07/10 Links Pt2: Dershowitz: Is the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Platform Antisemitic?; Melanie Phillips: Conversation the eclipse of liberalism and the failure of conservatism

From Ian:

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Candidates must adopt IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, an organization that takes no position on BDS, told The Jewish Week in late 2018 that BDS is not about free speech. “Lawmakers from both parties are working together to erode the First Amendment in a joint effort to create a new political free speech exception for Israel,” she wrote. “The potential ramifications of this effort are far-reaching and should provoke deep bipartisan alarm.”

Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of JNS, has also written quite often of the erroneous conflation of BDS with free speech. “Political speech is broadly defined in American law, and the courts have chosen to include activity like flag-burning or paying for political advertisements under that rubric. But it has never been defined as granting impunity to those who wish to discriminate against religious or racial groups in the course of conducting business,” he wrote in a Dec. 18, 2018 column titled “Discrimination against the Jewish state isn’t free speech.”

The other concerning statement in Kreibich’s position is: “Advocate for the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank through settlements.” While the word “occupation” should have signaled concern to Kreibich’s Jewish neighbors, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. This statement shows that the candidate does not believe that Israel has the right to self-determination.

The territories to which Kreibich apparently refers are certainly disputed, but they have been part of Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. It must then be assumed that she means the disputed territories must all be returned to the pre-1967 lines, regardless of Israel’s self-determination through armed conflict. That is a position supported by Sanders and was a position supported by former President Barack Obama in the final months of his term, though not by current Democratic leadership and not even by the current leading Democratic candidate for president, former Vice President Joe Biden.

The IHRA definition includes as anti-Semitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”

Saying that she will “advocate for the end of Israeli occupation” means that to Kreibich, Jews do not have the right to self-determination. According to the IHRA, this is inherently anti-Semitic and provides ammunition to those who would demonize Israel and its right to exist.

In this day and age, editors and reporters at The Jewish Link have learned that it is no longer enough to go to Washington once or twice a year with NORPAC or AIPAC to advocate as a group for America to support Israel. Israel must be accepted as the only democracy in the Middle East and America’s loyal ally since 1948, the establishment of the modern-day nation. Americans should know that Israel has a right to defend its borders and live in peace like any other country. In an era of rising anti-Semitism, xenophobia and violence, the need for American Jews to have a safe haven in the world is more important than ever.

It is incumbent upon every community member who cares about Israel and the survival of the Jewish people to read statements made by would-be elected leaders. This is not a time for complacency or quiet. If Jewish constituents care about the topic, then they must ask for representation from their elected leaders as well as explain, with specificity, why they cannot be supported with views like these.

The IHRA definition is a great place to start.

Pro-Israel activist Richard Millett wins first stage of High Court libel case against Jeremy Corbyn

A High Court judge has ruled that statements made by Jeremy Corbyn on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show in September 2018 could be held to be defamatory of the pro-Israel activist Richard Millett.

In a judgement delivered on Friday Mr Justice Saini rejected the claim by lawyers representing the former Labour leader that he was not referring to Mr Millett when he appeared on the programme and was asked to defend earlier remarks made about “Zionists” who, he believed, “do not understand English irony”.

Handing down his judgement, Justice Saini concluded: "To summarise my rulings on the preliminary issues, I find that the words complained of referred to Mr Millett; that they bore a meaning defamatory of Mr Millett as identified above; and I find that the allegations were factual.”

A June 23rd hearing at the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court took place to enable Mr Justice Saini to determine whether the meaning of Mr Corbyn’s remarks on the show justified a libel action.

The libel case revolves around an appearance by Mr Corbyn on the BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show in September 2018.

Mr. Millett launched a libel action alleging that the words spoken by Mr Corbyn in the programme were defamatory of him and their publication caused and is likely to cause serious harm to his reputation.

Mark Lewis, of Patron Law, who is representing Mr Millett told the JC: "The judge rejected the argument that Mr Corbyn was not referring to Richard Millett when he appeared on the Marr Show defending his 'irony statement'.

"The Court accepted that these were factual allegations that have a defamatory meaning."

Cool. I hit the target. https://t.co/KofnqS4ExI

— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) July 9, 2020

A Polish govt institute honors Poles who saved Jews. Scholars say it’s whitewash

In February 1943, Stanisława and Henryk Budziszewski decided to help a family of Jewish escapees at their farm in the Polish village of Żebry-Laskowiec where they lived with their three sons, Wacław, Stanisław, and Konstanty. The Jewish family consisted of a husband and wife — shopkeepers from the nearby village of Nur — along with their three children. Their surname remains unknown.

Everyone in the local villages knew that hiding Jews was illegal and, if discovered, the crime brought a sure death penalty.

The Jews were successfully hidden for just two weeks before they were discovered by German gendarmes and the Gestapo in the Budziszewskis’ farm, covered in hay in one of the barns. The adults in the Polish family were separated and interrogated; Waclaw, aged just 18, lied to the Germans and claimed that he had been helping the Jews without his parents’ knowledge.

The Jews were deported and murdered at an unknown location. Wacław was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he died on April 1, 1943. The rest of the Budziszewski family was sent to perform forced labor for the Third Reich.

Recently, the Budziszewskis are among 17 cases identified and honored by Poland’s Pilecki Institute as part of a project launched in March 2019 entitled Called by Name.

According to the Pilecki Institute website, the project is “devoted to persons of Polish nationality who were murdered for providing help to Jews during the German occupation.” Once identified, the rescuers are honored with a ceremony in which a memorial stone is unveiled in their name.

While the honor sounds admirable enough, numerous scholars claim that the initiative launched by the Pilecki Institute — an entity founded in 2017 with government funds — is part of an organized campaign to whitewash Poland’s wartime narrative and portray ordinary Poles as rescuers of Jews while ignoring their many acts of betrayal and anti-Semitism.

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New blog feature: Printing (and PDF)

I was asked yesterday if it  would be possible to add a “print” feature to my articles without the stuff on the sidebars.

I found a solution.

Now, below each article, you can see a widget:

 

Click on that and you can print the article, or create a PDF. (The email feature isn’t so great, it just links to the article.)

For those who don't have time to read articles during the week, this is a good way to read them on Shabbat for those Shabbat observers who are so inclined. 

Ian's linkdumps from Thursday totaled 61 pages! 

Enjoy! 

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07/10 Links Pt1: Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel? According to whom?; Do We Really Have to Read Beinart Again?; Danon: Obama’s Decision to ‘Abandon’ Israel Was Lowest Moment of UN Tenure

From Ian:

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Jonathan S. Tobin: Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel? According to whom?

In this woke version of reality, humanity is divided into two groups: white oppressors and indigenous people of color straining under the yoke of white atrocities. And in delineating this stark division between the bad and the good, Jews must accept that they are among the former and irredeemably white. The only thing for them to do is to admit guilt and to struggle against the systemic racist system into which they assimilated into in the United States.

As The Forward noted in an article about the controversy stirred up by Rabbi Kahn, Israel’s Consul General to New York Dani Dayan, recently noted that both Jews and Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to Israel, and that peace will only happen when the latter finally recognize this fact rather than insisting that Jews have no sovereign rights in any part of the country. By lending support to the idea that Jews aren’t indigenous, Kahn is actually undermining chances of peace in the Middle East rather than promoting it.

The fact that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel, to which their ties date back thousands of years and were reaffirmed with continuous settlement, as well as prayers throughout the ages, is irrelevant to the woke. So is the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are not white or European, but descended from people who were forced to flee their homes in the Arab and Muslim worlds after Israel’s creation in numbers that were greater than those Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel during the War of Independence. Yet as far as the rabbi is concerned, Jews who speak of being indigenous are stealing victim status that belongs only to Arabs and other people of color.

Perhaps Rabbi Kahn thinks the semantics here is important because the assertion of indigenous status distracts us from the sufferings of African-Americans or Palestinians. But his scolding of Jews for having the effrontery to claim ownership of this word has implications that go beyond his repellent pedantry and ideological inflexibility.

That’s because telling Jews they are not indigenous to Israel is akin to branding them imperialist colonizers in their ancient homeland. And once you step down that path you aren’t just virtue signaling your concern for the oppressed; you’re also implicitly declaring that Zionism and the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet are illegitimate.

The redefinition of words with plain meanings in order to weaponize them for ideological purposes is key to the Orwellian process by which the woke suppress not only free speech, but the rights of those they consider white oppressors. In effect, what Rabbi Andy is doing when he lectures us about “white Jewishness” and who can be considered indigenous is canceling the entire Jewish people.

The only possible response to such despicable wordplay is to refuse to play by woke rules. There can be no compromise with intersectional canceling. It’s time to make it clear to the self-righteous Rabbi Andys of American Jewish life that we won’t accept their lectures or their politicized language lying down. The alternative is to consent to a denial of Jewish rights whose ultimate purpose is the sort of tragedy that ought to horrify a nice young rabbi a lot more than how to define a word.

Melanie Phillips: Both hero and zero Israel's strategic incoherence

While Israelis are increasingly alarmed by the government’s loss of control over the coronavirus crisis, different events suggest that the country may have pulled off a spectacular advance in the battle against another intractable foe.

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a succession of mysterious explosions in Iran.

At the end of last month, there was a major explosion in the Khojir missile factory near Tehran and at a power plant in Shiraz, which plunged the city into darkness. There has also been an explosion at a Tehran clinic, and other major fires in power plants and a petrochemical factory.

The most significant event, however, was an explosion and fire last week at Iran’s centrifuge assembly plant in Natanz.

According to the former U.N. nuclear inspector David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington D.C., this destroyed nearly three-quarters of Iran’s main centrifuge assembly hall.

No one has claimed responsibility for these events. But the explosions at Khojir and Natanz required the kind of sophisticated intelligence, coordination and operational skill that suggest the involvement of a foreign power. Many experts assume that, in these at least, Israel was a principal actor.

The two sites were important elements in Iran’s infrastructure of warfare against Israel and the west.

Khojir, which is said to have a network of underground tunnels, is suspected of involvement in the production of ballistic missiles. Intelligence experts agree that the explosion there seemed to be the result of an Israeli cyber-attack. The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida, however, claimed that an airstrike by an Israeli F-35 stealth jet was involved.

The Natanz centrifuge hall, buried deep under concrete and enmeshed steel roof, was inaugurated in 2018 in order to make the advanced centrifuges needed to make an atomic bomb. Albright writes that it was thought to be Iran’s only clean-room operation set up for the mass
assembly of these centrifuges.

Do We Really Have to Read Beinart Again?

Beinart wrote, “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world.”

He is wrong. For most practicing Zionists — who live here and decide what Zionism is — the essence is indeed a Jewish state. In Beinart’s imaginary world, substituting the Jewish State for a far-fetched idea of a Jewish home is not such a big deal. But it is.

Beinart writes that the urgent need for new ideas is based on the moral call to prevent the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. He wrote, “Today, Israeli leaders find the status quo tolerable. But when Palestinian violence reveals that it is not, those leaders — having made separation impossible — could inch closer to policies of mass expulsion.”

Maybe. Probably not. We’ve managed a long time and with a lot of violence without resorting to ethnic cleansing. But even if you accept the necessity of Beinart’s warning, there is a much simpler way to prevent a catastrophe. Convince the Palestinians to refrain from the “violence” that could trigger “mass expulsion.”

Another problem is that a one-state solution does not preclude the option of ethnic cleansing. See Yugoslavia as an example.

On the plus side, what Beinart says is largely unimportant. He is not the first to propose a one-state solution, and probably won’t be the last. He will try to pitch his latest gimmick to a new generation of Jews (anyone for a book deal?). He will find some takers among radical American left-wingers. But where he gets it wrong again is that one of the main reasons Israeli Jews want a state is because they don’t wish to be the world’s pawns. Israel is armed to the teeth. It is savvy, tough and resilient. And if Beinart or any of his self-righteous friends want to take our state away, they can come for it. Let’s see how far they get.

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Palestinian “Beautiful Poems of Jerusalem” are, of course, antisemitic

 

Given that we are now in the three week period of mourning for the destruction of the Temples and Jerusalem, I was interested in this Arabic article from Egy4News of “the most beautiful poems about Jerusalem.”

I have not been aware of any Arabic poetry about Jerusalem before 1967, so I wanted to know the content of these “beautiful” poems.

Automatic translation does a poor job with poetry, but some bits and pieces of the poems come through:

.. A war that destroys the breath of the Zionists .. Ink will cause important events .. Horror of earthquakes, a fire of volcanoes…

…My family in all of the land has been separated .. And the children of the apes are the basis of my scourge…

…The blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is his land .. A land purified with all serenity .. And the prostitute desecrates his blessings .. With oppression, demolition…

…The face of his dome was covered with soot .. The Jews of treachery had woven nets… so the families in Jerusalem feared for their pigeons.

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Attacking Jewish human rights in the name of morality

The Israel-haters, a category that we must now add Peter Beinart to, use the argument that the imperative of Palestinian human rights demands a one-state solution with a natural Arab majority and Jewish minority.

The basic problem with the thesis that a one-state solution is the only way to give Palestinians the human rights they deserve is that this same “solution” would ensure that Jews lose the human rights they deserve.

The issue isn’t human rights. Everyone supports human rights. The issue is how to balance competing human rights of two different groups.  But the Israel haters don’t want you to think about that problem – they want to emphasize the Palestinian human rights issue and they do everything possible to avoid the obvious fact that Jews would not do well under any Arab majority government. They also avoid the equally obvious fact that Palestinians under “occupation” are in far better shape than Jews would be under Arab rule.

Why is this obvious? Just look at how Christians are doing in the Arab world.  They are oppressed and fleeing as fast as they can.

Arab Muslims hate Jews much more than they hate Christians. 

Sometimes, though, the one-stater Israel-haters are forced to answer the question about Jewish human rights directly. And their response is simply, yeah, that might be a problem, but we hope it won’t be that bad, and anyway it is a small price to pay for their vision of a world without Israel.

Listen to Ali Abunimah, whose book on a single state inspired Beinart, answer this very question in 2009 at Hampshire College:

 

You can never have an absolute guarantee about what the future will be like. ... You cannot guarantee that if there was a one-state solution it wouldn't, it would be…the best scenario is if it's more in the direction of South Africa and Northern Ireland than Zimbabwe. But we couldn't rule out, you know, some disastrous situation, like Zimbabwe.

Beinart, when asked that same question, is even less honest than Abuinimah. He didn’t even admit to the possibility of pogroms against Jews as the Arab world has had for centuries:

If there’s another round of violence between these two populations, why does that presage a situation in which they can live peacefully?

The evidence suggests that once people gain their freedom, the appeal of violence goes way down. The Irish Republican Army killed more than 1,700 people in terrorist attacks both in Northern Ireland and in the rest of Britain. That didn’t mean that Catholics in Northern Ireland were incapable of living alongside Protestants. It meant that they needed to live alongside Protestants with equal rights.

If there is violence, it’s a testament to the dynamics of oppression. It doesn’t show that Palestinians and Jews can’t live together in equality. It shows that they can’t live together without equality.

See? if Arabs are attacking Jews, that is proof that the Jews are mistreating Arabs! 

Because Arab antisemitism is unthinkable.

Beinart doubles down on the same idea here:

 

To human rights posers like Beinart, Arabs cannot be expected to act morally when they are “oppressed.” This is exactly what Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been saying for years after every terror attack: it is a “natural reaction” to Israel’s oppression.

To them, Jews can only be moral by voluntarily putting their lives in the hands of those who have made it clear that they want the entire land to be free of Jews.

The hypocrisy gets worse: Beinart and his friends say that the Palestinians not having the right to vote in Israeli elections is part of the reason that Jews don’t deserve their own state. But Lebanese and Iraqi and Egyptian and a couple of hundred thousand Jordanian Palestinians cannot vote in the limited  elections in their own countries either! Palestinians not getting full citizenship in Israel is unconscionable, but Palestinians not having the option of citizenship – by law – throughout the Arab world?

These people who care so damn much about Palestinian human rights that the Jewish state must be destroyed are curiously silent about Palestinian human rights in literally every Arab country.

And one definition of antisemitism is treating Israel with double standards. 

In the real world, one tries to balance the competing rights of different people. Whether Peter likes it or not, there is only one Jewish state, and eliminating it is far more immoral than maintaining it while trying to minimize any human rights problems that result.  I’m sure Israel can do better, and it should. But destroying Israel would destroy the human rights of Jews – and it would degrade the human rights of nearly two million Israeli Arabs as well.

(h/t kweansmom)

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“Peace Now” embracing one-stater Beinart

The Americans for Peace Now webpage describes the group this way:

APN is the sister organization of Shalom Achshav, Israel's preeminent peace movement. APN's mission is to educate and persuade the American public and its leadership to support and adopt policies that will lead to comprehensive, durable, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace, based on a two-state solution, guaranteeing both peoples' security, and consistent with U.S. national interests. We also work to ensure Israel's future and the viability of Israel's democracy and Jewish character through education, activism and advocacy in the United States, and by mobilizing American support for Shalom Achshav.

Like J-Street, they say they are Zionist and pro-Israel and support Israel as a Jewish state.

Like J-Street, they are far less pro-Israel than they claim.

Today, they are hosting Peter Beinart, who is on a self-promotional blitz this week to gain support for his vision of the destruction of the Jewish state:

 

You cannot claim to be pro-Israel while supporting the end of Israel and the likely slaughter of Jews that would follow.

APN justifies this webinar by saying “APN maintains our strong support for a two-state solution. We also believe that open conversation and critical thinking is crucial to growing a vibrant peace movement.”

If that is true, they would have hosted representatives of the Trump administration, to have an open mind about his two-state vision. If they care about open conversation, they would host Jews who live in Judea and Samaria once in a while.

They don’t. But they are eager to promote a one-stater that is officially against everything they claim to stand for.

Amazing how flexible the supposedly loving critics of Israel are in celebrating opinions to their left and slamming opinions to their right.

Apparently some in the Jewish Left have been itching for a reason to abandon even the pretense of supporting Israel as a Jewish state. Peter Beinart has given them the excuse they have been looking for.

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07/09 Links Pt2: Is Wokeness Awakening Antisemitism?; Josh Malina Asks Why ‘Cancel Culture’ Ignores Antisemitism; Al Jazeera Violating U.S. Law by Operating as Undisclosed Qatari Agent

From Ian:

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Is Wokeness Awakening Antisemitism?

Is the Media A Toothless Watchdog?

When social media outlets are used to disseminate hatred, they enable bad actors to promote their lies. The good new is that Facebook, YouTube , and Twitter have occasionally deleted accounts that violated their policies against the promotion of violence or incitement to hatred.

But all too often they seem to be playing catch up. As Mark Twain said: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” That’s the reason that antisemitism cloaked in wokeness is a problem. Society has a long history of bigotry, sexism, racism, discrimination, homophobia, and related ills. Being woke is thus a virtue, since it implies a deep concern about and dedication to social justice. But when known antisemites cynically seize upon this most noble of impulses, the media must act. But how?
Defining Antisemitism: The Time Is Now

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there’s been a significant increase in antisemitic social media posts over the last few months. And the danger of not acknowledging the growth of online antisemitism is that it often doesn’t stay online. That’s why it’s crucial to develop a clear definition of what constitutes anti-Jewish hatred and intolerance.

In recent years, one definition of antisemitism has gained traction. Drawn up by the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, this definition has been adopted and endorsed by a growing number of governments.


By working towards a consensus definition of antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred will finally come with a clear label. For years, many people felt that smoking was unhealthy. However, this suspicion only became a widely accepted fact once smoking companies were compelled to clearly label their products, describing the potential consequences of inhaling nicotine.

Going forward, defining antisemitism will empower lawmakers, colleges, professional sports franchises, and social media platforms to devise more effective policies against the dissemination of antisemitism.

If not now, when?

Jewish Actor Josh Malina Asks Why ‘Cancel Culture’ Ignores Antisemitism

Jewish actor and “West Wing” star Josh Malina advocated on Tuesday for the withdrawal of support for public figures who exhibited antisemitic behavior.

“Why’s it so hard to get cancel culture on the line when the problem is antisemitism?” Malina asked on Twitter.

“Cancel culture” calls for the “cancelling” or boycotting of individuals who share controversial opinions or display behavior on social media deemed to be offensive. The “cancelling” results in them being shunned by friends and supporters and turned down in regards to career opportunities.

Malina’s question has already received 2,600 likes. It sparked a conversation on Twitter and even garnered a response from Jewish comedian Elon Gold, who remarked, “Nobody gets cancelled for hating Jews. From Goebbels to [Mel] Gibson.”

Gibson — who has a history of making antisemitic remarks — was recently in the news because Jewish actress Winona Ryder mentioned in an interview that he had called her an “oven dodger,” a clear reference to the crematoria at Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Malina’s Twitter post came after a number of recent reports highlighting antisemitic social media posts by well-known figures, including NFL player DeSean Jackson, rapper and entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs, rapper Ice Cube and real estate mogul Mohammad Hadid, among others.

This part in particular is really important: "You're trying to defend something you don't understand is antisemitic, just as people try to defend things that they don't understand are racist against black people."

Yes. And we need more journalists showing this sensitivity.

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 9, 2020

Public Campaign Launched to Remove Three-Hour Antisemitic Speech by Louis Farrakhan From YouTube

A public campaign has been launched to persuade YouTube to remove a video of the notoriously antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s July 4 address, in which he referred to Jews as “Satan” who should have their brains knocked out by the “stone of truth.”

Farrakhan’s three-hour rant, titled “The Criterion,” was streamed live on YouTube and has so far garnered over 850,000 views.

In the speech, Farrakhan called the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan.”

He said, “Mr. Greenblatt, you are Satan. Those of you that say that you’re Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew… you are Satan and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca.”

“When you know who Satan is, you don’t have to kill him, [but] the stone of truth, that’s what you throw. We cast truth at falsehood till we knock out its brains,” Farrakhan continued.

He also called Jewish legal scholar Alan Dershowitz “a skillful deceiver” and “Satan masquerading as a lawyer.”

Furthermore, Farrakhan repeated the blood libel that Israel was responsible for police brutality against minorities in the US.

“That’s why you gotta come at us like a coward,” he said of the police. “Like snakes trying to wrap yourself around us so you could give us the treatment that you were taught in Israel. You may, as you gonna stop your police from going to Israel to learn how to kill better. … Your days of killing us without consequence are over.”

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Indigenous

 

 

Israel’s Consul General in New York Dani Dayan tweeted:

Tomorrow, Jews will start 3 weeks of commemoration of the breach of the walls of their Capital by an Empire, the destruction of the city, the subjugation of their country and the forced exile of its population, their ancestors. Tell me more about not being indigenous.

— Dani Dayan (@AmbDaniDayan) July 9, 2020

A lot of people argue about what “indigenous” means, and even the UN says there is no standard definition. It seems that too often the people defining the term are more interested in the color of the skin of the people claiming indigeneity than the actual circumstances.

But these same people are often the ones who want to downplay the very real Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. They don’t want to hear that Jews pray to have Jerusalem rebuilt three times a day (not just the Passover Seder’s “next year in Jerusalem!”) They don’t want to hear about the undeniable fact that during the 2000 years of Jewish exile, practically no country that hosted the Jews ever considered them to be truly equal citizens. Everyone throughout history knew that their home was in Israel, and if you look at old books the words “Hebrew” and “Israelite” are used as often as the word “Jew,” emphasizing the Jewish nation in exile.

In exile from where? Everyone knows the answer.

Jews have maintained psychological and physical ties to Israel ever since the current diaspora began. They have no other homeland.

And the current three week period where we mourn the destruction of the two Temples is all the proof you need that Jews have only had one real home.

If that isn’t the definition of indigenous, then you are twisting the word specifically to exclude Jews.

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Church Wonders How Many Liberal Jews Would Convert If Christ Recast As 'Anti-Zionism' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

 

Rome, July 9 - Leaders of the world's largest Christian denomination have commissioned a study to determine whether the body's ages-old ambition to convince adherents of the Mosaic faith to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and as their savior from Original Sin might meet more success with Jesus not in the role of the divine incarnate - a notion anathema to longstanding Hebraic sensibilities - but in a form of proven palatability to prominent, if not large, swaths of progressive Jews: opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland.

Pope Francis appointed a committee this week to explore the possibilities of rebranding Jesus Christ as anti-Zionism in efforts to proselytize to leftist Jews, Vatican insiders reported Thursday. The commission will focus on the potential effectiveness of such a change in semantics based on the realization that Jews who seek entree to elite cultural circles have always faced the demand that they renounce core aspects of Jewish identity and fidelity - but that over the last two centuries, shifts in Western culture have in turn shifted which core aspects of Jewish identity and fidelity they must renounce.

For more than 1500 years the dominant Christian culture insisted that access to elite circles required Jews to violate fundamental principles of Jewish faith by accepting, for example, the divinity of a human, when core Jewish tenets preclude the corporeality of God; now however, following centuries of decline in the influence of Church power and cultural hegemony, elite cultural circles now demand that Jews renounce allegiance to more secular aspects of Jewish identity and belonging - Jewish nationhood, for example, Jewish indigenous status in the one place Jews have ever had a sovereign home, or any collective right Jews might have to reestablish themselves as an independent political entity. That cultural shift has prompted the senior figures within the Roman Catholic Church to consider adapting their ancient compulsion to "prove" the legitimacy of their replacement theology - whereby Christians are the new Israel and the Jews, by rejecting Christ, must disappear - to suit the more modern sensibilities of anti-Zionism.

"If we can dress up the Christ as anti-Zionism that should appeal to all sorts of progressive Jews," explained Cardinal Pedro Beinardo, who heads the commission. "Some Protestant denominations already invoke Jesus in railing against Israel, which is fine, and in fact the reemergence of Jewish sovereignty poses a serious theological challenge to Christians, who still, by and large, insist the the New Testament renders the Old non-applicable. But we think to succeed, the approach needs to take things a step or two further, because there's been an erosion of the spiritual, as classically conceived, in the West, and we need to roll with that. Political ideology is the new religion, and we better understand that."

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07/09 Links Pt1: Understanding the collapse of liberal Zionism; Nothing will happen if sovereignty is applied to 30% of Area C; 3/4 of Natanz Centrifuge Assembly Hall Destroyed

From Ian:

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Jonathan S. Tobin: Understanding the collapse of liberal Zionism

There’s a reason why most Israelis find it difficult to listen patiently to lectures from liberal American Jews. For Israelis, their country is a real place filled with real people and perplexing dilemmas that have no easy solutions. But for all too many American Jews, Israel is a dreamland—a place for intellectual tourism where we can project our own insecurities and anxieties on the Jewish state while expressing our moral superiority over the lesser beings who live there and lack our wisdom.

Which brings us to the problem of Peter Beinart.

Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic and columnist for The Atlantic, sought to carve out a place for himself as the leading liberal critic of Israel with his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism. The book was as spectacularly ignorant as it was arrogant in its refusal to acknowledge the reality of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The conceit of the work was that Israelis needed to rise above their fears and recognize that a two-state solution was within easy reach. Anything that contradicted his assumptions—like the nature of Palestinian political culture or the continued rejectionism and obsession with the fantasy of Israel’s destruction—was either rationalized or ignored. Too immersed in their unseemly quest for security and profit, Israelis could only overcome the “crisis” of the title by listening to the wisdom of Beinart, a righteous American pilgrim, whose manifest good intentions should have generated respect and deference from his recalcitrant Israeli pupils.

Much to Beinart’s chagrin, rather than take the advice of a leading American public intellectual to heart, Israelis ignored it. In the eight years since then, Israel has endured more violence and political controversy while the Palestinians have continued to reject peace, whether along the lines laid out by President Barack Obama (whose alleged bona fides as a friend of the Jewish people was discussed at length in his book) or the less generous terms offered by President Donald Trump.

Instead of moving closer to moral and physical collapse as Beinart has been prophesying, Israel has only gotten stronger. Much of the Arab world has tired of Palestinian intransigence and largely abandoned advocacy for their cause, as many now perceive the Israelis as a vital ally in the struggle against Iran, as well as a needed resource in the areas of technology, agriculture and clean water. Peace with the Palestinians is not in sight. But until it becomes possible, the Jews of Israel will hold on and continue to thrive.

Daniel Gordis: End the Jewish State? Let’s try some honesty, first

Israel has had a long and complex history, stained time and again by many moral failings. Israelis have almost always responded by demanding that we be better, not by suggesting that we end the project. Israelis’ frustration with the peace process, our government’s now catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, our medieval and misogynist, homophobic rabbinate, Israel’s now massive unemployment, the “Price Tag” racists whom the government refuses to punish, the poverty in which Holocaust survivors live, the inequality that Israeli Arabs face daily and much more has not given rise to anything akin to America’s desire to destroy itself.

The unfettered quest for self-immolation, the intellectual thinness of cancel culture, the rage that pulls down statues of Christopher Columbus and advocates abandoning capitalism for socialism without any regard for how Marx’s and Lenin’s theories unfolded in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba or elsewhere – all that is a distinctly American response. Israelis, for all their many faults, show little sign of the cultural fatigue, intellectual sloppiness or willed oblivion-to-consequences that are now emblematic of America’s youth. What Beinart has done is to essentially take America’s desire for self-destruction and ask Israelis to adopt it.

No thanks.

We Israelis, like Americans, have had no perfect leaders. David Ben-Gurion was a racist who had utter disdain for darker-skinned Mizrachi Jews and their culture. Menachem Begin got innocent people killed in the King David bombing and decades later, launched the disastrous Lebanon War. Golda Meir famously asked, “What Palestinian people?” Ariel Sharon allowed the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.

Yet we also know that David Ben-Gurion built a Jewish state against all odds and kept it alive when that seemed impossible. Menachem Begin was instrumental in getting the British to leave Palestine, fought against military rule over Israeli Arabs, made peace with Egypt, returned the Sinai and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Golda Meir launched Israel’s long tradition of reaching out to African countries, out of a belief that if we had independence and hope, they should, too. It was Ariel Sharon who got Israel out of Gaza.

That is why we’re not tearing down statues (not that we erect that many, by the way, which is also interesting). We prefer to recognize that life is complicated, that great human beings are invariably also deeply flawed. The same is true of countries. Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is exhausting and depressing and surfaces much of Israel’s ugliness. No one should “prove” their love for Israel by denying that.

But Israel was created not to be perfect, but to restore the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland, and thus to allow the Jewish people and its culture to thrive and flourish as it can nowhere else on earth. Looked at that way, Israel is not only miraculous, it is an extraordinary success. We Israelis can see our terrible mistakes and still take pride in what we’ve accomplished; many of us are horrified by what it still not right here, but we have no interest in Beinart’s suggestion that we therefore commit national suicide.

Peter Beinart believes that because we cannot get the Palestinians to recognize our right to a state, we should knock over our proverbial king and give up the project. We believe that while we wait for the Palestinians to want a future more than they want revenge, we should build this society and the Jewish cultural, intellectual, religious and historical revival it makes possible. My bet is that Israelis will continue to build the society that is the largest, culturally richest, most intellectually dynamic Jewish community anywhere in the world, and that we’ll still be at it long after Peter Beinart has been entirely forgotten.

Petra Marquardt-Bigman: The Increasing Radicalism of Peter Beinart Must Be Confronted

Yet according to Beinart, Israeli Jews should hope that once they give up on their state, Palestinians would feel they have all the “freedom” they ever wanted and violence would “decline.” Beinart is at least honest enough not to promise that violence would stop, and in any case, he could calmly watch from the comfort of his home in the US if this “Isratine” experiment pans out.

Fantasizing about the elimination of the world’s only entirely Jewish state by eventually transforming it into yet another Arab-Muslim majority state in order to please — and hopefully appease — the Palestinians is of course a fairly popular pastime in some “progressive” circles. But while most progressives won’t be eager to acknowledge that they could once count on the support of the late Libyan dictator Qaddafi, Beinart is apparently not particularly picky about the company he keeps.

When he shared on Twitter “some of the writing that has shaped my thinking,” his list included “Ali Abunimah’s book, One Country,” which Beinart praised as “both trenchantly argued and deeply generous in spirit. I wish I could assign it in every Jewish school.”

It apparently doesn’t bother Beinart that — starting during the murderous Al-Aqsa intifada almost two decades ago — Ali Abunimah has been single-mindedly devoted to demonizing Israel. At his Electronic Intifada site, the Jewish state is constantly presented as a monstrous evil that must be eliminated, and that if Islamist terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad help to achieve that goal, they should obviously be cheered on.

Needless to say, Abunimah is certain that advocating the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state while whitewashing and promoting Islamist terrorism can never ever be antisemitic, and he thinks he should therefore be entitled to his own truly Orwellian definition of antisemitism. Preposterously enough, Abunimah sees himself as a fighter against antisemitism, because as far as he is concerned, “Zionism is one of the worst forms of antisemitism in existence today” and “supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”

The fact that Beinart believes that anything Abunimah writes is “deeply generous in spirit” tells us all we need to know about his judgement.

But whether it’s Ali Abunimah or Muammar Qaddafi or Peter Beinart, the people who advocate the elimination of the Jewish state will always insist that their motives are pure and noble. Their cynical disregard for the lives and aspirations of millions of Israeli Jews reveal the hollowness of that claim.

Dude @PeterBeinart just endorsed an antisemitic book by a raging antisemite in Chicago who supports Assad's mass murder of over 500,000 people in Syria and various Palestinian terrorist entities. What a topsy-turvy world! https://t.co/cFkjy7WHPy

— Benjamin Weinthal (@BenWeinthal) July 9, 2020

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Cancel culture has a lot in common with antisemitism/anti-Zionism

Actor Josh Malina asks a very reasonable question:

Why’s it so hard to get cancel culture on the line when the problem is antisemitism?

— (((Josh Malina))) (@JoshMalina) July 7, 2020

The likely answer is because cancel culture and antisemitism overlap.

Both the current cancel culture and anti-Zionism is based on a self-righteous, virtue-signaling worldview where the advocates are motivated not by any sense of justice but by appearing to care about justice.

The “Black Lives Matter” – based cancel culture is not led by Black people but by whites who are falling over themselves to tell the world how much they care about Black lives. The anti-Zionists of Jewish Voice for Peace are similarly not led by Palestinians but by Jews who are eager to show how much they care about Palestinians.

Cancel culture’s care for Black lives does not extend to Blacks killed by other Blacks. Anti-Zionists don’t care about Palestinians oppressed by fellow Arabs.

Both cancel culture and anti-Zionists have a one-dimensional view of the world. Real Blacks and real Arabs have much more complex and conciliatory views of whites and Jews, but these two cultures work hard to silence the reality in order to push their virtue-signaling agenda of evil whites and evil Jews.

Cancel cultures look at whites as inherently racist. Anti-Zionists look at Israeli Jews as being racist by definition.

And anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Anti-Zionists are against Jewish national rights; antisemites hate Israel.  But beyond that, traditional antisemites almost always couch their hate as positive – they are protecting innocent people, they are warning the world about the dangers of Jews/Israel.

Both are meant to push a political agenda while pretending to be humanitarian.

Both of these ideas are toxic.

So, yes, don’t expect cancel culture to give a damn about Jews. To their members, everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, and Jews are oppressors because they are Zionist and they are white. The cancel culture members who are both white and Jewish need to distance themselves from both unforgivable crimes, and their penance is to loudly denounce other whites and Jews.

It’s the woke equivalent of blackface.

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How would Palestinians act under Peter Beinart’s “one-state” solution?

Peter Beinart has gotten a lot of press this week over his essays in the far-Left Jewish Currents and the increasingly far-Left New York Times opinion pages for his proposal that instead of a two-state solution, the preferred outcome is a Jewish “homeland” in a single state that would presumably be called “Palestine.”

This is of course not a new idea. In  1947, when Arabs faced the possibility that the UN would vote for partitioning the land and creating a Jewish state, they suddenly declared that they were interested in a “bi-national” state with the Jews – predicated on the idea that Jewish immigration must end first, which would ensure an Arab majority in any election.

The more modern version of the idea espoused by many English-speaking Arabs also emphasizes to their Western audiences that a one state solution with equal rights is wonderful, as long as millions of Arabs with Palestinian ancestry are first allowed to flood the area and ensure that there is an Arab majority in any election.

Another version of the plan is Iran’s, where only the Jews whose families were in Palestine before 1917 would be allowed to vote.

The New York Times published a similar op-ed in 2009 for a one-state solution. It’s author was that famous peacemaker, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, where he actually pretended to be proposing this plan for Jews’ security:

A two-state solution will create an unacceptable security threat to Israel. An armed Arab state, presumably in the West Bank, would give Israel less than 10 miles of strategic depth at its narrowest point.

Obviously Jews should live next to Arabs who want to kill them rather than across a border. See how much he cared?

These thinkers’ interest in “democracy” is only to ensure that Jews do not have a state, not out of any love of the democratic system. And this is obviously true, because these same people never advocate for democracies in Jordan or Egypt or the UAE; they don’t even demand that Palestinians have elections themselves. They only want a single election meant to dissolve the Jewish state – what happens after that is unimportant.

But let’s look at that very question – what would happen after that?

We just have to ask Palestinians how they would envision sharing the entire area from the river to the sea with a sizable Jewish population.

One indication of their answer can be in polls over recent years about whether Palestinians are willing to share Jerusalem, which is a key part of most two-state plans, and therefore a good proxy for how they feel about sharing all of the country with Jews.

A clear majority of Palestinians demand not only full control over the formerly Jordanian-occupied portions of Jerusalem, but the entire city. 52% of West Bank Palestinians, and 80% of Gazans, agree with the statement “We should demand Palestinian rule over all of Jerusalem, East and West, rather than agree to share or divide any part of it with Israel.” This means that they would immediately ban all Jews from entering the city the way Jordan did from  1948 to 1967. Say goodbye to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter – Palestinians aren’t quite willing to share anything.

And there is no reason to think that they would consider Tel Aviv to be any more Jewish than Jerusalem is. Their maps make it very clear how willing they are to share the land, although there is no shortage of clueless Westerners who believe the lie that “Arabs and Jews lived in peace and harmony before Zionism.”

Beinart says that a two-state solution is ideal, but Israel has made that impossible. (Palestinians, as always, have no agency or responsibility in his eyes.) But how do Palestinians feel about a two state solution where they can have a state of their own?

Most Palestinians who say they want a two-state solution do not see that as the end of the conflict, but a stage towards the strategic goal of ending any Jewish rule.

 

And they see the “right of return,” flooding Israel with millions of Arabs, as the ideal way to destroy the Jewish state.

 

How would Palestinians act towards a significant Jewish minority of Jews in a single state? Again, one needs only to look at the history of Jews in Arab lands, or even in Palestine. Jews were attacked before Zionism. Immediately after the 1947 partition vote, when Arabs solemnly pledged that they would respect Jews as equals in their binational state, they started slaughtering them.

I made a cartoon last night to illustrate the immorality of an American telling Israelis what is best for them:

 

An Arab-majority state that would treat Jews as equals is nothing short of a fantasy.  The reality would be a return to the daily attacks on Jews that were seen in Palestine before 1948.

Beinart’s plan is based on a theory of a peaceful Palestinian Arab population that has absolutely no objective support. Does he seriously believe that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be disarmed in this fantasy state?

Peter Beinart is supremely concerned over what he sees as Jewish mistreatment of Palestinians yet shows literally zero concern over the certainty – not probability, but certainty - that his plan will result in massive Arab abuse of Jews. 

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