals were not meant to be a definition of Zionism, rather recommendations to the allies with an eye to what was politically possible. Even so, they did use the language of rights in their suggested conference statement: "The High Contracting Parties recognize the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home. "

Massad then makes an astoundingly incorrect assertion:

It is most important to note in this regard that, unlike the more recent and increased use by Zionists of the notion of Jewish self-determination, neither Herzl’s writings, the 1897 first Zionist Congress, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, nor the 1922 Palestine Mandate employed the language of "rights", let alone the right of self-determination.

Herzl's definition was "Zionism has for its object the creation of a home, secured by public rights, for those Jews who either cannot or will not be assimilated in the country of their adoption."

The phrase "public rights" was coined by Italian jurist Pellegrino Rossi in the 1830s. It meant universal rights for people - what it now called human rights. Herzl's definition of Zionism was based on the idea that Jews have the same rights as any other people, which would by implication include self-determination, a phrase that didn't gain popularity until the 1910s.

Massad cherry picks specific documents and statements and says that because they don't invoke "rights' or "self-determination,"then Zionists as a whole didn't use that language until recently. That is laughable.

A book on Zionism and the Jewish question by famed juror Louis Brandeis in 1915 says, "Jews collectively should enjoy the same right and opportunity to live and develop as do other groups of people."

Similarly, Jessie Ethel Sampter published "A Course in Zionism "in 1915, and wrote, "The Jew is always foremost in every modem movement towards justice. In the 18th century he fought for individual human rights, as his rights. In the 20th century he fights for the rights of the small nations to life and autonomy, also as his right. It is the democracy of nations, internationalism. "

Massad is even wrong in his assertion that self-determination is a new claim by Zionists. "A Jewish State in Palestine" by David Werner Amram (1918) says that the Zionist movement was partially a result of the "consciousness of the right of self-expression and self-determination of the Jewish people." The phrase did not have to be said explicitly by the early Zionists; it was well understood as one of many national rights that Jews should have as a people.

Similarly, the preface to a book written by the Zionist Organization in London in 1918 says, "Only by their resettlement in their ancestral land of Palestine...will the Jews be able to exercise the right of self-determination."

Early Zionists always asserted their national rights as the Jewish nation as well as the right of self-determination. It is not a new phenomenon. Massad's pretense that this is a new definition of Zionism is yet another failed attempt to delegitimize Zionism - and to push his brand of modern antisemitism.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Elder Comix: What's the problem with this plan?

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Chayyei Sarah -- A Parshah For Zionists (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Last week, while reading online articles about the political situation in and surrounding Israel, I wasn't really expecting to come across articles discussing Chumash.

Then again, with a title like Abraham The Zionist, and this week being Parshas Chayyei Sarah, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz's article in JNS should not have been a surprise.

The Parsha begins, of course, with Avraham buying a burial plot for his wife Sarah in Hebron, and the Torah goes over the negotiations for the land in some detail. The commentators ask why so much attention is paid to the circumstances surrounding the sale and they offer various answers.

Rabbi Steinmetz refers to one commentator in particular:

As Ibn Ezra [23:19] notes, the purchase of a burial plot for her marks the beginning of the future Jewish state. [emphasis added]

In an article on the HaTanakh.com website, Rabbi David Silverberg makes a similar point and expands on it. He notes that

Ibn Ezra further comments that this incident is significant in that it marks the first stage in the fulfillment of God’s promise that Avraham and his offspring would possess Eretz Yisrael.

This promise is made to Avraham earlier in Bereshit 17:8:

To you and your offspring I will give the land where you are now living as a foreigner. The whole land of Canaan shall be [your] eternal heritage, and I will be a G_d to [your descendants]. [translation: Aryeh Kaplan]

But Avraham is not the only one of the Avot (forefathers) who bought land in Eretz Yisrael. Just as Avraham bought land in Hebron, so too did Yaakov buy land -- just outside of Shechem [33:19].

In fact, Avraham and Yaakov were not the only two who bought land in Canaan -- just as Hebron and Shechem were not the only two areas where land was acquired on behalf of the Jewish people.

In her New Studies in Bereshit (p. 208), Nechama Leibowitz quotes from the Midrash in Bereshit 79:7

This is reminiscent of the first Rashi in Chumash, which explains that the Torah begins with the creation of the world in order to provide Jews with a counter-argument against those who would accuse them of "stealing" the Land of Israel.

Hebron.
Shechem.
Jerusalem.

All 3 cities established as Jewish cities, central to Jews.

In his Sefer, Eretz Yisrael in the Parashah: The Centrality of the Land of Israel in the Torah, Rabbi Moshe D. Lichtman points out another verse in the Chumash that highlights this Jewish connection to the land:

Land of the Hebrews?

However we understand this phrase, this verse indicates that on some level, despite being a small group -- albeit 70 members -- living in Canaan, the family of Yaakov was recognized for its connection to a specific area in that part of the land of Canaan.

This points to the ancient history and connection of the Jewish people in the land that long precedes the appearance of the Arabs, who after all are indigenous to Arabia.

But there are Jewish groups today who recognize the Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael, yet still maintain their distance while at the same time demanding the right to have a say in how the Jewish state conducts itself.

I mention this because of another article I came across this past week with an unexpected interpretation of the Chumash. While I enjoy Melanie Phillips's articles, I generally don't read her for her insights on the Torah. But she did have an interesting perspective on Jewish groups who criticized the recent Israel elections and took it upon themselves to advise Netanyahu on who should not be included in his cabinet.

In Dragons and Dragon-Slayers in Israel and America, Phillips writes:

Israel is indeed a state for the Jewish nation. However, membership in a nation confers obligations on its people to behave as a nation.

After all, the Torah itself tells us that when the tribes of Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh said they wanted to settle east of the Jordan because the pastures there were more fertile, they were told they could do so only on condition that they first fought alongside the other tribes to conquer the land of Israel.

But American Jews such as those in Mercaz Olami [the Zionist umbrella arm of Conservative-Masorti Judaism] don’t feel bound by any such obligation. They not only choose not to live in Israel but also choose not to fight in its defense.

Instead, ensconced in a faraway land they prefer, they lob verbal missiles at the tribe from which they have separated themselves when it defends its Jewish identity in ways of which American Jews disapprove.

Today, the long and established Jewish connection to the land does not automatically guarantee an equally well-established sense of Jewish identity and pride in the Jewish people.

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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's report to the UN is Soviet-level anti-Zionist propaganda

I've seen bias from the UN before, but I don't recall ever seeing a document that looks like it was written by a hardened Israel hater.

The reports usually at least pretend to be unbiased. Not this one.

Francesca Albanese, UN "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967," issued a report in September that apparently was just made public. The summary gives a flavor of how crazily biased it is.

One of her goals in this report, in the inevitable path to soon officially calling Israel an apartheid state, Albanese accuses Israel of "settler colonialism" without going into any arguments why, just footnoting lots of equally biased papers.

Israel is not a settler colonialist state.

Throughout the report, Albanese fully accepts the Palestinian narrative as true and doesn't even mention any Israeli counter-claims. The reader sees only one side of the argument, and is not even informed that perhaps Israel has its own arguments. Albanese doesn't want to acknowledge even the possibility that Jews have a right to their own state.

Her one-sidedness is quite deliberate. She describes the Palestinian right to self-determination this way:

The right to self-determination is an “inalienable right” of the Palestinian people, as affirmed by the General Assembly. The origins of Palestinians’ right to self-determination can be traced back more than a century, preceding the first codification in the Charter of the United Nations. The people of Palestine (Muslims, Christians and Jews), like other peoples in the Levant, also had their right to self-determination recognized under the Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919. Article 22 of the Covenant stipulated that “Class A” mandates (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Syria) would enjoy provisional independence “until such time as they are able to stand alone”. The “wishes” of the local communities were to be “a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”.

But she doesn't mention the Mandate for Palestine which specifically says that Jews have the right to self-determination - and no one else!

The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

This is lying by omission. Albanese knows the contents of the Mandate document - but wants to hide it from those reading this propaganda. And it happens over and over again.

She offers a brief history of the region where Jews are the only people who ever do anything wrong:

The culmination of centuries of antisemitism and persecution of Jews in Europe in the genocidal horror of the Holocaust strengthened support for political Zionism. This movement saw Palestine as the land to realize a “State for the Jews” through settlement and colonization. However, in that land a native Palestinian Arab population had resided for millennia. In 1947, the United Nations resolved to reconcile the separate claims to the land of the indigenous Palestinian people and the largely European Jewish settlers and refugees from Europe, by recommending the partitioning of British Mandate Palestine into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State”. Soon after, the creation of the State of Israel in most of the territory of Mandate Palestine was accompanied by massacres and the mass expulsion, wholesale denationalization and dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine. They continue to be deprived of their right to self-determination, together with their descendants, the refugees further displaced in 1967 and other non-refugee Palestinians.

She doesn't once mention that Jews have historical ties to Israel. She doesn't mention the attacks by Arabs on Jews in Palestine decades before 1948. She doesn't mention that the Arabs rejected partition. She doesn't mention that the Arabs attacked the Jews. She doesn't mention that the territories annexed by Jordan ethnically cleansed every single Jew.

It would take weeks to show the depth of Albanese's dishonesty, but here is just one paragraph of many:

The transformation of the Gaza Strip into a heavily populated, impoverished enclave controlled by Israel through a suffocating sea, land and air blockade, is part and parcel of that same settler-colonial design. The containment of the colonial population into heavily controlled reserves is at the core of the settler-colonial goal to ensure the demographic supremacy and prevent Palestinian self-determination.

How do these assumptions fit in with the fact that Israel forcibly removed every Jew from Gaza in 2005? Was that part of the plan too? And did Israel plan for Hamas to take over Gaza so it could have an excuse for blockading it?

This is not just re-writing history. This is Soviet-level propaganda.

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10/24 Links Pt2: An Inconvenient Truth: The Jewish People Never Left the Land of Israel; Bari Weiss: Kanye West's Dark, Twisted Fantasy And Jewish reality

From Ian:

An Inconvenient Truth: The Jewish People Never Left the Land of Israel

I just finished reading former US Ambassador David Friedman’s recent article, in which he makes the point that Judaism and Zionism are inseparable. It is a fine article and I agree with him, but I wonder if it places too much emphasis on the return of the Jewish people to their homeland after a lengthy absence. I have the same concern with an upbeat review of Israel’s achievements in a recent article by David Weinberg, which refers to two millennia of Jewish dispersion.

To imply that the Jews left the Land of Israel for 2,000 years, after the fall of Masada, is not accurate. It feeds into the view that the modern state of Israel is a European colonial enterprise with no historical connection to the land. What’s more, the Jewish return did not originate with the modern Zionist movement in the early 1880s. Aliyah has been continuous throughout the ages.

The Jewish people never really left the Holy Land. Certainly, many were killed or expelled at the time of Masada and later, but many Jews continued to live in “Palestine” (the name given by the Romans after the Bar Kochba revolt, 132-135 CE) for a considerable time afterward. The evidence is clear from the extensive archeological sites visible today, such as those at Beit Alpha, Beit She’arim, Tzippori (Sepphoris), Baram, and many others. Jews formed a majority of the population of Palestine until at least the fifth century CE, and an autonomous Roman-recognized Jewish patriarchate in Palestine existed until 429 CE.

Archeological ruins point to the establishment of more than 80 synagogues, particularly in the Galilee, during the six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. After Masada, the Jewish population was substantial enough for three serious revolts against Roman or Byzantine rule to occur; the last one, against the Emperor Heraclius, was in the seventh century.

Evidence from the Cairo Genizah, and the writings of the Spanish-Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, indicate that Jews continued to inhabit a number of towns, including Jerusalem, after the Byzantine defeat by the Arabs under Omar Ibn Al Khattab in 637, and even during Crusader rule. In fact, the 12th century witnessed an upsurge in Jewish immigration from Europe; 300 rabbis from England and France, including a number of prominent Tosafists, immigrated to the Holy land in 1211, while the noted Spanish rabbi and philosopher Nachmanides (the Ramban) made aliyah in 1267.

David Collier: Pete Gregson’s campaigns. Just where are the Scottish police?

A Holocaust denying antisemite created a partnership with a Gazan scammer who has family links to proscribed Islamic terrorist groups. They are still taking £1000s from people in Scotland for increasingly dubious and unbelievable campaigns. Why is it left to an independent Jewish journalist to investigate them? Just where are the Scottish police?

The unfortunate Mohammed Almadhoun
Mohammed Almadhoun is either scamming the people of Scotland or he is the unluckiest man alive.

About 18 months ago his house was bombed, and he ran a campaign to raise funds to rebuild it. The image he used for his ‘bombed-out’ house was a bombed out Hamas bank and had been swiped from the internet:

Mohammed Almadhoun houseTwo years before this he claimed that a school he teaches in was also bombed out – and once again he tried to raise funds to have it fixed. This time Almadhoun used an image of a school in Syria bombed during the Syrian civil war:

Mohammed also claimed he needed back surgery at the time – and once again ran a fundraising campaign to raise money to help him:

None of this was real – but nor did Mohammed succeed in raising much cash. What he lacked was a ‘sponsor’ in the UK so blinded by antisemitic hate – that he would promote every story that Mohammed gave him. Enter Pete Gregson – an antisemite who has bought into almost every conspiracy about Jews that can be found.

So earlier this year Gregson tells everyone that Mohammed would go to jail unless he could pay his debts – raising funds to help him. This despite the fact Almadhoun is a relatively wealthy man from a very powerful clan. Gregson was campaigning for a bogus story – and I told him so. Since then, things have only got worse.

London Centre Study of Contemporary Antisemitism: Alvin Rosenfeld: ‘The Jews are Guilty’: Contemporary Echoes of Old Religious Tropes

Alvin H Rosenfeld, the Director of the Indiana University Bloomington Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism talks about how centuries old tropes of religious antisemitism are being recycled and expressed in today’s America.

Another idiotic antisemitic argument

Today I tweeted this meme:

Some Jew-hating idiot responded that today's Jews have nothing to do with the Jews of Jesus' time, and gave as proof "'EDOM IS IN MODERN JEWRY.' The Jewish Ency. 1925 Ed., Vol. 5, Pg. 41."

This was new to me, so, for fun, I looked this up. And this quote is all over antisemitic websites, I even saw a video about it on "GoyimTV."

They are claiming that the Jewish Encyclopedia says that Jews are really descendants of Edom (Esau.)

So I looked up page 41 of volume 5 of the 1925 Jewish Encyclopedia. It really is the entry on Edom, although it doesn't say at all what they claim it says.

What it does say is that during the Hashmonean era, some of the Edomites (Idumeans) were forcibly converted to Judaism by John Hycranus I (which is the only case of forced conversion to Judaism in recorded history.)

The Idumeans did become enthusiastic members of the religion - King Herod was Idumean. They were obviously still a minority among Jews. (There is an interesting halachic issue mentioned in the article about whether Edomites were allowed to join the Jewish people, but that is a separate matter.)

Even so - they were considered Jews living in what would later be called "Palestine" in Jesus' time. They are clearly of MIddle East origin, native to the region. Even if some of them survived to remain Jews today, how, exactly, does this hurt the Jewish claim to Israel? The Idumeans lived as Jews in Judea seven centuries before Islam!

All this proves is that antisemites, like anti-Zionists, will seize a tiny piece of real information and build an entire fictional universe around it to fit their hate.

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The modern Humpty Dumpties (Elder Comix)

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things–that’s all.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master–that’s all’

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The 1968 Palestinian National Covenant (Charter) has an interesting paragraph:

Article 6:
The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

The Palestine Ministry of Information notes that the year of the "Zionist invasion" is considered to be 1917. It does not appear that they are including descendants of those Jews, so the issue is moot, but it points to something interesting in official Palestinian language.

This is one of the few uses of the word "Palestinians" in the document. Most of it refers to "Palestinian Arabs." So, for example:

Article 3:
The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country in accordance with their wishes and entirely of their own accord and will.

If the only people that have the legal right to the land are Arabs, then the Jews - even those they call "Palestinians," who had been there continuously for thousands of years - do not.

In other words, the Charter gives legal rights to Arabs that it withholds from non-Arabs.

Isn't that apartheid?

This is besides the explicit antisemitism in the charter itself - which has never been revoked - that denied the existence of the Jewish people to begin with. "Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."

Now look at the 2003 Palestinian constitution. There, they refer repeatedly to the Arab Palestinian people. The first paragraph of the preamble says:

The continuous attachment of the Arab Palestinian people to the land of their fathers and forefathers, on which this people has historically lived, is a fact that has been expressed in the Declaration of Independence, issued by the Palestine National Council. The strength of this attachment is confirmed by its consistency over time and place, by keeping faith with and holding onto national identity, and in the realization of wondrous accomplishments of struggle. The organic relationship between the Palestinian people, their history and their land has confirmed itself in their unceasing effort to prompt the world to recognize the rights of the Arab Palestinian people and their national entity, on equal footing with other nations.

Why the need to emphasize "Arab Palestinian people"? By 2003 (and unlike 1968), the term "Palestinian" was well known.

It appears that the term is used specifically to exclude Jews from calling themselves "Palestinian."

The Palestinian Arabs are well aware that the term "Palestinian" usually referred to Jews before 1948. They want not only to make sure that they are the only "Palestinians" with rights to the land but to ensure that they assert that Jews have no historic or legal rights to the land.

That explains why they call themselves "Palestinian Arabs" or "Arab Palestinians."

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The "anti-Zionist not antisemitic" crowd once argued that they would have no problem with Jews if Jews defeated them in battle

People who claim to be anti-Zionist and not antisemitic offer some reasonable sounding arguments. The reason we know that these arguments are disingenuous is not that the arguments themselves are logically false, but that we have over a century of such arguments - and they morph over time, while keeping the common denominator of always targeting Jews.

For example, the Arab boycotts against Jews from the early 20th century through the 1970s are now seen to be obviously antisemitic - even as they insisted in public that they have nothing against Jews. Today's BDS is a refinement of those methods, but again they only target Jews, not Israeli Arab businesses.

They keep trying to refine their arguments but when you look at history, you can see that the arguments may change but the underlying antisemitism remains the same.

I just saw a neat example of this from a July 12, 1919 article in the Deseret Evening News ("Is 'Zionism' A Threat to World Peace?") where Palestinian Arabs are interviewed about why they are against Zionism.

Their anger is against the perception that the British conquered Palestine only to give it to the Jews, who did nothing to deserve it. They actually say that if Jews have the right to Palestine, then Indians have the right to New York - tacitly admitting Jewish indigeneity.

Then comes this:

You see? The problem is that the Jews didn't earn Palestine, fair and square, by winning it in a war. They were cheating (by, for example, buying farmland at inflated prices, which the article similarly describes as a nefarious Jewish plot.)

Is that argument no longer valid? Or was it simply a logical sounding excuse to justify antisemitism after the fact?

Just like today, the argument sounded like it has merit at the time. Only since 1948 and 1967, when Jews did defeat the Arabs in battle, do we see that it was simply an excuse for hate, dressing it up as something respectable using rhetoric. They keep moving the goalposts to find other reasons to hate the Jews that don't sound antisemitic - "refugees" or "occupation" or "settlements" or "apartheid." Then as now, these arguments are created to find respectable clothing to dress up pre-existing hate.

Just as the "anti-Zionist not antisemitic" arguments of the past changed to avoid looking foolish, so will today's. And the modern antisemites really, really don't want you to look at history.

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The Abenaki And Jews Have More In Common Than Just Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Ben & Jerry's was in the news again this week, as a federal judge rejected their attempt to prevent their parent company, Unilever, from allowing their ice cream from being sold in Judea and Samaria -- or as Ben & Jerry's prefers to call it: "Occupied Palestinian Territory."

Just a little over a year ago, they formally joined the BDS movement when the company announced they would no longer sell their ice cream in the West Bank.

Just last month, Ben & Jerry's found themselves accused of being hypocrites for claiming it was inconsistent with their values for their ice cream to be sold "on occupied land" while they themselves based their headquarters on tribal Indian land -- according to a letter signed by over a thousand Israeli students and academics affiliated with Students for Justice in America, with the support of Shurat HaDin.

The New York Post covered the story: Israeli students accuse Ben & Jerry's of occupying tribal land:

Israeli students claim that ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is “illegally” occupying land in Vermont that once belonged to a Abenaki native American tribe and should practice what it preaches and immediately evacuate the properties.

...“We have concluded that your company’s occupation of the Abenaki lands is illegal and we believe it is wholly inconsistent with the stated values that Ben & Jerry’s purports to maintain. Ironically, in July of the last year you announced that you would discontinue the sale of your products in Israel because you object to the Jewish State allegedly occupying Palestinian territories,” the letter to B&J’s chairperson, Anuradha Mittal said.

This double standard had already been noticed just a few days after Ben & Jerry's original announcement last year, by lawyer Stephen Flatow:

Ever hear of the Abenaki Tribe?

Neither did I, until the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company this week started accusing Jews of illegally occupying other people’s territory, and I got curious about whose territory Ben & Jerry’s is occupying.

After all, if you’re going to go around calling other people “occupiers,” well, you better not be an “occupier” yourself, right? I mean, wouldn’t that be just the height of hypocrisy?

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield launched their business empire in 1978 by setting up an ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vermont. Today, the headquarters of their multi-billion-dollar enterprise is located in South Burlington.

It’s a safe bet that neither Ben nor Jerry ever asked permission from the territory’s original inhabitants. Like most white, imperialist, colonialist settlers, they just moved in and did what they wanted, the natives be damned.

The natives, in this case, were the Abenakis, a proud, peaceful group of indigenous tribes who had been living in that part of the country since forever... [emphasis added]

Yet not everyone had ignored the issue of the Abenaki's rightful place on the land. Legal Insurrection notes that just 3 miles from the Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, the University of Vermont features a land acknowledgment on their site that -- unlike Ben & Jerry's -- formally recognizes the history of the Abenaki and their historical connection to the land:

The UVM HESA Program acknowledges that the University of Vermont rests upon the traditional territory of the original inhabitants of this land – the Abenaki people – and the State of Vermont now occupies the lands of the Mahican and Pennacook tribes. We acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples were forced to leave Vermont during the 1600’s, and eastern tribes were displaced by colonial expansion.

The university goes on to note records indicating that in addition to efforts to force them off their land, during the early 20th century, the Abenaki were also subjected to forced pregnancy terminations and more than 3,400 of them were sterilized. They faced attempts to physically reduce their numbers, the kind of physical threats that Jews too have faced in their history.

As Jeff Benay testified in 2010, during testimony for recognition of the Abenaki by the state of Vermont:

As noted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “The Vermont Eugenics Survey of 1925 and the sterilization law of 1931, which were intended to anglicize the state’s population, identified the Abenaki as undesirable – along with Catholics, such as French Canadians, Irish, and Italians; Jews, the poor; the mentally ill; and criminals.”

Interestingly, Benay notes that while the tribe was recognized by the state governor in 1976, it was rescinded the following year by the next governor.

The reason?

The new governor said that he could not give recognition to a “sovereign nation within a sovereign state” -- a problem that Jews are very familiar with over the centuries, having been told that they could not be fully accepted because they constituted "a people within a people."

Another parallel between the Abenaki and Jews is the attempt to rob each of their history. One of the hurdles placed in the way of the Abenaki was meeting the Federal definition of "tribe" before they could be recognized as indigenous. According to the Federal government, they had to prove that they were an autonomous and existing entity since colonial times -- a test that the Abenaki could not pass to the government's satisfaction.

As Abenaki activist Fred Wiseman put it:

They said the Abenakis were genetic, political, and cultural fakes.

How often have we seen antisemitic attacks accusing Jews of something similar -- of being descended from Khazars or of having no historical and cultural connection to the land Israel?

Apparently, during the American Revolution, the Abenaki retreated north into Quebec, to the extent that 2 centuries later they “were indistinguishable from the general population in Vermont.” In other words, their skin color was white. Not only could they not be visibly identifiable as Indians, they also hid their Indian identity from the Census Bureau.

Again, a point of comparison:

It’s happened before. In 15th Century Spain, Jews converted to avoid getting burned at the stake, lived outwardly Christian lives, but secretly observed Jewish rituals at home.

Wiseman sums up the situation that the Abenaki face:

Whatever happens, the Abenaki will once again be defined by others. Indians don’t have the right to self-identify. We have to be recognized by white people.

This again is a situation that Jews are very familiar with, where others get to define what can be considered antisemitism, antisemites lecture us about what Zionism is and international agencies assume the authority to give our cultural heritage away to others.

Ultimately, what ties the Abenaki and Jews together is that they are both indigenous peoples, born in their respective lands with historical and cultural ties to it.

And both have struggled to return to their land and have their connection to it recognized.

In this, the Jews have been extraordinarily successful after thousands of years. And that is a problem for some.

According to the UNHCR Resettlement Handbook:

Indigenous groups are descendants of the peoples who inhabited land or territory prior to colonization or the establishment of state borders. They often have strong attachment to their ancestral lands and natural resources, an attribute that can distinguish them from other minority groups. They may also have distinct social, economic and political systems, languages, cultures and beliefs. Their right to self-determination has frequently been impeded by subsequent migration of other ethnic groups into the territory where they reside.

Indigeneity is defined, in part, in the context of colonization. That may be helpful to the Abenaki, but in the case of the re-establishment of Israel, enemies of the Jewish State accuse Jews of being the colonists. Yet the distinct social, political, language, culture and belief systems of the Palestinian Arabs originate in Arabia -- and are not indigenous to Judea.

But because the definition of indigeneity is made in the context of being a victim of colonialism, the history of the Arab invasion and conquest of the land is forgotten and they are held up as the native population in the face of the return of Jews to their home.

The world is just not ready for indigenous populations that successfully re-establish their home.

Ben & Jerry's can glibly explain to an interviewer the rightness of their refusing to sell their ice cream in Judea and Samaria, but when challenged as to why they sell their ice cream to areas in the US where there are problems with human rights issues -- the 2 men are totally dumbfounded: